San Francisco Islamists

The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal features a gripping account of the struggle for the soul of a Muslim mosque in San Francisco. Leading the forces of moderation and tolerance, albeit with a strong hand, has been Souleiman Ghali, a Palestinian refugee who founded the Islamic Society of San Francisco in 1993. In the other corner is an Egyptian-born imam named Sheik Safwat Morsy, who was recruited by Mr. Ghali in 2001 to lead the mosque, and reportedly used his platform there and elsewhere to preach anti-American jihadism.

The Journal article, entitled “Identity Crisis: At a U.S. Mosque, Path of Tolerance Leads to Tumult” and authored by Peter Waldman, provides a fascinating – if frightening – window into the struggles between anti-Islamist Muslims and those who promote in the guise of religious practice what amounts to a political ideology. It can be accurately described as “Islamofascism.”

According to this account, Mr. Ghali came to the path of moderation, despite a personal history of indoctrination and alienation against the West, Christians and Jews, through his exposure to the tolerance of religious expression that is a central tenet of the American constitution and society. The Journal recounts how he repeatedly sought to counter efforts by those like Sheik Safwat to radicalize and alienate the Islamic Society congregation from its host country.

This test of wills moved from the mosque to civil court when the Sheik claimed he had been wrongfully dismissed by Mr. Ghali after uncovering financial improprieties on the latter’s part. A jury – which was denied access to evidence that strongly supported Mr. Ghali’s claim that the reason for terminating the imam’s employment was the Sheik’s radicalism – found in favor of Safwat, who has gone on to found another mosque near the first, from which he reportedly continues to proselytize as before.

This drama underscores a central reality in the War for the Free World: The threat of Islamofascism, the most immediate and dangerous of the enemies we face in this global conflict, is not confined to distant countries and combat zones. Islamist ideology is being promoted here in the United States as well, quite possibly in a mosque near you.

The danger associated with our failure to appreciate this reality and to help those Muslims who oppose the Islamofascists (Suleiman Ghali is now facing a $400,000 penalty to be paid to the Islamist imam, and his vision of a moderate mosque is “struggling to stay afloat”) can translate into a Fifth Column in America, a threat that will make the preservation of our society, its freedoms and those of the larger Free World vastly more problematic.

Identity Crisis: At a U.S. Mosque, Path of Tolerance Leads to Tumult

The Wall Street Journal, 19 June 2006

Souleiman Ghali grew up as a Palestinian refugee in war-torn Lebanon. He was a Sunni Muslim imbued from childhood, he says, with hatred for Shiites, Christians — and especially Jews.

Then he met one. In 1993, Mr. Ghali, who owned a deli at the time, was searching for a place to open San Francisco’s first Arab mosque. He found an ideal building. But the owner, who was Jewish, wanted $10,000 a month in rent, far more than the group could afford.

“I hesitated telling the landlord what we wanted it for, because I assumed he didn’t like Muslims,” recalls Mr. Ghali. “But he said, ‘A mosque? Fantastic. We have so many fanatics. We need to work together for peace.'” The owner slashed the rent 80% and gave the mosque a long-term lease. “That stuck with me,” Mr. Ghali says.

Pushed by Mr. Ghali, the Islamic Society of San Francisco is at the forefront of a controversial movement to shape an “American Muslim identity” of tolerance and respect for other faiths.

But the future of his effort is now threatened by a voice from within. His mosque was hauled into court this spring by a fiery imam whom it fired in 2002, claiming he preached extremism. The cleric’s wrongful-discharge lawsuit has splintered San Francisco’s Muslim community, as rival groups, and ideologies, vie for worshipers’ support.

After his firing, the Egyptian-born imam, Safwat Morsy, opened a new mosque in a basement just around the corner from the Islamic Society, in the heart of this city’s gritty Tenderloin district. To swelling crowds, the Sheik Safwat has railed against “the traitor criminal Souleiman Ghali” and called for jihad, or holy war, against Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Our killed ones are in paradise and their killed ones are in hell,” he told worshipers in 2003, in a sermon that was translated from Arabic for the court case.

The fight is part of a larger identity conflict roiling many Muslim communities in the U.S. The Sept. 11 terror attacks and the recriminations that followed opened a searing debate among Muslims in America over the role of Islam in their lives.

Many Westernized Muslims, such as 47-year-old Mr. Ghali, reacted to 9/11 by recoiling from Mideast politics and other points of discord with mainstream American culture. They set out to repair the image of Islam in America by denouncing hatred and emphasizing the faith’s common values with other Western creeds. “Our vision is the emergence of an American Muslim identity founded on compassion, respect, dignity, and love,” says the Islamic Society’s Web site.

Other Muslims, particularly less-assimilated immigrants such as 48-year-old Sheik Safwat — who doesn’t speak English — mock the idea of an “American” Islam. They see attempts to tailor the religion to Western norms as cultural capitulation verging on blasphemy. Beware of “the new American Islam,” Sheik Safwat warned followers in the 2003 sermon translated for the court case, “a faith that does not talk about the jihad; a faith that does not talk about the confrontation with tyrants; a faith that does not talk.”

In a five-week civil trial held this spring in San Francisco Superior Court, jurors were asked to consider two starkly different versions of the conflict that has divided the Islamic Society. Sheik Safwat accused the mosque of unlawfully firing him for exposing what he said were suspicious accounting practices by Mr. Ghali and others. The Islamic Society insisted it had just cause to terminate the sheik for preaching radicalism.

The Islamic Society, now one of three Sunni mosques in San Francisco’s urban core, occupies a corner building on a seedy stretch of Market Street. The prayer hall, upstairs from a check-cashing service and a liquor store, serves an immigrant community of mostly Arabs and South Asians, many of them cabdrivers and laborers.

Even Mr. Ghali’s admirers say he imposed his progressive agenda on the Islamic Society autocratically. Working mostly by himself, he opened the mosque to ecumenical events for Christians and Jews and actively stumped for peace with Israel. This winter, he removed the barrier that separated women from men, a tradition in many mosques. He did so without consulting the community, knowing the move would cause an uproar — which it did. “First we changed the structure. Now we’re educating the people,” says Mr. Ghali, who owns a small copy shop near San Francisco’s Union Square.

Frequent Clashes

He clashed frequently with imams hired by the mosque to preach. Several years ago, he recalls, he ousted one imam — literally shoving him out the door during Friday prayers — after the cleric fulminated about Americans facing hellfire for immorality. Tempers flared as the preacher’s supporters shouted “Pharoah!” at Mr. Ghali and accused him of censorship. Mr. Ghali says he shot back: “Ask God to heal America, not punish it!”

Mr. Ghali says he sacked a second imam in 2000 for preaching too much about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Angry congregants gathered 300 signatures on a petition to keep the popular Yemeni cleric and throw out Mr. Ghali, who fought off the challenge. “We would not let the Arab constituency shape the mosque in their own image,” says Mr. Ghali.

Sheik Safwat, who was hired in July, 2001, is equally stubborn, say people who know both men. He came to San Francisco from the Muath ibn Jabal Mosque in Detroit, where one of the congregants says his religious views split the community and the mosque’s board. Sheik Safwat, recruited by Mr. Ghali for his eloquence and fund-raising skills, was named the Islamic Society’s executive director, as well as its imam, with responsibility to help “set the vision” for the mosque. His four-year employment contract included a house, health insurance and a salary of $3,500 a month.

The two men soon clashed. Fawaz Abu-Khadijeh, a cabdriver who is a regular at the mosque, recalls Sheik Safwat asking him for curtains to further seal off the women’s prayer area, then separated from the main hall by an eight-foot wall. The sheik’s wife, who covers her hair and face in traditional Islamic garb, was uncomfortable with the incomplete barrier, Mr. Abu-Khadijeh says. But Mr. Ghali says he vetoed the idea, snapping at Mr. Abu-Khadijeh: “We run the mosque, not Sheik Safwat’s wife!”

Mr. Ghali says he resented Sheik Safwat using the mosque to raise money for Mideast causes, drawing funds away from the Islamic Society’s own needs. “They both wanted to be leader,” Mr. Abu-Khadijeh says.

Three days after the 9/11 attacks, at a Friday prayer service attended by dignitaries including then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Sheik Safwat denounced the terrorists. “Islam does not accept this kind of behavior,” he said, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Islam is a religion of peace.”

But in April 2002, the sheik delivered a different kind of message, according to Farhan Memon, a New York attorney who attended the San Francisco mosque for many years. The Israeli army, in response to a rash of suicide bombings in Israel, was laying siege at the time to Palestinian fighters in the West Bank town of Jenin. From the pulpit, Sheik Safwat lionized the Palestinians for laying down their lives, including the bomber of Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria, who had killed 15 people, Mr. Memon later testified in the court case. The sheik’s message, Mr. Memon said: “American Muslims should find inspiration in that on how to become better Muslims.” (The sheik’s lawyer attempted in court to cast doubt on Mr. Memon’s testimony by noting that he was listening to a translation from Arabic.)

In a recent interview, Sheik Safwat, speaking through an aide who translated, denied he is an extremist and said he has denounced suicide bombing and the killing of innocents many times. He said that as the mosque’s executive director, he became aware of accounting irregularities which he contends are evidence of embezzlement and tax evasion. He said it was his duty to confront Mr. Ghali and other Islamic Society leaders. In response, he said, they fired him.

His dismissal, which came shortly after his controversial April 2002 sermon, tore apart the local Muslim community. The sheik and his followers attempted to overthrow Mr. Ghali and his allies at the mosque, court papers show. Before being slapped with a temporary restraining order, Sheik Safwat’s group changed the locks on the mosque, commandeered the podium during prayers and removed several computers and translation headsets to their new headquarters around the corner, according to sworn affidavits filed in court.

The sheik’s aide, Mohammed Allababidi, says those affidavits are lies. He says Mr. Ghali, to thwart rising opposition sparked by revelations of “corruption,” changed the locks and shut down the mosque for several weeks.

“There was a divergence of agendas, on top of a monumental struggle for power,” says Hatem Bazian, an Islamic law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who tried to mediate the dispute.

‘New Crusade’

Sheik Safwat filed suit against the Islamic Society in April 2003, accusing the mosque of illegally firing him in retaliation for exposing corruption. At the time, U.S. forces were invading Iraq and emotions among Muslims everywhere were raw. “They have declared religious war against Islam,” Sheik Safwat told followers at his new mosque, Noor Al-Islam, according to a San Francisco Chronicle account. “It is a new Crusade.” He said he blamed the U.S. government, not the American people.

Mr. Ghali, although he is not a professional imam, gave a sermon that same day at the Islamic Society. He urged restraint, the newspaper reported. “We are misunderstood,” he said. “Allah demands that we be patient and wise. Let not the hatred of others allow you to swerve to wrong and depart from justice.”

A few weeks later, as Baghdad itself was falling, Sheik Safwat delivered a tirade against infidel invaders and called for holy war to redeem Muslim lands. This sermon, captured in a cassette recording, was professionally translated and submitted as evidence in the court case. Sheik Safwat, invoking familiar extremist rhetoric for his Sunni listeners, blamed the fall of Iraq on connivance by the “traitor” Shiites and Arab heads of states, whom he branded “agents of treason.” The sheik also said he saw the hand of the “sons of Zion,” the Jews. With the fall of Baghdad, he said, Israel had “realized” its dominion “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” He praised martyrdom. While the Muslim dead of Jerusalem, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Sudan were in paradise, he said, the infidel dead were burning in hell. “The beacon of the jihad will not be extinguished by the tank and will not be extinguished by the airplanes,” he said. “The clash of civilizations and the combat of cultures and the recapture of the land and honor, this is what believers are waiting for.”

In another sermon, the sheik adopted the slogan used by the Palestinian political party Hamas to reject Israel’s right to exist: “Palestine, from the sea to the river.” Mr. Allababidi, who serves as the Noor Al-Islam mosque’s general secretary, says the sheik won’t elaborate on the 2003 sermons because they’re a “distraction” from “the corruption” at the Islamic Society mosque.

At the trial, the jury had to decide how much credence to give Mr. Ghali’s claim that the mosque had properly fired the sheik for his extremist rhetoric. Jurors never heard the sheik’s later sermons because the judge ruled that evidence from after the sheik’s 2002 firing was irrelevant to the case. Mr. Ghali testified that the sheik told him twice that the best way to deal with Jews was to “slaughter” them. Mr. Memon, the lawyer and former mosque worshiper, testified that the sheik told followers to “emulate” suicide bombers. Another attorney testified she’d heard Sheik Safwat preach hate at the Islamic Society’s regular Friday services.

The sheik and his lawyer maintained that Mr. Ghali and his allies had capitalized for years on their positions at the mosque for financial gain. They showed the jury blowups of canceled checks written to “cash” and donation receipts allegedly inflated for tax purposes. They cast doubt on the two attorneys’ testimony about hateful preaching, noting that neither spoke Arabic and both relied on simultaneous translations of the sheik’s sermons. Some Muslim scholars testified that they knew the sheik to be a peace-loving man.

An Excellent Witness

The sheik made an excellent witness, says David Newman, the jury’s foreman. With his wife and seven daughters looking on, the sheik presented himself as a committed pacifist, on good terms even with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He testified that during his nine-month tenure at the Islamic Society, he denounced Osama bin Laden, praised Jews and shunned Mideast politics. “I condemn any killing,” he told the jury.

In the end, jurors believed the sheik. The jury found that the Islamic Society had breached the sheik’s contract and awarded him $200,000 in damages. It also found that the mosque had misrepresented the job when it recruited him from Detroit. That finding, under California law, automatically doubled the damage award to $400,000.

The hateful rhetoric seemed “inconsistent” with the peaceful family man who appeared in court, says Mr. Newman, who works as a senior lawyer for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Without transcripts of sermons or Arabic speakers to corroborate the extremism, the jury didn’t buy it, Mr. Newman says.

The evidence of accounting problems and Sheik Safwat’s efforts to clean them up was more persuasive, he says. “Was there theft?” he asks. “None of us believed anyone made money out of this. But we all believed there were accounting irregularities. Much of their problem was just sloppiness.”

Adds Mr. Newman, an experienced trial lawyer: “There’s reality and there’s courtroom reality. I have no doubt we made the correct decision, based on the evidence we saw in the courtroom and the law as it was explained to us. I have no opinion on whether we got reality right.”

Issa Michael, the Islamic Society’s attorney, complains that the judge “handcuffed” his client by barring evidence from Sheik Safwat’s later sermons. Mr. Memon’s testimony, Mr. Michael says, was “irrefutable.” The fact he didn’t speak Arabic shouldn’t have mattered, the lawyer says, because the jury knew that the interpreters of the sermons were the sheik’s closest confidants.

To avoid possible punitive damages, the Islamic Society decided to settle the case, agreeing to pay Sheik Safwat $400,000. Its legal fees exceeded $100,000. Mr. Ghali resigned from the board after the jury verdict. The mosque is struggling now to stay afloat. It may have to sell a building in South San Francisco that congregants have been renovating for years to turn into an Islamic school. Mosque attendance is down. Some worshipers now attend Sheik Safwat’s mosque and a third one nearby. Peace and interfaith activities have ceased, and there is a move afoot, led by women, to rebuild the women’s barrier.

Tanja Brauer, who leads a women’s group at the mosque, contends that Mr. Ghali “let his concerns about non-Muslim public opinion overshadow some of our own concerns as Muslims.” Mr. Ghali says he “wanted our mosque to be different.” He acknowledges he could have been a better manager, but denies that anyone from the mosque stole any money. Sheik Safwat intends to use the settlement payment to repay debts, says Mr. Allababidi, his aide. His mosque is looking to buy a building to accommodate the capacity crowds coming these days for Friday prayers.