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The Mosque and the Imam
Washington's Islamic Center is riven by scandal and lawsuits.

The Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., is among the most prominent and opulent Muslim prayer houses in America. It displays the national flags of Muslim countries out front and makes obvious to thousands of passing motorists that the faith of Muhammad has a place in America.

That was the message delivered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower when the mosque was opened in 1957. The chief executive (accompanied by his wife, Mamie, who unlike later American first ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush saw no need to don an Islamic head covering) declared,

The countries which have sponsored and built this Islamic Center have for centuries contributed to the building of civilization. With their traditions of learning and rich culture, the countries of Islam have added much to the advancement of mankind. Inspired by a sense of brotherhood, common to our innermost beliefs, we can here together reaffirm our determination to secure the foundations of a just and lasting peace.

Eisenhower concluded,

Our country has long enjoyed a strong bond of friendship with the Islamic nations. .  .  . Under the American Constitution, .  .  . this Center, this place of worship, is as welcome as could be any similar edifice of any religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have your own church and worship according to your own conscience. Without this, we would be something else than what we are.

The Islamic Center was built at the suggestion of the Egyptians, but with support from Christian and Muslim Arabs and Turks in America, along with Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Indonesian, Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian diplomats and the Saudi royal family. The Nizam of Hyderabad, a fabulously rich Muslim dignitary in India, and the Aga Khan, global leader of the Ismaili Shias, were solicited for large contributions. Later assistance came from Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, and Tunisia. And U.S. corporations with interests in the Muslim world-Bechtel and the Arabian American Oil Co. (later Saudi Aramco), among others-kicked in. According to an official History of the Islamic Center issued in 1978, construction was slowed by the diversion of Arab attention to the fight against Jewish immigration to the state of Israel. Yet the mosque was completed and remains an impressive showpiece.

Since the late 1980s, however, the Islamic Center has come to be representative of the corruption of American Islam under the domination of the radical Wahhabi sect and its Saudi patron.

In 1978 the director of the mosque was Ardeshir Zahedi, ambassador of the shah of Iran. With the overthrow of the monarchy in Tehran the next year, the mosque fell into the hands of pro-Khomeini extremists, who became involved in one of the earliest and worst incidents of radical Islamist terrorism on American soil.

On July 22, 1980, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former employee of the Iranian embassy in Washington and opponent of the dictatorship of the ayatollahs, was shot to death at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. The killer was an American convert to Islam, David Belfield, known as Dawud Salahuddin, who confessed to the crime in an interview with ABC television's 20/20 in 1996. Belfield had been active in Islamic outreach (da'wa) to African Americans in U.S. prisons. Having killed Tabatabai, he fled to Iran, and in 2001 he appeared in the Iranian film Kandahar acting under the pseudonym Hassan Tantai.

In 1983, after much internal controversy, the Islamic Center was taken over by Saudi officials. The next year, a new director, or chief imam, was sent to the mosque-Saudi subject Abdullah M. Khouj. Khouj's credentials, which became public in a messy lawsuit beginning in 2006, were, in retrospect, problematic.

Khouj represented the Muslim World League (MWL), founded in Saudi Arabia in 1962 as an international agency for the propagation of Wahhabism. In 2006, relief branches of the MWL in Southeast Asia would be designated by the U.S. Treasury as financing fronts for al Qaeda. In addition, Khouj was admitted to the United States as a diplomat, allegedly serving as an attaché at the Saudi Embassy, but actually dedicated to advancing the most radical interpretation of Islam in history. His diplomatic visa allowed Khouj to receive a tax-free monthly personal salary of $10,920. He also received $50,000 a month to run the mosque, which he kept in his personal account. The State Department, from 1998 to 2001, pressed the Saudi embassy to explain why its purported attaché was running a major mosque.

And Khouj's résumé betrayed yet another lapse: While the bylaws of the mosque called for its chief imam to hold a doctoral degree in Islamic studies, Khouj had training only in psychology.

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