Maria invited me in. I sat on the sofa while she stood on the other side of a small counter that formed a tiny eat-in kitchen, pouring some of the fresh milk into a baby bottle.
“What is Islam?” she said.
“It means peace. To come to peace with God.” Another lie. “Islam” means “submission.”
“You know, we serve the same God,” I continued. “It is just that Muslims call him Allah.”
Her toddler, a boy of about two, abandoned his toy dog and pulled himself up on my knee. “What does your husband do?” I asked Maria.
“He is a janitor,” she said. “He works at the elementary school.”
“Ah, a hardworking man,” I said. “You would make the perfect Muslim family.”
She laughed and emerged from the kitchen holding the bottle in her right hand. In her left arm, the baby whined and reached for it. “Why? Why would we make a good Muslim family?”
“Islam is a religion of discipline,” I said. “Already, your husband is working hard to provide for you. Muslim families band together to help each other. For the Muslim, God empowers and makes positive changes in your life. And it’s a proven statistic that Muslim children stay out of trouble and do better in school.”
I knew no such statistic, but I made it up right on the spot. I was selling Maria what I sold in every house: hope. I sold them a future they could dream about. And I did not tell Maria that if she and her husband converted to Islam, if he so chose, she would become his doormat.
2
Some of the most fruitful neighborhoods were inhabited by poor African Americans. In the South, prejudice was still very much alive. Many of the men were unemployed, living on welfare and food stamps, and they were angry. They felt downtrodden and exploited.
Perfect.
One day in 1983, I drove down to a fringy ghetto neighborhood on the northeastern edge of the city. A mix of businesses and homes lined cracked, narrow streets, with tiny clapboard houses jammed between shabby office buildings and liquor stores offering to cash your government check. Cruising the streets slowly, I saw such a store on a corner, its windows shielded with metal bars. Next to a newspaper stand that was chained to the ground, a black man in his early twenties leaned against the wall, wearing a black stretch cap and trying to smoke a cigarette.
I parked on the street and walked up as if to buy something in the store. The young man attempted a tough stare. Inside, I laughed. Would he stare that way if he knew who I was?
I smiled at him and nodded toward the bars on the store windows. “This place looks like a fortress. Are they afraid?”
The tough stare dissolved immediately, replaced by a war-weary look I had often seen among Lebanese civilians. “Yeah. Couple people ’round here like to hit the place when they run short on money.”
I looked at the boy’s jeans, not washed in a week. Adidas tennis shoes, worn and out of date: Nike was the cool brand now. Only his shirt, a plain yellow T, seemed new. From his clothes and his manner, I suspected this boy was not a criminal, just jobless and lonely.
I took a few steps closer, extending my hand. “My name is Kamal Saleem. It is nice to see a friendly face here.”
“Antonio,” he said, shaking my hand. “That’s some kinda name. Where you from?”
I had perfected the art of finding something in common with those I hoped to convert: poverty, family breakup, illiteracy. I became like a fortune teller, gauging reactions, playing with feelings, finding the “tell” and moving in.
“The Middle East,” I said. “From a neighborhood like this one.”
In my country, I told him, there were Bedouin tribes who lived in the desert and were even poorer than the people in Antonio’s and my neighborhoods.
“The Bedouins have nothing,” I said, leaving out the part about the wealthy sheikhs. “But there was one Bedouin boy who rose to become very famous. His mother died, then his father. After that, his grandfather raised him. Then his grandfather died and the boy went to live with his uncle, who had no idea what to do with the boy, who did not even know how to read.”
Antonio took a pull on his cigarette. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that around here.”
“Those aren’t really good for you, you know,” I said, gesturing toward his smoke.
Antonio looked at me with mild surprise. “Why should you care?”
“This boy I told you about, he grew into a man who cared for a lot of people. After he left his uncle’s tent, he lived in a cave and God sent an angel to visit him—Gabriel, the greatest of all angels. And this man, whom no one cared about, God made him a prophet.”
I checked Antonio’s face. He was listening. A story will do that—hook a person’s interest in a way even the best argument cannot.
“Much slavery was taking place in that country,” I went on. “The light-skinned people were the wealthy ones, and the dark-skinned people were made slaves. This prophet reached out to people and told them that slavery was wrong.”
Another lie. Muhammad himself had slaves.
“As a matter of fact, this prophet’s right-hand man was a former slave, a black man named Belal, with a voice so beautiful that the prophet used his own money to free him.”
“You keep sayin’ ‘prophet,’” Antonio said. “This prophet got a name?”
“He was a Muslim prophet and as Muslims, we refer to him as Muhammad. Like Christians and Jews, we are people of the Book. We all worship the same God.”
“Then how come I ain’t never hearda no Muhammad?”
I allowed my eyes to light up. “Ah, because God is so wise! First, he gave us Judaism. You’ve heard of Moses, right?”
Antonio nodded.
“Then he gave us Christianity. Jesus was the most important prophet.”
Antonio dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his shoe. “Yeah, my grandmama try all the time to tell me about Jesus. Jesus this and Jesus that and praise Jesus!” He chuckled and shook his head.
Instantly, I noted that he was not a Christian. This was good. I went for the bullseye: “But when the Christians started killing people all over the world, God got fed up with them. Then he brought Islam, the final religion.”
“So what about the Jews and the Christians?” Antonio asked. I sensed he wanted to add, “and my grandma?” but he didn’t.
“Allah will have to judge them about what he told them to do. Listen, I am thirsty. Are you?”
I went inside the store and returned with two Pepsis in glass bottles. Antonio and I sat down on the curb side by side, drinking and talking. Now he was asking all kinds of questions, and I knew the hook was in his mouth.
In the days that followed, I gave Antonio “the treatment” I gave every convert. I introduced him to the brothers at the apartment mosque, discreetly slipping in the term al-mani, our code for someone who is still on the “other side.” No matter how much Jew-mapping and combat tape watching might have been going on in the apartment before I walked through the door, this introduction prompted an outpouring of kindness sweet enough to rot teeth.
Because all my new converts were American and had lived all their lives in sin, I did not hit them hard with the rules of Islam. Instead, I directed them little by little—how to pray, how to wash, how to read the Koran.
At first, I saw Antonio every day, always building him up, telling him I was impressed with his progress in the faith. After a couple of weeks, I began teaching a few do’s and don’ts of Islam—no ham, no bacon, that sort of thing. But it was still too early for the higher rules: Do not drink alcohol. Do not use your right hand in the bathroom. Do not look upon women. Do not tolerate a disrespectful woman. Do not tolerate your grandma’s Christianity.
When I learned Antonio had a girlfriend he was sleeping with, I went to her apartment and, towering over her in her doorway, commanded her to break off the relationship completely. “And if I find out you have been calling him, remember, I know where you live.”
Then, to make up for the new lack of sex in
his life, I lied to Antonio about how many virgins he would receive in jannah for picking up trash at the mosque.
Not every recruit was as easy to harvest as Antonio. But sometimes the difficult ones yielded the sweetest fruit. One evening in 1983, while canvassing city streets, I met a black gang-banger named Solomon. Two-hundred-seventy pounds of solid muscle, he wore a black bandanna like a headband and traveled with a posse. Over a period of months, I learned his reputation as a drug-dealing street king who loved the ladies and ruled his little corner of the city.
Solomon regarded me as a religious man and had apparently told his men not to hassle me when they saw me on the streets. Whenever I ran into Solomon himself, I never failed to invite him to mosque.
Surrounded by his posse, he always listened to my pitch politely, but then laughed it off. “Why would I want Islam, man? I got everything I need. Dope. Money. And all the women I want.”
Laughter, high fives all around.
But later that year, Solomon was busted for dealing cocaine after his laughing friends ratted him out to the police. And just like that, prison. No ladies, no money, no dope. But I knew he did not need those things any longer. What Solomon needed now was power. I went to visit him in jail before they shipped him off to the penitentiary.
We sat together in a dirty dayroom at a table topped with chipped orange Formica. “Now you are going to prison,” I said. “You are young. You will be fresh meat.”
Solomon stuck out his chin and scowled. “I can take care of myself.”
“What if I told you I know someone on the inside who can help? Someone who helped me once?”
Then I told Solomon about the Muslim Brotherhood.
At the state prison, the brothers gave Solomon a new name: Mustafa. And when he was released from prison two years later, my cell sent Mustafa to a terror camp in Pakistan.
3
A couple of months after putting Mustafa on a plane, I sped down a main city artery with the wind in my hair and the bright urban sun beaming down through my open T-top. The car, a nearly new red Mazda RX-7 had only a little over three thousand miles on it when I bought it through Muslim connections to an American car theft ring.
After a morning at the apartment mosque, I had stopped off at my own apartment to change clothes. I had just leased the apartment in another area of the city, near a college I wanted to penetrate. I was meeting some Moroccans for an early dinner at a Jordanian restaurant and wanted to make a good impression. Since I was still living out of boxes, I bought a new shirt at Dillards and stopped in at the apartment to put it on. Now, flying south down the expressway, my left hand on the steering wheel, my right hand on the shifter, a sense of blessedness thrummed through my bones. New clothes, hot car, power. I had worked hard in America and made many influential connections. I had a good cover job, women at my whim, and an unending supply of money, all the while advancing the cause of Islam and bringing glory to Allah.
Ahead of me, a black sedan slowed. I downshifted, then nudged the steering wheel left and switched lanes. I hit the accelerator and flashed by the sedan, hugging the grass median strip on my left.
My thoughts drifted back to the Moroccans, a golden opportunity. They were newcomers to the city and, my sources told me, Muslim zealots. I would tell them about the advance of Islam in America. Mentally, I rehearsed the complete speech I had prepared for them. Buy them dinner and the best wine. Hint at the financial backing I could bring. Invite them to join us for prayers. It would be an achievement to add another nation to our growing network. As the RX-7 ate up the black ribbon going south, I mused over my four years here: the Islamic converts I had made, how many I had wooed into the finer parts of the faith, into jihad itself. The mapping, the false documents, the money laundering fronts.
And the money—the money. My group had been the conduit for millions of dollars coming into America for the specific purpose of slowly, carefully eating away at America’s infidel Zionist faith, preparing it for the Day of Islam.
My heart danced. Surely, Allah is pleased with me.
I pressed the accelerator past the forty-mile-per-hour speed limit. I wanted to be a bit early so I could order drinks and hors d’oeuvres before the Moroccans arrived.
On my right I noticed the black sedan again, passing me but drifting left as though the driver did not see me. Then the car veered sharply, sweeping into my path, the driver’s-side door no more than ten feet ahead.
I braked hard and steered left. But the road curved to the right and my tire bit the median curb, lifting me up over the grass.
I was airborne.
“Allah!” I cried.
Reflexively, I jammed both feet into the brake pedal. The car landed hard in the grass and spun clockwise. I squeezed the steering wheel in a death grip and watched, amazed, as time seemed to slow down.
Tick: I watched the lane I had just been in spin by—
Tock: Still spinning, now facing the opposite direction—
Tick: My front end pointed at the northbound lanes, sliding toward heavy oncoming traffic—
Tock: A dirt construction site on the far side of the lanes. Hope flickered—if I could just slip through between cars….
My car was pointed southeast when I slid into the northbound lanes and the grille of a trash truck blocked out the sun.
Colorado Springs
2008
The 3 Ex-Terrorists were scheduled to speak together at the Air Force Academy in less than eighteen hours, and Zak had been missing for the better part of two days. As the minutes ticked past, my anxiety notched higher and higher. Most people, when a loved one is missing, reasonably hope for the best and imagine the worst. We had good reasons to feel certain of the worst.
Since Zak had been speaking out against radical Islam, jihadists had set fire to his home and his car, and physically attacked both him and his family.
It was part of the risk we all took, a risk that some Americans threw back in our faces with abandon. The day before the AFA event, The Gazette published a second story that attempted to discredit us, this time quoting a college professor who specifically called me a “fraud.” Again, the reporter did not bother to ask me my side of the story.
I had just finished reading the story when my phone rang. It was Keith. Zak had called and was okay. “You’re not going to believe what happened,” Keith told me. Zak had decided to fly straight from London through Chicago to Colorado Springs to meet us for the AFA event, instead of stopping off first at his home in Canada. But at O’Hare, his blood sugar had dropped so low that he nearly fell into a diabetic coma. Airline personnel were able to retrieve his medication from his bags, but the episode left Zak so weak that it was all he could do to dial the phone to let Keith know where he was.
Relief showered my soul. This frail man had carved a special place in my life. He was a kindred soul, a man who like me had thrown down his arms, a brother who understood me exactly. I did not think I could bear it if he were harmed.
The next morning, Walid, Zak, Keith, and I rendezvoused at a hotel in Colorado Springs. By then we had a new problem: During the night, someone had broken through the tinted rear window of Keith’s rented SUV and snatched Zak’s luggage. In a packed hotel parking lot, it was the only vehicle touched.
We did not have time to contemplate whether this was a crime of opportunity or Zak was the specific target: We were scheduled to do an interview on a local CBS morning show. Keith quickly arranged alternate transportation, and we crowded in for the ride to the television studio. Zak was forced to wear the rumpled suit he’d been flying in for two days.
We passed quickly through makeup and waited only moments in the green room until a production assistant ushered us before the cameras and hot lights of the set. The female host ran through introductions, then asked, “How are terrorists getting into the United States?”
I am so glad you asked that question, I thought.
“Jihadists today do not have to import terrorists,” I said. “The m
ajority of the jihadists in the United States are recruited here from poor neighborhoods, universities, and jails. The Muslim Students Association and other groups operate in hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States. Their members are not all radicals, but the radicals among them are busy recruiting new members.”
We’d entered the CBS studio before sunrise. After the interview, we stepped out into chilly sunshine. Less than thirty minutes later, we arrived at the Air Force Academy. Pine-covered foothills sloped up into higher peaks capped in blankets of snow. Military police had configured the academy entrances for heightened security, with concrete barriers forming an S-shaped gauntlet meant to frustrate would-be car bombers. We snaked through with the rest of the traffic. At the guard house, armed MPs arranged for a public affairs officer to escort us into the heart of the institution.
Our first stop was a briefing room where a general laid out the ground rules for our talk. We were prohibited, he said, from talking about Christianity and party politics.
I asked a question. “Can I talk about how I came to leave jihad? That story involves my conversion from Islam to Christianity.”
“I don’t have a problem with you telling your own personal story,” the general said. It was proselytizing he didn’t want.
Which was fine with us, because that’s not what we wanted either. We only wanted to warn Americans that vipers were living among them—and that the vipers were laughing.
America
1985
1
As the image of the truck grille filled my window, events sped up, then flashed past like scenes in a movie trailer: the truck’s right headlight exploded through my passenger window, showering me with glass. My body slammed up and forward, tearing the seatbelt loose. The impact ejected me from my seat even as the truck still pushed the RX-7 north. My ribs, then thighs, then knees, ripped over the steering wheel as I catapulted up through the open T-top.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 25