Muslim Organization in Nashville, Tennessee: An Overview
by Rebecca Bynum and Elizabeth Noble (Jan. 2008)
Nashville, Tennessee has one of the fastest growing foreign-born populations of any major US city. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, “The 2000 data showed an increase of 210.1 percent in the immigrant population since 1990, which compared with a 6.5 percent increase in the native-born population (which includes children born to immigrants) over the same period. That meant that immigration accounted directly for 45.4 percent of the overall population increase of the city.” Though much of this increase is comprised of immigrants from Southeast Asia, for our purposes we will focus on the Muslim population which accounts for up to half of all immigrants claiming refugee status to the United States.
A majority of the Muslim population of Nashville is concentrated in two ethnic groups, Iraqi Kurds and Somalis.
US Office of Refugee Resettlement in association with the State Department and the United Nations to settle refugees within all 50 states, relieving the burden on traditional gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Many of these Kurds settled in Nashville and they in turn, attracted others from around the country until today Nashville has the largest Kurdish population in the United States at 11,000. Over 100,000 Kurds have been settled in the U.S.
Every Nation (an offshoot of the now defunct Maranatha movement). Many parishioners, especially in the Church of Christ and its breakaway denominations like Belmont Church, have either served as missionaries to Kurdistan or serve as active sponsors of Iraqi Kurds, facilitating their resettlement in Nashville. The missionaries serve an estimated 10,000 Kurdish Christians in Iraq. The Kurdzman Church of Christ was established in 2000.
Douglas Layton of Bethel Outreach has proselytized in Iraqi Kurdistan for 35 years. His efforts to re-connect the Kurds with their pre-Islamic Medes civilization is certainly a worthwhile goal, and one the American government should adopt as well, but the Kurds coming into Nashville as a result of the work of these churches are mainly Sunni Muslims who have no intention of jettisoning Islam when they reach Tennessee.
In fact, Fadi Ezzeir, the president of the Nashville Chapter of the Muslim American Society, a well-known front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood, is a Kurd who grew up in Jordan.
“The Fadi Ezzeir is a also Board member of the Salahadeen Center (the Kurdish community center and mosque). He runs their Youth Education Center and is a Muslim Boy Scout leader.
A Kurdish woman, Kasar Abdullah was a past President of the Muslim Student Association (a radical Muslim student group financed by the Saudi Arabian government) at Tennessee State University. She now works as an Administrative Specialist for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and is a Girl Scout Leader as well.
In 2001, the Muslim girl scouts handed out prayer cards and packets of information about Islam to Mayor Bill Purcell and other guests along with a poster called “Helping Hands are the Petals of God’s Flower.” In Dearborn Michigan, a girl scout troop actually held a ceremony for little girls taking the Islamic veil.
Nashville Kurdish Forum. He partnered with Abdelghani Barre (more on this man later) to produce a Guide for Nashville Employers: The International Workforce through the auspices of the Nashville New American Coalition, a coalition of private employers and the Nashville Chamber of Commerce. He served on the Board of the local PBS television station and is a graduate of Leadership Nashville. He is now on the Board of Vanderbilt’s Center for Nashville Studies.
March 2005, 30 Somalis walked off the job at Dell Computers in Nashville demanding that they receive time off for sunset prayers (an ever-changing time schedule) en masse. They were reinstated with back pay and given accommodation after Metro Human Relations and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) stepped in. CAIR is linked to both the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Nevertheless, Catholic Charities of Tennessee received $1,270,716 from the state and $131,774 from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2006-2007, almost all of which ($1,359,000) was used directly to benefit majority Somali refugees. This is, of course, not counting health care benefits and welfare aid that these charities instruct refugees to apply for. These costs dwarf anything these charities receive from the state.
In 2000, Garrett Harper of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce applied for and received a grant for $375,000 from The Office of Refugee Resettlement for the Building the New American Community initiative, a pilot program designed to facilitate immigration and integration in three American cities: Portland, Oregon, Lowell, Massachusetts, and Nashville, Tennessee. The main focus of this initiative is to train new immigrants to take over the reigns of immigration themselves. They are trained on how to sit on coalition boards and how to apply for all manner of government grants and services.
This in turn spawned the Refugee Coordinator for the Metro Government, who is a member of the infamous Barré clan of Somalia and is rumored to be a Somali warlord.
Barré is an associate of Abdirizak Hassan, the executive director of the Somali Community Center of Nashville who successfully NashvilleTennessee, a Muslim graveyard and a madrassa. All of these pieces of property come under the Islamic classification of wakf, meaning the property belongs to Allah, which for practical purposes means they belong to the Muslim community in perpetuity and cannot revert to private hands. Muslims are also strongly discouraged from selling any property to non-Muslims. Control of land is central to Islamic doctrine.
The original Islamic Center in Nashville is located on 12th Avenue. It was started with seed money provided by Cat Stevens a.k.a. Yusuf Islam in 1979 after his conversion. Abdulhakim ali Mohamed (a Yemeni who grew up in Detroit) was appointed Imam in 1998. He came to Nashville after heading the education department of the al-Qaeda connected al-Farouq Masjid mosque in Brooklyn.
The Shura board is a consultative body which implements Islamic law (which includes the inequality of women and non-Muslims and allows polygamy in direct opposition to our U.S. Constitution) and gives instruction to the Muslim community. As of September 2007, the Shura board of the Islamic Center of Nashville consists of: Riyad Alkasem (a Syrian) who teaches Arabic for the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, Kaled Sakalla (a Palestinian) who teaches at the ITT Technical Institute, AKM Fakhruddin (from Bangladesh) who is a psychiatrist and also works at Meharry, Rahed Fakhruddin (Bangladesh), Qasem Abu-Ghazleh (a Palestinian), Addul Ghani Hashimi (a Malaysian), Hossam Bahour (a Palestinian), Shuaib Mohyuddin (a Pakistani), and Omar Alkatib (a Palestinian).
Sheik Abdulhakim Mohamed, no longer an Imam at the Islamic Center of Nashville, has partnered with Dr. Awadh Binhazim, a Kenyan PhD in Animal Toxicology who works at MeharryMedicalCenter, who was also on the Shura board of the Islamic Center for many years, to form Olive Tree Education. This is a very active propaganda arm of the Islamic movement that gives lectures and classes at Vanderbilt, TSU, a number of local churches, synagogues, civic groups and even to law enforcement.
Known members of the Muslim Brotherhood are often highly educated doctors and academics. Both groups gain automatic trust within the community, are well paid, and are able to circulate in the highest social circles to exert influence. They are master practitioners of what Hugh Fitzgerald has dubbed the “slow jihad,” that is, the quiet, steady, subversion of western legal and social structures from within. They are masters at manipulating western guilt, and appealing to the western sense of fairness and openness to others starting with the little demands for special treatment, like female-only swim days at the local pool, or letting boy scouts earn a Ramadan badge, and then progress to the stifling of western values, history and culture, beginning with Nashville, Tennessee, imagine what they are doing in your town.
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