A Voice of Holy War

By Jill Smolowe

Al-Salam Mosque is a chill, bare room that begs to go unnoticed. Street light dimly filters through the thick layers of blue paint and grime that coat all four windows. Sound echoes off the barren walls, and the ceiling leaks so badly that buckets must be placed strategically when it rains. The only furniture is a single high-backed wooden chair, a place of honor for such spiritual leaders as Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. For most of its eight years, the cavernous mosque on the third floor of a white brick building along Jersey City's Kennedy Boulevard has attracted scant interest. "We are a peaceful people; we come here to pray," explains Mohammed Nagib, the spokesman for the mosque's 300 Sunni worshippers. "We do not bother anybody." But last week the mosque was the focus of international scrutiny when federal agents arrested one of its occasional congregants, Mohammed Salameh, in connection with the World Trade Center bombing.

So far, there is nothing to connect Sheik Omar to the deadly blast. No motive. No material evidence. But he has a reputation as one of Egypt's most prominent and radical fundamentalist leaders -- a fiery voice of Islamic holy war who exhorts the faithful to their "religious duty," including the use of violence if necessary. That fame, coupled with suspicions -- but again, no concrete evidence -- of his complicity in a series of murders, has made the blind Muslim cleric a subject of the ongoing investigation.

The day after Salameh's arrest, Sheik Omar, who has been living on and off in New Jersey since 1990, placed a phone call from Detroit to the New York- based National Council on Islamic Affairs to denounce the bombing. "The holy Koran commands the faithful not to commit aggression," he said. "The bombing of the World Trade Center could not have been done by a true Muslim."

Though Sheik Omar, 55, has never been convicted of violence himself, he has been accused of giving religious approval for bloodshed. He was arrested, imprisoned, then acquitted, for encouraging the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. U.S. and Egyptian officials suspect him of issuing fatwas, or religious decrees, in the 1990 Manhattan slaying of Jewish militant Rabbi Meir Kahane and the 1992 Brooklyn murder of an Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi. Egyptian security officials claim they have evidence that his teachings inspired the murder of antifundamentalist writer Farag Foda, who was killed in Egypt last June.

Cairo officials also blame Sheik Omar and his 10,000 hard-core disciples in Egypt for 20 attacks against tourist targets. The most recent, a TNT explosion that ripped through Cairo's Wadi el-Nil cafe, came just 75 minutes after the Trade Center explosion, and investigators are looking into a possible connection. Four people were killed in the Cairo blast, including a Swede and a Turk. Two Americans and a Canadian were among the 18 people injured.

In an interview with TIME in January, Sheik Omar carefully denied involvement in any violent incident. "What is needed from me is not to make fatwas, but to say the truth," he said. Though his manner is good humored, Sheik Omar grows sharp when railing against the "dishonest" Western media and denouncing the brutal tactics of Egyptian security forces, abuses that are also well documented by human-rights organizations. His harsh interpretations of Muslim scriptures have won the allegiance of many young and disaffected Egyptians.

According to Salameh's court-appointed attorney, Robert Precht, his client has not mentioned the cleric in their two conversations since his arrest. Ibrahim Elgabrowny, the second man who was picked up last week after he tried to block an FBI search of his home, is a cousin of El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian American who is currently serving up to 22 years in Attica state prison on a weapons charge related to the 1990 Kahane slaying. Like Salameh, Nosair worshipped at Al-Salam Mosque. The address where Elgabrowny was arrested is also listed on Salameh's 1992 driver's license and has been used by Nosair. The New York Times reported on Saturday that authorities had found several false passports in Elgabrowny's apartment, including a Nicaraguan passport made out in Nosair's name and dated eight months after Nosair had been sent to Attica. Officials speculated that Elgabrowny may have been plotting a scheme to spring Nosair from Attica and reunite him with his family in Nicaragua.

Al-Salam Mosque, if unknown to the world at large before last week, has something of a mixed reputation in Jersey City. After Salameh's arrest, local merchants quietly voiced their relief. One shopkeeper described the worshippers as "bloody men who want to see everyone who isn't a Muslim killed." He also claimed that a shop owner had been harassed after he criticized the mosque in a television interview following the Kahane murder. "They made his life difficult and even fire bombed the store," he said. But a young Coptic Christian, who runs a bakery near the mosque, dismisses such reports. "In Egypt the problems are between the Muslims and Copts," he says. "Here, we live in peace."

People who live in the neighborhood said they have not seen Sheik Omar since Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, which began on Feb. 22. Mohammed Mehdi, secretary-general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs, said the sheik left New York to visit friends in Detroit. Mehdi added that Sheik Omar was exhausted by the publicity surrounding the January hearing in a federal immigration court in Newark, New Jersey, when the cleric was threatened with deportation for failing to disclose on his visa application that he had passed a bad check in Egypt. The judge has yet to rule.

Last week Sheik Omar turned up in a Detroit neighborhood with a troublesome entourage of about 50 supporters. When the group paid an uninvited visit to a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, on Thursday night as Ramadan prayers were beginning, the imam Mohammed Mussa tried to refuse them entry. Sheik Omar came in anyway, saying, "We have to tell the truth, and this mosque is not the place for the truth." As the imam started to pray, Sheik Omar continued to speak, disrupting the service for an hour. Imam Mussa later professed to be unperturbed by the interruption. "They are not educated people," he said. In fact, Sheik Omar holds a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Cairo's Al- Azhar University.

Sheik Omar's name has been on the State Department's list of suspected terrorists since before the assassination of Sadat. FBI officials disclosed last week that agents have been monitoring the cleric and some of his followers in Brooklyn and Jersey City for months, but have picked up no indications that any kind of attack was being planned. Al-Salam Mosque came under scrutiny during Operation Desert Storm, as part of the FBI's stepped-up watch of potentially violent Middle Easterners. Agents were assigned to observe the mosque and some of its adherents, says William Baker, an assistant FBI director at the time, because "that was one of the hot spots in New Jersey. Our strategy was to get a closer handle on Muslim terrorist infrastructures." But agents never determined that criminal activity was being plotted there, so they did not watch it round-the-clock nor seek court orders for wiretaps and bugs. While the FBI did not gather enough information to brand Salameh a potential bomber, he was listed on a terrorist data base containing 185,000 names.

Although Sheik Omar has not lived in his native land since 1990, he is still of acute interest to Egyptian authorities. The group that recognizes him as its spiritual leader, Al Jama'a al Islamiyya, attracts support from as many as 200,000 Egyptians. Officials charge that the sheik tapes messages of sedition on cassettes that he smuggles abroad for circulation in Egypt and for broadcast on a Lebanese radio station controlled by the Iranian-backed Hizballah. The tapes, say Egyptian authorities, are plainly intended to foment violence: his pronouncements incite attacks on Egyptian officials, Christian Copts and tourists. There has been unsubstantiated talk that he receives financial support from the Islamic states of Iran and Sudan.

At a time when Egypt's employment is shrinking, prices are rising, housing is dwindling and the population of 58 million is increasing by 1 million every nine months, the sheik's vision of an Islamic future appeals to many. His exhortations against the Mubarak regime, which he attacks for "spreading vice and immorality" and "trying to eradicate Islamic values," play particularly well to younger audiences. At Cairo University's Dar al Ulum college of education, the vast majority of students embrace Islam, but few seem to endorse the violent methods employed by Al Jama'a. Nonetheless, a student notes, "there should be more of a dialogue between the fundamentalists and the government." That day seems far off. In the wake of the Trade Center explosion, Mubarak told the Washington Post that he rules out further political liberalization. "There will be some ups and downs" in the activities of fundamentalists, predicted Mubarak. "But it will not increase more than that. I think they have reached the maximum." If attacks against tourists continue, he added, "I'll be very strict with them."

At the moment, the government does not recognize any political parties based on religion. Mubarak has hardened his suspicions about such self-styled moderate Islamic groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. And both sides have learned lessons from the military coup that followed the 1992 legislative election victory of fundamentalists in Algeria. Islamists have concluded that attempts to achieve political reform through democratic processes are meaningless; the government fears that political recognition of religious-based parties will further polarize the situation.

The result is a vicious standoff. Islamic groups, of which Sheik Omar's is just one of many, have accelerated their attacks on security forces and Coptic Christians, as well as tourist sites. Last year 80 people were killed and 130 wounded. Al Jama'a, which is believed to operate in small cells, has claimed responsibility for most of the 20 tourist attacks. In addition to the cafe attack, one Briton has been killed and five Germans wounded. Revenues from tourism, which were expected to total $4 billion this year, have been cut in half.

The government has answered with a massive security crackdown on fundamentalists in Cairo and other cities. In December Mubarak ordered 14,000 police and 100 armored personnel carriers to sweep Imbaba, a Cairo neighborhood known to be a sanctuary for extremists. Hundreds of fundamentalists were arrested. Still, the antigovernment attacks continue. Authorities now worry about the proliferation of small terrorist groups; diplomats fret about ham-fisted tactics. "The danger," warns an envoy, "is that fundamentalists may attain a level of faith that invites martyrdom."

Egypt is hardly alone in contending with a rebirth of Muslim fundamentalism. A tide of religious fervor has been sweeping across the Islamic belt, threatening to turn half a dozen countries into theocratic states akin to Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan. Terrorism, intolerance and revolution for export are some of the by-products. In their drive for cultural ascendancy, Islamists have found fertile ground in denouncing Western values -- and inspiring violent assaults.

Despite the movement's anti-Western rhetoric, fundamentalists are more concerned about instigating change in their own countries than in the outside world. In nations from Algeria to Pakistan, the desire for an Islamic society stems largely from the failures of corrupt and ineffectual secular governments to give burgeoning urban populations the jobs, housing and basic services they need. Most of the faithful are looking for justice at home, not war abroad. Yet many who decry the ills of the modern world would flinch at imposing religious rule by violent means. "The most important thing to remember is that not all Islamic revivalist movements are fundamentalist, that not all fundamentalists are political activists, and that not all political activists are radicals," says Mumtaz Ahmad, a Pakistani professor of political science at Hampton University in Virginia. "There are very respectable Islamic fundamentalist movements in major Muslim societies that are part of the mainstream and part of the democratic electoral process, and that want to operate within a constitutional framework."

Sheik Omar has put in his bid for something more dramatic. In January, one week before his appearance before the federal immigration court in Newark, he said he wanted to return to Egypt if he was deported. "If they kill me," he said of his possible return, "that will be a certificate that I am a martyr."

With reporting by Edward Barnes/Jersey City, Dean Fischer/Cairo and William McWhirter/Dearborn