In the Eye of the Media Storm: Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman

By Ian Williams

At the time I set out to interview Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, he was avoiding the press. In three weeks of phoning various mosques around New York to make contact, I heard from several of his followers that he had been misquoted and ridiculed. After several weeks, my bona fides established, perhaps mostly by dint of pronouncing the sheikh's name properly, I was told to turn up at a fourth-floor apartment in Jersey City.

On a brisk Saturday morning at the end of February, Sheikh Omar, who has been blind for most of his 55 years and learned the Qur'an from a Braille edition, was brought from his nearby home by a young student to the apartment where the interview was to take place. The sheikh was wearing the full hat and gown of a graduate of Cairo's Al Azhar University, but the apartment did not seem lived in. The walls of the living room where we spoke were lined with boxes which, however, contained nothing more inflammatory than copies of the sheikh's sermons and speeches.

In our stockinged-feet we sipped glasses of tea as the sheikh, sitting on a sofa and concerned that he and I could be misquoted, manipulated a cassette recorder with the dexterity of a lifelong blind man. After an hour and a half, his talking alarm clock began to let him know he had another engagement at midday. A week later, New York's World Trade Center's parking garage exploded, and another week later still, I saw televised footage of the interview site being raided by the FBI. Although it is difficult to feel sympathy for a fiery populist preacher whose atavistic brand of Islam would set the clock back centuries for Arab women and men, the media Lynching of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman does need some balance. When he was interviewed just before the bombing, his answers suggested that he was unlikely to be party to any actions that could prejudice his appeal with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Beside which, the FBI has had him under surveillance for many months. Apart from his overriding hatred of the government of Egypt, he sounded so moderate on many other issues that his fundamentalist colleagues in Palestine's Hamas or Algeria's FIS might have been dubious about his credentials. However looking at the fervor with which the media and security agencies converged upon Sheikh Omar's brand of fundamentalism as the link between two acts of terrorism in the United States, one could sympathize with him when he said, "America and the Soviet Union used to agree on only one thing—their enmity toward Islam. But when Communism fell, America found no other threat but Islam. This is a major error made by America and a pitfall. Islam is not against modern civilization, and it is not opposed against the West if it is sincere about supporting human rights. I've said before that human rights and freedom and democracy originated in Islam."

On occasion, his utterances were almost Delphic in their abstruseness, and he tried to deflect questions on Middle Eastern politics by claiming, "I am not a man of politics. I am a man with a specific case, which is the oppression and tyranny imposed on the Egyptian people by Hosni Mubarak's government.'' Of course, he could have been moderating his language for the media, but with the skills of a trained theologian, he was adept at avoiding direct responsibility for where the logic of his statements was leading.

For example, his remarks on Israel and the Palestinians were persistently elusive. Asked about Israel, he declared sententiously: "Those who have aggressed against the rights of others must restore these rights. I mean the Muslims in Palestine. The deportees are just the latest episode. When the Palestinians get their rights back, then there might be peace."

Asked whether he was referring to the rights to all of the land of Palestine they lost in 1948, or to the remaining 22 percent in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza they lost in 1967, he evaded by saying: "That issue should be judged by just people, and the Palestinians should receive their full rights."

Who these "just people" were he did not specify, apart from assuring that they were not the "American United Nations." Of the Camp David "Framework for Peace" brokered by President Jimmy Carter which, whatever was intended, became a de facto Egyptian-Israeli peace that excluded the Palestinians, Sheikh Omar said forthrightly and briefly, "It was an unjust and unfair treaty—and I don't want to go into details."

Asked whether he regarded the extent of PLO involvement in the current peace process as a fair solution or a bad compromise, he answered cryptically, "All Palestinian sides should be represented in such an agreement.'' Did he mean Hamas? "All the sides," he repeated.

Asked outright if he thought that Israel had the right to exist, he said, "Even though I've said that I'm not a man of politics and I'm representing a specific case, but I would say that every aggressor should be punished for his aggression."

Under further probing, he added: "If Israel wishes to exist, then it should not commit aggression against others. Can one state exist by eliminating another state? Israel can exist as long as it likes, but it should not commit aggression against neighbors that live next to it."

Dismissing as "inventions of the federal government" the suggestion that he was involved in several killings, including that of Jewish extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, Sheikh Omar pointed out that an Egyptian military court had acquitted him of involvement in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. On the other hand he said, he was "not sad" at what happened to Sadat and he hoped that Egypt's current president, Hosni Mubarak, "would suffer the same fate, too."

Sadat's predecessor, President Gamal Abdul Nasser, was, Sheikh Omar declared, "as bad as his two brothers."

Whatever his reluctance to talk about Israel, Palestine or events in the U.S., the Egyptian prayer leader has no inhibitions at all about attacking Cairo and its rulers. "The Egyptian regime is based on oppression and dictatorship," he said. "Hosni Mubarak's regime . . . is a police state. He rules Egypt through martial law and emergency laws. And I challenge Hosni Mubarak through the media, I challenge him to rule Egypt even for one hour without these emergency laws.

"He wouldn't be able to rule Egypt for a minute. Hosni Mubarak is ruling without freedom and democracy. He laughs at the West and fools them into thinking he has democracy. There is no freedom to write, no freedom to preach, and no freedom of speech. Democracy for him is oppression and aggression. Even Mubarak's election was not based on democracy."

The Egyptian cleric claimed his only relations with other fundamentalist organizations like Hamas in Palestine or FIS in Algeria were "the relations of affection and prayers for their victory."

I noted that a leader of the Islamic Front in Algeria was quoted as saying there is no such word as democracy in the Qur'an, and that an Islamic government could not be voted out once it was voted in. If that is true, I asked, how sincere is the sheikh's attachment to democracy?

He replied that "there is something in the Islamic system which is greater than democracy, which is shura (consultation). Shura means elections, freedoms and expressing every sound opinion that can be well argued. And if they fail in the elections, then they are voted out and others replace them." Under prompting, he added, "Even if they are not Muslims, if this is the will of the electorate."

When I noted one does not have to condone the behavior of Mubarak's government to wonder whether the attacks on Copts, tourists and secularists by the sheikh's Egyptian supporters are a good example of human rights advocacy, the sheikh responded:

''There is no other minority which has such privileges or enjoys such freedom and such lack of hostile feelings as the Christians in Egypt. Islam recognizes the rights of other religions and churches, so Muslims D`C the × ~r ~a ~s ~ the n~ the Muslims are entitled to. They maintain their money, their portions, their life and so forth. There is no such thing as strife in Egypt between Muslims and Christians. It is just being fabricated by the government. The Egyptian government is creating hostility between Muslims and Christians, just to win the sympathy of the West." Indeed, he claims, "I have those who love me amongst the Copts in Egypt."

Regarding the murdered tourists, he disclaims the attacks while excusing the attackers. "Tourism is legal in Islam and the Qurtan urges people to travel the globe," Sheikh Omar declares. "Tourism for health reasons, for learning, to carry out the pilgrimage, all these are good. But tourism is not gambling or wine or nightclubs. It is incumbent upon the tourists who travel to Egypt to respect Muslim customs and traditions.

"They should not spread corruption and sexual diseases. Then and only then will tourists be welcome and enjoy their full rights. I never called, nor did anyone call, for the killing of tourists. As for these youths who killed the tourists, and who are between 15 and 20 years, their fathers, brothers, cousins and uncles were all jailed. What they did was to draw attention to their cause and to embarrass the government and to try to get it to release thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners. No one intends to kill or injure tourists. But tell me, how come we are all angry at the death and killing of one tourist and no one protested when tens of thous ands were thrown into jails with no food or medication or reason?"

Sheikh Omar claimed that the Egyptian interior minister had sent "an emissary whose name I will not reveal at this time who informed me that, if I returned, I would be imprisoned and my house would be surrounded by police cars as it was during the last few years. Nevertheless, I'm willing to go to Egypt right now. If I am imprisoned, this would be a retreat, and if I am killed it would be martyrdom in the service of God.''

If he cannot go back to Egypt, Sheikh Omar says, then his preference is to stay in America. Since his colleagues in Iran called this the "Great Satan," I asked if it was an appropriate place for a person of his beliefs. "It may be that my presence in the belly of the Great Satan could show it the way to the right path," he said with a smile.

It remains, to be seen, however, whether the path for the sheikh leads to JFK Airport and on to Cairo in the belly of a jumbo jet. There have been suggestions that the "mistaken" visa issued to him was in fact a return for services rendered in mustering support for the "good" Islamic militants in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, it may be that the presence in the U.S. of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, and the media carnival around the unproven allegations about him, is doing its greatest service to those who want Islam to replace Communism as the strategic threat of the 1990s.