Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  No verse in the Koran reinforces this teaching as well as the Sura An Nasr (Chapter of Victory), which is thought to have been delivered to the Prophet hours before his death, when his thoughts were on his imminent ascension. Every student of Islam in Yemen who doesn’t know this vaguely eschatological sura will memorise it in his first days in the country, not because it is a creed, but because it is simple and beautiful:

  When the assistance of God shall come and the victory;

  And thou shalt see the people enter into the religion of God by troops:

  Celebrate the praise of thy lord and ask pardon of Him;

  For He is inclined to forgive.

  The excitement surrounding Anwar Awlaki’s release from prison eventually died down, but he returned to prominence in a much bigger way towards the end of 2009. On 5 November, Nidal Hassan, a sometime email correspondent of Awlaki’s who lived alone in a rented flat near Killeen, Texas, murdered thirteen US soldiers at the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood. Two days later, a notice of approval appeared on Awlaki’s blog.

  Nidal is a hero, Awlaki wrote.

  He opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan … How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? … May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance, and steadfastness, and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Ameen.

  US officials have since said that Awlaki had no direct ‘operational’ role in the Fort Hood attack. He was, however, in contact with Hassan via email, and this correspondence, it seems, was enough.

  Three weeks after the attack, American counter-terrorism strategists were huddling in the White House, where, according to WikiLeaks documents, they were devising a strategy, approved by the Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, to launch missiles at Awlaki’s house in the Yemeni village of Shabwa.

  The rest of the story is familiar enough. A twenty-three-year-old Nigerian blog fan, Umar Abdul Mutallab, had been having depression issues of his own. When he was living in London in 2005, he used to fantasise that jihad would deliver him from his problems: ‘all right I wont go into too much detail about my fantasies,’ he wrote to the Islamic Forum website, ‘but basically they are jihad fantasies. I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the muslims will win, and, inshallaha, rule the world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!’

  This happiness, however, seems to have given way to moments of acute self-doubt. Clearly he hoped that someone would rescue him from the emptiness. What else could he have meant when he posted this message, also in 2005, to the same chat room: ‘i am in a situation where i do not have a friend, i have no one to speak too, no one to consult, no one to support me and i feel depressed and lonely. i do not know what to do’?

  By the autumn of 2009, Mutallab had found his way to Yemen. At first he studied in the capital, Sana’a, but he disappeared in September. He probably made his way into the Yemeni mountains which is where all the most dedicated voyagers of the spirit eventually go. He seems to have established contact with Awlaki at some point though where and when we do not know.

  In any case, Mutallab was soon sending startling text messages back to his father in Nigeria. According to a cousin who saw them, they said that in Yemen, Mutallab ‘had found a new religion, the real Islam’. Another text, whose contents have appeared in the press, said: ‘Please forgive me. I will no longer be in touch with you.’

  To me, these sound like the words of a young man in the throes of religious excitement. He’s discovered a new religion. The new religion has given him a new family. He can now tell his oldest adversaries (so often, it seems, this person is Dad) to fuck off.

  Young men who begin to feel these sensations in Yemen can easily find themselves in a dangerous spot. If they have suffered from depression in the past, and have access to weaponry now, anything can happen.

  The first strike landed on the village of al-Majalah, 300 kilometres to the east of Sana’a on 17 December 2009. The Yemeni government later said that it killed twelve villagers. The second one, which targeted Awlaki’s house and killed about twenty people, occurred on 24 December. Awlaki was not in the vicinity.

  It’s not clear that the strikes advanced any of the US military’s strategic goals but they did provide Awlaki’s fans with exactly those ingredients required for a new round of spiritual excitement. A Muslim hero was once again set upon by a merciless force. What did he do wrong? He was never charged and no evidence against him was brought forth. Nevertheless, innocent Muslims were killed. Awlaki himself emerged without a scratch, which is exactly what one would expect of a spiritual hero. One would also expect him to take revenge.

  Within twenty-four hours of the second strike, Mutallab turned up in Amsterdam with a ticket, paid for in cash, for Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit. He was wearing his explosive-lined underpants and carrying a cigarette lighter. I suspect he was in a pleasant, victorious frame of mind.

  I happened to be in Aleppo, Syria, when these events occurred but my thoughts were focused on Yemen. In the back of my mind, I had known that my hitherto self-contained world of religious students in Yemen, Islamic study, and anwar-awlaki.com would one day turn up on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Now it was happening, more or less as I feared it would, with instant analysis on CNN, statements from the White House, and reporters doing live stand-ups from the terrace of the Mövenpick hotel in Sana’a.

  One thing I didn’t anticipate: I would begin to worry myself. I did worry, however, because I could see that neither the reporters nor the Western intelligence authorities had any idea how many Western kids were studying in Yemen. I could see they didn’t know much about what these students were learning, how long they stayed in Yemen, how they changed over the years, and what might make them go, as the specialists say, ‘operational’.

  I also fretted for this reason: I knew the teachers and students with whom I had lived in Yemen were against book writing. I knew my account of my experience in Yemen would seem to them, a priori, the account of an enemy of Islam, a spy-apostate. These people knew me well. Now it seemed clear that if I were to publish my book, they reserved the option to take revenge in any of a variety of unfathomable ways.

  Of course, they don’t read secular books, I told myself. A voice in my head replied: This isn’t necessarily good.

  At the time, in January 2010, there was no immediate need to worry about the situation. I went to Russia to think things over.

  One of the best things about getting to know the Western religious students in Yemen is that eventually they will tell you the story of their travels. Sometimes, it’s boredom that makes the young people light out for the territory ahead and sometimes it’s a spur of the moment decision, made in a mosque, or in front of a computer, or during a late night rap session. Once the students arrive in the Arab world, however, the narratives coalesce. Everyone lives through the same stages of the same voyage, more or less, and so everyone tells a similar story.

  The tale below, which follows the conventional pattern, was posted by an Abu Suleyman to a popular internet forum in 2009. It describes the experience of a family of Muslims from Sweden at large in Egypt: ‘Our childrens ages are 10, 8, 6 yrs old,’ wrote Abu Suleyman (in English):

  We have almost lost hope in this country and thinking of going to Yemen. Anyone who could give us naseeha [advice] in this regard, Yemen vs Egypt with regard to being able to raise God fearing children!!! That is, a good islamic environment for children to be in.

  Sometimes you feel that you made hijrah [immigration] from dar ul Kufr [domain of unbelievers] and all the bad things there but here in Egypt you found liers, muslims are using drugs in the streets, most of the people are very far away from the religion they are even going to graves to worship, superstition, uttering things of kufr and so on.

  In some versions of this tale, the narrators locate the site of Arab dissolution in an unhappy city or neighbourhood within Yemen; ofte
n the young men travel alone, and often they have in mind proper Islamic schools for themselves rather than for their kids. The basic pattern of the story, however, does not change: it is always a quest narrative whose object is a wiser, ancient, truly Islamic place. Perhaps it will be a village or a region or an entire society – anyway, Muslims will practise their religion proudly there, in peace, as one. The action of the story gets under way in Mansoura or Cairo, or Damascus or wherever the seekers happen to alight. Here they discover that the business tycoons who rule Middle Eastern countries revere Islamic law even less than Western governments do. Nor do the tycoons have any special fondness for secular, civil law. Students are thrown in jail at the drop of a hat, without even the pretence of an accusation.

  Meanwhile, the travellers wander around their new neighbourhoods. They usually live in low-rent districts since they will now be living, for an indefinite period, off their savings. The Prophet counselled careful husbandry in all financial matters. So they rent cheap apartments in cheap areas and thus discover, right away, the social problems of the Arab street – the unemployment, the aimless young men, the boredom that afflicts them, their jealousy of the ruling class, their incomplete education, their longing to flee. Many of these young Arabs turn to petty crime, hashish and alcohol.

  Is this what Islam has come to? wonder the Abu Suleimans of the world. The local religious authorities nod their heads.

  Don’t take your children into the public schools at all, they say. Stay away from the official, state-run mosques, since they’ve all been taken over by government agents. Perhaps you should consider going back home, say the religious teachers. Is there not more freedom there?

  Eventually of course the students find what they’re looking for: in Yemen it’s not so hard to find villages dominated by the fear of God, in which every citizen lives under the law spelt out in the ancient texts.

  The communities where this kind of Islam is still alive are almost always far away – up in the mountains or by the edge of the desert or in some rarely visited but storied village like Tarim or Dammaj in Yemen; anyway, they are in places not frequented by reporters or embassy officials or unbelievers of any kind. It’s often dangerous to get to them, and the trip almost always involves secret drivers, disregarded roads, and several vehicle changes.

  They are always in spectacular, Koran-redolent settings, in other words, but they are always, also, troubled.

  Many of the Western students and not a few of the Middle Eastern ones have been in jail in the past or close to it. Many of the Westerners have had attention deficit disorder problems or depression or drug issues or all of these things. Now they’ve fled their native countries, and have given themselves new Islamic names. The night-time prayers are playing with their sleep rhythms, and the new clothing, the new friends and the new language are playing with the very nature of personal identity.

  Add to this a further interesting factor: personal identity is not built from the same components in the Arab world as it is in the West. Among Muslims, especially in Yemen, you are who you pray with; that circle of beings with whom you break your fast, memorise the Koran, and travel around the countryside is you in a way no concept of the self in Western life comprehends. Whenever this collectivity is threatened, it is as if the organs of the self (in the Western sense) are threatened. Action must be taken.

  In response to this new world, almost all students, at least at first, go through a period of depression – although they are surrounded by friends, although they are living in the cradle of Islam, although they are doing what they always dreamed of doing.

  When they emerge from their dark moods, the students are transformed. Now, at last, they are surrounded by friends and family. Here is Islam as it should be: the orderly, barefoot rows of believers, every forehead glistening, everyone equal before God, every prayer spoken as if it emanated from a single body.

  When I was in Russia recently the atmosphere of the religious schools I had attended in Yemen and Syria came back to me. The education had given me a healthy disregard for material things, to say nothing of a solid understanding of the Koran, but even as I was memorising, I knew that this education had a harmful side. In two and a half years of study, I had attended three schools and had visited friends in several more. Without exception, these academies taught that evolution is a fable, that Islam is the wisest solution for life’s problems and that the Hebrew bible is a fraud, forced on the world’s Jewish population by elders who wish to hide references to Muhammad. In none of these academies were students asked to read widely. In no schools were students directed to use their reading to construct a modern, self-supporting, nuanced system of ethics. In religious schools in the Middle East if you don’t know what to do, you ask the sheikh. He has memorised much more than you. He knows what the Prophet would do and understands the Golden Time of Islam. Whatever the problem is, the sheikh, not the student, knows the answer.

  As I walked around in the mountains of southern Russia, it also occurred to me that Anwar Awlaki’s internet presence has, over the years, made him the owner of an important topic: young people’s personal transformations through Islam. He speaks about this more persuasively, and more frequently, than anyone. Why should he, I thought, have this field to himself?

  In a notebook, I drew up a CV for a rival teacher of Islam. Such a person, I thought, ought to begin as Awlaki had begun: he ought to leave the US for Yemen. Al fiqh Yemeni, al iman Yemeni. (Faith is of the Yemen; jurisprudence is of the Yemen.) So the Prophet is reported to have said when he stood on a bluff in Medina, looking south. Muslims often take this hadith to mean that essential Islamic properties inhere in the Yemeni landscape itself. It’s an interesting idea, and it’s made an impact in the housing developments and first floor walk-up mosques of the West.

  Once the teacher-to-be gets to Yemen, it hardly matters which school he chooses or which strain of Islam he apprentices himself to. If he’s memorising the Koran, learning to speak the classical Arabic in which scholarly discourse is conducted, performing every one of the prayers, hewing close to that which is enjoined and avoiding that which is prohibited, he is on the path of God.

  Perhaps, during his travels, he’ll be arrested somewhere out on the highway; perhaps he’ll spend some time in jail. I did. If he is arrested the resulting jail time will contribute to his education rather than delay it – but prison is not indispensable because sooner or later every religious student in Yemen will be persecuted by some government agency. Usually the experience will teach the student to stay as far away from official places and people as possible.

  Above all, if you want to have authority with young Muslims from the West these days, you must not look for the easy way out. If you got your degree in Islam in a two-year programme at a university with a campus and quadrangle cafes, it will be meaningless – for you and for whatever audience you’d like to address. If you lived in a decrepit, overcrowded neighbourhood in Sana’a, owning a Koran and a bike and not much else, and did this in winter and summer, over and over through your thirties, you might be on to something.

  What I want to say to the population of young men who educate themselves in this way, or would like to do so, is contained in the pages of this book. I address these questions: what happens when a well-meaning, curious, adventure-friendly Westerner enrols in a religious academy in Yemen? What happens as the years pass? Also: what is beautiful about an education in Islam these days and what is sick?

  Your target audience will not read your book, my book-reading friends in the West tell me. Fine, I reply. I’ll find that audience on YouTube, as Awlaki did, on Facebook and via Paltalk. Your former schoolmates and teachers will be angry with you, says my knowledge of their behaviour. Fine. I will do these people the courtesy of writing for them and to them. I will speak directly, not as an academic or a journalist or an expert of any kind but as someone with a story to tell.

  Sana’a, Autumn 2006

  1

  THE ROAD TO DAMMAJ />
  THE RULE CONCERNING who may study at the most famous Salafi academy in Yemen is as follows: anyone on earth of any stripe or kind or age is welcome. In theory, women should be accompanied by a guardian but this convention doesn’t have the status of a law and anyway isn’t enforced.

  You have to say that you believe Allah to be the one and only God, and that you believe Muhammad to be his prophet. After this the success of the student depends entirely on how well he warms to what’s happening around him: does he like memorising? If so, he can go far. Can he learn Arabic quickly? If so, he’s likely to make friends quickly. Does he have a talent for fasting? Is his body changing as the fasts go on? The kids who pray so well that they grow little clots of hardened flesh on their foreheads, a sign of piety not just to one’s teachers but also to the guardians at heaven’s gate, are usually well loved in Yemen. But these bumps grow naturally. Everyone who sticks around long enough has one. Most students enjoy seeing these rashes emerge, and thus pray more – which leads to smiles from their teachers, and admiring glances from fellow students.

  Once this feedback loop kicks in, anything in Islam is possible, especially in Yemen. In my case, the feedback loop hadn’t always run smoothly. Still, eight months into my life as a Muslim, all was well. I was memorising Koran every day, doing the five prayers and making friends. I knew I was going to go deeper in, and was vaguely frightened by the prospect, but like the others around me, I felt I was learning things about Islam I could never learn elsewhere. Islam was changing me.

  I didn’t want to stop this from happening. On the contrary I wanted to see what would develop if I kept on going to my classes, and kept on praying and memorising and fasting.