The publication of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, has reported that a ruling of it’s Fiqh Council was used by a group run by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. to force Muslim immigrants to stop selling alcohol in four precincts of West Louisville, Kentucky. According to the report:
Jefferson County Circuit Judge Mary M. Shaw has ruled that stores in four precincts (Westend) in West Louisville, KY, will not be allowed to sell alcohol and lottery tickets. The ruling came at the request of the Louisville, KY-based Ambassadors for Peace of Kentuckiana, an interfaith group battling purveyors of alcoholic beverages and gambling. The Ambassadors for Peace initiative is a project of the Washington, DC-based Universal Peace Federation (UPF). An unfortunate situation arose in the mainly AfricanAmerican neighborhood of Westend, where some new Muslim immigrants own small grocery stores, restaurants, and gas stations that started selling alcoholic beverages and lottery tickets. Recently, the City of Louisville held a referendum in these precincts on going dry, and some of these merchants challenged the results. A group led by Rev. Peter Hayes (chair, UPF/AFP-KY), MeShorn Daniels (vice-chair and president, G.A.R.M.Y., Inc.), and Dr. Patricia Muhammad (secretary and founder, Darfur United) opposed the merchants, citing the Fiqh Council of North America’s fatwa on the unanimous Islamic position that Muslims can neither drink, buy, sell, or produce alcoholic drinks nor sell lottery tickets (considered a form of gambling). Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi (chairman, FCNA) congratulated Rev. Hayes on the group’s “courageous moral and social stand against the sale of alcohol in your area. You have rightly pointed out that alcohol ‘promotes domestic abuse, crime and violence.’ In the Islamic tradition, alcohol is called ‘the mother of many evils.'”
The Ambassadors for Peace was not identified in the report as an organization associated with Reverend Moon.
FCNA is an organization comprised of Islamic scholars, most if not all of whom are associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood . FCNA grew out of the activities of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and later became affiliated with ISNA, itself an outgrowth of MSA. FCNA maintains a relationship with other similar bodies in the global Muslim Brotherhood including the European Council for Fatwa and Research and the Islamic Fiqh Academy in Saudi Arabia.
(Source: Horizons May 2008 – June 2008 Faiths Unite to Trump Two Evils SECTION: ISN MATTERS; Pg. 10 Vol. 37 No. 3 ISSN: 8756-2367)