Seeks "to contribute to the promotion of democracy, good governance, freedom, and human rights in the Arab and Muslim world."
Closely linked to the American Muslim Council, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah
Founded in March 1999, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) is an organization of academicians, professionals, and activists -- both Muslim and non-Muslim -- from across the U.S. who, as CSID Founder and President Radwan A. Masmoudi puts it, seek "to contribute to the promotion of democracy, good governance, freedom, and human rights in the Arab and Muslim world." According to Masmoudi, CSID has organized more than 30 seminars, conferences, and workshops on these topics in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Turkey, and Iran. "Our [Americans'] old policy of giving tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) support to dictators and oppressors in the Arab and Muslim world," says Masmoudi, "will only exasperate [sic] the situation and make the situation much worse."
CSID organized two major international conferences -- titled "What is Shariah?" -- in Nigeria and Sudan, seeking to identify ways that Islamic Law "can be modernized and updated, through the process of Ijtihad, to address the needs of the Muslims in the 21st century." "Shariah in Arabic simply means 'rule of law,'" says Masmoudi, "and therefore we cannot be against it. … [Its] punishments (stonings and amputations) were not invented by Islam. … The majority of Islamic legal scholars are now of the legal opinion that these punishments can be changed to more modern and/or culturally acceptable forms of punishments for … crimes [such as] theft, rape, adultery, murder, drugs, etc." CSID seeks to produce scholarship that will "spread knowledge in the Muslim community" and "improve the mainstream American community and policymakers' understanding of Islam's approach towards individual freedom, civil rights, and political pluralism" while countering "widely held prejudices and misconceptions."
CSID was created by Board members and former staffers of the American Muslim Council, a group whose leadership has declared its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. "Most of CSID's Muslim personnel are radicals," wrote Islam scholar Daniel Pipes in March 2004. One such individual is CSID fellow Kamran Bokhari, who, according to Pipes, "also happens to have served for years as the North American spokesman for Al-Muhajiroun, perhaps the most extreme Islamist group operating in the West."
Some CSID Board members are agents of the Saudi Arabian government, which spends enormous sums of money to spread Wahhabism, a radical and intolerant form of Islam, all around the globe. One of the Center's Founding Directors was Taha Jabir al Alwani, a Founder of the Council of the Muslim World League in Mecca, perhaps the most influential distributor of Saudi Arabian money on earth.
The Chairman of CSID's Board of Directors is Ali Al Mazrui, a State University of New York professor who in 2003 came to the defense of University of South Florida Professor Sami Al-Arian when the latter was arrested as an agent of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
