MSA USC's website contains a section explaining that Shari'ah, or Islamic Law, is the only legal system acceptable in the eyes of Allah:
" [T]he Islamic State must derive its law from the Qur'an and Sunnah. [A] pure democracy places the people above the Qur'an and Sunnah, and this is disobedience to the Creator. However, the best alternative to a pure democracy is a democracy that implements and enforces the Shari'ah Any law which contradicts the Qur'an or Sunnah is unlawful."
MSA USC also advocates the establishment of a worldwide Islamic empire, or caliphate, headed by a supreme leader, or caliph, who rules according to the tenets of Shari'ah. In 1991-92, the Muslim scholar Gharm Allah Al-Ghamdy gave a series of lectures to MSA USC members, explaining that the caliph's duties were to "safeguard Islam in its original form, and to protect against the introduction of new things into Islam"; to "protect the physical boundaries of the [Islamic] state through the use of arms and other methods"; to "defend the rights of Muslims abroad, and to see to it that Islam can spread freely in non-Muslim lands (including the use of force)"; to "organize jihad [holy war] against any non-Muslim government which prevents Muslim da'wah [invitation to embrace Islam] from entering its land"; and to "collect and distribute zakat [tithes] and the spoils of war according to the Qur'an and Sunnah."
In January 2005, MSA USC hosted the seventh annual MSA West Conference, which featured a speech by former MSA UCLA member Ahmed Shama, who told his listeners: "[W]e want to restore Islam to the leadership of society In short, we want to make the word of Allah supreme in every single aspect of life . The end goal of everything that we're talking about is the reestablishment of the Islamic form of government."
"We have an obligation," Shama added, "to make sure that our MSAs are part of the global Islamic Movement" whose ultimate objective is "reinstating the Islamic system of Khilafa [the caliphate] to the leadership as required by Shari'ah, and renewing the obligation to spreads [sic] the call of Islam."
Shama went on to identify the terrorists in post-Saddam Iraq -- those seeking to foment chaos by indiscriminately killing American troops and Iraqi civilians -- as fellow members of his (and MSA's) "global Islamic Movement." "You look at the situation in Iraq," said Shama, " and you see people like Muqtada al-Sadr, who are legitimately rising up against occupation. You see the residents of Fallujah and Mosul legitimately striving against occupation, and anyone who is doing that for the sake of Allah are [sic] a part of the global Islamic Movement. Call them insurgents, call them whatever the heck you want; they are part of the global Islamic Movement if they are fighting against the occupation for the sake of Allah."
Shama also identified the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as part of the "mainstream Islamic Movement," reserving special praise for the prominent Brotherhood figures Hasan al-Banna and Sayed Qutb. Qutb was the author of two books, In the Shade of the Quran and Milestones, that heavily influenced Osama bin Laden. "If you want to know about the Islamic Movement, you must first read Milestones," Shama told his MSA audience at USC. (The book's central thesis is that Arab secular leaders must be overthrown because they are not authentic Muslims, and that jihad is a vital endeavor -- of an aggressive, expansionist nature -- that aims to extend Islam's dominion over all the world's nations.)
The MSA USC website concurs with Shama's assessment of jihad:
"Hence, the Creator obligates us to fight wherever people are being grossly deprived of freely hearing or practicing the Message of Allah as contained in the Qur'an and Sunnah. Sayyed Qutb, a famous Muslim scholar eloquently discusses the notion of jihad and self-defense in his book Milestones: 'If we insist on calling Islamic jihad a defensive movement, then we must change the meaning of the word 'defense' and mean by it 'defense of man' against all those elements which limit his freedom. These elements take the form of beliefs and concepts, as well as of political systems, based on economic, racial, or class distinction.'"
MSA USC minimizes the Muslim world's long history of complicity in slavery, an institution that persists in some Islamic nations to this day:
"As for slavery, Islam is unique among the 'religions' in its close attention to the peaceful removal of this practice. Before the advent of Islam, slavery was widespread all over the world. The Messenger of Islam taught us that freeing slaves was a great deed in the sight of Allah . The condition of slavery is very different in Islam than the harsh conditions imposed by non-Muslims or disobedient Muslims. As a result of the teachings of Islam, slavery was almost completely eradicated from many areas of the Muslim world, peacefully and without bloodshed."
The MSA USC website features several hagiographies of the Prophet Mohammad. According to one of these accounts, Mohammad brought "peace in place of the war of everybody against everybody else"; he "established a harmonious equilibrium between the spiritual and the temporal, between the mosque and the citadel"; he "left a new system of law, which dispensed impartial justice and in which religious tolerance was so great that non-Muslim inhabitants of Muslim countries equally enjoyed complete juridical, judicial and cultural autonomy." Another account states that Mohammad's successes in life "had been effected by sheer moral force, without a stroke of sword"; that he engaged in military combat only "in pure self-defense, after repeated efforts of conciliation had utterly failed"; and that he invariably eschewed warfare except in those circumstances where he was literally "dragged ... into the battlefield."
According to the MSA USC website, the phrase "'Muslim terrorist' is almost an oxymoron" because an authentic Muslim understands that "by killing innocent people, [he] is commit[t]ing an awesome sin." "This phrase," says MSA USC, "is offensive and demeaning of Islam, and it should be avoided. It is hoped that as the general level of public awareness and understanding of Islam increases, people will keep 'terrorism' and 'Islam' separate from each other, not to be used in the same phrase."
The MSA USC website makes available for its readers a host of ahadith (the plural form of hadith), or traditions of the Prophet Mohammad. The ahadith serve as a major source of context for the Quran's often-fragmentary narrative. Among the ahadith which the MSA USC website traditionally included was one that legitimizes the genocide of Jews: "You will fight against the Jews and you will kill them until even a stone would say: Come here, Muslim, there is a Jew (hiding himself behind me); kill him." This hadith was removed from the website in August 2008, however, when USC Provost, Chrysostomos Nikias, reacting to a call from the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, ordered the campus MSA to remove the "despicable" hadith.
MSA USC invited Taliban ambassador Sayyid Hashimi to speak at the University of Southern California campus on March 10, 2001, six months before 9/11. In that address, Hashimi asserted that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime had been able to "reunify the fragmented country" and successfully orchestrate "the restoration of human rights," particularly women's rights. He blamed the American media for having "transformed" Osama bin Laden and other likeminded Muslims "into terrorists." He characterized the Bill Clinton administration's 1998 attempt to kill bin Laden with cruise missiles as an act of American terrorism. "The United States government tried to kill a man without even giving him a fair trial," said Hashimi. "We have said that if really this man [bin Laden] is involved in the Kenya/Tanzania acts [the deadly 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in those nations], if anybody can give us proof or evidence about his involvement in these horrific acts, we will punish him. Nobody gave us evidence." "I personally think now that maybe the United States is looking for a Boogy Man always," Hashimi added.
From 1995 until July 2006, the "Compendium of Muslim Texts" section of the MSA USC website featured an essay titled "Becoming Muslim," authored by Adam "Yahiye" Gadahn (a/k/a Azzam Al-Amriki, or "Azzam the American"), a young Muslim convert who disappeared from California in 1999 at a time when he was wanted by the FBI for his possible connections to al Qaeda.
While Gadahn's whereabouts remained unknown, U.S. authorities identified him as an individual who had appeared in several post-9/11 al Qaeda videos, though this could not be confirmed with absolute certainty because in each instance his face was partially covered by a scarf. Then in 2004, ABC reporter Brian Ross said that Gadahn was indeed the man who, in previous videos, had warned that forthcoming al Qaeda attacks would flood the United States with "rivers of blood." Also in 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft positively identified Gadahn as an al Qaeda operative. The following year, terrorism experts concluded that Gadahn was the speaker on a September 11, 2005 al Qaeda video marking the fourth anniversary of 9/11 and promising more attacks against Americans.
Notwithstanding all this, MSA USC continued to feature Gadahn's essay on its website.
Then in July 2006 Gadahn revealed his identity for certain when he appeared unmasked in an al Qaeda video with Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. In that production, a bearded, turbaned Gadahn denounced U.S. soldiers in Iraq as "the real terrorists" who had murdered and raped innumerable Iraqi civilians, and he encouraged fellow Muslims to "go on a shooting spree at the Marines' housing facilities at Camp Pendleton" in California. After this video was made public, MSA USC finally removed Gadahn's essay from its website.
In July 2007, MSA USC sponsored an on-campus presentation by a ten-year-old Iraqi girl named Salee Allawe, who, during the previous year, had lost both her legs in a U.S.-led air strike over Hasswa; her brother and a friend were killed in that same strike. This MSA USC event was organized by activist Cole Miller, founder of the Los Angeles-based NoMoreVictims.org, which condemns "the death and mutilation of children" at the hands of "the American empire" and its unrestrained "militarism." Said Miller, "If the American people had even an inkling of what we're doing, they would put a stop to this."
In recent years, MSA USC has participated in an annual "Ramadan Fast-a-Thon" along with as many as 280 fellow Muslim organizations, including well over 200 MSA chapters. The purpose of this event is to raise, through temporary fasting, public awareness of hunger and homelessness in Muslim communities. Recent endorsers of the Fast-a-Thon include:
Imam Zaid Shakir, Yale University's former Muslim chaplain who has expressed his desire to see the United States eventually become "a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law"
