Book review 'A Mosque in Munich'

[struggle4progress]

By Bruce Ramsey
Special to The Seattle Times

'A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West'
by Ian Johnson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 318 pp., $27


"A Mosque in Munich" is the story of how the scheming agents of several governments tried to make political use of Muslims in Germany, and instead helped light a fuse for Islamic radicalism.

The book's lurid subtitle, "Nazis, the CIA ... " etc., suggests that the National Socialists, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Muslim Brotherhood are "linked," to use the sloppy newspaper word. Some writers already have taken this story to mean that Nazis and "Islamofascists" have the same political roots. The book's author, Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson, is careful not to say any of this. His well-researched story tells of a Muslim institution tended by many hands, each for their own purposes ...

The mosque was a German idea. Von Mende wanted one built under the control of his man, an Uzbek who had been the imam of a Turkic battalion in the Wehrmacht. The CIA promoted its own candidate, Said Ramadan, an Egyptian agent of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group promoting a radical, politicized version of Islam. Writes Johnson:

"The Germans and the Americans had the same idea: control the mosque, control the local Muslims, and then use them to fight communism" ...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2012015678_br06mosque.html