Declassified FBI reports, interview records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and documents seized from a Hamas leader's home place the MSA, ISNA, ICNA, the Muslim American Society and CAIR in the Muslim Brotherhood's American network. El-Sayed has helped lead a chapter of one, spoken at the conventions of three, and praised and raised money for a fourth.
In August 2004, two off-duty Baltimore County police officers on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge noticed a couple videotaping the span's support structure. The driver was Ismail Elbarasse, a Virginia man whom federal prosecutors would later describe as a Hamas leader and associate of Hamas political chief Mousa Abu Marzook. When FBI agents searched the couple's home in Annandale, they found, hidden in a sub-basement, the archive of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. (Elbarasse was held as a material witness and was never charged in the case.)
Among the documents was an 18-page Arabic memorandum dated May 22, 1991, by Mohamed Akram, a member of the Brotherhood's American governing council: "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America." It says:
"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."
- Muslim Brotherhood "Explanatory Memorandum," May 22, 1991, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, Government Exhibit 3-85
The memorandum closed with an attachment: "A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends." It runs to 29 groups. The first is the Islamic Society of North America. The second is the Muslim Students' Association. Number 26 is the Islamic Circle of North America (rendered, in the exhibit's typographical error, as "ISNA = ISLAMIC CIRCLE OF NORTH AMERICA"). Also listed: the North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Muslim Arab Youth Association.
Abdul El-Sayed spent two years on the executive board of the University of Michigan MSA, as outreach chair and then vice president, and a third writing for its newsletter. Since 2017 he has been a featured speaker at ISNA's national convention at least three times, at the joint convention of ICNA and the Muslim American Society, and at banquets of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, for which he has personally asked audiences to give money.
"Seeds" that "fly in our orbit"
The Akram memorandum was Government Exhibit 3-85 in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, the 2008 Dallas prosecution in which a federal jury convicted what had been the largest Muslim charity in America, and five of its leaders, of funneling about $12.4 million to Hamas.
The listed groups were "seeds," Akram wrote, and "the big challenge that is ahead of us is how to turn these seeds or 'scattered' elements into comprehensive, stable, 'settled' organizations that are connected with our Movement and which fly in our orbit and take orders from our guidance."
"Founded by a group of the first Ikhwans"
A Brotherhood Shura Council work paper, "written on 10/25/91, approved by the Council on 11/9/91" and entered at trial as Government Exhibit 3-3, places the MSA at the beginning of the Brotherhood's American history: "In 1962, the Muslim Students Union was founded by a group of the first Ikhwans in North America..." ("Ikhwan," Arabic for "brothers," is the Brotherhood's name for itself.) It continues: "In 1969, the first organizational meeting for the Ikhwan separate from the Students Union was held..." And: "In 1980, the Muslim Students Union was developed into the Islamic Society in North America (ISNA) ... to be a nucleus for the Islamic Movement in North America."
A recorded lecture by Zeid al-Noman, introduced in the transcript as head of the U.S. Brotherhood's Executive Office (Government Exhibit 3-89), explains how the Brotherhood used the MSA. In the 1960s, he said, the main condition for joining the Brotherhood 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." Recruiters attended "the MSA conferences and [chose] active Arab elements and approach[ed] them to join the Ikhwans," and "the most important resolution the Group might have taken was who was going to be a member of the MSA's executive committee." "The reality of the Movement," al-Noman said, "is that it is a students' Movement."
In 1995, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric widely regarded as the Brotherhood's spiritual leader (he turned down the movement's top post, General Guide, in 2004), told the Muslim Arab Youth Association convention in Toledo, Ohio, that the young men imprisoned with him in Egypt in 1954 "immigrated to the West... And they began to establish Islamic activity... and now we see what we see in the West: the Muslim student associations, the Muslim Arab Youth Association... ISNA... The contemporary Islamic revival is the result of that work." ISNA's president moderated the session.
What the FBI wrote
A December 15, 1987 report by the FBI's Indianapolis field office on the North American Islamic Trust, declassified in 2007 and released to the IPT under FOIA in 2008, states that "[e]arly members of the MSA have been identified as being active in an organization referred to as the 'Muslim brotherhood,'" and that "[s]ome of the current leaders of the MSA were members of the 'Muslim Brotherhood' in their respective home countries in the Middle East and Egypt."
A second Indianapolis report, dated October 21, 1988, records a source who "advised that historically members of the MSA and subsequently NAIT, ISNA and the IIIT have been IKHWAN members from Egypt, various other Middle East countries and Pakistanis who are also members of the JAMAAT ISLAMI organization."
An unsigned paper attached to the 1988 report, "Political Activity of Muslims in America," which the source said was written by an American Muslim, put it plainly: "The Ikhwan can be credited with forming several of the Islamic organizations in America. MSA, formed in 1963, has often been a collaborative effort of Ikhwan members from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and the Sudan." It also explains ICNA's origin: a number of "Jamaat Islami MSA members," discontented with what they saw as ISNA's lack of "movement orientation," decided during an ISNA convention "to form the Islamic Circle of N[orth] America (ICNA)." Jamaat-e-Islami is the South Asian sister movement of the Brotherhood.
In February 2007, the FBI put an analytic conclusion of its own in writing. An intelligence assessment released to the IPT under FOIA says:
"The MSA was established in 1963 as the first formal U.S. MB organization."
- FBI intelligence assessment, "Sisterhood: Women Facilitating Muslim Brotherhood Activities in the United States," Feb. 27, 2007
That assessment was written while El-Sayed was vice president of the University of Michigan MSA. The rest of the passage is redacted.
"Now officially the Muslim American Society, the MSA and ISNA"
FBI interview reports, known as FD-302s, in the immigration deportation file of Nabil Sadoun, a former CAIR board member, obtained by the IPT under FOIA, record two men who said they had been part of the U.S. Brotherhood.
In a January 2005 interview in Dallas, under a proffer agreement, the first described the Brotherhood's Public Works department as having "managed the different organizations that fell under the Brotherhood's umbrella like ISNA and MSA," which "were under the control of the Brotherhood because they were founded by Brotherhood members."
The second, interviewed June 9, 2009, said the MSA, ISNA and the IAP "were all part of the Muslim Brotherhood establishment in the U.S. in the late 1980s." He described a split after 1993, when "the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (i.e. the Palestine Committee which controlled the IAP, the UASR and the HLF), split from the overall U.S. Muslim Brotherhood (i.e. the Egyptians/Kuwaitis/Iraqis/Sudanese who were now officially the Muslim American Society (MAS), the MSA and ISNA)." By 1998, he said, the Muslim Arab Youth Association "was defunct because the Muslim Brotherhood had other organizations in place by then to replace MAYA's mission, to include MAS, ISNA and the MSA."
The Muslim American Society was registered in Illinois in 1993 with Brotherhood leaders as its directors. Esam Omeish, MAS's national president from 2004 to 2008, acknowledged in a 2007 radio interview that "a lot of the Muslim Brothers, who had been Muslim Brothers in their own countries, have come to the U.S., organized, [and] established student groups," though he said MAS no longer had ties to the Brotherhood. El-Sayed was a featured guest at the joint annual MAS-ICNA convention in Chicago in December 2018, and was celebrated a year earlier as the man who "deserves the support of the Muslim community nationwide."
"CAIR was later added"
CAIR, founded in 1994, does not appear on the 1991 list. But it appears in the Brotherhood's records of its Hamas-support apparatus.
In a July 2008 filing summarizing the Holy Land trial evidence, prosecutors said the international Brotherhood had ordered its chapters to create "Palestine Committees" to support Hamas with "media, money and men." The filing said the U.S. Brotherhood's Palestine Committee "was initially comprised of three organizations: the OLF (HLF), the IAP, and the UASR," and that "CAIR was later added to these organizations." The cited exhibit, an agenda of a 1994 Palestine Committee meeting, lists CAIR among the committee's "working organizations." The government named CAIR on its list of unindicted co-conspirators and joint venturers. The same filing stated: "The evidence introduced at trial, for example, established that ISNA and NAIT were among those organizations created by the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood."
"The U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood created the U.S. Palestine Committee... CAIR was later added to these organizations."
- Government's Amended Memorandum, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, July 11, 2008
In a 2009 ruling, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis, who presided over the trial, wrote that the government "has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine ('IAP'), and with Hamas.". After the trial, the FBI suspended its outreach relationship with CAIR. "Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS," an FBI official wrote to a senator in 2009, "the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner."
Secret members, public organizations
The Brotherhood's own records explain why El-Sayed's insistence that he has "never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood" misses the point.
The Brotherhood had two layers. The first was a secret body of sworn members whose existence was never announced. Its founders, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2004, "publicly called themselves the Cultural Society and not the Brotherhood." Ahmed Elkadi told the Tribune he had led the U.S. Brotherhood from 1984 to 1994. A 2008 study by Zeyno Baran for the Hudson Institute, a conservative-leaning Washington think tank, reported that an undated internal Muslim American Society memo "explicitly instructs group leaders to respond negatively if asked whether they are part of the Brotherhood."
The second layer was public. Al-Noman called these bodies "general activism organizations" and "fronts." "Fronts are one method... one method for grouping and are one method to communicate the Ikhwan's thought," he said. These open organizations, chartered under American law, were where the movement's agenda would actually be carried out, and where most of the people who served it would never be asked to swear an oath.
The MSA was the first and most important of them. It was not a separate movement that happened to share founders with the Brotherhood. By the Brotherhood's own account, it was the vehicle the Ikhwan built to carry the movement into American universities: founded by "a group of the first Ikhwans," used as the Brotherhood's recruiting pool, its leadership chosen at the Brotherhood's own meetings, and, in its early years, the distributor at chapter meetings of English translations of al-Banna, Qutb and other Brotherhood ideologues, according to Baran's study. It gave birth to ISNA and NAIT. The FBI's analysts called it "the first formal U.S. MB organization."
That is why the question of "membership" is a red herring. No one has produced evidence that El-Sayed swore allegiance to the secret organization, and this series does not claim he did. For most American Muslims of his generation, the Brotherhood was not something one joined. It was something one encountered through the institutions it had built: the MSA on campus, ISNA and ICNA at the conventions, CAIR at the banquets. Those are the institutions El-Sayed served. When he says he has never been a member of the Brotherhood, he is answering a question the record does not raise.
"Conquest through Da'awa"
What were those institutions for? The Brotherhood's answer was da'wah: the "call" or "invitation" to Islam.
"Conquest through Da'awa, that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! not through sword but through Da'awa."
- Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Muslim Arab Youth Association convention, Toledo, Ohio, 1995, IPT translation
In a historic speech Yusuf al-Qaradawi gave in Toledo, Ohio, in 1995, at the annual conference of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA). Qaradawi, the Brotherhood's most influential cleric and a radical whom nearly every Islamist group in the United States has lionized, spoke on "The Good Omens of the Victory of Islam." The session's moderator was the president of ISNA. In the speech, Qaradawi spelled out the goals and mission of the Islamist movement: "What remains, then, is to conquer Rome. The second part of the omen. "The city of Hiraq [once emperor of Constantinople] will be conquered first", so what remains is to conquer Rome.' This means that Islam will come back to Europe for the third time, after it was expelled from it twice... Conquest through Da'awa, that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da'awa."
The record
The Brotherhood's own leaders, in their own documents, claimed the MSA and ISNA as their creations and listed ICNA among "our organizations and the organizations of our friends." Brotherhood insiders told the FBI that the MSA, ISNA and MAS were the Brotherhood's public face in America. Federal prosecutors told a federal court, in a July 2008 filing after the first trial, that the evidence "established" that ISNA was created by the Brotherhood and that CAIR was added to its Hamas-support committee. A federal judge found "ample evidence" of CAIR's and ISNA's associations with Hamas.
What El-Sayed has said about them
El-Sayed has never addressed any of this. Asked in 2017 by The Guardian whether he was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, he said "No" and that he believed in "a separation of church and state." He has never publicly said what he makes of the Brotherhood's claim that the MSA he helped lead was one of "our organizations"; of the FBI's assessment that it was "the first formal U.S. MB organization"; or of prosecutors' finding that ISNA was a Brotherhood creation and CAIR part of its Palestine Committee.
Weeks after losing the 2018 Democratic primary for governor, he told CAIR's national banquet: "CAIR is an organization that has looked beyond its responsibility to Muslims alone." In 2020, he told a CAIR-Oklahoma banquet that "never has an organization like CAIR been more important than it is right now" and urged the audience to "support this organization."
Next: Part 3. The chapter's own newsletters and board minutes document El-Sayed's years as outreach chair and vice president of the University of Michigan MSA: his recruitment and da'wah work, a board planning a campaign for Tariq Ramadan and weighing a fundraiser for KindHearts, the charity Treasury called "the progeny of Holy Land Foundation," and his "their ends I do not question" column.
Links to all six parts of the series:
Part 1. "Sure. Yeah, Absolutely." The long road to a three-word disavowal
Part 2. "Our Organizations." What the FBI and the Brotherhood's own records say
Part 3. The Ann Arbor Years. Inside the MSA chapter he helped run
Part 4. The Circuit. ISNA, CAIR and ICNA-MAS, 2017–2020
Part 5. The Company He Keeps. A rally, a flotilla organizer, a youth council and Hasan Piker
Part 6. In His Own Words. Israel, Hamas, Iran, the Brotherhood, and ten questions
Steven Emerson is an award-winning investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), which maintains one of the world's largest archives on Islamist terrorist networks. He is the author or co-author of eight books on terrorism and national security.
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