Here’s a detailed report on Saudi Arabia’s vast campaign to spread radical Wahhabism around the world—and especially in the United States: Saudi export of strict Islam raises suspicions. (Hat tip: Mentat.)

SAN DIEGO - Omar Abdi Mohamed, a lanky, soft-spoken political refugee from war-ruined Somalia in East Africa, had been preaching the word of Islam in the United States for the past nine years. Two things make him unusual.

In January, U.S. immigration authorities arrested him, saying they suspected him of being a conduit for terrorist funds, federal court records show. At the time, he was on the payroll of Saudi Arabia’s government.

Mohamed was one of 30 Saudi-financed preachers in this country. Each month, the Saudis paid $1,700 to the 44-year-old, who taught the Koran at a run-down Somali social center here. He worked with little supervision from Saudi religious authorities 8,000 miles away. In the late 1990s, he set up a small charity to help famine victims in Somalia, and that is how his trouble began.

The charity received $326,000 over three years from the Global Relief Foundation, a private Islamic charity based in Illinois. In October 2002, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Global Relief a terrorist-financing entity linked to al Qaeda.

The collision of Saudi missionary work and suspicions of terrorist financing in San Diego illustrates the perils and provocations of a multibillion-dollar effort by Saudi Arabia to spread its religion around the world. Mohamed worked on the front lines of that effort, a campaign to transform what outsiders call “Wahhabism,” once a marginal and puritanical brand of Islam with few followers outside the Arabian Peninsula, into the dominant doctrine in the Islamic world. The campaign has created a vast infrastructure of both government-supported and private charities that at times has been exploited by violent jihadists — among them Osama bin Laden.

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In May 2003, the State Department refused reentry to the chief imam of the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, Fahad al Thumairy, who also was a Saudi diplomat at the consulate in Los Angeles. The Sept. 11 commission report later said the State Department had determined “he might be connected with terrorist activity.”

The report also said that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, “spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.” Al Thumairy, who reportedly led an “extremist faction” at the mosque, denied knowing the two hijackers. While his denial was “somewhat suspect,” the report said there was no evidence connecting him to the hijackers.

This article is illustrated with a photograph of the King Fahd Mosque, where, in April 2001, I had a personal experience with one of the followers of the RoP that was a dark omen of things to come.

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