From Cologne to the Conquest of Europe: How the Muslim Brotherhood is Challenging the Pope

From Cologne to the Conquest of Europe: How the Muslim Brotherhood is Challenging the Pope
At World Youth Day in Cologne, Benedict XVI is also meeting with Muslims. Here are the leaders and organizations of radical Islam in Germany, with their plans for expansion

ROMA, August 18, 2005 – The penultimate event of Benedict XVI's visit to Cologne, before the vigil and Mass with the young people of World Youth Day XX, will be a Saturday, August 20 meeting with the "representatives of some of the Muslim communities."

The meeting will take place at the residence of the city's archbishop. The Muslims asked the pope to visit a mosque, but Benedict XVI declined the invitation.

His prudence is understandable. Cologne and Munich – where Joseph Ratzinger was archbishop from 1977 to 1981 – are the cities in which the Muslim Brotherhood, which has for decades been the main ideological and organizational source of radical Islam in the world, has gained control of most of the mosques and of active Islam in Germany and in Europe.

Mahdy Akef, an Egyptian now residing in Cairo who is the present murshid, or supreme guide, of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide, is an explicit supporter of the suicide terrorists in Iraq. From 1984 until 1987, he directed the most dynamic Muslim center of Germany, in Munich, with its great mosque in the northern part of the city.

Munich was the birthplace of the Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland, IGD, one of the largest Islamic organizations in Germany. The IGD is under the full control of the Muslim Brotherhood and has sixty mosques spread throughout the country.

For a few years, its organizational headquarters has been located in Cologne. The president of this body is Ibrahim Al Zayat, a 39-year-old Egyptian, the charismatic leader of a network of youth and student organizations that are linked to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY, the largest Islamic youth organization in the world. WAMY is financed by Saudi Arabia, bears a strong, rigorist Wahhabi imprint, and produces vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian publications.

Curiously, the commitment to young people on the part of the Roman papacy, which is celebrating one of its key moments in Cologne during these days, has in that same city a parallel in one of the leading centers in Europe for promoting radical activism among young Muslims.

There are about 3.5 million Muslims in Germany, most of them Turkish. A little less than half of them were born in Germany. And just over half of them engage in little or no religious practice.

But the organizations with radical tendencies prevail among the active Muslims. Of the nineteen organizations grouped together under the Zentralrat der Muslime – the umbrella organization they created in 1994 to coordinate their activities and present themselves as a political voice – at least nine, and the strongest ones, are dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The first stepping stone by which the Muslim Brotherhood extended its presence in Germany and Europe was Munich.

After the Second World War, Muslims from various countries, and particularly from central Asia, established a significant presence in this city. Their head, Nureddin Namangani, who came from an Uzbek family, had been an imam in one of the nazi SS divisions during the war between Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union. On account of their opposition to communism and toward Moscow, these groups of Muslim expatriates drew the interest of the American, English, and Soviet secret services during the Cold War.

This was until an important Egyptian named Said Ramadan came to Munich from Geneva.

The son-in-law and chief collaborator of Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Said Ramadan had arrived in Europe in 1954 after fleeing from Egypt, where the Brotherhood had been outlawed. He established himself in Geneva and studied law in Cologne. He founded a magazine for Muslims in Europe, "Al Muslimun." He had a Jordanian diplomatic passport, received financing from Saudi Arabia, and was looked upon favorably by the CIA because he was an opponent of Nasser.

In 1960, with the support of a large group of young followers, Said Ramadan took control of Munich's Muslim community and, partly with the help of public funds from the Germany, began the construction of a new mosque. His objective, which he quickly attained, was to make of this a center for the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout all of Europe.

His trusted assistant in this operation was Ghaleb Himmat, a Syrian with Italian citizenship who lived in Campione d'Italia, on Lake of Lugano. With Said Ramadan already occupied with his Islamic center in Geneva – today directed by his son, Hani, and with another son, the famous Tariq Ramadan, among its members – over the course of a few years Himmat effectively replaced Said Ramadan as the head of the Islamic center in Munich. In 1973, the year of the new mosque's inauguration, Himmat became the president of the organization connected to this, the one to which he gave the name Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland, IGD.

The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Germany is both Egyptian and Syrian, the latter having its general headquarters in Aachen. The IGD is their main organization. But most of the Muslims in Germany are Turks, and they have their own powerful organization, Milli Görüs, which means "national vision" in Turkish. Its president is Mehmet Sabri Erbakan, the nephew of Nehmettin Erbakan who was the leader of the Refah party outlawed by the Turkish constitutional court in 1998 because it was judged as being in conflict with the principles of a secular state.

Although it does not explicitly refer itself to the Muslim Brotherhood, Milli Görüs also promotes a radical form of Islamism and has close ties of collaboration with IGD, which are reinforced by family ties. Zayat, the current president of the IGD, is married to Sabiha Erbakan, the sister of the president of Milli Görüs.

In 1994, a frequent visitor of the mosque in Munich, Mahmoud Abouhalima, was given a life sentence in the United States for having organized, one year before, the car bomb attack on the World Trade Center in New York. But it was only after the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, that investigations into the connections between terrorism and the radical Islamic circles in Germany intensified.

And the connections quickly led to the Munich mosque. Himmat, who was president of the IGD at the time, and one of his close collaborators who also attended the mosque, Youssef Nada, ended up on the list of people who support terrorism which was produced by the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of the two men. Investigations are still underway on the part of various countries, including Italy, into the movement of money on behalf of terrorist groups carried out by the Bahamas-based Al Taqwa bank founded and directed by the two men.

In spite of this, in October of 2002 the Catholic Academy of Berlin displayed no concern over extending an invitation to Zavat, Himmat's successor to the presidency of the IGD, to attend one of their meetings. Even in the political arena in Germany, the directors of the IGD, Milli Görüs, and Zentralrat der Muslime continue to receive a hearing as if they represented the entire Muslim community and a traditional, peaceful Islam, instead of the particular ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islam. The current president of Zentralrat der Muslime, Nadeem Elyas of Saudi Arabia, has confirmed that he sent hundreds of young Muslims from Germany to study in one of Saudi most ideologically skewed universities, the Islamic University of Medina.

This is the same kind of misunderstanding that has compromised the dialogue between Vatican authorities and Muslim representatives a number of times.

One memorable occasion was the audience on October 13, 1993, held at the Vatican by John Paul II and Hassan Al Turabi of Sudan, who at the time was the leading ideologue in the world for radical Islamism, an inspirer and protector of Osama Bin Laden.

But in more recent times, and after the shift that took place on September 11, one can recall the meeting in Doha, in Qatar, from May 27-29, 2004. On the one side were Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the previous foreign minister for the Holy See, and Archbishop Michael L. Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and on the other were the leading imam of the Al Azhar mosque in Cairo, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, and one of the most widely followed leaders of Sunni Islam, Youssef Al Qaradawi.

Both prior to and since this meeting, Tantawi has repeatedly justified the Palestinian suicide terrorists. As for Qaradawi, he justified such acts even outside of the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Qaradawi completely embodies the stance of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is the de facto Islamic "maestro" with the greatest audience among the Arab people. But Qaradawi also has a broad audience among Muslim immigrants in Europe, where he founded the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which is headquartered in Ireland, in 1997.

The interreligious meetings organized every year by the Community of Sant' Egidio, with the participation of numerous cardinals and bishops, are another example of murky dialogue.

Last July 24, the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, "Avvenire," criticized the fact that at the 2004 meeting in Milan, authorization to speak had been granted to another apologist for the suicide terrorists: Ahmad Al Tayyib, the rector of the Al Azhar university in Cairo.

"Avvenire" also defined as "imprudent" the fact that some Italian universities – including the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, which is affiliated with the Pontifical Gregorian University – have signed last June 15 an agreement to collaborate with that same university, Al Azhar. This is the most influential university in the Sunni Islamic world, with 400,000 students from 92 countries, and is under significant control from the Muslim Brotherhood.

But why would he not meet with the Moslems in the name of ecumenism and Vatican II, how false these docments then are?

Honoring the Buddhists and the Moslems all in one document! Amazing! We must hold with high esteem the Moslems!

DECLARATION ON
THE RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
NOSTRA AETATE
PROCLAIMED BY HIS HOLINESS
POPE PAUL VI
ON OCTOBER 28, 1965

2. From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.
Religions, however, that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust. Again, Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination. Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing "ways," comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.(4)
The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.

3. The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.
Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

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