An Interesting Historical Mystery

By Jeffrey Breinholt

My recent post on the Muslim Brotherhood's history in the U.S. courts (here), drew some attention and curiosity. In it, I described a court opinion involving a document seized by American prison officials in 1959, detailing the goals and membership requirements of the Muslim Brotherhood. Pierce v. LaVallee, 212 F. Supp. 865 (S.D.N.Y. 1962.). Some who reviewed the text of the document are convinced, based on its wording, that it did not relate to the Muslim Brotherhood we know today as the Ikwan.

I cannot solve this mystery, based on the methodology I used for the article - on-line legal research tools, which allow full-text searches of American court opinions. This is a method I used in an article about Watergate a few years ago, and I believe it is an effective way of historical narration in situations where facts are controverted, because of the role of judges in resolving factual controversies. The beauty of judicial opinions is that they are the result of the adversarial cauldron, where opposing sides put on their evidence. This makes them a nice historical tool. Judicial opinions also have their limitations, since judges don't address facts that are not relevant to their rulings. Whether the document described in Pierce relates to the Ikwan was not relevant to the court's ruling.

This is what we know: in 1962, a federal court in New York determined that prison officials were legally justified in taking action against group of Muslim prisoners who were agitating, based in part on a document that described the requirements for members of a group called the Muslim Brotherhood.

There are three possibilities, and hopefully readers and contributors of the Counterterrorism Blog can assist me in determining which is most likely: (1) The document in the court opinion derives from the Ikwan, as Doug Farah and I originally suspected, (2) the document derives from the Nation of Islam, which briefly adopted the name or literature of the Muslim Brotherhood or (3) the document comes from third group that went by the name Muslim Brotherhood.

Here is some additional factors I found:

Malcolm X allegedly met with Muslim Brotherhood's Said Ramadan in Switzerland in 1964. Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam during the relevant period, joined the group in 1933, around the same time as the formation of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. According to FBI reports issued under the Freedom of Information Act, the Nation of Islam was publicly accused by a group known as the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood in 1959 of not being true Muslims.

What do these additional factors suggest? The second of these possibilities I mentioned is supported by the fact that another Muslim Brotherhood prison case (Desmond v Blackwell) involved an inmate who specificaly complained that he was being deprived of writings of Elijah Muhammad. This would suggest judges of that era may have been confused about the distinction between these two groups and conflated them. However, the document excerpted in the Pierce opinion specifically referred to the Muslim Brotherhood, not the Nation of Islam. Moreover, it would not make any sense for the Nation of Islam to force its adherents to follow the edicts of a group known as the Muslim Brotherhood, nor that the Muslim Brotherhood would permit the Nation to use its internal policies, if the two groups were not aligned. This makes the second possibility highly unlikely.

The first possibility is suggested by the date of Elijah Muhammad's conversion and by Malcom X's meeting with Ramadan in the early 1960s. Under this theory, the Nation and the Ikwan may have secretly (and perhaps temporarily) joined forces based on common origin, and the language of the Muslim Brotherhood document in the Pierce case represented a melding of rhetoric of the the two groups.

What about the third possibility - the document refers to a third group, which was distinct both from the Nation of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood we know today, which went by latter's name?

Here's some additional information to support this theory. The person described in the FBI document as criticizing Elijah Muhammed was Alhajji Talib Ahmad Dawud. He was married to a jazz singer named Dakota Station and founded a group called the Muslim Brotherhood as an offshoot of an Indian group called Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI). Many of its converts were black musicians like McCoy Tyner, and - while practicing an orthodox brand of Islam - they were not political. In fact, Dawud even sued the Nation of Islam when it appeared that his wife's singing career was being tarnished by the Nation's reputation.

In my opinion, the Pierce document did not come from Dawud's group. It's an open question whether it came from the Ikwan. Anyone else out there want to try their hand at this question?

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