• Front group for Wahhabi-Saudi money movers
• Was raided by the U.S. Treasury in March 2002 for allegedly funding terrorism

Affiliated with Cordoba University in Ashburn, Virginia, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS) is the only educational institution that the U.S. Defense Department has approved to both train and endorse Muslim chaplains for the American military. Characterizing itself as "the first Muslim-run graduate-level Islamic studies institution of higher education in the United States," GSISS seeks "to link the modern social sciences to the traditional classical Islamic sciences in a serious and scientific way," so as to "assist in discovering an intellectual direction that bridges the potential conflict in paradigms between Western civilization and the classical Islamic legacy."

GSISS offers a Master of Arts degree in its Social Studies/Islamic Studies program, which students can complete in a ten-month period. Graduates of this program commonly go on to become imams, academics, non-profit directors, and military, hospital, and prison chaplains. GSISS owns a library of 30,000 volumes in the English, Farsi and Arabic languages. The school's first graduating class completed its studies in 1999. 

Shortly after 9/11, as the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan, Muslim American military chaplain Abdul-Rashid Muhammad asked GSISS leader Taha Jabir Alwani (who would be named as an unindicted co-conspirator of Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian in early 2003) for his authoritative opinion as to whether American Muslim soldiers were morally permitted serve in a war against an Islamic enemy. Alwani, in turn, conveyed the inquiry to the Qatar-based Wahhabi cleric Yousef al-Qaradhawi, who vacillated before ultimately calling on Muslims worldwide to "support the Afghans who stand firm against the American invasion," which he blamed on justifiable Muslim anger over U.S. support for Israel.

Islam scholar Stephen Schwartz has called GSISS "a front group for Wahhabi-Saudi money," and the federal government has long suspected the organization of maintaining ties to Islamic terrorism. On March 20, 2002, U.S. law-enforcement agents raided the offices of key GSISS personnel, including Board member Jamal Barzinji, who was involved with a total of nine organizations raided in connection with terrorist financing -- among them the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Institute for Islamic Thought. On the day of the raids against GSISS, Barzinji appeared on television claiming that he was unaware of any questionable activities by any of the targeted groups.

In March 2003, the ChevronTexaco Foundation awarded GSISS a $100,000 grant for a program "designed to empower members of the Muslim community to respond to prejudice expressed against many individuals and communities, especially South Asians, Muslims and Arabs after the September 11th tragedy." Founded on the premise that American society is rife with anti-Muslim bias, this project trained 40 Muslims from 10 mosques in techniques of "conflict resolution" and "identifying bigotry"; the participants were then dispatched to various locations in metropolitan Washington, DC to give small-group presentations on the evils of anti-Muslim prejudice.