Huma Abedin was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her father, Syed Abedin (1928-1993), was an Indian-born scholar who had worked as a visiting professor at Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz University in the early Seventies.
Huma's mother,
Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is a sociologist known for her strong advocacy of
Sharia Law. A member of the Muslim Sisterhood (i.e., the
Muslim Brotherhood's division for women), Saleha is also a board member of the
International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief. This pro-
Hamas entity is part of the
Union of Good, which the U.S. government has formally designated as an international terrorist organization led by the Muslim Brotherhood luminary
Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
When Huma was two, the Abedin family relocated from Michigan to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This move took place when Abdullah Omar Naseef, a
major Muslim Brotherhood figure who served as vice president of Abdulaziz University (AU),
recruited his former AU colleague, Syed Abedin, to work for the
Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), a Saudi-based Islamic think tank that Naseef was preparing to launch. A number of years later, Naseef would
develop close
ties to
Osama bin Laden and the terrorist group
al Qaeda. Naseef also spent time (beginning in the
early 1980s) as secretary-general of the
Muslim World League, which, as journalist
Andrew C. McCarthy points out, "has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology."
It is vital to note that IMMA's "
Muslim Minority Affairs" agenda was, and remains to this day, a calculated foreign policy of the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, designed, as Andrew C. McCarthy
explains, "to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West." For details about this agenda,
click here.
At age 18, Huma Abedin returned to the U.S. to attend George Washington University. In 1996 she began working as an intern in the
Bill Clinton White House, where she was assigned to then-First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton. Abedin was
eventually hired as an aide to Mrs. Clinton and has worked for her ever since, through Clinton's successful Senate runs (in 2000 and 2006) and her failed presidential bid in 2008.
From 1997 until sometime before early 1999, Abedin, while still interning at the White House,
was an
executive board member of
George Washington University's (GWU)
Muslim Students Association (MSA), heading the organization's “Social Committee.”
It is noteworthy that in 2001-02, soon after Abedin left that executive board, the chaplain and "spritual guide" of GWU's MSA was Anwar al-Awlaki, the
al Qaeda operative who
ministered to some of the men who were among the 9/11 hijackers.
Another chaplain at GWU's MSA (
from at least October 1999 through April 2002) was Mohamed Omeish, who headed the
International Islamic Relief Organization, which has been tied to the funding of
al Qaeda. Omeish’s
brother, Esam, headed the
Muslim American Society, the Muslim Brotherhood’s quasi-official branch in the United States. Both Omeish brothers were closely
associated with
Abdurahman Alamoudi, who would later be convicted and incarcerated on terrorism charges.
From 1996-2008, Abedin was employed by the
Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs(IMMA) as the
assistant editor of its in-house publication, the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (
JMMA).
At least the first seven of those years
overlapped with the al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Omar Naseef's active presence at IMMA. Abedin's last six years at the Institute (2002-2008) were spent as a
JMMA editorial board
member; for one of those years, 2003, Naseef and Abedin
served together on that board.
Throughout her years with IMMA, Abedin remained a close aide to Hillary Clinton. During Mrs. Clinton's 2008 presidential primary campaign, a
New York Observer profile of Abedin described her as "a trusted advisor to Mrs. Clinton, especially on issues pertaining to the Middle East, according to a number of Clinton associates." "At meetings on the region," continued the profile, "... Ms. Abedin’s perspective is always sought out."
When Mrs. Clinton was appointed as President
Barack Obama's Secretary of State in 2009, Abedin became her deputy chief of staff. At approximately that same point in time, Abedin's name was
removed from the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs' masthead.
Apart from their working relationship, Abedin and Mrs. Clinton have also developed a close personal bond over their years together, as reflected in Clinton's 2010
assertion that: “I have one daughter. But if I had a second daughter, it would [be] Huma.” In 2011, Secretary Clinton paid a friendly visit to Abedin's mother, Saleha, in Saudi Arabia. On that occasion, Mrs. Clinton publicly
described her aide's position as “very important and sensitive.”
On July 10, 2010, Huma Abedin, a
practicing Muslim, married then-congressman
Anthony Weiner in a ceremony
officiated by former president Bill Clinton. A number of analysts have
noted that it is extremely rare for Islamic women—particularly those whose families have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood—to marry non-Muslims like Weiner, who is Jewish. Indeed, Dr. Anwar Shoeb, the highest-ranking faculty authority at the prestigious College of Sharia and Islamic Studies in Kuwait, formally
declared that Abedin's marriage to Weiner was “null and void” under the dictates of Sharia Law, which explicitly forbids matrimony between a Muslim woman and an "infidel"; in fact, Shoeb classified the Abedin-Weiner union as a form of “adultery.”
Abedin went on
maternity leave after giving birth to a baby boy in early December 2011. When she
returned to work in June 2012, the State Department
granted her an arrangement that allowed her to do outside consulting work as a “special government employee,” even as she remained a top advisor in the Department. Abedin did not disclose on her financial report either the arrangement or the
$135,000 she earned from it, in violation of a law mandating that public officials disclose significant sources of income. Abedin's outside clients
included the U.S. State Department, Hillary Clinton, the
William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, and Teneo (a firm co-founded by Doug Band, a former counselor for
Bill Clinton). Good-government groups
warned of the potential conflict-of-interest inherent in an arangement where a government employee maintains private clients.
In June 2012, five Republican lawmakers (most prominently, Michele Bachmann) sent
letters to the inspectors general at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State, asking that they investigate whether the Muslim Brotherhood was gaining undue influence over U.S. government officials. One letter, noting that Huma Abedin's position with Hillary Clinton "affords her routine access to the secretary [of state] and to policymaking," expressed concern over the fact that Abedin “has three family members—her late father, mother and her brother—connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.” Some other prominent Republicans such as John McCain and John Boehner
disavowed the concerns articulated in the letters.
On February 1, 2013—Hillary Clinton's final day as Secretary of State—Abedin
resigned her post as Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of staff. Yet she would continue to serve as a close aide to Clinton.
On March 1, 2013, Abedin was
tapped to run Clinton’s post-State Department transition team,
comprised of a six-person “transition office” located in Washington.
In early March 2015, it was reported that throughout her entire four-year tenure as Secretary of State (SOS), Hillary Clinton had never acquired or used a government email account, and instead had transmitted -- in violation of government regulations -- all of her official government correspondences via a personal email
account that was housed on
a private server. In addition, Abedin and Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills,
also had email addresses on the secret server while employed at the State Department.
After Hillary Clinton announced in the spring of 2015 that she was running for president (2016), Abedin was named
vice chair of the Clinton campaign.
Huma Abedin's brother,
Hassan Abedin, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and is currently an
associate editor with the
JMMA. Hassan was once a
fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, at a time when the Center's board included such Brotherhood-affiliated figures as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Abdullah Omar Naseef.
Huma's
sister, Heba Abedin (formerly known as “Heba A. Khaled”), is an assistant editor with
JMMA, where she served alongside Huma prior to the latter's departure.
, but apparently Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the scholars on Fox News aren't what we call "readers."
