One day when we were standing around near the main room in the Musalla, Dennis Geren held both of his hands in front of him and pretended to shoot at cars that were driving by on I-5. Seeing this, Abdi said with a smile, “No, baba, peace! You shouldn’t do that!”
“But, Abdi,” Dennis said with a smirk, “they’re kufar!”
“Peace, baba, peace,” Abdi repeated. And so he put the Hawk in his place with three words and an infectious grin.
One reason that Dennis and I frequently ended up debating was because he had somehow gotten the idea that the most persuasive way of speaking was framing his comments as questions. When you ask questions, he reasoned, it seems that you’re demanding an answer from the listener. So when Dennis ranted about Algeria, he’d rattle off a fiery series of questions: “They cancel the elections in Algeria and leave the Muslims to be slaughtered by the Algerian army. Is this justice? Is this the human rights I always hear them talking about? Do you stop ‘terrorists’ by sweeping through Algerian villages and slaughtering babies?”
The problem for Dennis was that each question did seem to demand an answer, particularly because his understanding of the international situations about which he had such strong opinions tended to be off base. After I’d let Dennis’s first three or four questions go by, I’d eventually feel compelled to engage him. We’d then enter into wide-ranging debates in which Dennis tried to recount every evil inflicted by the Western world in the past five centuries, and would make me defend them all. Given my roots as a campus radical, I wasn’t always happy with this role.
One day we were arguing about the Taliban. Ever since I had become Muslim, I had thought it obvious that the Taliban’s brutal rule was contrary to true Islamic principles. I thought it obvious that my religion wouldn’t countenance a dictatorial regime that treated its women like cattle and viewed free intellectual inquiry as a disease.
I remembered how Dennis had defended the Taliban when we made our presentation to Ms. Thorngate’s class. I assumed then that he didn’t understand the full brutality of their rule, and that I could change his mind. But I was in for a surprise.
“Dawood spoke to a man,” Dennis said, “who’s actually been to Afghanistan. He said that they were practicing true Islam there, and everything was beautiful.” I probably should have wondered what the man had been doing in Afghanistan. The country wasn’t exactly known for its tourist industry. It was, however, known for its terrorist training camps. But I tended to overlook the small signs back then. I would end up overlooking many, many more.
“Dennis,” I said, “seriously. The country’s most popular form of entertainment is public executions. Women can’t get an education, and can barely get health care because of the ridiculous sex segregation. Those guys are running one of the worst governments in the world.”
“That’s not what Dawood’s friend says. And, Daveed, the guy is a brother.”
I shrugged. So the guy who said that everything was beautiful in Afghanistan was Muslim. Did that make him infallible?
Dawood walked into the office. I wanted to end the conversation. Dawood was more than a decade older than me, and became Muslim many years ago. He spoke with the unwavering certainty of a true believer, and was the kind of person who I felt uncomfortable engaging in argument.
But Dennis saw Dawood’s entrance as a way to settle our dispute. He asked Dawood, “Didn’t you tell me that a brother who came through here had been to Afghanistan and said that all the Western media stories were distorted?”
“Oh, yes,” Dawood said. “He said they were practicing the truest form of Islam he’s seen. He said that the whole country would fall apart if they didn’t have sharia law, and what they’re doing there is beautiful.”
The look Dennis gave me was that of the bright pupil whose teacher said he had answered a classroom question correctly. It was as though the account of some guy I had never met meant more than hundreds of well-documented newspaper stories.
While trying to make his dream of a peace convoy into Yugoslavia a reality, Pete also pursued another ambitious project that would never come to fruition.
As the Kosovo war progressed, a stream of ethnic Albanian refugees entered the United States. Pete wanted Al Haramain to help them. Although the refugees had a variety of needs, Pete cared about their religious needs most. The proposal for the head office in Saudi Arabia that Pete had me type for him described their religious situation in breathless terms:As you know, Brothers, many years of Communist rule successfully eradicated knowledge of Islam in the majority of Albanians who had lived in Kosova.6 Reliable sources have informed us that the horror stories we all hear about their lack of Islamic knowledge are true. Fifty-year-old Albanian men do not even know how to make wudu, many Albanians do not know what to say when making salat, and even fewer know what the Arabic words mean. And now they are amongst the Christian missionaries and temptations of the West.
Christian missionaries are hard at work and well funded in the United States, trying to make the Kosovar Albanians disbelieve in the Oneness of Allah. The refugees’ translators are not even Muslim, making it even more difficult for them to maintain their faith.
Pete’s solution to this problem was, like most of his ideas, ambitious. He wanted to print business cards immediately in the Albanian language so the refugees could contact the Ashland office. He wanted to create an 800 number for a 24-hour emergency help line manned by two new full-time employees who spoke Albanian. He wanted the Ashland office to be established as the State Department’s Islamic organizational contact, so we would be informed whenever more refugees arrived in order to reach out to them. Pete wanted to get Islamic literature in the Albanian language from Saudi Arabia that could be distributed to the refugees. But that wasn’t all; he also had long-term plans, such as creating a newsletter in the Albanian language that could grab their attention because of its political and cultural content—but the newsletter would eventually be used to introduce them to correct Islamic practices.
The head office in Riyadh bought into Pete’s vision. They sent us about $50,000. But what came of that money? We received two large boxes of Islamic booklets in the Albanian language. These booklets contained translations of the first sura of the Qur’an (which was a mere seven verses long) and a portion of the second sura. Some of these booklets were distributed to Albanian cultural and Islamic centers on the East Coast. Seven thousand business cards were printed. Some of the cards were sent out along with the Islamic booklets, while Pete personally distributed other cards on a trip to Fort Dix in New Jersey, where many of the refugees were stationed. We did create an 800 number for refugees, but never had an Albanian speaker to man it. And I did the paperwork necessary to get Al Haramain put on the State Department’s list of organizations involved in refugee placement—but the paperwork was never sent in.
That’s what the Riyadh office got for its $50,000. But they were so flush with cash that they probably never realized the total and complete waste of their money.
And, at the very least, it was a better use of cash than some of Al Haramain’s future endeavors would prove to be.
It was dusk and I sat on the deck behind my house. Holding a cordless phone in one hand, I slowly punched in the Boston telephone number. I was calling al-Husein.
To me, religion was both a relationship with God and also a relationship with a community of believers. I thought back to how al-Husein had helped to draw me out of myself at Wake Forest. Through al-Husein, I was able not only to learn about Islam, but to reach a greater level of engagement with other people. But I was separated from Wake Forest and al-Husein not only by thousands of miles, but also by time. There had been a fleeting moment of community, a fleeting moment in Winston-Salem where my Islam fueled my activism and my activism fueled my Islam. But was that all illusory? Had I misunderstood the nature of Islam, the nature of my Muslim brothers and sisters?
I was again beginning to feel isolated. It was from these phone calls with al-Husein t
hat I drew my sense of community, able to reconnect with the progressive vision of Islam.
“Assalaamu ’alaykum.” Al-Husein answered his phone with the traditional Muslim greeting.
“Who the heck is Sam Alaykum?” I joked. It was typical for us to play off the image of the ignorant Westerner who can’t understand Islamic concepts; here, the joke was someone mistaking the Islamic greeting for the other party saying his name.
“Bro!” al-Husein said. “Good to hear from you!”
“How have you been, brother?” I said. And thus began one of our many wide-ranging conversations. I had closed myself off more at the office, knowing that anything I put forward could be subject to attack, reprimand, and a reading assignment. My conversations with al-Husein were more of an anarchic free flow of ideas. The topics we discussed would bounce from Islam to class and race to foreign policy to social justice to progressive politics to the shortcomings of the radical view of the faith.
I filled al-Husein in on some of the interesting Islamic rulings that had been directed at me over the past few months. “So I was reading a newspaper article during Ramadan,” I told him, “and it said that Muslims aren’t supposed to eat, drink, have sexual intercourse, or listen to music during the day.”
“Not supposed to listen to music during Ramadan? I’ve never heard that.”
“Neither had I, so when I got into work I asked about it. Get this, right away I’m told that Muslims shouldn’t listen to music at all. So one of the guys comes in with a book that has a complete fatwa on the matter. He wanted me to stop listening to music altogether!”
“I’m familiar with brothers who make that argument,” al-Husein said. “But look at the Muslims who incorporate music into their faith. These are guys who have nothing. They don’t have electricity, they don’t have running water, they’re trying to scrape up enough money to feed their families. I say let them have their music.”
I saw a logical flaw in al-Husein’s argument. Neither he nor I lived in desperate poverty; there should be no religious sliding scale that allowed us to commit acts that would otherwise be haram. But I didn’t mention it. I was just happy to have some support for a more liberal interpretation.
I didn’t even notice as two hours of conversation flew by. After talking with al-Husein, the difference was even more pronounced the next morning when I got into work and again had to face Dennis Geren. He had just taken in his morning ration of Idris Palmer e-mail, so had a fresh batch of talking points. Here we go again.
When Amy and I had worked at Wake Forest’s summer debate camp last summer, there had been something unsaid between us. Amy was the first to broach it when, for the first time, she told me that she loved me. This time, I was the first to broach something else that had been unsaid.
Near the end of one of our phone calls, I said, “Amy, do you think we made a mistake in breaking up?”
There was a long pause. It wasn’t an awkward silence. She was giving serious thought to what I had asked. “We may have,” she said.
“Amy,” I said, “I love you.” Then I told her everything: how conflicted I felt when we decided to stop seeing each other back in December, how much I missed her, how I’d reread her letter and old e-mail messages several times, how I knew that I still loved her.
“I wish,” I said, “that we weren’t doing this over the phone. It would be more appropriate if I were down on one knee in front of you with a sparkling ring in hand.”
I felt Amy smile on the other end of the phone. She said that she needed time to think about it. I told her to take all the time she needed. I didn’t feel nervous or anxious. I simply knew that she was the one.
Despite Mount Dennis’s tendency to erupt, I at least felt comfortable talking to him about our differences of opinion. Perhaps it was Dennis’s good side—the fact that, despite his anger, he was a man of manners and compassion. Perhaps it was that Dennis was, like me, young in his faith. Perhaps it was that Dennis recognized his own extremes. Whatever it was, I felt more comfortable debating against Dennis than I did with the others at Al Haramain.
I realized that I now lacked confidence in my understanding of Islam. A year ago, I had such certainty in the moderate vision of the faith that al-Husein trumpeted to me. The problem was that I had always believed that extremists distorted the faith out of ignorance, or for their own political gain. Now I was surrounded by people with extremist views, and there was no obvious flaw in their interpretation. I could quibble with their evidence on some points, but where was their approach to the faith wrong? I couldn’t find the silver-bullet argument that would slay their approach with a single shot.
Despite this, I continued to believe in progressive Islam. What I needed to do, I realized, was gain enough confidence in my knowledge of the faith and in my standing in the community that I could engage these issues openly. I redoubled my efforts at theological study, poring over the Qur’an, the ahadith, and theological treatises. As I learned more, my conversations with al-Husein continued to be my main outlet for ideas.
Little did I know that my studies would actually lead me to the legalistic interpretation of Islam that I then regarded as extreme, to a theology rooted in rules divorced from morality. And little did I know that al-Husein himself would help usher me down this path.
I spoke with Amy again a few days later. This time she had made up her mind.
Yes was her answer: Yes, she would marry me.
I felt an indescribable glow. This was the woman I loved, and now we would spend our lives together. We were already talking about having Amy come out for the summer, about shopping for a ring. I wasn’t sure if I had ever felt as happy and complete.
Eventually this glow would fade as the religious changes I went through fundamentally altered the way I saw the world, altered things as central as my relationship with my parents or the woman I loved. But that would come later. For now, I felt nothing but pure, unmistakable joy.
seven
SALAFI
On a crisp night, the Gold’s Gym in the shopping center off Siskiyou Boulevard provided the one spark of light in a row of closed stores. A woman stood on the sidewalk outside the large plate-glass windows looking into the exercise rooms and waving at me.
Her name was Kristy Hennan. She was a year behind me at Ashland High School, but I never really knew her until she began classes at my alma mater, Wake Forest. She was a tall, dark-haired woman with a robust sense of humor who was oddly shy at the same time. She had been passing by the gym and had seen me inside.
I walked outside hesitantly. Kristy and I had been friends at Wake Forest, and it had been a few months since we’d had a chance to hang out. Normally I’d be delighted to see Kristy, but a lot had changed over the last few months. Back at Wake Forest, nobody was looking over my shoulder to make sure that my interactions with women fell strictly within the bounds of Islamic law. Now, as I slowly walked to the gym door, I could feel Charlie Jones’s and Dennis Geren’s eyes following me, studying me in an effort to discern microscopic flaws.
For the past few weeks, I had been working out with Charlie and Dennis. But it wasn’t your usual workout regime. Dennis had reprimanded me during my initial trip to the gym. He looked down at my gym shorts, then said in a stern voice, “Shorts should be below the knees.” I couldn’t believe he was commenting on my shorts. Suddenly my entire devotion to Islam turned on whether my clothing was long enough while I was exercising.
I muttered that I was just wearing shorts while I was in the gym, and wouldn’t be venturing outside in them. I realized that this distinction would make no difference to Dennis. If I wore shorts again, I would be reprimanded again. Naturally, the next time I went to the gym with Dennis and Charlie, I wore sweatpants.
Then, there was Charlie’s unique manner when we worked out together. Charlie was a strong guy. He had the same routine each time he threw up a set on the bench press. First he’d say the basmallah quietly: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, Arabic for “in the na
me of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” Then, on finishing the set, he’d say, “Alhamdulillah. A drop of sperm can do this. I was once a drop of sperm, yet Allah could make me grow to do this.” And he would nod his head emphatically, his eyes wide.
Charlie and Dennis watched me walk into the darkness outside and talk to this woman they didn’t know. This alone was probably improper in their eyes.
After some awkward small talk where my mind wasn’t on Kristy, but on how our conversation would be perceived by the others, she said that she was glad to see me but had to go. So her demand was natural enough. “Daveed, come here and give me a kiss.” It wasn’t a sexual or romantic demand, just the kind of thing that’s normal between friends of the opposite sex.
I hesitated. I thought of the teacher whose hand I had refused to shake when I was with Sheikh Adly. I thought of Charlie and Dennis staring at me from inside the gym. I thought of Dennis correcting me when my shorts had come up above the knees. I smiled at Kristy, then said no.
Kristy knew me better than the teacher whose hand I had refused to shake, and didn’t take offense. She assumed that my refusal had to do with Amy, my now-fiancée. This was wrong. It was about what two men she didn’t know (and who she almost certainly wouldn’t like) would think about what a peck on the cheek said about me as a Muslim.
“That’s okay. Give me a hug, anyway.” Her tone of voice was disappointed and somewhat surprised, but also understanding.
Kristy put her arms around me and I hugged her rather lamely, putting my right hand softly on her back. I never thought I would feel internal conflict over something as routine, something as small as a hug. But here, hugging a woman involved a significant moral and religious struggle.
For some women, a hug or a kiss on the check is no different from shaking hands. But to me, even shaking hands would have been out of bounds.
My Year Inside Radical Islam Page 13