It was a beautiful August day in Lithia Park’s Japanese Garden. Stone paths snaked through the garden, there were scattered benches, flowers of many colors were in bloom. As usual, I didn’t appreciate the beauty.
The film crew from Landmind Productions was there, shooting footage of the local Muslims as we talked about how we came to Islam and what our faith meant to us. I watched them shoot a scene where Yunus Sedaghaty talked about the impact of Islam in his life. It didn’t come across as sincere. I wandered toward our food spread. (When Pete gave the film crew money to buy refreshments, he gave three provisos: “Don’t spend this money on alcohol, pork, or pornography.”)
A man named Muhanid Khuja was sitting by the food, some sandwiches that the crew had picked up from the local Subway. Muhanid was from Guam. He had shown up in Ashland a few weeks back, seemingly at random, saying he was on a mosque tour through the United States. Some of the mosques he had encountered apparently horrified him with their deviant practices. But he took a liking to us, and Pete took a liking to him. Soon, Muhanid became Pete’s new right-hand man. Pete was in the process of buying a new house, and Muhanid was trying to guide him through the thorny process of making the purchase without paying interest.
Muhanid had a large beard and a large gut. I chatted with him for a few minutes, and the topic turned to my impending departure for law school. Muhanid was skeptical. “As a lawyer you have to take a pledge to defend the Constitution. There are some things in the Constitution I like, but a lot of things in the Constitution are completely against Islamic principles.” Muhanid then talked about how he had once served in the U.S. Armed Forces. At the time, when he was a less serious Muslim, he didn’t give much thought to whether it was wrong to do so. Now, in retrospect, he realized that it was wrong—the oaths he had made, the allegiances he had given contradicted his oath and allegiance to Allah.
“What in the Constitution is against Islam?” I asked.
“Well, for example, abortion.”
I shook my head. “No. The word abortion is never mentioned in the Constitution, and nothing in the Constitution says that you have to be for abortion rights. There are a lot of Christian lawyers who practice in the U.S. but bring lawsuit after lawsuit trying to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
“Well,” Muhanid said, “if you were a Muslim living under the Roman Empire, what would be the right thing to do? Would you practice in Roman courts, or would you steer clear of them entirely?”
During a break in the filming, I caught a piece of Pete’s conversation with John Foote. Pete was describing Yunus’s interest in learning how to make videos, and wanted to see if Yunus could go by Landmind from time to time for training on video production.
“I do landscaping,” Pete said. “I’m a landscaper. If Yunus came by from time to time and you showed him how to do film production, I could do landscaping work for you in exchange.” He smiled conspiratorially. “And then we won’t have to worry about taxes or anything like that, ’cause no money is changing hands.” (When I interviewed John Foote for this book, I learned that the training that Pete envisioned never took place.)
I smiled and gave a half-laugh. I was no expert in tax law, but I knew that an exchange of services like that should be taxable. At the time I thought it was just another example of good old colorful Pete.
Later, it was time to shoot a scene with Yunus. For the shot, the film crew had us sitting on a couple of rocks, with a stream flowing gently past. They wanted to film our dialogue—a young Muslim man (me) sharing his wisdom with a Muslim teenager.
As the cameras rolled, Yunus asked me the same question I had heard on my first day of work. That day now seemed like a lifetime ago, and in some ways it was. “How are Muslims able to find the right person to marry,” he asked, “if they aren’t able to date?”
This was no mere theoretical question for him. It was a question that—with Pete as his father and Islam as his religion—he would have to grapple with. I remembered how at one point he and Dennis Geren were poring through correspondence from people requesting Islamic literature. Every time they came across a letter from a woman, they’d ask aloud whether she was single. My response at the time was gentle mockery: “Grow up, you two!” And Yunus had earnestly replied, “We are grown up. There are very few things more grown up than this.” And you know? He was right. He wasn’t thinking about a fling or a one-night stand. Yunus was just trying to do the best he could with the rules that were supposed to guide him.
I hesitated when Yunus asked his question. The hesitation was probably so small as to be unnoticeable, but my thoughts immediately turned to my relationship with Amy. I thought of how we had met, remembered our first kiss on a van ride back from Carrollton, Georgia, recalled the first time that Amy had told me that she loved me. There was a year of courtship before I asked her to marry me, a full year before I knew with certainty that Amy was the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
That’s what I thought about in my moment of hesitation. But I almost immediately turned to Yunus and parroted the explanation that Pete had given on my first day on the job. “We believe that our method of courtship is better than the Western courtship process. There is a right way and a wrong way to tell whether someone is right for you, and the Islamic courtship process is devoted to quickly figuring out whether a potential mate is someone with whom you can spend the rest of your life. Often Western relationships are very superficial. You might not start to discuss deeper issues that are central to how you view the world for months or years. In the Islamic courtship process, you don’t date. You want to know if someone is marriage material. And so you don’t work toward a discussion of those deeper issues. Instead, that’s where you begin.”
Yunus nodded. He actually seemed satisfied. Of course, none of that is what I did with Amy. But I believed the words that I spoke. I loved Amy deeply, but actually regretted that we had met and dated in the traditional Western way. We weren’t even married under Islamic law yet. Every time she and I were alone in a room together, every time we touched, every time we kissed—all of this was sinful.
I loved Amy deeply, but I was racked by doubt.
As the scene wrapped up, Yunus came up to me and said, “Good job with your comments on marriage.” I nodded, somewhat surprised. It was the first time Yunus had said anything positive to me.
It was now dusk, and the production crew was packing up their cameras. I walked to my car. There was a lot to think about. Normally, this would be one of those drives where I’d pop in a tape and let the music wash over me while I drove, lost in my thoughts. But today there was no tape to play.
It was an event that most Americans didn’t even notice. Islamic militants from Chechnya invaded the neighboring Republic of Dagestan on August 7, 1999. Somewhere between a thousand and four thousand fighters entered Dagestan and declared the land they occupied to be an Islamic state. Three days later, Russia responded by sending in fifteen thousand ground troops and initiating hundreds of bombing runs, killing thousands.
To most people, it seemed like one more skirmish occurring half a world away. I realized immediately, when I first ran across news of the invasion, that it would prove significant to me. It went to the heart of so much of what I had been thinking about and praying for over the past several months. Chief Justice Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid had argued at great length that jihad was not just an acceptable means of establishing an Islamic state, but that undertaking jihad was an affirmative duty. And now the jihad had come.
I spoke briefly with Mahmoud Shelton, the Naqshbandi Sufi who had graduated from Stanford, about the situation in Chechnya. He stood in the office, and was flipping through a newspaper. When he came across a story about the invasion of Dagestan he skimmed it and seized on a line that described the invaders as Wahhabis. “But I didn’t think the Wahhabis were heavily involved in the war of liberation from 1994 to 1996,” he said.
I shrugged. “The details aren’t clear yet. It doesn’t seem to
be the same group as in the first war, and this definitely wasn’t defensive.”
“So, what, is this just some group of random yahoos who are invading Dagestan in the name of creating an Islamic state?”
I didn’t reply. I knew that of all the people here, Mahmoud would be the most antagonistic toward Wahhabi fighters. Though I had more than a little sympathy for where he was coming from, my mind kept returning to Sura 9:29, the order to fight those who do not “forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger.” Wasn’t that just what these mujahideen were doing?
I was never a fan of good-byes. Even when al-Husein graduated from Wake Forest a semester before me, our farewell was poignant yet short. My last day of work at Al Haramain was unceremonious.
I packed up the limited personal items that I had in the office, gave Dennis Geren a firm handshake, and called Pete on his cell phone. I told him that my work there was complete. “I’ll keep you in my prayers, bro,” Pete said. “And when you’re in law school, just make sure you remember . . .”
As so often happened, Pete’s cell phone lost reception. It was almost fitting. This way, I could at least imagine that he had some piercing insight to share with me. In reality, he probably would have just interrupted himself before he could have finished the thought.
I recognized that I left Al Haramain a completely different person than I was the day I traipsed through the front door, ready to take part in the presentation to Ms. Thorngate’s high school class. My views of God, the world, and myself had been drastically transformed. I had no idea whether I preferred the new me or the old one, nor did I know whether I was sad or happy to be finished at Al Haramain and on to law school.
ten
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Astaghfirullah!” It was an Arabic phrase literally asking Allah for forgiveness that al-Husein and I sometimes used in our conversations.
This time, al-Husein used the phrase while we were standing in line to buy various casebooks for my first semester of classes at the New York University School of Law. The guy ahead of us in line reminded me of your typical Wake Forest frat boy, both in his appearance and his chosen topics of conversation. He was speaking into his cell phone, loud enough that al-Husein and I could hear every word. He gave an all too predictable description of what he had done last night: “Man, we got so drunk!”
We both chuckled. Wake Forest was far behind us. We had changed far more in the sixteen months since al-Husein’s graduation than either of us could have imagined, but suddenly we were back on common ground: making fun of arrogant frat boys for their toxic lifestyle. It was one of those rare moments where it seems like old times really can be recaptured.
Al-Husein had come to New York to help me move into my new room in D’Agostino Hall, NYU’s high-rise student residence at the corner of MacDougal Street and West Third in the heart of Greenwich Village. I was still trying to sort out how we now fit into each other’s lives, but I was glad to have him around.
Al-Husein flipped through the various orientation materials, helping me pick out the organizations that I should be a part of. At the top of both of our lists, naturally, was the Middle Eastern Law Students Association (MELSA), the one student group with an Islamic orientation.
It was great to see al-Husein, but different. It was as though we were getting to know each other anew. At one point we had been comrades in the struggle to create a more progressive Islam. Since then, we had both become more serious about the faith. But how did our newly formed worldviews mesh? Neither of us knew the answer.
We spent some time exploring the city together. New York City has a heavy Islamic presence, and al-Husein was eager to encounter other Muslims on the street. “You can tell another Muslim by the way he dresses,” al-Husein said. “You look for the beard, for the loose-fitting clothes.” I nodded.
And we spotted other Muslims almost right away when we left D’Agostino Hall and stepped onto bustling West Third Street. D’Agostino was right across from Vanderbilt Hall, a large red brick building where the bulk of the law school’s classes are held. Another block down, just past Vanderbilt, was Washington Square Park.
We walked east on West Third, toward Broadway. This was to be another of the many long walks that al-Husein and I took together, where we’d reflect on life’s meanings, and our place in this world and the next. Only I had far less of an idea about what to expect from the conversation than I did in the old days, when we had circled Wake Forest’s quad together.
We didn’t get more than half a block before glimpsing a couple of other Muslims across the street. One of them was black and the other was South Asian. And it wasn’t beards or loose-fitting clothes that gave them away: they both wore kufis.
We waved at them and crossed the street. We all exchanged Islamic greetings. It turned out that both men taught at the university level. “We’re scientists,” the black convert said. “We’re involved in changing paradigms. We take our faith, and we bring that to our scientific work.” Although al-Husein was in divinity school at the time, he was still thinking about going to medical school as his father had done. This enthused our two conversational partners, as they thought that he too could be involved in the important task of changing paradigms, in the medical field. They were less interested in the fact that I was beginning law school—probably because there was no need to change paradigms there. We all knew that sharia was the perfect law: what more innovation did the field of law need?
While al-Husein spoke with the black convert, I spoke with the South Asian. He gave me his phone number. “We should stay in touch,” he said. “There are so many situations right now that affect us as Muslims. There is this situation in Chechnya. That’s something we need to watch.”
I nodded. Just as I had thought when the mujahideen first invaded Dagestan, this conflict was proving to be far more important than most Americans realized.
This is a much different place than college was,” I said. “You probably have better insight into this than I do. Who are our natural allies?”
I was asking one of the female members of MELSA, who was in her third year of law school. We were talking on the phone. I clutched my large green plastic receiver while peering out the dorm window at West Third Street. I felt that I had to ask this question because I found NYU confusing, unfamiliar. Most Wake Forest students were apolitical—but if anything, the average Wake student was right of center. So the various minority student groups formed a sometimes ill-fitting alliance. But the average NYU student was hardly right of center. In class, whenever I thought of raising my hand to make a left-of-center point that would have been vaguely revolutionary at Wake Forest, at least two or three students would beat me to it. I wasn’t sure there was such a need to work with other campus minority groups. And with my deepening commitment to Islam, I wasn’t sure that these ill-fitting alliances would be productive anymore.
But I wasn’t expecting the answer I got. “I wouldn’t trust any of these groups,” she said. “There are so many yahoods here that we can’t really trust anybody.”
I was taken aback. Yahood was Arabic for “Jew.” I said, “You know that my parents are yahoods, right?”
“Of course,” she replied. “I could tell by your name. Why do you ask?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Why did I ask? Wasn’t the reason obvious? If both of my parents were Jewish, then perhaps I wouldn’t find the assertion that we couldn’t trust anybody at NYU because there were so many Jews all that appealing. But instead I said, “No reason. Just making sure you knew.”
This was not the Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of Wake Forest campus activist days. I normally wouldn’t remain silent in the face of bigotry of any kind—particularly when it was directed at people like me. But since my time at Al Haramain, things had changed.
My one solace during my first semester at NYU was prayer. When I undertook my five daily prayers, that was the one time that I knew I was doing something unambiguously good.
Aft
er that rather upsetting phone call, I went through my afternoon prayers. Making du’a at the end, I supplicated Allah to cure the Ummah of this disease of anti-Semitism.
Those prayers were bizarrely interspersed with supplications for Allah to grant victory to the mujahideen.
The first time I went to a Yankees game, what struck me most was the music they played after the game ended. As the final out rolled in and people began to rise from their seats, I recognized the opening bars of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” piping through the loudspeakers.
Although it was one of the many songs to which I’d never devoted much attention, this time I really listened to the lyrics—and found that I disagreed with them:If I can make it there,
I’ll make it anywhere.
If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere? Hardly. I thought of Ol’ Blue Eyes—an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a musician—trying to make it in Mecca. Frank Sinatra did make it in New York, but I doubted that he could make it in the world that I had been inhabiting.
In fact, I knew that I too could make it in New York—but didn’t know whether I could make it as a true follower of Allah. This is what I thought about as I shuffled out of the Yankees game with the rest of the crowd.
I still spoke with Pete from time to time. In one of our first discussions after I got to New York, he told me that he wanted to do something to protest the brutality with which the Russians were carrying out their military campaign against the Chechens.
“Bro, now they’re gonna use chemical weapons against the mujahideen, ” Pete said. “I saw pictures on TV of some of these Russian soldiers with gas masks on. They claim that they’re wearing gas masks because the mujahideen are gonna use chemical weapons against them, but that’s a lie and I can prove it.” Pete paused for dramatic effect, then said, “Would you use chemical weapons in your own backyard?”
My Year Inside Radical Islam Page 19