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| Bad Bugger Books Behind Bars |
| 2008-09-30 |
| Early this year, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced the completion of an inventory of Islamic books and videos in Muslim chapel libraries in the 105 federal correctional institutions. The inventory, which runs to 399 pages, shows a marked predominance of Wahhabi and other fundamentalist Sunni literature among the Muslim holdings of federal prison chapels. The collections also contain plentiful materials from the Nation of Islam, the extreme black nationalist movement headed by Louis Farrakhan, but Shia and Sufi works are generally absent, as are texts on broader aspects of Islamic history and culture. This finding is significant in light of two other facts: Muslim extremists' openly stated intent to spread their ideology in prisons, and the Bureau of Prisons' own past reliance on Muslim chaplains trained in Wahhabi Islam. While no major acts of terror have been traced to recruitment in U.S. prisons, the tools necessary for extremist indoctrination remain, unaccountably, in place. Among the authors available to inmates in federal prisons, contemporary popularizers of Islamism, including jihadist radicals, are well represented. More encouraging is the discovery that the inventory includes only half a dozen copies of the infamous Wahhabi edition of the Koran, printed in English in Saudi Arabia with interlineated extremist commentaries (see "Rewriting the Koran," THE WEEKLY STANDARD, September 27, 2004). But the inventory shows at least 280 copies of works by Abdullah Hakim Quick, a Wahhabi-oriented fundamentalist from South Africa. These include videos of Quick preaching hateful attacks on Baha'is, as well as Ahmadis, a heterodox Muslim group, and titles like Muslims Under Siege and The Importance of Da'wa in Times of Crisis. (Da'wa is Islamic missionary activity. Islamists pursue da'wa aggressively, sometimes with the explicit goal of establishing a worldwide Islamic state or caliphate.) Quick is also known for his pseudo-historical claims for an early Muslim presence in the Americas. The inventory further lists 250 items by another South African extremist, the late Ahmed Deedat, notorious as an anti-Christian preacher, with such piquant titles as Da'wa or Destruction, as well as ferocious attacks on Salman Rushdie. Federal prison chapel libraries offer some 200 volumes by the Pakistani jihadist Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79) and approximately 200 copies of works by the eccentric Turkish Islamist Harun Yahya, who is known for donating books printed in numerous languages around the world, many of them expounding anti-Western conspiracy theories. It also lists 185 copies of offerings by a prominent North American fundamentalist, the Egyptian-born Jamal Badawi; 175 copies of titles by Imam Siraj Wahhaj, the preacher best known for spreading Wahhabism among black Americans; and 125 by Jamal Zarabozo, a white American Sunni radical. Zarabozo is the compiler of a retrograde 1996 collection of Islamic fatwas on the status of women. |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #1 So clean out the libraries, then shelve more appropriate titles... and get rid of the extremist clergy. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-09-30 15:51 |