Muslim Leader Who Was Once Labeled an Alarmist Is Suddenly a Sage
He warned that Islamic extremists had infiltrated the vast
majority of American Muslim mosques and student and community
groups, and that they had bought more than 20 nuclear warheads and
were paying former Soviet scientists to break them into chips that
could be carried in suitcases. "We want to tell people to be careful, that something major might
hit quickly," he told a forum on Islam convened by the State
Department. Now the sheik, who was denounced as a charlatan by nine major
American Muslim organizations, is back in the spotlight as never
before. He has appeared on CNN, "Today," MSNBC, NPR and more since
the terrorist attacks, cast as the Muslim who dared to blow the
whistle on his brethren. Two weeks ago, he briefed the staff of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Uzbekistan, a country that has
supported the United States in its war on Afghanistan and whose
president has offered Sheik Kabbani a warm welcome. Sheik Kabbani's profile and motivations, in reality, are a
complex intertwining of religious and political rivalries. Even
experts and policy makers who admire him say he has undermined his
message with hyperbolic claims about the influence of Islamic
extremism in the United States. "He's a good guy and he does mean well," said Robert Seiple,
ambassador at large for religious liberty in the Clinton
administration and now president of the Institute for Global
Engagement, in St. David's, Pa. "But his comments about 80 percent
of the leadership of Islam in America being extremists are
irresponsible and terribly unfortunate," Mr. Seiple said. "It just
plays into the hands of those who would demonize and create
division, and those knee- jerk types who see Islam as a
monolith." Probably more than any other figure, Sheik Kabbani helped shape
the view circulating among some American commentators and
intellectuals that the problem within Islam can be attributed
entirely to Wahhabism, the austere, fundamentalist brand of the
faith practiced in Saudi Arabia. "Where he makes the mistake," said Sulayman Nyang, a professor of
African and Islamic studies at Howard University, who serves on an
advisory board for the sheik, "is he tries to lump together the
Wahhabis with all the other Islamist groups. Not all of them are
Wahhabis." Sheik Kabbani grew up in Lebanon, exposed to visiting Islamic
luminaries in the home of his uncle, the grand mufti of Lebanon. As
a boy, he traveled the Islamic world with a Sufi master, Sheik
Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani, the namesake of the
Naqshbandi-Haqqani order of Sufism, and married his daughter. Sufism is the mystical stream within Islam, and scholars say
there are 40 to 60 major orders and 1,000 branches. The whirling
dervishes from Turkey are Sufis. Sheik Kabbani's Sufi order emphasizes participation in politics
and social issues, adherence to Islamic law and a strain of
apocalypticism that, combined with his political analysis, stoked
his dire predictions, said David Damrel, an expert in Islamic
mysticism at Arizona State University. While well accepted and integrated in many parts of the Muslim
world, Sufism has in some places been suppressed by the more
legalistic, puritanical Islamic movements like Wahhabism, which has
made inroads in the United States by building mosques and training
teachers. They disapprove of Sufi practices like venerating holy men
and making pilgrimages to the graves of saints. Uzbekistan is
important to Sheik Kabbani's Sufi order because the founder of its
parent Naqshbandi branch is buried there. Escaping the civil war in Lebanon in 1991, Sheik Kabbani was sent
to the United States to spread the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order, already
well established in places like Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and
parts of South Asia. He has homes in Michigan and California and
claims about 8,000 regular contributors and participants, 60,000
occasional students and 13 Islamic centers. He relates to his
disciples like a guru. In an interview last week in New York, 17 students congregated in
the room to hear him. A male student brought coffee; when Sheik
Kabbani went to the restroom, another held his turban and another
his cloak. Sheik Kabbani said that he stood by his claim in his State
Department speech that 80 percent of American mosques had been taken
over by extremists, because of the 114 mosques he first visited in
the United States, "Ninety of them were mostly exposed, and I say
exposed, to extreme or radical ideology," based on their speeches,
books and board members. He said that a telltale sign of an
extremist mosque was a focus on the Palestinian struggle. Sheik Kabbani said that American Muslim groups were dominated by
Sufi-hating Wahhabis, and that when he tried to distribute pamphlets
at the annual conference of the Islamic Society of North America,
organizers called the police. They say he disrupted the conference
by grabbing the microphone from a speaker. In 1998 he set up an office in Washington and named his
organization the Islamic Supreme Council of America, whose grandiose
title further inflamed other Muslim leaders. "He wanted to have a voice among the Muslim leaders," said Dr.
Nyang, "so when American government talked to Muslims, the Sufis
would have a voice, and he, Kabbani, will be the voice of the
Sufis." His State Department speech was attended by Muslim leaders he
branded extremists, and ended in shouting. His address had combined
fact, like Osama bin Laden's merging with other terrorist groups,
and broad suspicion, like, "If the nuclear atomic warheads reach
these universities, you don't know what these students are going to
do." Nine Muslim groups, including the Council on American Islamic
Relations and the Muslim Students Association, signed a letter
demanding "with heavy heart" a retraction and an apology. Death
threats flew in both directions. Sheik Kabbani received F.B.I.
protection. "With one talk he made every Muslim student in America suspect,"
said Hassan Hathout of the American Muslim Political Coordinating
Council. After that, Sheik Kabbani received only a wary welcome in
Washington until Sept. 11. But last week in New York, he represented
Muslims alongside a rabbi from Israel, a Hindu from India and
several Christian ministers at the closing news conference for the
World Conference on Religion and Peace, a United Nations
nongovernmental organization. "The Kabbani affair is the introduction into America of Middle
Eastern sectarianism, and the hyperbolic rhetoric and
interfratricidal struggles that go with that competition for
attention from American leadership," said Dr. Nyang, whose
grandfather was a famous Sufi. "America is a big magnifying mirror,
and they compete for access to it, because it projects you
internationally and makes you look big."
wo years ago, an obscure Muslim spiritual leader named
Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani stepped to the microphone at the State
Department and issued a chilling admonition to Americans to beware
the Muslims in their midst.
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