Just What Is the MSA?

At the center of the foot-bath controversy coming out of the University of Michigan-Dearborn is the harmless-sounding Muslim Student Association (MSA). According to the MSA’s website, “MSA is dedicated to representing the Islamic perspective through lectures, cultural and social activities, community celebrations and social betterment programs.”

That, and as we in Dearborn have come to learn, the MSA is front and center in obtaining religious accommodations through its alter ego, the Muslim Accommodations Task Force (MATF).

But there’s more to the MSA than just baking brownies for fundraisers and bringing in guest speakers. Much, much more.

Stephen Schwartz, a senior policy analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote the following about the MSA in 2003:

When its leaders speak to mainstream media, MSA presents itself as a campus-service organization not much different from other collegiate faith groups. But the reality is very different, and deeply sinister. MSA is a key element in the Wahhabi lobby, and a cornerstone of the conspiracy by Saudi-backed extremists to control American Islam, as well the public discourse about Islam in America. (“Butcher Enablers”).

Jonathon Dowd-Gailey of the Middle East Quarterly reports:

“There is overwhelming evidence that the MSA, far from being a benign student society, is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses—a voice espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, agitating aggressively against U.S. Middle East policy, and expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.”

How can a campus service organization professing a mission to present "the Islamic perspective" at the same time be a sinister front for Wahhabism?

The answer is, that the organization was directly spawned for that purpose by the foundational Islamic terrorist group of the past century, the Muslim Brotherhood. That is, the Muslim Brotherhood created the MSA for the purpose of establishing Islamic dominance in North America by slow degrees.

The Mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America

The Muslim Brotherhood, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, was founded in 1928 by 22-year-old Hassan Banna in the Egyptian city of Ismailiyya, in reaction to the end of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolishing in 1924 of the centuries-old Islamic caliphate. "Banna railed against the colonial powers' humiliation of Muslims, and preached that governments should be ruled by Islamic law, or sharia." (“In Search Of Friends Among The Foes”).

As Robert Spencer writes in Onward Muslim Soldiers, (p. 218), Banna’s political/religious “vision was in perfect accord with that of classical Muslim scholars such as Ibn Khaldun, who taught in the fourteenth century that ‘in the Muslims community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.’”

Force, as we are all aware, means armed jihad, the sword. Persuasion comes in the form of dawah.

In lands and situations where a weaker Muslim community cannot prevail through violent jihad, the teaching of al-Ikhwan “allows for the suspension of Jihad, and concentration on the non-violent Dawa campaign. Both Jihad and Dawa, in any event, are designed to serve an interim goal of advancing the long-term, ideological objective.” Ultimately, “[t]hrough Dawa the ground for Jihad is supposed to be prepared.” ("Hamas: Radical Islam in a National Struggle").

And dawah is Muslim-speak for the old frog-in-the-boiling-water experiment. It is meant to proceed by increments. But the objective remains the same: the eventual imposition, by force if necessary, of Islam and sharia law. Dawa doesn't accomplish this. It just gets us all used to the idea. (By the way, how do you think that's going?)

As reported in the Washington Post, (“In Search Of Friends Among The Foes”),

Advocating patience in achieving Brotherhood goals at an Ohio rally in 1995, "top Brotherhood official, Youssef Qaradawi, said victory will come through dawah .... ‘Conquest through dawah, that is what we hope for,’ said Qaradawi, an influential Qatari imam who pens some of the religious edicts justifying Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. ‘We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawah,’ said the imam, who has condemned the Sept. 11 attacks but is now barred from the United States.”

The Muslim Brotherhood Movement Homepage, under the heading of “Establishing the Islamic Government,” describes this step of preparation:

Al-Ikhwan believe that ruling a government should be the step which follows preparing (most of) the society for accepting the Islamic laws. Otherwise, ruling a totally corrupt society thru a militant government-overthrow is a great risk. Preparing the society is achieved thru plans for: spreading the Islamic culture, the possible media means, mosques, and da'wa work in public organizations such as syndicates, parliaments, student unions, .... Parallel to that, distinct muslims should be trained to administer political, economical, social, and student organizations efficiently (and Islamically), as another preparation step.

According the same source, the group’s theme is:

Allah is our objective.
The messenger is our leader.
Quran is our law.
Jihad is our way.
Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

In his 1995 speech, Qaradawi said the dawah would work through Islamic groups set up by Brotherhood supporters in this country. After praising the old “supporters who were jailed by Arab governments in 1950s and then came to the United States to ‘fight the seculars and the Westernized’ by founding this country's leading Islamic groups,” he specifically singled out as an example of dawah the Muslim Students Association: “Twenty years later, the MSA -- using $21 million raised in part from Qaradawi, banker Nada and the emir of Qatar -- opened a headquarters complex built on former farmland in suburban Indianapolis. With 150 chapters, the MSA is one of the nation's largest college groups.”

Papers now surfacing because of the Houston terror-support trial US v. Holy Land Foundation provide a stark look at Muslim Brotherhood plans. One such document, prepared by Brotherhood official Mohamed Akram around 1991, is titled “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,” and provides this "general strategic goal" for the movement:

Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning, establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic state wherever it is.

Key to this mission of "establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement" is “Settlement,” a term meaning “That Islam and its Movement become a part of the homeland it lives in”, i.e., North America. In order for this to take place, “the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain ‘the keys’ and the tools of this process in [sic] carry out this grand mission as a ‘Civilization Jihadist’ responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and -- on top of them-- the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.”

Maybe the language is a bit heavy, but not as bad as all that, right? Maybe "Civilization Jihad" only means the same peaceful civiliazational advances we all hope for? You can think that until he gets more specific about the meaning of “settlement”:

“Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America:

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan 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 God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

That seems clear enough. Down with Western civilization and the US Constitution, and up with Sharia. And the Muslim Brotherhood does hold an impressive track record for founding groups that successfully accomplish many of their deadly ends. Along with the MSA, the Brotherhood founded Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all extremely efficient shedders of innocent blood. Those heavily influenced by Muslim Brotherhood ideas include Osama Bin Ladin and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The Brotherhood Founds the MSA

Joe Kaufman at FrontPage Magazine summarizes the well-documented history of how the MSA came into being:

The Muslim Students Association (MSA) was founded by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in January of 1963. It was the first major project of the newly arrived Brotherhood immigrants, who numbered in the hundreds. Today, MSA chapters are found in most, if not all, of the leading universities throughout the United States and Canada. (“MSA, the Missing Co-Conspirator”).

Much like the Brotherhood overseas, the MSA is set up using “Zonal” representatives. Both the U.S. and Canada have East and West Zones and conferences staged at each.

In another Muslim Brotherhood memo made an exhibit in the Holy Land case, Brotherhood official Zeid-Al-Noman explains how in the early days of the Ikhwan in the 1960s, a "main condition of recruitment in the ranks of this Movement was that a brother...must be active in the general activism in the MSA, a person who attends its general conferences or participating in its executive committees, whether local or central, and this was the Movement's condition in the 60s." Zeid also explains that one dynamic element of the organizational base in North America is that "the vast majority of the Muslim Brotherhood here are students."

And, according to Minneapolis-Star reporter Katherine Kirsten, neither the contemporary MSA or MATF, in spite of being student organizations, is merely being "operated by overly enthusiastic college students. Its professional staff, based in the Washington, D.C., area, includes coordinators who provide legal advice, teach students to lobby, write letters on their behalf, and help them overcome ‘obstacles’ such as college administrators' concerns about violating the separation of church and state.”

And just to show how the MSA is a chip off the old Muslim Brotherhood block, in March 2003 the MSA hosted a guest speaker at an MSA meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York who declared openly,

“‘We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it ... Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.’” (Jonathon Dowd-Gailey, “Islamism's Campus Club: The Muslim Students' Association”).

As Dowd-Gailey explains:

The MSA reflects a prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA's Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics:

It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more "In-your-face" association.

All of this, the guide explains, results from the MSA's duty "to bring morality back into the campus" and to convince students to practice Islam "as a complete way of life."

In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of "special treatment" and "self-segregation" that sounds reminiscent of, and may actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding that universities be more "Muslim-friendly," the MSA's newly established National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims only.

(NOTES: The RATF has since been renamed the Muslim Accommodation Task Force (MATF). Also, The Starter’s Guide is no longer available online, and online searches reveal no traces of it aside from Dowd-Gailey’s footnote.)

Indeed, The Muslim Accommodations Task Force (MATF), is “an initiative by theby [sic] MSA National to invite Muslim students, their colleagues, educators and administrators to discover how Muslim student leaders and colleges and universities have worked hand in hand to make campuses ‘Muslim-friendly.’”

The MSA Founds the ISNA

In 1981 the MSA spun off the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "an umbrella organization for Islamic groups that holds annual conventions drawing more than 25,000 people."

International Communication Professor J. Michael Waller described the ISNA's function at length in recent Congressional testimony:

The Islamic Society of North America is an influential front for the promotion of the Wahhabi political, ideological and theological infrastructure in the United States and Canada.

Established by the Muslim Students Association, ISNA seeks to marginalize leaders of the Muslim faith who do not support its ideological goals. Through sponsorship of propaganda, doctrinal material and mosques, is pursuing a strategic objective of dominating Islam in North America. ISNA provides ideological material to about 1,100 of an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 mosques in North America. It vets and certifies Wahhabi-trained imams and is the main official endorsing agent for Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military.

Politically, ISNA has promoted leaders of the American Muslim Council (AMC), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

NRO's Stephen Schwartz describes ("Butcher Enablers"), how Western Muslim scholar Hamid Algar, in his essay, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, “calls attention to MSA's role in the creation of the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, which is best described as a branch of the Saudi religious militia operating to impose Wahhabi conformity on all of American Islam.”

In 1971 some of the same people who founded MSA also founded the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), “a financing arm that holds title to hundreds of U.S. mosques and manages bank accounts for Muslim groups using Islamic principles.” (“In Search Of Friends Among The Foes”).

I don’t know about you, but those sound like some hefty spin-offs from just a college student’s group. I’ll bet InterVarsity never appointed a subcommittee that ended up controlling the pulpits of more than half the Bible churches in America.

“In addition,”continues Schwartz, “the MSA has strong ties with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), established in 1972 and directed from the Saudi capital, Riyadh. WAMY's U.S. offices in Northern Virginia have been a central target of the federal investigation of terrorist funding and money laundering by Islamist groups following the horrors of September 11th.”

For that matter, in January 2006 the U.S. Senate Finance Committee requested the Internal Revenue Service to turn over documents concerning several Muslim charities, including the MSA, in search of ties between tax-exempt organizations and terror groups.

So we've got the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Wahhabists, CAIR, the ISNA, financial ties to terrorists, anti-American propaganda, and an ideology of religious contempt for the West. That's a perfect storm of bad guys amongst whom is nestled your local MSA. Is it any wonder Joe Kaufman refers to the Muslim Student Association as “the missing coconspirator” in the Holy Land case?

But more to my point, remember that Qaradawi promised the Muslim Brotherhood and its puppet front, the MSA, would “conquer America, not through the sword but through dawah.”

Objections to the foot baths were never about people just being unhappy about installing new plumbing for a few students showering their feet in a rest room. The objections are about parrying the thrust of dawah.

There is a reason why, when a few of us pinched the University and the MSA over these foot baths, it was CAIR that squealed.

They are telling us this is only preparation. And like the old saying goes, Allah is in the details.