American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (16 page)

Indeed, what I have discovered is that the heart, if not the soul, of the extremists is in fact largely in the United States, where these radicals have set up many of their fund-raising and political headquarters. These groups have literally hijacked the mainstream Islamic organizations here in the United States. They are the engines that drive the radical groups in the Middle East. Besides [providing] millions of dollars of funds as well as propaganda, these groups do something far more dangerous: they provide legitimacy to the radicals.

Tragically, Ashmawy died in a car accident in 1998. His courageous voice will always be missed.

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Duran was born in Spain of parents who were descended from the Barbary pirates of Morocco. “Whenever my children ask about our origins I tell them ‘You don’t want to know,’” he says. “But when I did tell them my youngest daughter thought it was kind of exciting. ‘Now I can be Captain Hook on Halloween,’ she said.”

Duran lost his father at four but his mother worked doubly hard in bringing him up. Using a wide network of friends and relatives throughout Europe, she helped him get a good education. In 1956 he was sent to live with Hafiz Kamil Silajdzic, a family friend in Bosnia. “They had a ten-year-old son named Haris,” says Duran. “I was six years older but we became pretty good friends.” Forty years later, Haris Silajdzic became the prime minister of Bosnia, serving from 1993 to 2000, when he resigned in a dispute over how big a part religion should play in the government. (He wanted less.)

Fascinated with his culture and devoted to Islam, Khalid went to Pakistan to finish high school. “I studied in one of the madrassehs—the ones you see in the news, where they now teach nothing but the Koran. They’ve been there all along. It’s just that in my day it was a much more liberal education.” Duran mastered Urdu, the native language of Pakistan, as well as Arabic. (He already had Spanish and German and would eventually learn English.) “I think my ambition was to be minister of education in some country,” he says. “I just never figured out which one.”

At twenty-two he returned to Europe and began studying sociology and political science at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, supporting himself by doing road construction work. He did his Ph.D. dissertation on “The Quest for Muslim Identity,” a study of Amhad Amin, a liberal Egyptian reformer of the early twentieth century. While at the universities he was also courted by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. “It was just a very natural thing,” he says. “It was a way for Muslims to get together. They didn’t ask me to build bombs or perform terrorist acts or anything. Mostly we had a lot of meetings.”

Duran enjoyed the company of fellow Muslims but soon began to doubt their ideology. “It didn’t ring well in my ears,” he says. “I had grown up in Spain with Franco’s fascism and after a while I began to say to myself, ‘You know, this sounds like the same thing.’ It was a very, very narrow point of view. Muslims were the only good people in the world and we were the only good Muslims.” After a few years he quietly dropped his participation.

Upon finishing graduate school, he returned to Pakistan to teach at Islamabad University. “At the time Pakistan was still very much under the British influence and everything was taught in English,” he says. “I taught in Urdu. I was the first professor ever to do that. I had only learned it in high school but I could speak it better than the natives.”

The years from 1968 to 1974 were turbulent, with the break-away of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh and a brief war with India. “There were many sects and they were always recruiting me,” he recalls. “I tried them all but it never worked out. I’m too undisciplined.”

Instead, he began a further exploration of the Muslim world, doing anthropological research on three cultures—the Andalusian Muslims of Spain, the Swahili Muslims of East Africa, and the Hindustani Muslims of northern India. In the process he met his wife, who is East African.

“Islam is a highly flexible religion that has adapted to many local circumstances,” he says. “In Spain you can see the influence of Judaism. In East Africa, you see traces of animism. In India, there is a lot of Buddhism in Islam. Each culture is quite different yet each thinks of itself as the true Islam.”

With his broad-based background, Duran began to serve as an ambassador of moderate Islam in many European forums—especially after the Iranian Revolution brought Islamic fundamentalism to the fore. In 1978 he wrote
The Political Role of Islam
for the German Middle East Institute. Among other things, he pointed out the catastrophe that was being caused by Saudi oil money spreading Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world. For this effort he was blacklisted by the Saudi Embassy.

“The fundamentalism of the last half-century is a stranger to traditional Islam,” he says. “It’s based on something entirely different. Basically, it’s a revolt against the modern world. People in modern societies are very cosmopolitan and tolerant of ethnic and cultural differences. They thrive on them. But fundamentalism tries to establish an ethnic purity and withdraw from cosmopolitan society.

“People don’t remember, but the Muslim Brotherhood grew up in Egypt in the 1930s as an imitation of European fascism, which was also a revolt against modernity. In Italy and Germany you had the brownshirts and the blackshirts. In Egypt you had the greenshirts, which was the Muslim Brotherhood. It failed in Europe but survived in Egypt and spread to other parts of the Islamic world.”

Duran warns that much of the hatred for America comes from the vast disparity of incomes across the globe. “This isn’t just an Islamic thing,” he says. “You find resentment of America and its people everywhere where there are poor people. They don’t have enough to eat and then they turn on television and see something like ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty.’ It’s bound to cause resentment. Of course you have to realize that watching a television set in the Third World means sharing it with 20 or 30 other people.”

Yet some of the worst anti-Americanism among Muslim fundamentalists comes from people who are often remarkably well educated—engineers, doctors, and even scientists. Duran has an answer for that as well.

“The odd thing about Islamic fundamentalism is that it’s always had its strongest appeal among engineers,” he says. “There’s even a joke about it in Arabic. The words ‘
al-ikhwan al-muslimun’
mean ‘Muslim Brothers’ and ‘
al-ikhwan al-muhandisun’
means ‘Engineer Brothers.’ In Egypt they always say the Muslim Brotherhood is really the Engineering Brotherhood.”

Duran attributes this to shortcomings in education. “Engineers don’t exercise their fantasy and imagination. Everything is precise and mathematical. They don’t study what we call ‘the humanities.’ Consequently when it comes to issues that involve religion and personal emotion, they tend to see things in very stark terms. The Muslim Brotherhood has become very conscious of this. They’ve set up special programs in the universities to try to recruit students in the humanities, but they never have any luck. Having an education in literature or politics or sociology seems to inoculate you against the appeals of fundamentalism.”

With his broad knowledge and humanistic outlook, Khalid Duran has never had any trouble moving in a multicultured world. His German-language book on Osama bin Laden has been a bestseller in Germany ever since September 11, 2001. In 2001 he also published
Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews
with the American Jewish Committee. The book was endorsed by Prince Hassan of Jordan and received favorable reviews throughout the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, it did not satisfy the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. CAIR wrote a derogatory review, censuring the book’s contents and attacking Duran personally, questioning whether he was a “real Muslim.” “They referred to me as ‘The Pretender,’” he says. “They not only questioned my religion, they doubted my origins and said that Khalid Duran probably wasn’t my real name!”

Sheikh ‘Abdu-I-Mun‘im AbuZant is a mullah with Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, that nation’s fundamentalist organization. After reading CAIR’s review of the book (not the book itself), Sheikh AbuZant called Duran an “apostate” in
Ash-Shahid,
a Jordanian newspaper.
¹⁰
Apostasy in Islam is generally regarded as high treason. According to most interpretations of the
shari‘a
(law), an apostate from Islam is to be put to death.

Brazenly ignoring reality, CAIR immediately claimed that AbuZant’s death threat existed only in the minds of the American Jewish Committee and was a ploy to increase sales of the book.
¹¹
An article in
Az-Zaituna,
the party paper of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), CAIR’s parent body, called the
fatwa
concocted, while at the same time dismissing it as unimportant because it had appeared “in a local paper.”
¹²
But in fact the reality was that Duran was now in physical danger.

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I can only hope Muslims everywhere will eventually recognize the self-destructive path that fundamentalism represents and will return to the highest ideals of their true religion.

But in the end, wishing for a “nice” ending to the clash between militant Islam and Islam, we must not blind ourselves to the bitter reality that militant Islamic fundamentalism holds the far more powerful upper hand in the intra-religious debate within Islam. For years prior to September 2001, the West—and the United States in particular—deluded itself into the belief that militant Islamic fundamentalism could be contained, that it was not a strategic threat to the U.S., that it could be co-opted, and that there existed a rigid separation between those groups that “condemned” terrorism and those that engaged in it. The horrific casualties of September 11 showed that our Western conceptions were in fact misconceptions. Militant Islam, in its various incarnations, will continue to be a fixed feature on our political landscape for many years to come.