Imam serves as public face of an embattled mosque

After nine years of interviews, Imam Johari Abdul-Malik has learned to wait for the questions.

View Photo Gallery — One of the largest mosques in the country, Dar Al-Hijrah is prima...

Under Suspicion: Muslims in America

Washington Post: By William Wan,

If he waits long enough, the reporters inevitably ask about Anwar al-Aulaqi, the radical cleric who once led the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque. They want to know about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, and the two Sept. 11 hijackers who also once worshiped there. And they often come with a list of other terrorism suspects who have been connected in some way with the Northern Virginia mosque.

But having defended Dar Al-Hijrah for so long, Abdul-Malik knows what they’re really asking: What exactly is going on at this mosque? Is this a breeding ground for terrorists?

It is a suspicion that nearly all Muslim institutions have faced to some degree since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. But none more so than Dar Al-Hijrah.

As its critics often point out, almost no other mosque in the country has been linked to so many cases of alleged terrorism. The notoriety has gotten to the point where after each attack or arrest of a Muslim suspect, the mosque often finds TV crews camped outside its doors.

They are usually met by Abdul-Malik, who was hired to be Dar Al-Hijrah’s public face. Charged with rehabilitating its image, he has become ubiquitous in the media, appearing on the major networks and holding countless news conferences.

His answers, honed by repetition, are always confident and unequivocal: Aulaqi led their mosque for only one year, and there were no signs then of any radical, anti-American theology. As for Hasan, Abdul-Malik said, he was simply a man who snapped mentally.

“There is nothing at Dar Al-Hijrah, no ideology or preaching, that somehow leads people to violent extremism,” Abdul-Malik declared. “We condemn terrorism.”

But there is also much he doesn’t say.

He doesn’t always express the outrage within his mosque over the indignities suffered by Muslims throughout America’s war on terror. He doesn’t linger on the distrust harbored by many worshipers toward the government. He doesn’t lay out the divisions among the mosque’s leaders on how to handle such issues.

And when it comes to Aulaqi, Abdul-Malik only rarely mentions the ties that once connected the two of them. How before Aulaqi became an operative for al-Qaeda, before he became a target on the CIA’s kill list, he and Abdul-Malik had been companions for one of Islam’s most sacred rites. How in those early days he and others had considered Aulaqi a respected colleague, an admirable leader, perhaps even a friend.

He says none of this because in this new battlefield of perception that has emerged since Sept. 11 — where ammunition consists of past associations, loaded words and fear — there is seldom space for nuance.

‘A lot of anger’

The mosque’s name means “land of migration,” and every Friday more than 3,000 worshipers from more than 35 countries pack into Dar Al-Hijrah’s prayer hall. Doctors from Pakistan kneel next to hotel workers from Sudan. Refugees from Somalia pray alongside naturalized citizens from Egypt.

It was founded by a group of Arab college students in the 1980s. Through local fundraising drives and assistance from a few foreign donors such as the Saudi Embassy, the congregation bought 3.4 acres in Falls Church and began constructing a $5 million prayer hall.

Today, its immense stone facade — chiseled with a verse from the Koran and adorned with a minaret and domes — is just off Leesburg Pike, hidden by evergreens.

Its members are, for the most part, intensely committed to their faith and deeply conservative. Monday through Thursday, when many Muslims pray at home or near work, Dar Al-Hijrah regularly draws 200 to 400 worshipers, with many rising before dawn to get to prayer.

Women must enter through a back door so as not to be seen by men, and they sit in a separate area. Sermons at the mosque often touch unapologetically on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, with sometimes fierce statements of support for the Palestinian cause.

For years, the most serious accusations leveled at the mosque were neighborhood complaints about street parking. That changed, however, the day federal investigators realized that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers — Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi — had briefly worshiped there in 2001. And the imam at the time was Aulaqi, who had not yet begun preaching the extremist theology he would become well-known for.

Ultimately, the FBI and the federal 9/11 Commission were unable to determine whether Aulaqi saw with the hijackers at Dar Al-Hijrah in 2001. But they noted that he and some of the hijackers had met the year before at his former mosque in San Diego.

The way the commission’s report put it, the two hijackers’ appearance at Dar Al-Hijrah in 2001 “may not have been coincidental.”

That whiff of suspicion was seized upon by bloggers and authors, who dubbed Dar Al-Hijrah the “9/11 mosque” — a slur that its leaders have been fighting ever since.

In those early days, the mosque often felt like an institution under siege. Its office received menacing calls. Several members’ homes were raided in the months after Sept. 11. And many believed that the FBI had the mosque under surveillance.

“There was a lot of anger there,” said Michael Mason, former head of the FBI’s Washington field office who visited Dar Al-Hijrah as part of a region-wide outreach effort. “Sometimes you would go to mosques where people were overly polite because you’re the FBI. That was not the case there.”

At one early FBI town hall meeting, one Dar Al-Hijrah congregant essentially called Mason a liar, saying he wouldn’t believe anything Mason said.

“I said, ‘I didn’t come here to be spoken to like that,’ ” Mason said. “Afterward, he came up and apologized, and I told him: ‘I’m a black man. I know something about being treated for what you are rather than who you are.’ ”

Mason and Michael Rolince, the field office’s former head of counterterrorism, said their agents never came across any information that the mosque was somehow encouraging terrorism. But Rolince qualified it this way: “I’m not willing to say anyone was radicalized there or recruited there. But I’m not willing to say it didn’t happen, either. You look at the litany of people coming through there, and whether it’s through bad luck or bad timing or by design, you don’t know.”

Donate To Zakat U.S.A. Donations Tax Deductable

Crisis In The Horn Of Africa Pictures 1432 AH

Click Here: OPOW Slide Show

OPOW NEEDS YOUR HELP

If you like this article please consider donating to : Oppressed Peoples Online Word

Mission Statement Of Oppressed Peoples Online Word

O.P.O.W. Email: oppressedpeoplesonlineword@gmail.com

World News Up-dated : Mosaic World News

Press TV Live