Earlier in August, Abdul El-Sayed had come under fire for a planned appearance at the Islamic Society of North America, an Islamic group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror funding trial, alongside numerous figures who had called for violence and terrorism, including Imam Tariq Masood who had praised Hitler and describing having “forced his 13-year-old niece into marriage, and advised his followers to do the same with their young female relatives.”
El-Sayed tried to disavow any connection to the imam who had been accused of “pedophilic rhetoric” but a book by yet another Islamic figure with troubling views on child rape was spotted on his bookshelf despite his efforts to prevent coverage of the hateful text from being broadcast.
Abdul El-Sayed had asked documentarians covering his previous campaign to “not get these things in the shot” and, as reported on by the Free Beacon, the book in question was by Bilal Philips, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, who in other writings had ‘advocated that young girls are fit for marriage the moment they begin menstruating.’
“The prophet Muhammad practically outlined the rules regarding marriage prior to puberty, with his practice he clarified what is permissible and that is why we shouldn’t have any issues about an older man marrying a younger woman, which is looked down upon by this society today, but we know that Prophet Muhammad practiced it, it wasn’t abuse or exploitation, it was marriage,” Philips had argued in another book.
In that same book, Bilal Philips also argued that monogamy was “illogical”, “men are polygamous by nature” and the alternative was prostitution, that the Koran allowed men to rape their wives, “a woman is obliged to give herself to her husband and he may not be charged with rape”, and that “Sharia does permit a husband to hit his wife.”