Caught in the Act? Akbar Ahmed, the ‘Islamization of Knowledge,’ and the Muslim Brotherhood
Last fall, Professor Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic studies at American University, appeared on media outlets including The Daily Show and CNN and said America’s Founding Fathers admired Islam. I disproved this view in a detailed, heavily documented article. Widely linked, the article garnered a response written by Prof. Ahmed’s research fellow, Frankie Martin, which appeared in the Washington Post last November.
Martin used so much ad hominem and invective in his article — directed towards me — that Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch wrote that Martin’s piece was an “intemperate — one might even say hateful — attack.”
Ad hominem and invective are frequently used as an attack on civil debate so as to divert discussion away from the facts. So Mr. Martin, I have some more facts.
Professor Akbar Ahmed’s own CV and bio conceal his work with a global Islamist movement known as the Islamization of knowledge. The movement maintains international seminars, conferences, and summer student programs. These events are organized by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which was founded in 1980 and has headquarters in the United States and satellite offices in the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, and Pakistan.
Islamization of knowledge is defined by its proponents as follows:
Islamization of knowledge simply refers to an attempt through which those aspects of the body and purpose of knowledge and of the process and methodologies of discovering, validating, imparting and applying it, which oppose Islam, are identified and made subservient to the Islamic worldview. [Italics in original]
The Islamization of knowledge movement seeks to ensure that anything taught in the university classroom which “opposes Islam” must be discarded. An extreme example is found in Ahmed’s erroneous statements that the Founding Fathers admired Islam. This was an attempt to “Islamize” Americans’ “knowledge” of the origin of their nation.
The Islamization of knowledge is a global movement that was begun in the 1970s by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a 1991 memorandum — “On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” – the Muslim Brotherhood itself described its own goals as follows:
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist process” with all that the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim 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 God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
According to counterterrorism expert Dr. Terri K. Wonder of Henley-Putnam University:
The Islamization of knowledge is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “strategic vision … under [which] a minority Muslim group infiltrates through legitimate legal processes a majority’s secular institutions, starting with its universities. Over time, “Islamized” Muslim and non-Muslim graduates of universities enter the workforce, including a nation’s civil service sectors. From there, arguably, those “Islamized” graduates are poised to subvert a host society’s law enforcement branches, intelligence community, military branches, and foreign services.”
…
When the [International Muslim Brotherhood] has determined that institutions in a host society have been weakened sufficiently “from below” through its “Islamization” reform program, it leaves its phase of “concealment” (kitman) and enters into direct action, which could be anything from a leadership coup in a mosque, to the takeover of a police station, to a government coup d’etat.
Ahmed’s American University CV and his current American University bio , AU Faculty, and U.S. Army profile pages omit his 30-year association with the Islamization of knowledge movement.
The same Muslim Brotherhood document cited above lists several groups as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” Among those listed are the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS), and the Islamic Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS). All three organizations are part of a network known as the SAFA Group, which the federal government raided in March of 2002 on suspicion of providing material support to terrorists, money laundering, tax evasion, and ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
One of the originators of the Islamization of knowledge, and a founding member of IIIT, is American Professor Isma’il al-Faruqi. In 1983, al-Faruqi declared his objective was to see America eventually under the banner of Islam:
Nothing could be greater than this youthful, vigorous, and rich continent [of North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great].
Yea,I had an encounter with a black Muslim who tried to pull that ‘Islamization’ nonsense a few years ago on a call in talk show on KPFT-FM (Pacifica) here in Houston…he tried to claim that George Washington’s family coat of arms was derived from ‘al Islam’….well,as it happens I am a recognized authority in the field of heraldry,so I immediately called in to the show and was put on the air with him…I asked him if he even knew what the Washington coat of arms (which to this day can still be seen around DC)looked like…needless to say,he had no clue so I proceeded to describe it for him in heraldic terminology…”Argent,2 bars gules,and in chief 3 mullets of the second”…which translates in plain English to a silver or white shield,argent,with 2 red horizontal bars or stripes,and 3 stars of 5 points across the top of the shield of the 2nd color…gules or red…I further informed him that gules and argent were the livery colors of the House of Plantagenet which ruled England commencing with the reign of Henry II in 1154 and ended with the demise of Richard III in 1485 and it was during this period when the Washington family arms was first granted by the Crown…well,the response I got was about what you would expect…that this was a racist lie and that all I was trying to do was to slander him and defame Islam etc etc etc….so all I could do was laugh and hang up…but this is the sort of tactic we can expect to see from them in the months and years to come…and for which ALL of us must be aware of and prepared to refute every time it appears or the ignorati among the American populace will gullibly accept such nonsense at face value
This article lends credence to the charge that Obama is a Muslim, since Obama has engaged in Islamization of knowledge. Remember his trip to Cairo, “America is one of the largest Muslim nations” or words to that effect, and “Islam invented printing” or words to that effect.
Sure Akbar, anything you say. Next we’ll be hearing that the Founders were really crypto-Moslems disguised as Christians. Truth is whoever, if any, among the Founders admired Islam did so out of ignorance. Adams Jefferson and Franklin found the religion of subjugation and war utterly noxious and contemptible.
Click my name to read my widely linked articles on Egypt’s lifting of its 30 year ban on Iranian warships using the Suez.
Brilliant article that I am sending to everyone I know. First class reporting. Thank you for your work.
“Ahmed is currently Tamara Sonn chair of the department of Islamic studies at American University.”
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
This is a very important report. It examines the most frightening aspect of stealth jihad. There have already been reports of corrupting school textbooks at the grade-school level.
In the Muslim Brotherhoods plan the part that says “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” needs to be fully understood by anyone who has anything whatsoever to do with the writing, editing and approval of school textbooks. The part that says BY THEIR HANDS is the most sinister. By that they mean they are counting on naive infidels with their preoccupation with multiculturalism and their abysmal lack of knowledge about the true nature of Islam to contribute to their own destruction.
Here is my fantasy about a religion I am truly sick to death of hearing about considering it is one which brings absolutely nothing to the table in terms of the words ‘advancement’ or ‘innovation’.
The U.S. ends all immigration by muslims into America including visas of any kind. This creates a world wide sensation within Islam where a lot of finger pointing will be done within Islam itself. Islam in its many polities will be forced to have some kind of dialogue about religion and state whether it likes it or not and set its own house in order. Muslims like their religion fine, I have no problem with that but keep it out of America; I don’t want it and I don’t need it considering the weird and arrogant desire among some few muslims to subvert secularism and spread Islam even to the point of mindless terrorism within America.
The humorous thing to me is that such an act would be considered radical and yet I cannot think of a single way that the U.S. would be a loser in such a scenario other than people positing that we are compromising our own Constitution and philosophy that is the very bedrock of a democracy and a Republic. Guess what? I’m willing to risk it and smile like a bastard while I’m doing it.
I disagree that we would compromise the very idea of America. There are many quite concrete ways in which America would benefit unless you share the liberal viewpoint that America only really can become its true self if it is put at the disposal of the Third World and its broken systems and lack of any consideration of the greater good.
America has plenty of problems of its own in terms of the propensity of normal criminal behaviors that are the lot of mankind. We do not need a giant, weird religion to codify and formalize man’s inhumanity to man whose greatest aim seems to be no aim at all since the nature of Islam seems to be defined by what it is against and not what it is for. Honestly, with all the rhetoric coming out of Islam it is still not clear to me what in the hell it is that they actually want other than a lack of people different from themselves.
Well, I too wish a lack of people different from myself and those are people who cannot produce, cannot innovate, cannot think, cannot live and let live, cannot reverse engineer an air conditioner, cannot add the words ‘fair play’ to the Arabic language, cannot stop obsessing over imaginary beings, cannot stop dreaming of subverting their betters by using, not their own systems but those OF their betters, cannot stop thinking of Palestinian Arabs and Jews, cannot see their own shortcomings, cannot shut up, and sure as hell cannot enrich this world.
Islam has not one thing to offer this world other than a form of childish mental imprisonment and the promise of violence at worst and second class citizenship at best to those who do not submit.
America better wake up and knock off the guilt over Jim Crow and Columbus and the Trail of Tears and the multicultural experiment that has gone terribly awry. Every non-Western culture in the world is allowed to have documentaries made about them that acknowledges their particular genius at this or that human endeavor but not Europeans and European Americans – no, that is forbidden and yet it is the greatest genius and most important and influential one in the history of mankind.
We ignore that fact at our peril since what is happening in America with immigration is the exact opposite of the Industrial Age and the Age of Reason and European Americans cannot prop up debauched cultures forever as our numbers shrink. Those two ‘Ages’ are our cultural legacy and we should protect it and respect it rather than laying it out at the service of people with no such legacy who at once decry it and are incredibly addicted to it to the point of not being able to stay away. They are Johnny-Come-Lately’s with no claim on my cultural legacy – none.
One does not become an American by touching American soil anymore than I become a Hindu by coming to Bali and a passport means nothing to me in terms of immigrant ‘rights’ – nothing. There are legal rights and there are moral rights and the former is being abused and the latter doesn’t even exist for those who are from the middle east.
You think Islamic culture is superior? That’s fine, I have no problem with that. One can find it in a place called the middle east and there are plenty of Islamic countries to be expansive in this regard. Enjoy yourselves, knock yourselves out, have a good time and stay put. Make yourselves a nice Magna Carta, write some “Federalist Papers” style manifestos, have a nice revolution and civil war to sort it all out and call me in the morning.
That’s the unfortunate moment when I’ll wake up from my dream fantasy of no DREAM Acts and realize that my global brothers, rather than fight to make a largely secular constitution of their own, will instead flock to America in their millions and make my own Constitution nothing more than a glib suicide pact.
Thank you, James May.
That fits in nicely with my recurring advocacy of “containment and isolation” of Muslims. Containment and isolation within their existing Asian boundaries.
Muslims seem to be concentrating on subversion and incremental advancement throughout the West exercising adept “lawfare” which we’re just now learning to recognize for what it is…i.e. gradual penetration of our political institutions giving them stronger and stronger footholds from which gradual saturation is accomplished, before we’re generally aware of Islam’s true malignancy.
Alas, political correctness in America is also strongly entrenched, so we’ve got a barely recognized lethal conflict brewing right in our pots in our backyards, right this minute.
Your description of the ‘Constitution as largely secular’ exists because of the long Progressive Revelation superseding assault on factual history…
This truth is dawning.. Only a civilization steeped in Judeo-Christian factual history, morals and ethics may operate a ‘largely secular’ national framework..
secularism for the sake of cultural relativism is the death of America.. and the stealth jihad all rolled into one..
Just remember that the Creator which made American principles possible is not allah.. nobody in their right mind thinks Jesus was just a muslim profit.. that’s the revisionism that must be fought against..
Just as we should fight against the lie that the Founders were trying to create the Atheist State Church of the Federal Government.. your secular constitution.. a gaping wound which allowed the infection of islam in..
you hit the nail on the head!!!
Ah, yes, they have the Islamization of knowledge, but I have transactional analysis: I’m OK and they’re Muslims.
That’s a good one!
Yes, I’m old enough to remember when Transactional Analysis came out!
The “Federalist Papers” ain’t exactly a religious tract and the Declaration of Independence a shot across the bow at the idea of the “divine right of kings” as is Paine’s “Common Sense”.
Secularism is not atheism and no religion has cornered the market on morals and ethics. It was not values as religious or otherwise that was not wanted in government but dogma. A system was wanted based on observation, past experience and pragmatic rationalism, not faith, that would enable people to be good to one another and not be commanded by God to do so and in specific ways.
Laura,
Several things: It seems you may have forgotten to actually read the chapter by Akbar Ahmed in the book “The Islamization of Knowledge”. You see, in 1980 he was asked to write a chapter on Anthropology and whether there was such thing as an Islamic Anthropology. He very clearly came to the conclusion that there was no such thing. He, in fact, challenged the premise of the book. Did you read it or just make an assumption because he is a Muslim? Shoddy “reporting” at best.
Secondly, Ahmed was a member of the Civil Service and was not allowed to, and never has, joined a political party. If he wanted to join a conservative party, why would he choose one from Egypt? He is from Pakistan where the Jamaat-i-Islami would have done the trick.
One would think that the liberals should be in the forefront of the fight against the “Islamization of Knowledge”; after all, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine the hue and cry from the Left if someone talked about “Christianization of the Knowledge”. I guess for the Left, blinded by the hate for the Western Civilization, every enemy of the West, no matter how repugnant (even Islamists!) is a friend.
This has been de rigueur in our jails and prisons for decades.
well wonders never cease I do agree with James May- and as I have researched ISLAM’s tactics in USA since 9-11-2001- I will sadly say this goal of Ahmed’s is a done deal- every college, teachers and students, all our govt and media have seen the “moderrate” show and bought the program-
and defend it!!
They elected a man who espouses the Islam revised version of history and religion he was taught, believes and thinks is “beautiful” (inlcuding the jewhate)
Muslims are fantqstic imitators and theives – not a creative force- they stole Judaism and Mo changed it to suit his purposes, declared the prophets Muslims back to Moses- if that isn’t revisionism what is?
Now they redefine all of history to suit themselves- no fact, no accomplishment not theirs is off limits to their theivery.
Of course Obummmer was happy to REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT this propaganda, this dis-information campaign worthy of Goebbels at Cairo- it is his worldview. His actions prove it daily. His fruedian slips and his friend’s words betray his attempt to hide it.
Islamic thought and Islamic science are oxymorons, and yes “understanding”
ISLAM is like falling into backwards world, an Orwellian descent into doublethink,madness, insanity. Those born and immersed in it, those who know no other and have access to no other information I can forgive. I cannot ever forgive Americans for their willingness to be dupes and dopes- they do have means to KNOW it’s a LIE-and the abilty to discern facts from fantasies of ISLAM
As the fantastic Mike McDaniels at PJM has pointed out, under muslim rules, Obama was born a muslim and stayed one until he was baptised by ‘Racy’Wright at the age of 27.
This transformed him into an apostate subject to punishment and so he is forever cut off from his ‘peeples’ who invented Greek fire (by being experimented on at Constantinople), crescent rolls, (by being whipped by King Sobieski), cravats, (same story), European coffee houses, (same story), wishing on fallen stars, (Kaaba), mocking bird mosque architecture, (on top of churches), a religion, (unauthorized sequel to Judaism and Christianity), true democracy (for muslims only), and involuntary public aviation building demolition.
Bat Ye’or, who wrote the book “Eurabia – The Euro-Arab Axis” warned about this years ago and how Islam has bought out the U.N. and would be coming the the U.S. and here it is. I only hope it is not too late.
he doesn’t conceal it at all. The bios you refer to are simply brief bios and don’t go back that far. He has over 30 book and hundreds of articles to his credit so the bio is over 30 pages. most websites use a short version when reproducing his credentials. His association with IIIT in 1981 woudnt reflect poorly on his character, would it? They weren’t on anyone’s list. Do you think everything he does is sinister, just because he is a Muslim?
The chapter he wrote was republished many times. Far from hiding it, it seems he encourages your reading it.
Nothing new! German nazies declared the Aryan (and Jewish) science in particular physics-Aryan physics.Islamism and nazism are alike in their irrational and racist nature.
He has issued a response here:
http://journeyintoamerica.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/laura-rubenfelds-article-a-response/
Good grief! The gist of this article is that people should be afraid of boogeymen.
The boogeyman has ideas which have some sort of magic power on their own.
Well, maybe they do, the power of the ‘you ARE entitled to something for nothing’ and ‘you too, can be a winner’ free- lunch ideas saturate our worth-less waste- based economy. On their own and out of the context these ideas pimp an Establishment bent on robbing whomever crosses their path regardless of whether they are Moslem, Jew or atheist.
As for religious ideology, bring it on! Anyone who lacks the courage of their own convictions needs to reexamine those convictions … on their own terms. Keep in mind, convictions cannot be bought in a store or ‘rented’ from anyone, even university professors and certainly not from marginal media personalities such as the author Rubenfeld.
This is just more of the same old commodification of everything and associated devaluation of critical thinking.
Here’s the latest rebuttal to Rubenfeld’s latest smear campaign on Dr. Ahmeed. How can you sleep at night?
http://craigconsidine.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/islamophobic-yellow-journalists-attack-professor-ahmed-again/