My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  After the minority speakers addressed the crowd, Knox said, “Anybody else want to speak? White people, you got anything to say?” While his remark was said with humor, the serious undertone was that white people did not care about racism.

  All those walks on the quad and talks with al-Husein had affected me. I found that I had something to say. In response to Knox’s call, I climbed the chapel steps and took the megaphone. Despite all my public speaking experience as a college debater, I was nervous. I wasn’t making abstract arguments to persuade a judge; instead, I was talking to my peers about something I cared about. My speech was short and disjointed. It was about how white people, as members of the majority culture, needed to confront racism when we saw it. I finished the speech to a mixture of scattered applause and long stares. Still, I felt good.

  As I walked down the steps, I felt that I was changing. I was moving from spectator to participant. Al-Husein clapped me on the back. “It’s nice to see you taking a stand. We need more people like you involved,” he said.

  Later that day, al-Husein brought me to a meeting of a group he had founded, the Asian Student Interest Association (ASIA), a minority student group for those of Asian descent. Al-Husein opened the meeting by introducing each attendee. When it was my turn, he jokingly described me as a “token white member,” then said I had given a speech at the VOICE rally that caught people’s interest. My speech probably caught no one’s interest, but this was al-Husein’s way: he made people feel that their contributions, however small, were valued. Al-Husein asked me to tell the others why I had decided to address the rally.

  I told the group that I had always been aware of racism at Wake Forest, but that I—like too many white people—often shrugged it off as someone else’s problem. Over time, I realized that racism wasn’t someone else’s problem. Racism was everyone’s problem, and it was time for all of us to take a stand. As I spoke those words, I knew that this was the beginning of my stand.

  I was also intrigued by al-Husein’s religious views. From the beginning, one of the things I liked about him was that he was Muslim. He was, in fact, the first practicing Muslim I knew. The difference between al-Husein’s faith and Mike’s was pronounced. While fundamentalist Christianity seemed to shut Mike’s mind, al-Husein’s practice of Islam spurred him to new levels of inquiry and interest in the world.

  Islam, al-Husein told me, is “a simple faith.” Its defining characteristic is its steadfast monotheism. I learned that Muslims believe in the same God as Christians and Jews, even though they often use the Arabic term “Allah” to refer to the Lord. Muslims also believe in the same prophets as Christians and Jews. The line of prophets in Islam begins with the first man, Adam, and includes the likes of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims believe that Muhammad was the final prophet. They believe that God revealed Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an, to Muhammad, and that the Qur’an is God’s direct, literal word. I was also interested to learn that Muslims believe that the Old and New Testaments are earlier holy books inspired by God—but that those books became corrupted over time and are no longer completely reliable.

  After my long, intense discussions with Mike about Christianity, I was especially interested in Islam’s view of Jesus. Al-Husein explained that Islam holds, similar to what I believed, that Jesus was a prophet of God and had a special relationship with Him, but that Jesus was still just a man. He was in no way divine.

  When Mike first told me the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument, I was sure that it must have a fatal flaw. Islam seemed to make that flaw explicit. Josh McDowell’s argument could only be true if Jesus really did claim to be God—and Islam held that he never did so. Instead, the holy books that purport to show Jesus claiming his own divinity have been corrupted over time and can’t be trusted on that point.

  The logic underlying the faith appealed to me, as did al-Husein’s Sufi-oriented practice of Islam. He had actually undergone a set of religious transformations by the time I met him. Al-Husein was raised as an Ismaili. There are two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, of which Sunnis comprise about 90 percent of the world’s Muslims. The Ismaili branch of Islam is Shia, and its adherents follow the Aga Khan. They believe the Aga Khan is Prophet Muhammad’s rightful successor, and many Ismailis refer to him as a “living guide” or even “the living Qur’an.” Every Ismaili I’ve known has had a moderate religious outlook. However, Sunni Muslims often regard them as heretics because of the Ismaili notion that the Aga Khan can interpret the Qur’an for his followers. Many Sunni Muslims believe that, rather than showing fidelity to the text of the Qur’an and Islamic traditions, the Ismailis are faithful to a man who changes the religion over time.

  Shortly before al-Husein and I became friends, he converted to Sunni Islam. He didn’t provide too many details when we discussed it, but apparently he had been briefly sucked into a very conservative practice of Islam. Al-Husein once said that the semester before he met me, he would walk around campus feeling anger and loathing toward the Christians and Jews around him. He would think of the Christians, with their belief in the divinity of Jesus, as polytheists; he would think of the Jews, with their idea that they were God’s chosen people, as racists. Because of this, he earned the nickname “angst-ridden al-Husein.”

  But he abandoned those views before I met him. When I got to know al-Husein, he was a Sufi.

  Sufism is generally thought of as a mystical strain of Islam that emphasizes spirituality over religious formalism. While this view of Sufism doesn’t hold true in all contexts, it generally fits Sufism as practiced in the West—and was certainly true of al-Husein’s practice. The kind of Sufism that al-Husein adhered to didn’t claim a monopoly on religious wisdom. This resonated with the spiritual views with which I had been raised. In his introduction to Essential Sufism, Robert Frager explains, “Most Sufis believe that the great religions and mystical traditions of the world share the same essential Truth. The various prophets and spiritual teachers are like the light bulbs that illuminate a room. The bulbs are different, but the current comes from one source, which is God.”

  I viewed my parents as spiritual outliers when I was growing up, but now I had seemingly found a venerable religious tradition.

  When I went to a mosque for the first time, it was al-Husein who took me. I spent the summer of 1997 in Winston-Salem, teaching at Wake Forest’s summer debate institute for high school students. It was then that al-Husein brought me to the juma prayers (the traditional Friday prayers) at Masjid al-Mu’minun.

  Masjid al-Mu’minun was affiliated with the Islamic ministry of W. D. Muhammad, the son of former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. When al-Husein asked me to go with him, I was hesitant. There were a couple of mosques in town, and al-Husein had mentioned that he had heard anti-Semitic comments at one. I was also skeptical of Masjid al-Mu’minun’s roots in the Nation of Islam, which taught that the white man is the devil.

  But I nonetheless joined al-Husein. When we got to the mosque, it didn’t stand out from the other nondescript houses dotting Harriet Tub-man Drive. Once we were inside, though, the building had an Islamic feel, with a large well-lit prayer room and a poster of the Grand Mosque in Mecca on one of the walls.

  There were some two dozen mosque-goers inside, mostly African-Americans, with a few Middle Easterners mixed in. I noticed that the men sat near the front of the prayer room, facing forward, while the women gathered in the back of the room. Shortly after we arrived, a tall black man stood up and shouted in melodic Arabic: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Ashadu laa ilaha il Allah! Ashadu laa ilaha il Allah!” I realized that this was the start of the call to prayer, signaling that the services were beginning.

  A short Middle Eastern man with a humble demeanor delivered the sermon, which is known as a khutbah in Arabic. Al-Husein whispered that this was a guest imam who normally didn’t give the khutbah. He obviously wasn’t used to public speaking and seemed bashful. But I listened attentively.


  The sermon was devoted to apologetics for Islam, explaining why it could shed light where other religions proved deficient. He started out by rebutting the Christian notion of the Trinity, pointing out that the Qur’an says of God, “He begetteth not, nor is he begotten.”

  “So,” the speaker said, “Allah has no son. Allah is only one, which leaves no room for a son or a trinity of gods.” I was puzzled that his only evidence came from the Qur’an. But I nonetheless sympathized with his argument, as I was unwilling to accept the idea that a man could be God.

  It made me nervous when the sermon’s refutations moved from Christianity to Judaism. I recalled what al-Husein told me about his stint as a fundamentalist, when he thought of every Jew as a racist. I became even more concerned when the discussion of Judaism immediately turned to the concept of the chosen people. Although the speaker rejected the notion that the Jews were God’s chosen people, the speech didn’t become an anti-Semitic screed. Instead the guest imam simply said, “But this isn’t so. The Holy Qur’an rejects any race’s superiority when it states in Sura [chapter] 49:13: ‘O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other, not that ye may despise each other. Verily the most honored of you in the sight of Allah is he who is the most righteous of you.’ So Allah doesn’t prefer people because of their race, but only because of their righteousness.”

  That was it; no extra digs at the Jews.

  I found that my other hesitation, the mosque’s roots in the racist Nation of Islam, proved equally unjustified. While the attendees were predominantly black, I didn’t feel out of place. Instead, I noticed a spirit of brotherhood in faith that united the believers regardless of race.

  I had found myself absorbed by the question of race since moving to the South, as I was uncomfortable with the racial tension that I witnessed in North Carolina. But my visit to Masjid al-Mu’minun reminded me of the moving passage in Malcolm X’s autobiography when he went on the hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. It is there that Malcolm X experienced a reversal in his thoughts about race:Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair—all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other. . . . That is when I first began to re-appraise the “white man.” It was when I first began to perceive that “white man,” as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, “white man” meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about “white” men. There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.

  I sensed echoes of the same spirit in Masjid al-Mu’minun. There was a greater ease of interaction between the races than I had encountered since moving to North Carolina.

  Al-Husein had assured me before we left for the mosque that it was okay if I took part in salat, the Islamic ritual prayer. He said that some of the other Wake Forest students who had gone with him found salat to be a deeply moving experience. I merely found it confusing. I followed along as best I could when I stood in line for prayer, trying to imitate the bowing and prostration. I didn’t even try to repeat the Arabic words.

  My confusion about what to do during salat helped tip off the other mosque-goers that I wasn’t Muslim. When the prayers ended, al-Husein and I stood around talking with some of the worshippers. One of the Muslims came up to me and said he wanted to give me something, then headed to the back rooms.

  When he returned, he handed me an audiotape of a previous sermon, along with a short book by Imam Muhammad Armiya Nu’Man called What Every American Should Know About Islam and the Muslims. It was a touching gesture, one that marked my transition from mere intellectual curiosity about Islam to actually considering the faith for myself.

  With each new layer I peeled back in my study of Islam that summer, the faith seemed more inviting.

  Although the book by Muhammad Armiya Nu’Man that had been given to me was grammatically challenged, it verified much of what al-Husein had told me about the true, peaceful Islam. I was again struck by the respect displayed for other religions. In a section somewhat absurdly titled “Do Muslims Hate Christians and Jews?” Nu’Man quoted Sura 2:62 of the Qur’an:Those who believe (in the Qur’an)

  And those who follow the Jewish (Scriptures)

  And the Christians and the Sabians,

  And who believe in Allah and the

  Last Day, and work righteousness

  Shall have their reward with their Lord;

  On them shall be no fear, nor shall

  They grieve.

  Nu’Man commented on the verse: “This verse lets us know that Jews, Christians, and Sabians (an ancient religious sect), who believe in Almighty God and do good works, will have their reward with their Lord. As Muslims we accept this.” To me, Sura 2:62 left no room for ambiguity: one did not have to be Muslim to reach heaven. Righteous Jews and Christians would also have their reward with the Lord.

  This reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad while I was considering Mike’s argument for Christianity. My dad said that the idea that believing in Jesus’ divinity was necessary for salvation was wrong, and added, “I’ll prove it to you.” He said that if you were in “heaven,” but knew that many other people—even your friends and family—were being eternally tormented just because they called God the wrong name, that wouldn’t really be heaven. How could you be happy in a place like that? In contrast to Mike’s fundamentalist Christianity, verse 2:62 of the Qur’an offered a strikingly nonexclusivist view of salvation.

  Even before 9/11, I knew that a lot of non-Muslims feared Islam because of so-called “Islamic terrorism.” But as I read more, I decided that terrorism was separable from the religion itself. I was convinced of this by people like Nu’Man, the average Muslim on the street who could testify to the impact that the faith had on him. I was also convinced by some of the Western scholarship I came across. John Esposito’s The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? discussed at length terrorism and Islam. Firmly rejecting what he dubbed “the temptation . . . to view Islam through the prism of religious extremism and terrorism,” Esposito elegantly summarized a conclusion I was rapidly reaching: “The demonization of a great religious tradition due to the perverted actions of a minority of dissident and distorted voices remains the real threat.”

  There was also Huston Smith, the eloquent scholar of comparative religion. In The World’s Religions, Smith addressed four crucial areas of Islam’s social teachings. In each area, Smith either defended Islam against the charges leveled against it or else found it superior to the West. He concluded that Islamic economics wasn’t incompatible with capitalism, but that “[t]he equalizing provisos of the Koran would, if duly applied, offset” capitalism’s excesses. Smith defended Islam against the charge of degrading women. Of Islam and race relations, Smith wrote, “Islam stresses racial equality and ‘has achieved a remarkable degree of interracial coexistence.’ ” Here, Smith explained that Malcolm X discovered in his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca “that racism had no precedent in Islam and could not be accommodated to it.” Finally, Smith defended Islam against the common Western stereotype of being a warrior religion. While he admitted that the Qur’an “does not counsel turning the other cheek, or pacifism,” Smith wrote that the Qur’an only countenanced warfare that was defensive or else intended “to right a wrong.”

  My studies convinced me that the true Islam was moderate. There were undoubtedly s
ome Muslim extremists, but Christianity had its own dark periods, and one couldn’t impute the actions of a few extremists to the entire body of believers. The faith felt not only comfortable, but thanks to my childhood in a hippie town and the religious views of my “Jewnitarian” parents, also familiar.

  The respect for other religions was familiar. The conception of Jesus was familiar. Islam’s position on warfare, as explained by Huston Smith and others, was sensible. And Muslims were encouraged to search for greater social and economic justice. Islam’s success in eliminating racism in its adherents was one proof of the faith in action. The religion had so many deep insights relevant to modern life.

  As the summer came to end, I no longer wondered if I would become a Muslim. Rather, it seemed only to be a question of when.

  two

  CAMPUS RADICAL

  Al-Husein gave me a ride to the Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro and waited with me for my flight. We played a few games of pinball in the airport’s game room before saying our good-byes. It was fitting that al-Husein was the last friend I would see before I left the country, since the new ideas and concepts to which he had introduced me would profoundly influence the course of my time in Europe.

  It was fall of 1997, and I was heading to study abroad in Venice, a city of canals where I would find a bridge to a new life.

  En route to Italy, I saw a Saudi Arabian businessman making salat in the Chicago O’Hare Airport. When he finished his prayers, I showed him the books I had been reading about Islam. We conversed for as long as his broken English could carry him. I felt a real warmth from him.

  While in the Chicago airport, I called my home in Oregon. My mom picked up. After a minute of small talk, I got to the point. “Mom,” I said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m seriously considering Islam as a way of life.”