Music City USA hosts clashing views of Islam

Sayyid Syeed

Two events held within a week of each other in one of America’s heartland cities illustrate the sharp divide over perceptions of Islam’s role in the nation.

Last Friday, an Assemblies of God church in suburban Nashville stepped up to host a conference warning of the encroachment of Islamic law on Western Civilization after the event’s contract with a downtown hotel was canceled because the management feared Muslim protesters might react violently to the speakers.

Meanwhile, a Methodist church across town is hosting an interfaith dialogue tonight featuring a founder and current leader of a prominent national Islamic organization that has enjoyed cache with the federal government, including the White House. The group’s critics, however, point out it was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-financing case in American history.

The group, the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, has been documented in court as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent of most of the major jihadist groups in the world, including al-Qaida and Hamas.

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Sayyid Syeed – ISNA’s national director of interfaith and community alliances – is scheduled to speak at the West End United Methodist Church in Nashville at 7 p.m. for a “special evening of learning and cooperation” titled “Family of Abraham – Toward a Common Vision.”

The event’s host committee features many prominent political, business, academic and religious leaders in Nashville, including city council members Brady Banks, Megan Barry and Fabian Bedne.

Frank Gaffney (WND photo)

A flyer for the gathering says that “given the politics and events of the day, questions about Islam have arisen that require an authoritative response.” Christians, Jews and Muslims must educate themselves about each other’s religions, the flyer says, as a “necessary first step toward global understanding and religious harmony.”

Among the questions generated from the audience in a “well-received inaugural dialogue” in July were “What is Shariah law?” and “Is there reason to fear it’s incursion into American law?”

Last Friday, the Preserving Freedom Conference organized by the Sharia Awareness Action Network at Cornerstone Church emphatically answered yes to the latter question.

Speaker Frank Gaffney, a former Defense Department official in the Reagan administration, noted ISNA was named on a document entered at the trial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation in 2007 as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 29 likeminded “organizations of our friends.”

The document, titled “An Exploratory Memorandum on the Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” details the Brotherhood’s aim of ultimately taking over America and replacing its system with Saudi-style Islamic law.

The document states:

The Ikhwan (Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

At the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007, federal prosecutors said Sayeed was serving as secretary-general of ISNA when the group was funneling money to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Two years later, ISNA – along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the North American Islamic Trust and the Islamic Association of Palestine – tried to have its name removed from the list of terrorist co-conspirators.

Federal Judge Jorge Solis, who heard the Holy Land Foundation case, rejected the request, however, writing that the “government has produced ample evidence to establish the association” of those groups “with Hamas.”

Gaffney was part of a team of experts coordinated by his D.C.-based Center for Security Policy that produced a report last year titled “Shariah: The Threat to America.”

The report explains that according to Shariah, “every faithful Muslim is obligated to wage jihad – whether violent or not – against those who do not adhere to this comprehensive, totalitarian, political-military code.”

“Adherents to Shariah,’ the report states, “are fundamentally and unalterably opposed to the survival of the Constitution of the United States”

One of the sponsors of last Friday’s conference, the Tennessee Freedom Coalition, has been active on the political front. They helped make the Volunteer State the first in the nation to pass a law to protect citizens’ constitutional rights against the infiltration of foreign laws, including Islamic law.

Beginning a conversation

Rev. Michael Williams, senior pastor of West End United Methodist, the church hosting tonight’s dialogue, told WND he was unaware of the ties Syeed’s organization has to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Holy Land Foundation case.

He pointed out Syeed’s reputation as a speaker at the First International Conference of Imams and Rabbis in Brussels in 2005 and at the First U.S. Conference of Imams and Rabbis in New York in 2007. Syeed also received the Lifetime Achievement award for distinguished service in furthering Islamic tradition in North America from the Catholic Heritage Foundation in Louisville, Ky. In addition, the event organizers noted, he has developed a text that is used in communities across the nation called “Children of Abraham: Jews and Muslims in Conversation.”

Wafa Sultan (WND photo)

“For some folks, there is nobody you could choose to be the perfect spokesperson,” Williams told WND. “What we’re hoping is that we that we can begin a conversation” with someone who can help Christians and Jews understand Islam better.

Asked to respond to critics who contend Islam is a uniquely political religion that requires its followers to establish its supremacy in every nation and ultimately over the world, Williams pointed to history, arguing Christianity also has known eras of theocratic aggression.

He said his purpose is to enter into a dialogue that “models the best defense against any combination of religion and politics – that is a kind of civil discourse” that doesn’t claim that one is right and the other is wrong.

In contrast, a speaker at last Friday’s conference – Wafa Sultan, a former Muslim from Syria who is now an U.S. citizen – asserted Americans should have no illusions about Islam.

“We think, ‘If only we are nice to each other, it will be fine,'” she said, “while completely ignoring a minority group that plays by different rules and intends to exploit the U.S. in every way possible.”

Another speaker, Andrew Bostom, author of “The Legacy of Jihad” and the upcoming “Shariah vs. Freedom,” warned that the most prominent group of “mainstream” Islamic scholars in the U.S. – the top interpreters of Islamic law for Sunni Muslims – have declared they are open to engaging in offensive jihad against the American system as soon as Muslims are strong enough.

Known as the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America, the scholars, he noted, have issued “fatwas,” or decrees that sanction the killing of Muslims who abandon Islam and condone female genital mutilation. They also have made anti-American statements directed at U.S. troops and said Muslims must not work for the FBI.