A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West - Hardcover

Johnson, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014183 ISBN 13: 9780151014187

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2010

Synopsis

In the wake of the news that the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Europe, journalist Ian Johnson wondered how such a radical group could sink roots into Western soil. Most accounts reached back twenty years, to U.S. support of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. But Johnson dug deeper, to the start of the Cold War, uncovering the untold story of a group of ex-Soviet Muslims who had defected to Germany during World War II. There, they had been fashioned into a well-oiled anti-Soviet propaganda machine. As that war ended and the Cold War began, West German and U.S. intelligence agents vied for control of this influential group, and at the centre of the covert tug of war was a quiet mosque in Munich - radical Islam's first beachhead in the West. Culled from an array of sources, including newly declassified documents, "A Mosque in Munich" interweaves the stories of several key players: a Nazi scholar turned postwar spymaster; key Muslim leaders across the globe, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; and, naive CIA men eager to fight communism with a new weapon, Islam. A rare ground-level look at Cold War spying and a revelatory account of the West's first, disastrous encounter with radical Islam, "A Mosque in Munich" is as captivating as it is crucial to our understanding the mistakes we are still making in our relationship with Islamists today.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Johnson's reporting on religious repression in China for the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and he won a Nieman fellowship at Harvard to research this book. He is the author of WILD GRASS: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (Pantheon, 2004). He lives in China, where he'll cover the Olympics for the Wall Street Journal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151014183
• ISBN 13: 9780151014187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320