WASHINGTON – Senator Kerry in 2002 welcomed the groundbreaking of a mosque in Boston that has come under recent scrutiny among some of the city’s religious leaders for its ties to the radical strain of Saudi-exported Islam known as Wahhabism.

On November 7, 2002, the Massachusetts lawmaker drafted a statement “recognizing the outstanding work of the Islamic Society of Boston.” The occasion was the start of construction of a new cultural center and mosque that was to build a partnership with the neighboring Roxbury community.

In recent months the center and the ISB have come under fire from citizens who say the group has espoused a moderate version of Islam for English-speaking audiences while the Arabic materials inside are anything but.

“I visited this mosque one time with my wife,” a former Harvard University professor, Ahmed Mansour, told The New York Sun in an interview. “I found their Arabic materials full of hatred against America. I recognized they were Wahhabis.”

Mr. Mansour is in a position to know. He taught at Harvard’s law school through a program the university established for scholars persecuted in their home countries. In Egypt, Mr. Mansour crossed the country’s Islamic fundamentalists, and he has devoted much of his academic work to the study of radical Islam.

Mr. Mansour is one of 20 Boston community leaders that formed Citizens for Peace and Tolerance, a group challenging the city’s subsidy of the mosque: It sold the land to the ISB for far less than the market value. Its promotional materials say the mosque has received “most of the $22 million” to finance the new mosque from donors in Saudi Arabia.

The disclosure could undermine the Democratic presidential nominee’s argument that he takes a tougher line on the Saudis than the president. This summer, to cheers at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Mr. Kerry famously said, “I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family.”

Another member of Citizens for Peace and Tolerance, Dennis Hale, a political science professor at Boston College, said he chalks up Mr. Kerry’s early welcome of the mosque to poor staff work.

“I could blame Kerry for many things; I don’t blame him for that. That’s the kind of thing any senator would do, a welcome-to-the-neighborhood sort of thing,” Mr. Hale said. “If he were not running for president and he was a senator, he would look into this more carefully and I would think the Saudi connection would bother him.”

The controversy over the mosque in Boston flared in October 2003,when Mr. Kerry was still an underdog in the Democratic primaries and Governor Dean was surging. The Boston Herald published articles on October 28 and October 29, 2003, disclosing that the ISB’s founders included Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who is now in a federal prison for accepting funds from Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi and raising money for foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas.

Mr. Alamoudi was part of an Islamic delegation invited to the Bush White House in 2002 for an Iftar dinner.

He founded the ISB in 1982 but has not been associated with the organization for several years. The Herald also reported the close ties between the ISB and the Islamic Society of North America, which is being investigated by the Senate Finance Committee for raising money for terrorist organizations. Both groups have the same mailing address on their tax forms.

Boston’s other newspaper, the Globe, wrote an October 15 editorial this year saying that the IBC had changed its ways and its new leadership had promised not to give a forum to radical speakers who espoused anti-Semitism. The mosque recently fired its treasurer, Walid Fitaihi, whose Arabic writings on Jews prompted an outcry from Boston’s Jewish community. The leaders of the mosque this month sent a letter to Mayor Menino disavowing Mr. Fitaihi’s views. Nonetheless, Mr. Fitaihi, who now resides in Saudi Arabia, remains a trustee of the mosque.

A spokesman for Boston’s mayor, Seth Gitell, told the Sun, “These allegations of hate do not represent the community that Mayor Menino knows and the ISP’s letter of last week reinforces that.”

The former communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Hussein Ibish, said that in his dealings with the ISB he did not believe the mosque was a cover for radical ultra-conservative Islam. “The reading materials that may have come in for free from well-funded right wing foundations don’t necessarily reflect the beliefs of the leadership. I met with two young women who represented the center, who seemed to be very moderate in their religious and political outlook,” he said. Mr. Ibish added that Wahhabi organizations would never allow uncovered women to meet with outside officials.

The Kerry campaign did not respond to calls for comment.