For more than a decade, Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa has served as a Muslim cleric in Maryland, working as a prison chaplain and as an imam at mosques in Annapolis and outside Baltimore. He gave a two-week course in 2011 on Islamic teachings on marriage at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama made a much-publicized visit this year.
But in the last two years, Imam Bengharsa’s public pronouncements have taken a dark turn. On Facebook, he has openly endorsed the Islamic State, posted gruesome videos showing ISIS fighters beheading and burning alive their enemies and praised terrorist attacks overseas. The “Islamic Jurisprudence Center” website he set up last year has condemned American mosques as un-Islamic and declared that homosexual acts should be punished by death.
Yet Imam Bengharsa has not been arrested or charged. It appears that the authorities do not have clear evidence that he has broken the law.
The case poses in a striking way the dilemma for the F.B.I. in deciding when constitutionally protected speech crosses into inciting violence or conspiring to commit a terrorist act.
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But Imam Bengharsa’s harsh recent pronouncements set him much farther from mainstream American Islam. On the Islamic Jurisprudence Center site in April, he condemned by name the leading Muslim organizations in the United States, 12 prominent clerics he called “evil scholars/imams,” and a list of 22 mosques — including the two where he previously worked. Since the court documents naming him were made public, he removed those pages from his site, though they remain available in the Google cache.
In his standoff with the F.B.I., Imam Bengharsi appears to have scant support in the American Muslim community. Muhammad Jameel, the president of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, said that the imam’s marriage lectures five years ago were his only connection to the mosque and that his recent statements were “against all the tenets of Islam.”
“He’s a nut,” Mr. Jameel said. “He has freedom of speech. But if he’s a criminal, I want to see him in jail.”
But in the last two years, Imam Bengharsa’s public pronouncements have taken a dark turn. On Facebook, he has openly endorsed the Islamic State, posted gruesome videos showing ISIS fighters beheading and burning alive their enemies and praised terrorist attacks overseas. The “Islamic Jurisprudence Center” website he set up last year has condemned American mosques as un-Islamic and declared that homosexual acts should be punished by death.
Yet Imam Bengharsa has not been arrested or charged. It appears that the authorities do not have clear evidence that he has broken the law.
The case poses in a striking way the dilemma for the F.B.I. in deciding when constitutionally protected speech crosses into inciting violence or conspiring to commit a terrorist act.
...
But Imam Bengharsa’s harsh recent pronouncements set him much farther from mainstream American Islam. On the Islamic Jurisprudence Center site in April, he condemned by name the leading Muslim organizations in the United States, 12 prominent clerics he called “evil scholars/imams,” and a list of 22 mosques — including the two where he previously worked. Since the court documents naming him were made public, he removed those pages from his site, though they remain available in the Google cache.
In his standoff with the F.B.I., Imam Bengharsi appears to have scant support in the American Muslim community. Muhammad Jameel, the president of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, said that the imam’s marriage lectures five years ago were his only connection to the mosque and that his recent statements were “against all the tenets of Islam.”
“He’s a nut,” Mr. Jameel said. “He has freedom of speech. But if he’s a criminal, I want to see him in jail.”
