Present Day

Islam in the West
During the British conquest of Muslim lands they successfully created pseudo-Islamic movements to aid their cause, such as the Ahmediyyah in India and the Bahai in Persia. A similar strategy has been employed when the Iranian revolution as well as the Russian-Afghan war put Islam at the top of the news in the West, and the interest generated in the hitherto much less known religion of Islam led to large numbers of conversions. To keep these developments in check, various movements sprang up to divert the activities of those new converts, who were often highly politicised. Worth mentioning amongst them are the Nation of Islam in the USA, and the Sufi movements of Sheikh Abdulqadir “al-Murabit” and of Naqshebandi Sheikh Nazim “al-Qubrusi” in the UK. Abdulqadir, formerly Ian Dallas, attracted followers with rhetoric allegedly exposing freemasonry and the manipulation of the world’s usurious financial system, only to gradually lead them up the garden path towards the nihilistic philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger and get them to sell, in some cases adulterated, gold dinars. Sheikh Nazim, the successor of Sheikh Abdullah Ed-Dagistani in Damascus has been successfully attracting wealthy converts. His teachings are closely related to the Indonesian Subud cult, which in turn is part of the UN one-world agenda of replacing genuine religious movements with false ones.

Sufism or Islamic mysticism, originally developed out of the Ismaili version of Shia Islam through a marriage of the concept of the Imamate with the Gnostic teachings of the Sabeans of Harran and Hellenistic Neoplatonism, remains a favourite means of directing Muslims away from political engagement to the esoteric. The naivety of the Muslim public also allowed for leaders to be imposed on them through media propaganda. Thus television fame, for example via Al-Jazeera, assures a following to modernising scholars, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who permit interest, the consumption of stunned meat and weaken any resistance, particularly of the military type, against the occupation of Muslim lands and the Zionist project, whereas traditional scholars are bereft of an audience by being bypassed by the same media. A storm in a tea cup over whether such a false scholar is actually a radical and should be denied entry to the US or the UK enhances their reputation amongst ordinary Muslims. Likewise, Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, became a hero once again when denied access to the US, subsequently withdrawn, on a visit for a joined recording with Dolly Parton, and nobody ever asks questions about him having embraced Islam upon the suggestion of his Israeli brother and manager David Gordon (nee Wickman) and whether it was appropriate for his nephew Daniel to have unhindered regular access to the London offices of the largest Muslim charity Yusuf Islam established in the UK.
In the USA, Mark Hanson became Sheikh Hamza Yusuf who, after initially attracting a following by attacking the Dajjal system, volunteered to become a Muslim advisor to the Bush administration after 9/11.