A Mosque in Munich

On May 18th Ian Johnson, author of A Mosque in Munich and the Chief of the Wall Street Journal’s Berlin Bureau joined Schwartz Fellow Nicholas Schmidle to discuss the history of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West through the lens of the chequered history of the Islamic Center of Munich.

Mr. Johnson described how he was first inspired to research the Munich Mosque. On entering an Islamic book store in London he was surprised to see a commemorative plate containing pictures of the world’s most influential Mosques. Included amongst pictures of the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Blue Mosque of Istanbul was a picture of a decidedly less grand one tucked away in a Munich back street. After years of painstaking research, he finally revealed the story of the Islamic Center of Munich. He described how it traces its lineage to a program organised by Nazi Germany to recruit Soviet Muslims as a fifth column to destabilise the Soviet Union during World War II. As the war came to a close many Muslim soldiers fled to Munich where they remained after the war, opening a Mosque in the late 1950’s. Mr. Johnson went on to explain how the CIA, upon discovering the existence of these anti-communist Muslims in Germany, recruited them to fight Communism as part of a broader strategy to use religion to fight communism.

By sending them on pilgrimages to Mecca to counter Soviet propaganda spread by Soviet Muslims, the CIA hoped to contain communism in the Islamic world. The program was dropped however once US foreign policy became focused on Vietnam and the Mosque was abandoned by the CIA. Mr. Schmidle was fascinated by the possibility of ‘blowback’ from CIA operations amongst Muslims, likening the situation to the role the CIA played in creating Al Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan War. Mr. Johnson related the story of the Mosque to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation described by Mr. Schmidle as a ‘Gateway Drug’ to Radical Islamism. The Mosque was slowly taken over by figures strongly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and became synonymous with political Islam. Al Qaeda’s chief of finance sought counselling from the Mosque’s Chief Imam before being arrested in 1999. After 2001 the head of the Mosque’s board of directors was placed on a terrorist watch list and had his assets frozen. By the end of the 2000’s the Mosque had become normalised, admitting Turkish-Germans for prayers and acting less like a terrorist cell. Entwined with the history of the Mosque were Mr. Johnson’s observations about his research, including memos by Swiss intelligence officers declaring Said Ramadan – an exiled senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood – to be an American agent.

Participants

featured speakers
Ian Johnson
Author, A Mosque in Munich
Berlin Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal

Nicholas Schmidle
Author, To Live or to Perish Forever
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation