Mohammed al-Hanooti

Mohammed al-Hanooti (born March 12, 1937, in Haifa, British Mandate of Palestine) is a former Imam (from 1995-99) of the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. Al-Hanooti immigrated to Iraq in 1948, and then to the US in 1978. Al-Hanooti was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In 1993 he led a New Jersey mosque that hosted Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind Egyptian leader of militant group Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya now serving a life sentence for seditious conspiracy) and some of his followers, including one of the bombers, and had repeated contacts with the man who killed Rabbi Meir Kahane.

He spoke up for Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, who was deported in 1997 and indicted years later on charges of arranging financial support for Hamas, which the U.S. views as a [...] organization. In 1998, he criticized President Clinton for ordering U.S. military strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, saying there was not enough convincing evidence to justify the violence.

In 1999 he testified in support of Ihab M. Ali, who refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the 1998 United States embassy bombings, telling the federal judge that Islamic law "gives him the right to abstain from giving testimony in case it hurts him or it hurts any other Muslim."

His work in affiliation with the Muslim American Society has been aimed at building bridges between Muslims and American society.