Central Area mosque was 1990s hub for harsh rule

The street thugs, junkies and gangbangers who once controlled the Central Area block surrounding the Dar-us-Salaam mosque had more to fear than just police.

In the late 1990s, there was a new law in the neighborhood — sharia, a strict Islamic code — and transgressors were dealt with swiftly and harshly.

Smoking and drinking around the mosque were forbidden. Drug dealers were banished. Disrespect toward women was not tolerated. Prayers were required.

Those rules were enforced by armed patrols who roamed the sidewalks and neighboring businesses. Sometimes, offenders were beaten.

"We did not have the money to move to an Islamic country," recalled Ali Shahid Abdul-Raheem, 30, an Auburn man who belonged to the mosque during that time. "So we tried to make one here. That block was our Islamic country."

Call it the Seattle Taliban. And like the fundamentalist regime that ruled Afghanistan, the mosque proved a haven for militants who loathed America and the West.

Most of the 100 or so Muslims who regularly attended Dar-us-Salaam were peaceful, and many took a dim view of the violence they saw as an affront to their faith.

However, a group of between seven and a dozen men became increasingly radical, according to former mosque members and federal law-enforcement sources. Most of that group were African-American converts to Islam but it included Ali Shahid Abdul-Raheem, a white man formerly known as Patrick Fitzsimmons, and Semi Osman, a naturalized British citizen from Lebanon who for a time was the mosque's imam, or prayer leader.

London link

The militants' path led them to Abu Hamza al-Masri, leader of a London mosque considered a crucible for terrorism and a recruiting ground for Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

The relationship between the Seattle group and the radical British cleric is at the heart of a continuing international investigation that led to the arrest last month of James Ujaama, a former member of Dar-us-Salaam suspected of conspiring with Abu Hamza and others in 1999 to set up a terrorist-training camp in rural Oregon.

That a Seattle mosque may have had connections to international terrorists comes as news to most local Muslims. But, one local leader explained, small prayer centers in Central Seattle that call themselves mosques have operated largely in the shadows of the mainstream Muslim community.

"They are as unstable as the weather in Seattle," said Hisham Farajallah, a Boeing engineer and volunteer director of the Idris Mosque in North Seattle. "You may have contact with one person one day, and the next day he's gone."

When the mosque opened in 1994, it was called Yasin and was located in a tiny storefront on East Cherry Street. Some of the American members followed Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, the former Black Panther militant known in the 1960s as H. Rap Brown, who was convicted last year of murdering a Georgia sheriff's deputy.

In 1996, the mosque — its population burgeoning with immigrants — moved to 2211 E. Union St. and changed its name to Dar-us-Salaam.

Always open

The mosque was one of the few in Seattle open around the clock. In keeping with the faith's teachings, any Muslim visitor could stay for up to three days, and sometimes longer, in small rooms upstairs. Several of the militant members lived at the mosque, and the security teams patrolled the neighborhood all hours of the day.

Downstairs at the mosque was a small foyer, where worshippers removed their shoes and where a box for charitable contributions was located. Inside the mosque was a large, plain prayer room. Next door was a coffee shop and delicatessen with pool tables.

In 1997, the mosque took a more militant turn after Ujaama, one of its most charismatic members, traveled to England. There, according to his friends and a confidential FBI memorandum reviewed by The Seattle Times, Ujaama "fell under the influence" of Abu Hamza.

Several Dar-us-Salaam members formed a jama'aat, a secret organization dedicated to the fundamental Islamic law of sharia. Such organizations are encouraged by Abu Hamza in his writings.

Sometimes, during the sermon after Friday evening prayers, the men preached violent jihad, or holy war, against nonbelievers.

Omar Aden, a Somali immigrant who attended both the Yasin and Dar-us-Salaam mosques, recalled at least one instance when some worshippers got up and left the sermon — a notable breach of Islamic protocol.

"They just didn't like what they were hearing," Aden said. "They did not feel the mosque was a place for that kind of talk."

Some of the American convert members of the mosque had embraced a militant view of Islam that others, most of them born into the faith, did not accept, Aden said.

Abdul-Hakim, an African-American convert who attended the mosque, agreed.

"Some people believe African-Americans are really extreme in the way we practice Islam. Well, we have to be," he said. "Islam has cleaned up a lot of lives."

Cleaning up the area

The militant members set out to clean up other lives, and the block around Dar-us-Salaam.

"We thought the Taliban was good — not perfect, but show me a country that is," said Abdul-Hakim. "But their ideals don't sit well in this society. If you steal, you lose a hand. If you are an adulterer, the penalty is death. Homosexuality is forbidden and is a death sentence. There is no premarital sex and no dating."

Some of the American mosque members armed themselves, and a few obtained concealed-weapons permits. According to the FBI, three of these men — including Mustafa Ujaama, James' brother and another central figure at the mosque — legally purchased 19 firearms in this period.

"The drug dealers wanted their turf," Abdul-Hakim said. "Nobody writes up that the mosque cleaned up that neighborhood and made it safe for a woman to walk down the street."

But at a cost. According to Ali Raheem, a cab driver who was a regular at the mosque, there were numerous assaults.

"Yes, violence did occur," he said. "We cleaned the block up."

Not all of the violence was reported to police, but several incidents were:

• On July 24, 1996, Mustafa Ujaama was arrested after admitting he fired a dozen rounds at a car involved in a hit-and-run accident at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Massachusetts Avenue. Ujaama's companion, Andre Tremaine Anderson, also known as Abdul-Raheem Ali, was hospitalized. Police confiscated two 9-mm handguns. Anderson told police the guns were "to defend their mosque." Ujaama was charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm. The case was later dismissed for "proof problems."

• On Aug. 28, 1997, Anderson's 5-year-old son shot himself with a handgun he found under a pillow. In searching the house, police found a loaded 12-gauge riot gun, a loaded SKS assault rifle, two .40-caliber handguns and six swords, according to police reports. The boy recovered from his injuries.

• On Nov. 19, 1998, Dante Chepel Anderson, Andre's brother, was arrested at the mosque after a Somali immigrant named Ali Omar Ali suffered a broken nose and facial cuts in a beating at a neighboring cafe, the East African Deli. The victim called police and told officers he had been pistol-whipped by a man who had borrowed a handgun from Dante Anderson.

Police opened a hate-crimes investigation the following day after the victim said he was approached after the beating by a group of about 10 men from the mosque — including one he identified as Andre Anderson. Several of the men had handguns in their waistbands. He said they pushed him down and called him an infidel.

"The victim feels he is being targeted because he is not Muslim," according to a police report on the incident.

Ali Omar Ali was confronted again that afternoon by three men from the mosque, one of whom gave him $100 and told him to leave the city or he'd be killed, according to police reports.

"We were prepared to prosecute the case," recalled retired Seattle police homicide Detective John Nordlund, who oversaw the investigation. But the victim disappeared and no charges could be filed, he said.

Ali Omar Ali now lives in Ohio and could not be contacted. Several attempts to contact the Anderson brothers were unsuccessful.

Abdul-Hakim recalled the incident, but said Ali Omar Ali was punched, not hit with a gun, because he had been confronted about dealing drugs.

Ali Omar Ali has no record of arrest or prosecution in Seattle.

Some objected

The violence and guns at the mosque did not sit well with other worshippers, recalled Omar Aden, who owns the nearby Tawakal Little Coffee Shop.

"There was a little bit of a cultural difference," Aden said. "A lot of people complained about the guns. In our country, guns are not allowed in the mosque."

The mainstream Idris Mosque in North Seattle also would not approve of any effort to enforce Islamic law, even if it meant reducing crime in a neighborhood, Farajallah said.

"Religious teachings, you can't enforce. You can preach it only,'" he said. "You cannot cause harm."

Farajallah said he tried to contact leaders at Dar-us-Salaam in an effort to bring them into the mainstream but was unsuccessful.

In fact, he said, the first time he heard of James and Mustafa Ujaama was when they identified themselves in the press last month as subjects of the FBI investigation.

"Those individuals, I never heard their names before. I say that as the leader of the community for the last 10 years," Farajallah said.

Abdul-Hakim denied there was any rift between the American and immigrant members of Dar-us-Salaam, but said the immigrants were timid and unsure of themselves. Ali Raheem said there was a "love-hate" relationship with the immigrants.

"Their character is like sheep — very gentle," he said. "That was not going to work in that neighborhood."

While some of the militant members were focused on cleaning up their neighborhood, the FBI alleges that others — in particular, James Ujaama — had a bigger target: the West.

In November 1999, two men from London — Oussama Kassir and Haroon Aswat — arrived in the United States and traveled to a remote ranch near Bly, Ore. The FBI believes the men had been sent by Abu Hamza after James Ujaama had faxed the cleric about the potential for the ranch to be used as a training camp for terrorists.

The next month, Kassir and Aswat came to Seattle and lived in the mosque for several weeks.

That time period is now the focus of the FBI's investigation of the connections between the small Seattle storefront mosque and Abu Hamza's North Central London Mosque, one of the world's most infamous centers of radical Islam.

In 2000, Dar-us-Salaam moved to 2201 E. Union St., two doors to the west, and became the Taqwa Mosque. That building was damaged by the earthquake Feb. 28, 2001, and closed.

A new Taqwa mosque opened two blocks to the east. Its worshippers include both Islamic immigrants and American converts.

Mike Carter can be reached at 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com.

Seattle Times staff reporters David Heath, Susan Kelleher and Hal Bernton contributed to this report.