A resounding voice in traditional Islam: Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani is a vocal opponent of Saudi extremist Wahhabi Islam, which he says has infected many Muslim institutions in the United States

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 1, 2002 | by J. Michael Waller

Where were all the Muslim and Arab pressure groups several years ago when the first warnings were raised about Osama bin Laden and terrorist-support networks in the United States? Pretty quiet, by most accounts. One of the few Muslim leaders in this country to warn publicly and repeatedly about the internal terrorist threat was Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani of Detroit.

As leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, Kabbani has been a courageous voice of moderation and American patriotism, raising the alarm--at great personal cost--about impending foreign and domestic terrorist threats and advising what should be done about them. For years he has warned about the hijacking of Islam in the United States and elsewhere in the world by a militant and violent Wahhabist sect financed by Saudi Arabia that now controls or funds a large number of mosques, religious schools and political organizations in this country [see "`Wahhabi Lobby'" Takes the Offensive," Aug. 5]. Traditional, "moderate" American Muslim leaders, for the most part, have felt too isolated, outnumbered and intimidated to resist.

Wahhabi-linked groups worked hard to marginalize Kabbani as a result. That may be changing. In recent weeks, the State Department and White House actively have engaged the sheik and his organization.

A native of Lebanon, Kabbani is a Sufi Muslim and an internationally respected Islamic scholar whose teachers trace directly back to the Prophet Mohammed. He is part of a respected family of traditional Islamic scholars that has led the muftiate of Lebanon for the last 150 years. His cousin is the grand mufti of Lebanon, the ultimate authority of Islamic rulings in that country.

INSIGHT spoke with Kabbani on the eve of the first anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as he prepared to call for Muslims across the country to set up "community-watch" programs to fight neighborhood crime, and "protect our mosques, schools and centers from the threat within our ranks."

Insight: How did you come across the violence-oriented strains of Islam in America that clashed with the traditional Islam you learned in the Middle East?

Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani: I was raised in a very conservative family and studied at the American University of Lebanon. At the same time my uncles, my father's family and my mother's family were running the religious Muslim affairs of Lebanon. So I was raised in a family that knows Islam very well. We are very well-rooted in Islam. When I came to the United States, I saw what was being implemented here was not the classical Islam that 90 percent of the Muslims around the world adopt or practice. I began to realize that it was the Wahhabi Islam. From the beginning, we knew we had to stand up. We knew the danger that would come with that ideology. So we said we would not be part of any of their literature. We have our own, and it has to be only classical Islam, the pure Islam that came to us 1,400 years ago from the time of the prophet through the majority of Muslim scholars around the world. Not the scholars of Saudi Arabia. So we stood up and we told people and we educated them about that kind of Islam.

Insight: You're unusual among Muslim leaders in America. More than condemning terrorism, you actively have warned of the terrorist dangers to U.S. national security.

MHK: I tried my best to be patriotic and to do something against violence and against causing wars in the world, and I saw there was a danger. Many Muslims in the United States were aware of the danger, but they didn't have the capacity to speak on behalf of the Muslim community because the microphone has been hijacked.

Insight: In what way has the Muslim community's voice been "hijacked"?

MHK: We stood up in 1996. We spoke up about the Wahhabis. I did it openly. I mentioned the dangers of Wahhabism at our international conference in Los Angeles. From that time we began to get hit. We were discriminated against, boycotted, cut from many Muslim conferences because we were not accepting the way of Islam they were presenting. We were saying, "This is not the Islam we know in the Muslim countries. This is Wahhabi Islam. We cannot accept it."

We found a lot of American Muslims saying, "We don't know what Wahhabism is." Unfortunately, American converts were naive; they didn't know that there was Wahhabi Islam. Muslims born and raised here don't know the difference. The Islam they are seeing now is brought from the World Muslim League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

Insight: Saudi-based groups?

MHK: Yes, Saudi organizations that were brought here to America. And they're spreading Wahhabi Islam, and people think it's Islam because it's coming from the land of the two holy cities. No one will understand unless he is a scholar and knows Islam from back home.

Insight: What was the response to your warnings?

MHK: It caused a lot of commotion in the Muslim community. It opened their eyes. In the beginning of 1998 we began to publish The Muslim magazine, which was very well-accepted in the leadership community, in the administration, the U.S. State Department and the Muslim community. We began to expose everything. We spoke about [Osama] bin Laden, we spoke about the extremist groups in America, how they are using the centers, how they are using the Muslim mosques, how the ideology of Wahhabism is spread, how the leadership is implementing it but how the Muslim community in general is not accepting it. It went very well.