At the first annual IANA conference in 1993, Ali Al-Timimi spoke alongside Bilal Philips, a fellow named Mohammed Abdul-Rahman from Afghanistan, Mohammad Qutb from Cairo, and Gamal Sultan from Cairo.
There was a Mohammad Abdul-Rahman who was the blind sheiik’s son. The blind sheik would soon be sentenced for terrorism relating to WTC 1993 and the “Day of Terror” plot directed at NYC landmarks.
And there was a Mohammad Qutb who was Syed Qutb’s brother who taught Bin Laden at university in Saudi Arabia, having emigrated to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Qutb, as al-Hawali’s teacher, also strongly influenced al-Hawali. Al-Hawali would be sent to prison in 1994.
In the 1970s, bin Laden was taught by Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Dr. Mohammad Qutb, and a Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood member, Dr. Abdullah Azzam, who later would found Al Qaeda. Azzam’s ideas of non-compromise, violent means, and organizing and fighting on a global scale were central to AQ methods. (A sentencing memo in the US District Court here mentions a videotaped interview made by IANA Vice Chairman Rafil Dhafir of Azzam in Afghanistan in the early 1980s but the local ACLU head assures me there was no enhancement in sentencing for terrorism.)
And there was a Gamal Sultan, the former EIJ member who would seek to start a political party in 1999 with EIJ founder Kamal Habib that sought to chart a nonviolent course (given the practical reality that the movement had been so infiltrated by the security forces), but that the blind sheik declined to endorse.
Salafist commentator Umar Lee has explained that during this period “the most dynamic part of the salafi movement in the DC-area were the students Sheikh Ali al-Timimi. In the DC area, who in the 1990’s co-founded a very small with a small office in DC for an organization called the Society for the Adherence to the Sunnah.
In 1994, cooperation with Al-Timimi’s Society for the Adherence to the Sunnah, Washington, D.C., IANA held its first annual summer camp in English in early July, close to Baltimore, MD. The theme of the camp is, “Living the Shahadah in America.”
In 2000, Mohammed Abdel Rahman, a/k/a “Asadallah,” who is a son of Abdel Rahman, was sitting alongside Bin Laden and Zawahiri and was videotaped encouraging others to “avenge your Sheikh” and “go to the spilling of blood.”
In 2000, on a trip to Pittsburgh, Gamal Sultan and his colleages thought Pittsburgh reminded them of Kandahar given its rolling hills.
Question: what impressionable Maryland youth attended that summer camp co-sponsored by Al-Timimi’s group and IANA?
Illustrating the soundness of the point made by Bilal Philips — that the description “unindicted conpirator” in the WTC 1993 is pretty meaningless - here is the list as posted by Kifah Jayyousi, now on trial currently in Florida. There are 172 individuals on the list. Jayyousi posted it to a newsgroup in 1995.