Umar Abd al-Rahman

ʿUmar ʿAbd ar-Rahmān

ʿUmar ʿAbd ar-Rahmān ( Arabic عمر عبد الرحمن, DMG ʿUmar ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān , often written Omar Abdel-Rahman in Egyptian Arabic ; * May 3, 1938 in Gamaliyya, Gouvernement ad-Daqahliyya , Egypt ; † February 18, 2017 in Butner , North Carolina , United States ) was an Egyptian Islamist and founder of al-Jamāʿa al-islāmiyya . From 1996 until his death in 2017, he served a life sentence in Butner Federal Prison .

Al-Jamāʿa al-islāmiyya, founded by ʿAbd ar-Rahmān, is classified as terrorist by the governments of the United States and Egypt. She is responsible for many acts of violence, including the Luxor massacre in November 1997, in which 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians were killed.

Life

Egypt and Saudi Arabia

ʿAbd ar-Rahmān was born in Egypt in 1938 and lost his eyesight as a toddler due to diabetes . As a child he read the Koran in Braille and developed an interest in the work of the Islamic scholars Ibn Taimiyya and Sayyid Qutb . He completed primary and secondary education at an institute at al-Azhar University and graduated in 1960. In 1965 he received a diploma from the Faculty of Theology ( uṣūl ad-dīn ) in Cairo and was appointed imam of a mosque in Fayyum . The defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Six Day War of 1967 left a lasting impression on him. From now on he began to refer to Nasser as Pharaoh . After he forbade prayer at Nasser's grave from a minbar when he died, he was arrested at the end of 1970 and imprisoned in the Cairo Citadel for eight months . Nevertheless, he was able to do his doctorate in March 1972 at the theological faculty of the Azhar. From 1973 to 1977 ʿAbd ar-Rahmān taught at the branch of Azhar University in Asyut . Here he developed close relationships with the Islamist-oriented youth, who had their stronghold primarily at the University of Assiut , but also had supporters at the branch of the Azhar.

In 1977 ʿAbd ar-Rahmān went to Saudi Arabia to teach at the girls' faculty in Riyadh . After his return in 1980 he developed close relationships with two of Egypt's most radical organizations, the Egyptian Jihad organization and the al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group). After President Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated by the jihadist organization in October 1981, he was arrested as a suspected mufti of the organization and charged with murder. Although ʿAbd ar-Rahmān could not be proven to be involved in the Sadat assassination, he spent three years in Egyptian prisons. He was only released in October 1984.

In the following years, Sheikh ʿAbd ar-Rahmān was again active as a preacher in the Fayyum. Two of his sons went to Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviet occupiers . He visited her there in the mid-1980s. In 1987 he published his book "Words of Truth" ( Kalimāt al-ḥaqq ), in which he spoke about jihad. After the Egyptian authorities banned ʿAbd ar-Rahmān from preaching in April 1989 and his followers protested at the Schuhadāʾ mosque in Fayyum, he was arrested again, but was arrested again a short time later due to protests by supporters of the Jamaʿa in Asyut released. ʿAbd al-Halīm Mūsā, who became Egyptian Minister of the Interior in January 1990, received him in his office and gave him back his freedom of movement. In June 1990, ʿAbd ar-Rahmān left for Saudi Arabia to perform the Hajj .

It is believed that ʿAbd ar-Rahmān took control of the international jihadist wing of Maktab al-Chadamāt (MAK) and al-Qaida after the death of Abdallah Yusuf Azzam in November 1989 , but there is no evidence of this. ʿAbd ar-Rahmān is said to have had close ties to the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyār and to have been involved in covert American CIA and ISI programs to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

From 1990 in the USA

In July 1990, ʿAbd ar-Rahmān entered the United States on a tourist visa obtained in Sudan. It is believed that he wanted to take over the management of the MAK in the USA and that he got a tourist visa with the help of the CIA as a reward for his work against the Soviet Union.

Abd al-Rahmān preached in three different mosques in New York and was quickly surrounded by a group of loyal followers. In July 1992, the American authorities withdrew his green card because he had received it based on false information. On March 18, 1993, the American authorities decided on his deportation, but ʿAbd ar-Rahmān appealed against the deportation order so that he was allowed to remain in the country. Around the same time, he and his followers came under the sights of the FBI , which was looking for the perpetrators of the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 . ʿAbd ar-Rahmān is said to have issued a fatwa calling for violence against the US military. There are also said to have been plans for further major attacks.

On July 4, 1993, ʿAbd ar-Rahmān was arrested with nine of his followers. Shortly thereafter, he was charged with "a conspiracy to blow up buildings"; in January 1996 he was sentenced to life in prison. ʿAbd ar-Rahmān's sentencing was an important event for Islamic militants around the world, including Osama bin Laden . In 1997 members of ʿAbd ar-Rahmān's group al-Jamāʿa al-islāmiyya carried out two attacks on European tourists in Egypt, including the 1997 attack in Luxor . The assassins demanded ʿAbd ar-Rahmān's release.

In 2005, members of ʿAbd ar-Rahmān's legal aid group were found guilty of facilitating communications between ʿAbd ar-Rahmān and al-Jamāʿa al-islāmiyya. His attorney during the trial against him was Lynne Stewart , who was 66-year-old and was sentenced to 28 months in 2005 (the prosecution had asked for 35 years). On appeal from the public prosecutor's office, she was finally sentenced to ten years in prison for allegedly aiding and abetting terrorism by violating the more stringent prison conditions for ʿAbd ar-Rahmān.

ʿAbd ar-Rahmān died in prison on February 18, 2017, at the age of 78.

literature

• R. Gunaratna: Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror . Scribe Publications, Carlton 2002, ISBN 0-425-19114-1 .
• P. Lance: 1000 Years For Revenge: International Terrorism and The FBI . HarperCollins: New York 2003, ISBN 0-06-059725-9 .
• Thomas J. Moser: Politics on God's Path, On the Genesis and Transformation of Militant Sunni Islamism . IUP, Innsbruck 2012. ISBN 978-3-902811-67-7 .
• Malika Zeghal: Gardiens de l'Islam. Les oulémas d'al Azhar dans l'Égypte contemporaine. Paris 1996. ISBN 978-2-7246-0679-9 .

Web links

• Bin Laden's 1996 Fatwa ( Memento from February 20, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) PBS.Org
• The CIA and the Sheik ( June 4, 2003 memento on the Internet Archive ), The Village Voice , March 30, 1993
• Mary Anne Weaver: Blowback , The Atlantic , May 1996

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Locate a Federal Inmate: Omar Abdel-Rahman , Federal Bureau of Prisons . Retrieved August 22, 2012. 
2. ↑ Zeghal 1996, p. 338.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Zeghal 1996, p. 339.
4. ↑ Zeghal 1996, p. 340.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Zeghal 1996, p. 343.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Zeghal 1996, p. 344.
7. ^ Civil rights attorney convicted in terror trial CNN website, February 14, 2005
8. ↑ The Lynne Stewart Case - An American Story Martina Groß, dradio.de, Deutschlandfunk, Das Feature, September 6, 2011 ( Manuscript : PDF, 114 kB, September 7, 2011)
9. ↑ Reuters: the organizer of the terrorist attacks died in the World Trade Center. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 20, 2017 ; Retrieved on February 19, 2017 (ru-RU). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.