My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  I was Mike’s only non-Christian groomsman, and the others let me know it. During my last visit to Bellingham, I had been interested in meeting and talking with Mike’s Christian friends. I found the experience more grating now. Last time around, I was spiritually confused. This time, I had found my path. I was Muslim, and resented the fact that Mike’s friends didn’t appreciate that I was also a man of faith. Instead, they seemed intent on proving that their religion was better than mine.

  I had a handful of religious debates with Mike’s other groomsmen. I most vividly recall my debate with Tim Prussic, a somewhat pudgy man with sandy blond hair and a sharp wit. Tim was studying to go to seminary, and I would catch him thumbing through flash cards during spare moments, trying to learn biblical (koine) Greek.

  In explaining my conversion to Islam to Tim, I touched on the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument with which I had once grappled: “Christianitynever really appealed to me because I couldn’t accept the idea that a man could be God.”

  “We don’t really believe that a man became God, though,” Tim replied. “It isn’t a question of whether a man can turn into God. What you’re saying is that you don’t think God is able to turn himself into a man.”

  I didn’t appreciate the interruption. I felt that I was trying to explain my deeply held beliefs to Tim, and he was just trying to score a debating point. I see our discussion differently today. Now I realize that Tim had touched on an area of genuine confusion on my part. He had taken my view of Jesus’ divinity—that there was no way a man could become God—and turned it on its head.

  But at the time, I was annoyed by Tim’s obstinacy.

  At the wedding, it was obvious how happy Mike and Amy made each other. And I found that I now enjoyed Amy much more than when I first met her. At the reception after the ceremony, I caught a few moments alone with Mike and Amy. Amy Hollister asked, “Will we be seeing you in another wedding that includes an Amy in the near future?”

  I smiled. “Perhaps,” I said.

  I had been dating Amy Powell only since January, and had given no thought to marriage. But you never know how these things will turn out.

  After being surrounded by fundamentalist Christians at Mike’s wedding, I looked forward to being among Muslims again. On my first Friday back in Ashland, I went to the local congregation’s juma prayers. Because al-Husein’s debate with Sheikh Hassan had been so cordial, I felt no qualms about going back to worship there. The book that Dawood had given me on salat had helped, and I looked forward to showing Ashland’s Muslims the progress I had made on my congregational prayers.

  When I called ahead to verify the time and place of prayers, I was told that the services had moved to 3800 Highway 99 South, near the freeway exit at the south end of town.

  I whistled as I drove toward the new location, impressed. Every house out there was its own little castle with an estate surrounding it—a row of McMansions. The new prayer building fit this mold. The cramped prayer room in the back of Pete Seda’s house was a thing of the past. They had moved to a mansion-sized blue building perched on a hill. Horses, a donkey, and even a dromedary camel roamed the fields in front of it. As my car inched up the paved drive, I got an idea of just how big the property was. They were building a second access road to an area further up the hill, which was covered with blackberry bushes and other shrubs. Two bent palm trees near the fore of this second road brought a bit of the desert to Ashland.

  As I got out of my car, I noticed clucking chickens scratching about a henhouse on the hill just past the main building.

  When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a beautiful prayer room. It had a thick, blue carpet and its windows looked out on the fields surrounding us. Clearly, the group had more money than ever.

  The khutbah that day was uneventful compared to my previous visit. I stayed after services were over, speaking with the other worshippers.

  Pete Seda walked up to me. Though he didn’t make much of an impression when I went to services in his house the previous December, I now wondered why. Pete, like al-Husein, was obviously gifted with extraordinary social skills.

  Even though Pete had only met me once before, he greeted me as an old friend. “Bro, it’s good to see you again,” he said. “How do you like our new building?”

  “It’s great,” I said. “Beautiful.”

  “Here, bro, let me show you around,” Pete said, putting his arm around me. He first led me outside while rattling off the group’s future plans one after another, like a veteran auctioneer. Pointing to the palm trees, he said that the group had bought an Arabian tent they were going to erect for a weekly event called “Arabian Nights.” Non-Muslims would attend; the local Muslim community would serve them Arabic coffee and teach them about the Islamic faith and culture. Pete saw this as an opportunity for dawah, or Islamic evangelism.

  Walking past the parking lot and pointing to the fields, Pete explained that the camel was also part of the group’s dawah. It was named Mandub, “ambassador” in Arabic. And it proved to be a great ambassador, capable of melting the hearts of kids and adults at first sight.

  Pete then gave me a tour of the main building. He had a plan for each room, sometimes several contradictory plans. When he showed me the enormous bathroom with its multiple sinks, he explained that he wanted to redesign it with benches and footbaths to make it easier for worshippers to make wudu (the pre-prayer ablutions). He wanted to re-carpet and redesign the downstairs area, where the women would pray.

  Pete ended the tour in the office, which overlooked the drive leading up from Highway 99. It had a breathtaking view of the surrounding mountains. They were bucolic, with peaks and trees that looked like a bumpy green fur that you could run your fingers through.

  It was no coincidence that Pete ended the tour in the office. He was a consummate salesman, and the tour had been one big sales pitch. The finale was explaining how the group managed to afford all of this. He said the congregation had just become affiliated with a Saudi Arabian charity called the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation. Al Haramain had given them a grant to buy the prayer building, which the locals called the Musalla.

  At the time, I didn’t know how active Al Haramain was in the United States, and didn’t know whether it had other offices elsewhere in the country. It turns out that the group’s U.S. headquarters was located in my hometown of Ashland, Oregon, and that this was in fact Al Haramain’s only office in the United States at the time. (Al Haramain would later open another office in Springfield, Missouri, proudly declaring it the first mosque “in the heart of the Bible Belt.”)

  Pete had countless ideas for what he could accomplish in partnership with the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation. He was a visionary who had found a group to bankroll his vision. Among his dozen ideas for the future, the one that most captured my imagination was called the Medina Project. It was a plan to build an Islamic village here in the United States. The village would be run by sharia to the extent that U.S. law allowed. While they wouldn’t have beheadings and amputations, the women would be veiled, pork would be banned, and so would alcohol.

  “America is my home,” Pete said. “I don’t want to go overseas to practice Islam. I want to bring Islam here to America. The U.S. gives us freedoms as Muslims that we couldn’t imagine in the Middle East. We need to take advantage of those freedoms.”

  I nodded. The difference between this vision and Sheikh Hassan’s was not lost on me.

  Pete then concluded his sales pitch. “Bro, with Al Haramain backing us, we’re gonna do a lot. We’re trying to hire another person for the office, and I think you’re perfect.” He rummaged around, then handed me a copy of an Islamic publication called Al-Jumuah magazine that featured their employment ad. It explained that there was a job opening in the Ashland office, and set the salary at $2,000 a month.

  I told Pete that I would graduate from college in December (withdrawing from school when I was sick with Crohn’s disease had set me back by a semester). I planned
on going to law school in the fall, but was looking for something to do between college and law school.

  “Bro, do you have a résumé?” Pete said. “Why don’t you drop it off before you leave town?”

  Pete brought me some of the trademark spiced mint tea that I tried the first time I encountered Ashland’s Muslims. I liked the gesture; it was nice after a debate, or after talking business, to be able to slow the pace down, drink tea together, and turn to more personal matters.

  Our brief talk after Pete had made his sales pitch convinced me that he was what we might call a character. He was completely controlled by his passions. Sometimes these passions were for the bizarre and destructive, but I thought at the time that when Pete was seized with passion for the right thing, he could be an amazing force for good. Since I was a newer Muslim, Pete—in his rambling way, changing topics before he could even finish a thought—told me why Islam was such a great religion. He talked about a documentary he’d seen on split-brain patients, those whose right brain and left brain are disconnected. He said that some of these patients found their left hand behaving in unexpected ways, as though it had its own malicious will. This, to him, confirmed the wisdom of Islam’s preference for the right hand over the left.

  But before Pete could drive home that point, he made an unexpected (but not uncharacteristic) turn to discussion of marriage in Islam. I found one of his remarks so humorous that I later told some friends about it. “The great thing about our religion,” he said, “is that if you get tired of your wife, Allah will let you take on a second wife. You don’t even have to divorce the first one.”

  I was amused rather than horrified to speak with such an outspoken fan of polygamy. I didn’t then realize how seriously he took this.

  A few days later, I brought Pete my résumé.

  I had known from the first time I encountered Ashland’s Muslims and saw al-Husein debate with Sheikh Hassan that there was a name for the kind of Islam practiced by the community’s leaders: Wahhabism. The Wahhabis are a Sunni sect founded by Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth-century theologian who lived in what is now Saudi Arabia. Abdul Wahhab was obsessed with returning Islam to the puritanical norms that he thought were practiced in Prophet Muhammad’s time. He had a severe and strict interpretation of the faith.

  In accord with Abdul Wahhab’s teachings, the Wahhabis have an absolutist vision for Islam that holds that the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad’s example (the Sunnah) are the only permissible guides for the laws of a state and the conduct of an individual. They resent Muslims whose norms differ from theirs. They reject all Shias for starters, and the Sufis are also particularly despised. Many Sufis are mystical Muslims who aren’t about religious absolutes. They tend to be more free-form in interpreting the Qur’an, somewhat like Reform Jews’ free-form interpretation of the Bible. Despite the acrimony between the Wahhabis and the Sufis, I decided to apply for a job at Al Haramain because, even if my views differed somewhat from those of my coworkers, it seemed like a good opportunity to learn about Islam and to help advance the faith. I could also live with my parents while in Ashland, saving on rent and allowing me to spend more time with the people who meant so much to me before beginning my “adult life.”

  When I gave Pete my résumé, I also showed him some of the work I had done as a campus activist. I had produced a document called “Agenda for Change,” which listed our goals (such as making the school adopt a hate-speech code and changing the core curriculum to require students to take multicultural courses before graduation), as well as concrete steps for attaining the goals. I told Pete that I wanted to produce a similar document that the local Muslim community could rally around—except that our goals would be loftier, for instance, the creation of a functioning Islamic village.

  At the end of the summer, I returned to Wake Forest to teach at its summer debate institute for high school students. Amy Powell was working there as an instructor, and also served as a resident adviser in one of the campus dorms. I had a somewhat more posh living space. I had the top floor of the Nia House (which, during the school year, was an African-American women’s residence) to myself. Amy would usually come to the Nia House at night but return to the dorm before morning.

  One night we were up late and fell asleep while cuddling. After a few hours Amy stirred. I saw the green glow from my alarm clock: 2:53 a.m. She needed to get back to the dorm. Amy leaned over and gave me a quick, tender kiss on the lips. She hesitated a second. “I love you,” she said.

  We had been dating about seven months. Although it was the first time either of us said those three words, I didn’t hesitate. “I love you, too, Amy,” I said.

  By the alarm’s dim glow, I watched her walk out of the room, toward the stairs that would take her outside.

  In the fall semester, it was back to the front lines of campus activism. A key question there was how to get people involved. The previous semester, before al-Husein graduated from Wake Forest and moved on to Harvard Divinity School, he and I both latched on to self-perception theory. Developed by Daryl J. Bem, self-perception is a psychological theory that holds that an individual only has about the same level of knowledge of his own behavior that another person could have. People’s attitudes are developed by observing their behavior and then reasoning backward from it to determine what their attitudes must be. One implication of the theory is that if you can get someone to act in a certain way, eventually his beliefs will fall into line.

  Applying this theory to campus activism, al-Husein and I thought that if we could get people involved, even in a minor way, they would start to define themselves as activists. If we got someone to sign a petition, that was a step. If someone showed up at a rally, that was a step. All the better if they’d actually write the petition or speak at the rally. Even in al-Husein’s absence, I continued to think about and find new applications for this theory.

  The interesting thing is that self-perception theory never crossed my mind when I thought about taking a job with Al Haramain. I knew as early as my first visit, when I heard Sheikh Hassan’s sermon about the duty of emigrating to Muslim countries, that the group had a number of views with which I disagreed deeply. Yet I thought I could accept a job there, sample the group’s beliefs, pick and choose from their positive ideas, and discard the rest.

  I never considered that the methods al-Husein and I had gleaned from self-perception theory to try to shape people into campus activists could, in turn, be used to shape me.

  Pete Seda e-mailed me that fall to let me know I had been selected for the position at Al Haramain. I was eager to channel my passion for activism into the world beyond the walls of Wake Forest. And now, my first opportunity to do so would come as part of a Wahhabi charity that funded al-Qaeda.

  three

  A FROWN AND AN AK - 47

  My first official duty as an Al Haramain employee was to speak to a high school class about Islam in December 1998. The presentation would take place at the Musalla, the prayer house near the south end of town.

  Amy was visiting Ashland for her Christmas break, and she came to watch. I didn’t consider the fact that my coworkers would think that even having a girlfriend was contrary to Islamic law.

  Their views on relations between the sexes would become clear soon enough. But during this visit, nothing was said to me about Amy. In fact, Pete treated her with the same kind of suave charm that he used on anyone he found deeply distasteful. He even shook her hand upon meeting her, a theological concession that I didn’t comprehend at the time.

  Amy and I got to the Musalla half an hour before the high school class arrived. Pete handed me a sheet of paper. I smiled after reading it. The class had two teachers, one of whom I knew. Susan Thorngate stood out in my childhood memories because of her willingness to put up with the antics of a bright but hyperactive kid. She had taught me both eighth-grade English and drama, but had moved from the middle school to the high school since then.

  When Ms. Thorngate and her class
showed up, she smiled broadly, doing her best to conceal her surprise at seeing a Jewish former student of hers now standing there in a kufi. “Daveed,” she said, “you’re working here now?”

  I nodded.

  Ms. Thorngate moved forward as though to hug me, then hesitated. “I guess I probably shouldn’t give you a hug in a place like this,” she said in a low voice. I would have had no moral qualms about it, but she was right. I was just beginning to learn about Al Haramain’s rules and restrictions, but already knew that hugging a woman would, to say the least, be frowned upon.

  “Susan, I want you to meet my girlfriend, Amy,” I said.

  She was happy to see Amy. Her happiness was the kind that anybody who knew you when you were young has upon meeting an acquaintance you’ve made later in life. It was a happiness that comes of the opportunity to tell embarrassing stories.

  Fortunately, the first tale she seized on was mild: my eighth-grade habit of wearing the same Guns N’ Roses T-shirt to class day after day. She charitably added that I wasn’t a slob, and I probably washed the shirt at the end of each day.

  Thankfully, before she could start another tale, Pete intervened. Seeing that Ms. Thorngate and I knew each other, he said, “See what happens? You give us a few minutes with your students, and we go and convert them!”

  Ms. Thorngate turned to me and said, in a tone that suggested she had given it some thought, “When I think about who you were back in middle school, I realize that you were probably always destined to be a Muslim.”

  Although I didn’t know what she meant, I nodded thoughtfully.

  Pete and the others led the class into the prayer room, where they would give the presentation. The other presenters were Dawood and a man I had just met, Dennis Geren. Dennis was another of Ashland’s Caucasian converts to Islam. Having become Muslim several months ago, Dennis was a zealous novice. He sported a shaved head and long beard. The tattoo on his muscular arm was testament to another life before Islam. Dennis and the Eeyore-like Charlie Jones would be my office mates for the next nine months, all three of us working under Pete Seda’s direction.