And not incidentally, also as a gateway for "Imam training" and religious instruction ~ including special education programs in Saudi Arabia, sponsored and funded by the Rabetah al-'Alam al-Islamiyyah ("Muslim World League") and Dar al-Iftaa' (who wrote "stipend" checks for approved Imams in American mosques) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth ("MAYA") ~ of "religious leaders" for numerous newly-established mosques and Islamic Centers near schools attended by muslims.  The well-funded sponsors were more often unable to find any local "mosque leadership" suited to their ambition to make Muslim America "effective in white society" as Tijani, an ISNA architect, announced as planned (above) in 1978.

   Alternative national and regional umbrella organizations, such as the Islamic Circle of North America and the Council of Masajids of the United States, were established to preserve the hard-won autonomy and independence of assimilated and integrated ethnic muslim communities already established for generations in such places as Dearborn Michigan, Cedar Rapids Iowa, and St. Louis Missouri, from the financial power, nationalizing ambitions, and radicalizing influences of the Saudi-based politicians and religious elites.  This resistance characterized the development of Muslim America during the decade of the Seventies, and was largely successful owing to the manifest ambitions dominating ISNA.

   As members of the leadership strata of the MSA empire moved from residence to residence, they did not, as a rule, enter a "change of address" in the organization's records, but simply established new memberships for all members of their families.  Analysis of the ISNA's actual official membership rosters of the MSA and their main professional associations, undertaken by Muslim America and published to some 1500 mosques and Islamic Centers in America in 1978, disclosed that most of those holding leadership positions had multiple votes to cast in ISNA elections ~ some leaders with as many as thirty-six votes from five or more residence addresses ~ sufficient to secure complete oligarchic control over the directions of affiliated organizations.  [Source materials including analytic studies remain available to qualified researchers in Muslim America archives.]

   In addition, overall membership figures disclosed for public information were inflated by some 600%, showing their Saudi funding agencies an astounding rate of success.  Small groups of black American muslims, shown in photographs at conventions, contributed greatly to ISNA's bottom line, although spectrum-wide ISNA showed little interest in contributing to the development of muslim communities in Black America.  Few white Americans had shown much interest in Islam, and most of those who had were inclined more toward the mystically heterodox and largely populist "sufi" tendencies and toward intellectual philosophies and approaches of the Shi'ah than to the Saudi orthodoxist parties.  The mythical "two thousand" mentioned by Tijani consisted largely of American women who had married ethnic muslims ~ or who had arrived at Islam independently and had been hired for menial positions with ISNA affiliates.  This miniscule success in recruiting even "token" white Americans to ISNA's ranks of luminary articulators did not go unremarked in Saudi Arabia.

   Simultaneously, the ISNA leadership, based in Plainfield and Indianapolis, Indiana, conducted a thorough-going effort to establish itself in America's federal and State prison systems.  The showcase "Prison Program" at Graterford Correctional Institution was touted to penologists to displace the indigenous community prison ministries, carried on mostly as support for local families, by black inner-city muslim communities of Muslim America ~ that were then displacing the so-called "Nation of Islam" of the false prophet Elijah Muhammad, long a favorite of ISNA attention.  A special program was established on the independent charitable work of an American muslim in Ashland, Oregon, funding and publishing rudimentary libraries of muslim materials throughout America's prisons, under the aegis of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  These efforts, too, have largely failed to advance Saudi political ambitions in Muslim America.

   Internal policy discussions within ISNA occurred in Arabic, as they do today in the so-called "Salafi Da'wah," which is the latest known effort tailored to the American enterprise of these ambitious careerists.  The page above was translated from the MSA's al-Da'wa newsletter discussing the development of MSA influence among American muslims, by the notable Professor Hamid Algar in his Berkeley-based al-Bayan Bulletin.  Tijani is reported to have denied making the statements recorded in al-Da'wa.  The Arabic text, from al-Da'wa, is shown above by Dr. Algar.