Have the Islamic Militants Turned to a New Battlefront in the U.S.? : Terrorism: A blind Egyptian cleric in New Jersey has spread rage on two continents. He’s being linked to the suspect in the New York violence.

The arrest Thursday of the first suspect in the World Trade Center bombing has focused investigators’ attention on a storefront mosque in Jersey City, N.J., headed by a blind Egyptian cleric who calls himself a “soldier and servant in the cause of Allah” and whose followers have woven a network of Islamic rage across two continents.

The suspect, Mohammed A. Salameh, is believed by federal authorities to have worshiped at the Jersey City mosque, as did the man police say carried out the assassination of extremist Jewish leader Meir Kahane three years ago in New York.

What connection, if any, may exist between these outbursts of violence and the mosque led by Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman is not yet known.

But Egyptian and American authorities said that Abdul Rahman’s lessons to the faithful in New Jersey and Brooklyn, where the cleric fled three years ago from the Egyptian oasis of Fayoum, long have been messages of holy war against Egypt and other secular regimes of the Middle East.

The arrest of Salameh raises questions about whether the Islamic militants who have created havoc in the Middle East, beginning with the 1981 assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, have opened a new battlefront in the United States.

Heightening that concern is the fact that the World Trade Center bomb exploded an hour before Gamaa al Islamiya, an underground group said to be directed by the sheik, allegedly blew up a coffee shop in Cairo.

Authorities said that the suspect in the New York bombing had “contacts” with Abdul Rahman, although it is not known how extensive they were. A mosque spokesman denied that Salameh is known to members there.

Al-Sayyid A. Nosair, another follower of the mosque, is now in prison on charges stemming from the assassination of Kahane, and Abdul Rahman’s followers regularly gather contributions to support Nosair in prison.

Authorities in Egypt said that the sheik is using the United States as a base to organize and raise money for the Gamaa al Islamiya’s violent campaign to unseat the Egyptian regime and replace it with a fundamentalist Islamic state.

Egyptian authorities said that they believe the followers of Abdul Rahman, 54, were responsible for at least two recent assassinations in Egypt: that of Parliament Speaker Rifaat Mahgoub and secularist author Farag Foda.

They also accuse him of sanctioning the recent wave of Islamic militant attacks against foreign tourists in Egypt, the most recent of which was the Feb. 26 bombing of a downtown Cairo cafe.

In an official statement, Gamaa al Islamiya denied any connection with the Cairo bombing. But a spokesman for the group in Assyut told journalists that Islamic militants had carried out the attack as part of their vendetta against the government.

Gamaa al Islamiya’s activities in the United States--along with recent arrests in Israel of U.S.-based Palestinians working on behalf of the fundamentalist group Hamas--point up the extent to which the United States and Europe have become important organizational and fund-raising bases for Middle Eastern fundamentalist organizations, Arab and Islamic sources said.

“These groups will work wherever they’re allowed to work and the U.S. is a rich country,” said a Saudi official who regularly deals with Islamic organizations in America and Europe. “Nobody goes there and solicits money for the Muslim brotherhood. No, they solicit money for a mosque project they have, a hospital project they have, and in the end, where does the money go?”

Further, Western mosques and universities are often fertile development grounds for budding Islamic activists.

Abdul Rahman began preaching at the New Jersey mosque after U.S. authorities mistakenly granted him a visa in 1990. He had been acquitted once in Sadat’s assassination and again in 1990 for lack of evidence on charges of plotting to overthrow the Egyptian government in a wave of violence around his native Fayoum.

The U.S. Embassy in Khartoum failed to note that Abdul Rahman’s name was on a list of those requiring special permission to enter this country. But it was not until late last year that American authorities began proceedings to withdraw Abdul Rahman’s green card and to force him out of the United States.

Authorities asserted that Abdul Rahman violated American law by writing a bad check and having more than one wife--his two wives live in adjoining apartments in Fayoum and he reportedly has married an American from his congregation in New Jersey.

Egyptian authorities said they also suspect that Abdul Rahman has issued fatwas (religious decrees) endorsing assassinations aimed at Egyptian intellectuals, including Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, the head of the supreme state security court and various actors and police officials.

Abdul Rahman--a Port Said native who studied and taught at the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo before running afoul of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser--in recent months has denied any connection to tourist attacks in Egypt. But the Egyptian government has seized cassette tapes that he recorded in the United States condemning tourism and urging war against the government.

“To those lamenting what has happened to tourism, I say it is sinful,” said one of the tapes, excerpted in a local magazine. “The lands of Muslims will not become bordellos for sinners of every race and color.”

In a recent interview with the British newspaper, the Independent, Abdul Rahman warned tourists to avoid Egypt and said that his American stay was temporary. “America is behind all these un-Islamic governments and tries to keep them strong and wants to help them defeat the Islamic movements,” he complained.

Islamic organizations throughout the Middle East were particularly critical of the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War, which they claim was a United States attempt to assert its power in the region.

Egyptian authorities have no official charges pending against Abdul Rahman and have indicated that they are not eager to have him back should he be deported from the United States. Even if he were arrested immediately after his arrival, said one Cairo official, the arrest likely would touch off a wave of protests that might be difficult to control.