I wasn’t the only one grappling with a more conservative, rules-based practice of Islam. One day I got a somewhat cryptic e-mail from al-Husein. He told me that he had just experienced a miracle, and couldn’t wait to tell me about it.
Al-Husein had continued to be my one real outlet for religious discussion. At work, I would often be hit by conservative ideas that seemed ridiculous, but about which I judged debate to be futile. On those days, I couldn’t wait to call al-Husein and get his perspective. I looked forward to these conversations the way I used to look forward to our walks on the quad.
I had become more serious, more rules-based in my practice of Islam than al-Husein. Yet I found him to be a fount of perspective on how not to lose sight of the spirit of the faith even while observing the forms of practice more closely.
I didn’t know what to expect when al-Husein told me that he’d experienced a miracle. I called him when I got home from work.
“Assalaamu ’alaykum.” As always, he answered the phone with the traditional Islamic greeting.
“Wa alaykum assalaam, bro. So, tell me about this miracle.”
He had been visiting one of Boston’s mosques, he said, and after prayers a bunch of the worshippers stood up and started shouting off time periods. “Twenty days!” one of them shouted.
“Two weeks!” Another rose to his feet.
“Five days!” said a third.
Al-Husein said skeptically to a man sitting beside him, “This isn’t some kind of Sufi thing, is it? Because I’ve tried that before and I’m not into it.” The man assured him that this was not, and said that al-Husein had to experience it. So al-Husein stood up and said, “Three days!” (Al-Husein didn’t know this at the time, but when these men shouted out these time periods, they were committing to leave home for that period and go on a mission trip for the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary group.)
As al-Husein told his story, I silently took note of that question: “This isn’t some kind of Sufi thing, is it? Because I’ve tried that before and I’m not into it.” I hadn’t heard al-Husein criticize Sufism before. When he helped teach me about Islam, it was through the lens of Sufism. So why did al-Husein brush Sufism aside as something that he’d already tried? I thought back to what al-Husein had told me a few weeks before about his experience running for office in the Harvard Islamic Society (HIS).
Elections and offices were clearly important to al-Husein. Given the political force he had been at Wake Forest, it was only natural that al-Husein would run for office in HIS.
But the HIS election meeting was not what al-Husein expected. He had never seen anything like it. When it was time to vote for each office, the various candidates left the room and stood in the hallway. The Muslims who remained would discuss them. But they didn’t discuss the candidates’ qualifications, as al-Husein had expected. Instead, the discussions focused solely on their faith.
This made al-Husein unexpectedly nervous. All his life, al-Husein had been judged on his secular qualifications, and they were never found wanting. But now he would be judged by different criteria, and for the first time he didn’t know what the others would say.
When his office came up, al-Husein stood outside in the hallway while HIS’s other Muslims debated about him. Even though he was running unopposed, he had to stew out there for fifteen long minutes while they considered his candidacy. Ultimately, they decided to give him the office. But for those fifteen minutes, he wasn’t sure that they would. At the time, weeks before he experienced his miracle, al-Husein had told me that this was a wake-up call. “I need to start taking my Islam more seriously,” he said.
It seemed strange to me that you would alter the practice of your faith because of what others might say. That is, it seemed strange until I thought of my own situation. Wasn’t this what I was doing at Al Haramain?
Al-Husein continued the story about his miracle, describing a speaker in the mosque who addressed those who are born into Islam but don’t understand or practice their religion. He spoke of Muslims who had strayed from their faith and needed to rediscover it. To al-Husein, it was as though this man were speaking to him. I knew that I had been craving greater theological certainty; so was al-Husein. And now it was explained in a way that fit his situation.
The speaker, al-Husein learned, was from an Islamic missionary group known as the Tablighi Jamaat, which was founded in Mewat, India, in 1927. Their dawah isn’t focused on non-Muslims, but rather on nominal Muslims, those who claim the faith but don’t really practice it.
The Tablighis encouraged al-Husein to spend the night in the mosque with them. That night, al-Husein experienced his miracle. It was unclear to me precisely what happened, but al-Husein said that his practice of Islam was transformed. Where he once wasn’t serious about the faith, he was serious now. Where he once might have made theologically questionable arguments, al-Husein now thought he saw the true path that Allah wanted him to follow.
I was complimentary and encouraging. “That’s great, brother,” I said. “I’m glad that you were touched in that way. Keep me in your prayers, bro, and pray that Allah does the same for me.”
I didn’t want to say how nervous al-Husein’s “miracle” made me. I had a feeling that I would be losing a dear friend—losing my best friend—to radical Islam. Al-Husein was the one who had brought me into Islam, but now my sense of the faith was changing. I was making a shift, hesitatingly but surely, toward a more conservative understanding. I felt rationally compelled to move in this direction, but emotionally my liberal ideals screamed out against it. I felt guilty that I might not be moving to a more conservative practice steadily or quickly enough, and al-Husein had been the one sounding board for what I was going through inside. (Since Amy was not a Muslim, I didn’t think she could comprehend my struggles.) If I lost al-Husein to the radicals, I would lose the one person I regarded as a genuine ally in my quest for a moderate and progressive Islam.
I doubted al-Husein’s motives. It seemed that, in actuality, his experience with the election coupled with the peer pressure he was experiencingfrom more conservative Muslims at Harvard was enough to bend something as fundamental as his religious beliefs. But I wondered if the same thing was also happening to me.
One day I was trying to get caught up on our reports for the head office in Saudi Arabia. That afternoon, when Pete entered the office, I handed him a stack of long-overdue reports. These had originally been Charlie’s responsibility, but these days his productivity had diminished to almost nothing. He would be absent from the office for weeks at a time.
Pete flipped through the reports and eventually seized on the bottom of the stack, the December 1998 report. Among other things, it went into detail about the presentation to the high school class that I had participated in on my first day with Al Haramain. Pete shook his head. “Bro,” he said, “you gotta give this as small a write-up as possible. The head office is pretty angry.”
“Why are they angry?” I had come to hate asking questions like this.
“They were mad about all the male and female students being in the prayer room at the same time. We even sat them apart . . . so that we could stomach having them there.” Pete said that some photos of the event had gotten back to the head office, and they were offended at the images of hijab-less women in the same room as male students.
In December, I thought it was strange to separate the students by sex. Now I learned that even that was not enough. As I revised the December report, I couldn’t wait to hear al-Husein’s thoughts.
When I spoke with al-Husein that night, I realized that I was indeed losing him as an ally. When I recounted the conflict with the head office over the high school presentation, his reaction was telling.
Or rather, his lack of reaction. This was the kind of conservative religious thinking that al-Husein and I used to mock. While I recounted the incident with all the amusement and bewilderment that had typified these conversations in the past, al-Husein responded with a pregnant sil
ence. He didn’t debate me, but neither did he agree. He said nothing.
I knew al-Husein and his silences well enough to know what it meant here. He was new to conservative Islamic thinking, but probably felt internally conflicted about the matter—and my flip dismissal of the head office’s concerns likely made him uncomfortable.
Over the next few weeks, I became increasingly guarded in my conversations with al-Husein. We still spoke once or twice a week, but I felt that now I not only had to watch what I said at work, but also around al-Husein.
In our life before the Tablighis, I would sometimes call al-Husein out for making theological arguments that didn’t reflect proper Islamic principles—such as when I heard him tell a woman student at Wake Forest that Muslims were only urged to avoid homosexuality because they shouldn’t subject themselves to the prejudice against gays. Now he was overcompensating. Al-Husein seemed to believe that his search for social justice was itself the cause of his theological transgressions. So he simply abandoned it.
One figure at the center of al-Husein’s spiritual transformation was named Brother Taha. I never knew Brother Taha’s last name, but he was another Muslim whom al-Husein had met through the Harvard Islamic Society. I first heard the name Brother Taha from al-Husein about a month before he spent the night with the Tablighis. Al-Husein had mentioned that there was a learned brother in HIS named Taha, and that Brother Taha was a Salafi. Once I heard he was Salafi, I knew enough to be worried—for al-Husein, for our friendship, and for myself.
The Arabic word Salaf, from which the term Salafi comes, means predecessors or early generations. Those who subscribe to this school of thought seek to return to the pure Islam practiced by Prophet Muhammadand the first generation of Muslims. Salafi, in short, is the term that Wahhabis use to refer to themselves (although there are some Salafis who can’t be classified as Wahhabis). Osama bin Laden is a Salafi.
From the outset, al-Husein was impressed by the depth of Taha’s knowledge, and recognized that there was a compelling case for Salafism. Our conversations became peppered with al-Husein’s comments about what “a Salafi would say.” He didn’t refer to himself as a Salafi, but wanted us to be aware of, and consider, the Salafi position. An angel and a devil were perched on al-Husein’s shoulders arguing. Whether the Salafi was the angel or the devil depends on your perspective.
It was clear that the days when my conversations with al-Husein were far-ranging intellectual odysseys were gone. Just as al-Husein remained silent when I told him about the head office’s reaction to our high school presentation, I soon found our conversations punctuated by silences. These silences would follow any criticism I offered of extremism in Islam. Perhaps al-Husein disagreed with me—but I suspected that it was something more than that. I suspected that he agreed with my criticisms deep down, but that he was trying hard to suppress these feelings. That he was ashamed of them.
Al-Husein would also more frequently take jabs at liberal Muslims with whom he disagreed. These jabs began innocuously enough after his night with the Tablighis. “On campus they always have these events,” he told me. “Events like What is Islam? I don’t even go to them anymore. I already know the answer. What good could they do me?”
He didn’t say that because these events were basic, containing introductory information. No, it was because these were Sufi-type events that approached the faith by exploring the manner in which various people practice Islam. Al-Husein was no longer interested in how other people practiced Islam. He had found true Islam—why did he need another perspective?
As al-Husein became seduced by the Salafi worldview, we had our own Salafi visitors in Ashland. Three men came over from Saudi Arabia to produce a documentary about Islam: Abdul-Qaadir Abdul-Khaaliq, an African-American convert to Islam who now lived in Saudi Arabia and worked for Al Haramain; Ahmed Ezzat, an Egyptian sheikh who now lived in Saudi Arabia; and a Saudi man named Abdullah An-Najashi, who barely spoke English.
I later learned that there was a second reason for their visit, beside the documentary. Sheikh Hassan had recently complained to Al Haramain’s head office in Riyadh that it didn’t make sense to have the U.S. headquarters in an out-of-the-way place like Ashland, where there wasn’t a huge pool of potential converts to draw on, and where there was a limit to the impact that publicity and dawah work would have. The Riyadh office wanted to have our visitors assess the wisdom of keeping the head U.S. office in Ashland.
Pete was raving about Abdul-Qaadir long before he set foot in southern Oregon. “This guy is great,” Pete said. “He can come here and teach classes every night at the Musalla, teach weekend classes, and help show us what real Islam is.”
So I was intrigued to meet Abdul-Qaadir, and came away impressed when we were introduced.
Abdul-Qaadir was a light-skinned black man with a broad chin and a full beard. His facial hair wasn’t very thick; there were a few patches on his cheeks where I could see his skin through the hair. He usually wore a kufi and thobe. His clothing gave off the appearance of cleanliness and purity. I noticed that he rarely smiled, and had a peculiar way of speaking: he projected constantly, as though he were always speaking to an audience, carefully enunciating every syllable. But the main thing that struck me about Abdul-Qaadir was that he was a man of obvious intellectual gifts.
One morning Abdul-Qaadir came into the office and sat next to me. I would soon look forward to my private morning chats with Abdul-Qaadir,as each gave me a new insight into the faith. They would remind me of the walks I used to take with al-Husein around the quad, except that my talks with Abdul-Qaadir tended to leave a bitter aftertaste.
This particular morning Abdul-Qaadir described the story of his conversion to Islam. Years before, after being raised a Christian, Abdul-Qaadir was studying music. (He would later stop playing music, believing it violated Islamic law.) Abdul-Qaadir said that he was at dinner with friends one night—at a Church’s Chicken—and learned that the musicians he was eating with were Muslim. He was unfamiliar with Islam, and in fact had never before heard anybody question the Trinity. When his dinner companions not only said that they didn’t believe in the Trinity, but were also able to provide good, logical arguments against it, Abdul-Qaadir was blown away. Soon after, he took his shahadah.
Al-Husein and I spoke that night. It was becoming increasingly difficult to relate to him. But I wasn’t sure why it was difficult: I wasn’t sure if it was because his views were becoming radical, or if it was that I lacked faith. What I knew—and what I found appealing about al-Husein’s transformation—was that he now possessed the kind of absolute confidence in his convictions that I had so long sought.
Abdul-Qaadir’s arrival gave me something I could discuss with al-Husein. I described Abdul-Qaadir in glowing terms, then said, “Please pray that Allah helps Abdul-Qaadir do the same thing for my faith that Brother Taha did for yours.”
Many of my talks with Abdul-Qaadir were “words of wisdom” experiences. Sometimes he’d come in to tell me about a theological issue that he was thinking about. Sometimes he would talk about more general matters. One day he explained his personal growth as a Muslim.
Abdul-Qaadir had been involved in various Islamic groups, and had been close to a number of different Islamic thinkers. Some of the figures he told me about were more liberal in bent; one of them, much like al-Husein and I, used to speak constantly about “social justice.” But Abdul-Qaadir turned his back on that outlook. He said he thought about writing a book exposing his former mentor’s heterodoxy, but decided not to: “That would be like shooting a fly with a bazooka.”
Abdul-Qaadir’s Islamic development culminated in him discovering Salafism. I was taken by his description of that discovery. He didn’t frame it in the manner that I usually heard—that Salafism is self-evidently right, and that other Muslims who don’t see that are deviants or fools. Rather, it was something he grew into slowly, step by logical step, after a few misadventures within the faith. “I’m happy to call myself a Salafi,”
Abdul-Qaadir said. “It’s the most persuasive method of understanding Islam that I’ve found. Maybe there’s something better out there, but I haven’t found it.”
A few days later, Abdul-Qaadir and I spoke about my love of books. He asked me about the Islamic authors I liked, and I told him that one of the main ones I’d been reading was Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips (a Jamaican convert to Islam). “It’s good that you like to read so much,” Abdul-Qaadir said. “People who read tend to be fooled less easily.”
I nodded. While most of my coworkers would be hard-pressed to read a single book from cover to cover, Abdul-Qaadir was well read and multilingual.
I had first thought of the Salafis as men like Dennis Geren, who didn’t have complex ideas and were quick to accept the answers that their sheikhs gave. Abdul-Qaadir and al-Husein didn’t fit that mold. Abdul-Qaadir came across as reasonable and thoughtful, a man of conviction. When I was around him, I felt that I was the one leading an unexamined life. Abdul-Qaadir knew with absolute certainty where he stood, and his life was seemingly free of inconsistencies. He was married and had kids. He and his family had removed themselves from the un-Islamic environment of the United States to live in Saudi Arabia, a country where he didn’t have to deal with the mixing of the sexes; he didn’t have to grapple with such issues as the duty of hijra.
Abdul-Qaadir had me pick up a newspaper for him every morning on the way to work so he could clip out articles that had some relevance to Islam. He believed, though, that photographs were haram; after all, the Prophet told his wife Aishah that the angels won’t enter a house with pictures in it. So when an article that Abdul-Qaadir clipped from the paper had a photo in it, he’d turn it over so the picture couldn’t be seen.
This ability to negate all that was inconsistent with his worldview was so different from the life I was living, a life of uncertainty and compromises. It was clear that Abdul-Qaadir’s purpose as a Muslim was to submit to Allah’s will. He came to Salafism because he believed that the most logical way of discerning Allah’s will was a literal reading of Allah’s word, the Qur’an, and a return to the Prophet’s example. Abdul-Qaadir embraced the truth unapologetically. How could I not be drawn to this clarity?
My Year Inside Radical Islam Page 14