Guest Post: RAND Islam and CIA Islam too…
Charles Cameron has been guest blogging here in a series on radical Islamism and terrorism. A former researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, his most recent essay, an analysis of the powerpoint presentation of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, appeared in the Small Wars Journal.
This post is a follow up to the previous an interview al-Awlaki gave to a California Muslim news journal, InFocus, from which I’ve extracted the following:
IF: One of your most recent lectures is titled “Battle of the Hearts & Minds,” in which you talk about lies and propaganda. Would you briefly summarize the point of this lecture for our readers?IA: There has been a plethora of reports from governmental and non-governmental sources on how to defeat what they perceive as the Islamic danger. For example RAND Corporation, which is a think tank affiliated to the Pentagon, 
has issued a couple of reports on this. They have openly stated that they are unhappy with the way Islam is and want to change it. They then proceed to delineate the characteristics of their version of Islam and how to promote it. They also describe the type of Muslims that they think might be willing to prescribe to this “Rand Islam.” Because they understand that the masses in the Muslim world have lost trust in the US, they state that the US hand in this effort should be hidden and that their Muslim stooges should be in the forefront.
IF: What tips would you give to Muslims living in the U.S. to win this battle of the hearts and minds?
IA: Muslims need to be able to tell the difference between the real Islam and the RAND Islam and they need to know who their enemy is. Living in the West, they also have a responsibility of refuting such attempts of changing the religion of Allah.
The second can be found in the lecture series titled “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” about which al-Awlaki was questioned in the IA
interview excerpted above, eg on p. 19:
We talked about some of the recommendations that were in the Rand report and how to deal with this issue of separating between the modernists or the Rand Muslims, and the extremists or the real Muslims, true Muslims.
and p. 25:
So it is our duty just as they are intending to change our religion and promote falsehood and to turn us to Rand Muslims, we need
to promote Al Haq.
And the phrase “RAND Islam” has a cousin,”CIA Islam” — which was applied, curiously enough, to al-Awlaki himself by a one-time rival,
Al-Faisal, as Brian Fishman noted in a post on Jihadica yesterday.
Al-Faisal’s lecture on al-Awlaki is listed as “CIA Islam – Sheikh Faisal’s Takfeer of Anwar Awlaki” on www.archive.org. On the recording, Faisal explains that his lecture is about a preacher named “Anwar” from the Masjid al-Rabat in San Diego. He then proceeds to play sections of Awlaki’s lecture for his audience before refuting its points. The voice on the tape seems to be that of Anwar al-Awlaki.
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