Alms for Jihad

Giving to charity is incumbent upon every Muslim. Throughout history, Muslims have donated to the poor and to charitable endowments set up for the purposes of promoting Islam through the construction of mosques, schools, and hospitals. In recent years, there has been a dramatic proliferation of Islamic charities, many of which were created in the declining decades of the twentieth century by the infusion of oil money into the Muslim world. While most of these are legitimate, there is now considerable and worrying evidence to show that others have more questionable intentions, and that funds from such organizations have been diverted to support terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda. The authors of this book examine the contention through a detailed investigation of the charities involved, their financial intermediaries, and the terrorist organizations themselves. What they discover is that money from these charities has funded conflicts across the world, from the early days in Afghanistan when the mujahideen (Muslim warriors) fought the Soviets, to subsequent terrorist activities in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Palestine, and, most recently, in Europe and the United States. This ground-breaking book is the first to piece together, from a vast array of sources, the secret and complex financial systems that support terror.

J. MILLARD BURR worked for many years in the Department of State and was formerly United States logistics advisor for Operation Lifeline Sudan I. He has worked closely with international charities for more than forty years.

ROBERT O. COLLINS is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

   They have previously co-authored three books: Requiem for the Sudan: War, Drought, and Disaster Relief on the Nile (1995), Africa’s Thirty Years’ War: Chad, Libya, and the Sudan, 1963–1993 (1999), and Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989–2000 (2003).

Alms for Jihad

Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World

J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521857307

© J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Burr, J. Millard.
Alms for jihad : charity and terrorism in the Islamic world / J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-85730-9 (hardback) – ISBN 0-521-67395-X (pbk.)
1. Charities – Islamic countries. 2. Terrorism – Islamic countries. I. Collins, Robert O., 1933– II. Title.
HV435.B87 2006
361.7′5′091767 – dc22 2005024165

ISBN-13 978-0-521-85730-7 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-85730-9 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Illustrations

Maps

Figure

Tables

Preface

This book seeks to unravel and bring clarity to the complex, elaborate, and secret world of Islamic charities that have financed terrorism. It is not an attempt to give the kind of learned discourse on zakat, sadaqa, or waqf that can be found in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Similarly, it cannot provide an extensive analysis of each of the regions where Islamic charities have supported terrorists. Thus, the individual chapters are more an abstract, a précis, to provide a succinct explanation of the composition, financing, money-laundering, and management of those charities through which runs their common objective, the establishment of the Islamist state. It must be abundantly clear from the outset that there are thousands of Islamic charities to assist and support the poor, the destitute, the sick, and the refugee that have nothing to do with terrorism. Many of these charities promote Islam for its religious mission, but that is not what this book is about. Our objective was to have the reader, when reaching the last page, have an appreciation for the global extent, ferocity, and determination of the Islamists who are perpetrating crimes against humanity in the name of religion, and the role that certain Islamic charities have played in supporting those Islamists. The rhetoric of revolution to justify terror to seize political power has become a masquerade that denigrates the very spiritual meaning and power of Islam.

   Although the authors have had to struggle to select the critical evidence from our many sources to satisfy the practical constraints of publication, the genesis of this book began during the writing of Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989–2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For those familiar with Khartoum, one of the most striking differences between the city in the 1980s and in the 1990s was the appearance of new Islamic charities and their gratuitous proliferation in prominently situated offices. Who were these charities? What was their purpose? Why the Sudan of all places? The more we sought the answers to this phenomenon, the more we realized that Khartoum had actually been transformed from a rather somnolent outpost of the Islamic world into a center of the international Islamist movement, made possible by the enormous amounts of money made available to its leaders by Islamic charities. The search was on before the trail turned cold.

   The authors owe a debt of gratitude to Olivier Roy and Steven Emerson, investigators whose lone voices were heard in the early 1990s warning governments that an Islamist revolutionary movement was germinating throughout the western world. Emerson distributed a video to convince those who would look and listen that the Islamists had established in the USA “an elaborate support and recruiting network coast to coast with branches in more than 88 American cities.” They served as recruiting centers that supported mujahideen operating around the world. Despite the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Khobar bombing of the US military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the substantial evidence afterward that Islamist warriors had declared war on the USA and now Europe, Emerson was seen as an alarmist, perhaps because of his well-known Israeli bias. Even though certain intelligence officers understood the dangers of jihad in the USA, the authors determined as early as 1993 that the FBI was extremely cautious in its investigation of Islamic charities.

   A second debt of gratitude is owed Rita Katz, the “anonymous” author of Terrorist Hunter, the story of one woman’s struggle to expose the activities of seditious operators within Islamic charities functioning in the USA. Like Emerson, she was a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, for the abundant evidence she uncovered during a decade of determined investigation. Her book is essential to an understanding of how Islamic charities supported Islamist movements in the USA, but it has been largely ignored by Washington.

   We especially want to thank once again Alan Goulty for reading, as he had done for Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989–2000, the early chapters of Alms for Jihad before leaving the UK for demanding diplomatic duties as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Tunisia. We also want to express our appreciation to Steve Humphreys, Professor of History at the University of California Santa Barbara, for his unflagging support in all matters Arabic, and to Sylvia Curtis, the intrepid research librarian at UCSB, who has always come to our rescue.

   Spellings can be a curse that can result in chaos, particularly when the documentation for a book, like this one, comes in many languages. Motivated by familiarity, practice, or ethnic pride, Africans, Arabs, Asians, and Europeans have spelled the name of a person, place, or event in a transliteration that reflects their own parochialism, patriotism, and panache. The result is often confusion rather than clarity. The only legitimate prin- ciple is consistency of spelling in the text. Consistency, however, is not a universal virtue and does not always guarantee clarity. In the search for clarity, we have consequently Anglicized or given the English equivalent for people, place-names, and events recorded in different languages. Place-names are spelled for understanding rather than in the local patois. Personal names are more precisely retained because they are complex, for everyone spells his or her name to their satisfaction and not by standardized rules of transliteration. As with place-names, variety can produce bewilderment in the reader that can best be resolved by consistency. We have abstained from the use of diacritical marks in transliteration wherever possible, retaining them only for a very few Arabic words (e.g. Shari‘a) and avoiding them when possible in personal names. Currency is expressed in US dollars. This is not academic arrogance. It is a practical response for those who wish to understand what we have written.

   If spellings are a curse, acronyms are a necessary evil. Virtually every government agency, and certainly most Islamic charities, have very long names. It would be stylistically cumbersome to repeat this lengthy nomenclature at every entry. Although there are 206 acronyms on the list, many are rarely used in the text while others, because of their frequency, become instantly recognizable to the reader. When the name of the organization is first presented, the acronym is placed in parenthesis, e.g. Islamic Countries Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (ICESCO). In a few instances where the acronym appears in a later chapter we refresh the reader’s memory by repeating the full name of the organization, but those are few.

J. Millard Burr
Rio Rico, Arizona

Robert O. Collins
Santa Barbara, California

Abbreviations