My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  I had now begun to supplicate God not for what the most conservative interpretations of Islam asked for. Instead, I asked for what I knew I needed; and for the first time, my supplications began to reflect my growing doubts.

  I once thought I knew the truth; I now asked God to lead me to it.

  In church the next Sunday, the sermon was about God’s love.

  For months, I was sure that I couldn’t possibly be worthy of God’s love. How could I be? Here I was racked with doubts, unable to trust myself to do the right thing or to follow basic rules.

  The sermon had an angle that I didn’t expect: that we really weren’t worthy of God’s love. “Nobody deserves salvation,” the preacher said. “We are all tarred with sin; we are all dead in our own sinfulness. None of us is worthy of standing before God on the day of judgment.”

  Long pause. “But He loves us anyway. He loves us with a perfect, divine love. The only way we can be worthy of standing before God is through the sacrifice of the perfect embodiment of humankind, the sacrifice of one without sin. That is why God gave us the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice of His only begotten son, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the ultimate sacrifice, and the ultimate gift, a gift none of us deserves but one which we are privileged to be able to accept.”

  As had become my post-church tradition, I strolled through Washington Square Park and thought about the sermon. This was the first time that I had considered that God might love me even though it was a love that I didn’t deserve. The idea appealed to me deeply on an emotional level. But was it the truth?

  It was a Friday night. Most of my friends were out drinking. I was in my dorm room, hunched over my desk, thinking about a death that may or may not have occurred two thousand years ago.

  I found that Islam and Christianity had two very different accounts of what became of Jesus. Christianity holds that Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead. Islam holds that Jesus was never crucified. In the Muslim account, his enemies were deceived into believing that Jesus had been crucified—but in reality, he wasn’t.

  I once thought of this as an area where the two faiths’ different accounts made no practical difference. But as I learned more about Christianity, my mind changed. There may, in fact, be no two events more important to Christianity than the crucifixion and resurrection. It was Jesus’ sacrifice that allowed the forgiveness of sins. And Jesus’ resurrection—his ability to conquer hell and come back from the dead—shows that we too can return from death.

  It was understanding the importance of these events to Christianity that made them my topic of study tonight. As I had so often done lately, I tried to tease out one principle at a time.

  Before Jesus’ disciples saw him rise from the dead, they were scattered, demoralized, and frightened. With his resurrection, their faith was reinvigorated. The disciples believed that they saw Jesus alive again, saw him resurrected. The disciples preached this and were persecuted for it. Some of them were put to death while swearing by the resurrection.

  I wondered whether their account could be believed. I turned and opened the Qur’an that sat in another corner of my desk. Verse 4:157 addressed the crucifixion: “That they said (in boast), ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah’;—but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts.” Which one was right?

  What principle could distinguish between the two accounts? I thought of the persecution that Jesus’ disciples suffered because of their belief in the crucifixion and resurrection. They didn’t die for a set of ideals—it was for a set of facts. Do people die for a set of facts that they know to be false?

  I felt that I was onto something. Slowly, with each layer that I pulled back, I felt my ideas about God shifting.

  It had been a summer of internal upheaval. But when I first told Amy about the religious changes I was experiencing, I did so casually.

  She was down in North Carolina, and we were talking on the phone. I told Amy about the religious works I had been reading, like the Bible and C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. For the first time since I started work at Al Haramain, I sounded enthused about religion.

  There was one key comment that actually mattered to me in this discussion. I slipped it in near the very end, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “I guess I’ll eventually have to get baptized, then,” I said.

  There was silence on the other end of the line through which I could feel Amy smiling. “I have to say that makes me happy,” she said.

  She sounded as though her happiness embarrassed her.

  Late one night, with religious tomes spread out on my desk and strewn about my room, I found myself thinking of Abdul-Qaadir. I thought about the confidence with which he had told little Yusuf that his mother should be killed for leaving Islam. I absentmindedly picked up my hardcover copy of Muhammad bin Jamil Zino’s Islamic Guidelines for Individual and Social Reform. I turned right to the hadith that had been bothering me: “Whoever apostatizes from Islam should be killed.”

  I exhaled deeply, wondering how seriously one should take these injunctions in the twenty-first century, in the United States of America.

  I thought back to the night that I took my shahadah. I had woken up the next morning knowing that everything was different. I had woken up as a Muslim, and couldn’t wait to find out what my new life had in store. What would the future hold if I became Christian?

  twelve

  A QUIET NORMAL LIFE

  I was sitting across the table from a gray-haired, bearded Urdu speaker, discussing religious matters. My lunch companion wasn’t from Pakistan (where they speak Urdu); he was a white American from New Jersey.

  Shortly after I converted to Christianity in late 2000, I reached out to some of the Christian groups that minister to Muslims. One day I got a phone call from a man named Dick Bailey. He had worked as a missionary in Pakistan for years. This was our first meeting, and it wouldn’t be the last. I met him just as fall was turning to winter, with crisp winds and overcast skies.

  We were going to have lunch together. Dick said he was fine with all kinds of food, but didn’t like goat meat—a reference, no doubt, to the time he’d spent in Pakistan. We walked a few blocks to Johnny Rockets, the hamburger chain. An odd place for our first meal together.

  Seated in the faux 1950s-style diner where the jukebox blasted 1980s pop tunes, I told Dick about how I was born into a Jewish family, and about my conversion to Islam and later to Christianity. It was a story that, at the time, was unfamiliar and difficult to tell. As I spoke, I felt how disjointed and elliptical I must have sounded. I told Dick about my friend al-Husein, and how I soon needed to tell al-Husein that I was no longer Muslim.

  In an effort to boost my spirits, Dick told me of other people who had been Muslim and eventually came to Christ. After relaying one of the stories, Dick concluded by saying, “But he’s had to pay a price for becoming Christian.”

  “What price?” I thought I knew the answer.

  “Within Islam, the penalty for leaving the faith is death. There are a lot of Muslims who take that very seriously, even in the West.”

  “I’m worried about that,” I confessed. “Here I am in law school, exams are coming up in about a month. I have a good job lined up for the summer, and I want to do well. I don’t want to deal with someone threatening to kill me. I don’t even want to have to think about something like that.”

  “We all pay a price for our belief in Christ,” Dick said. “This isn’t the same kind of persecution, but when I go back and see my old friends from high school, a lot of them think I’m weird for becoming a devout Christian. The point is that all of us sacrifice in some way.”

  I looked at Dick blankly. He was right: it wasn’t the same, at all. People thought I was weird when I became Muslim. I could deal with people thinking I was weird. Living under the constant threat of being killed, that is a different story.
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  I told Dick that I didn’t want to tell al-Husein that I had become Christian. I wasn’t afraid of al-Husein; he wasn’t a threat to me. Or so I hoped. It was just that so much was new and uncertain. It would be hard enough to tell al-Husein that I wasn’t Muslim. I didn’t want to tell him that I had become a Christian on top of that. Dick turned to me as we stepped out onto Eighth Street. “Promise me something,” Dick said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not saying that you need to tell al-Husein that you’ve become a Christian. But I want you to promise me that if he asks, you won’t lie to him. He might ask you, ‘If you’re not a Muslim, then what have you become? Are you an atheist? Have you gone back to being a Jew?’ ”

  I nodded. “I won’t lie to him.” But I hoped that the question wouldn’t arise.

  I think you need someone to come out there, spend a weekend with you, pray with you, and help you reconnect with the faith.”

  This was al-Husein’s reply when I told him that I had ceased to believe in Islam. I was hesitant, but I recognized that this is what a good friend does. If you’re having a spiritual crisis, a good friend takes the time to see you and try to shepherd you through it. Nonetheless, he could tell that I was hesitant.

  “Look, I’m going to come to New York this weekend anyway, to spend time with Liana’s family,” al-Husein said. “I don’t have to stay with you. I’ll just come out to see you while I’m there.”

  We met up on a Sunday, in the early afternoon. We walked into the West Village together. Last time we had walked through the West Village was when al-Husein had come to help me move into my dorm room. Then we had both been disdainful of the decadence, the materialism, the disbelief that was so prevalent.

  We went to an Indian restaurant where I was a regular. Al-Husein handled the entire interaction impressively. As we strolled through the West Village, he didn’t mention Islam. He didn’t mention Allah. He asked about law school, and seemed genuinely interested in the classes I was taking, in the plans I had for the summer, in what I wanted to do when I graduated. It was this kind of proficiency with people that had so impressed me about al-Husein when we first got to know each other.

  After I spent a while telling him about law school, about my plans for the summer and my plans after graduation, I asked al-Husein about his life. He filled me in on how things were going at the Harvard Islamic Society, and told me about how he had continued to grow in his faith. Then al-Husein gently asked, “How is your study of Islam going?”

  He didn’t demand that I explain myself or my spiritual crisis. He wasn’t interrogating me. His transition felt like nothing more than an innocuous question.

  I nodded and smiled, aware that the conversation was about to become more serious. “As you know from our previous conversations,” I said, “I feel that the foundation for my belief in Islam has crumbled. I feel that I came to the faith for the wrong reasons. When I became a Muslim I was assured that the progressive vision for the faith was the true one, a version of Islam that upheld women’s rights, human rights, religious freedom, social justice. A version of Islam that was perfectly at peace with all other religions. But as I learn more about Islam, I realize that much of what I was at first told about it wasn’t accurate.”

  “Are you angry?” al-Husein asked. “Do you feel that people misled you?”

  He wanted to know if I was angry at him, if I felt that he had misled me into believing in a version of Islam that wasn’t real.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not angry at anybody. I think everybody who helped me along my path to Islam was genuine in what they believed. I don’t think anybody lied to me or purposefully misled me. But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel like my foundation for belief has been cut from under me.”

  Al-Husein nodded thoughtfully. “I know that you had a bad experience with the people you worked for out in Oregon. But you can’t let what a few people did sour you to the whole religion.”

  “I’m not. This is deeper than that.” I didn’t tell al-Husein that, when he had decided to become more serious about Islam, his own views were often indistinguishable from those of my coworkers at Al Haramain. Nor did I tell al-Husein that what ultimately led me away from Islam wasn’t dissatisfaction with any of the social teachings: it was the fact that I was persuaded by the case for another faith.

  “Let me give you some advice,” al-Husein said. “This is a very important issue. There are few issues more important than what you’re struggling with now. It isn’t important because of your friendship with me. And I’m not just saying that it’s important because I’m a Muslim. This is about your relationship with God. What happens to you in the next life could hinge on what you decide now.”

  I nodded. Everything that he said was correct.

  “Here’s my advice,” al-Husein said. “You need to ask yourself two questions. First, you need to ask yourself whether you believe in God.”

  I smiled. “That answer is easy.”

  “Then if you decide that you believe in God, the next question you have to answer is why Islam is the right religion.”

  I don’t think the surprise showed on my face. Al-Husein was perfectly right up until this second question. He was correct that the first thing anybody needs to ask is whether he believes in God. But the second question couldn’t be more wrong. I had once been so focused on Islam that I was unable to even conceive of following another faith, so I understood where al-Husein was coming from. But the second question to ask is not why Islam is right. If you think God exists, the next step is to compare various faiths.

  But my concern was not to score any debating points. My concern was al-Husein himself. I grew up without siblings, but while I was in college I had come to regard al-Husein as my brother. That may have changed after I left Islam, but I still cared for him. At the very least, he was still my half-brother.

  “Your ultimate duty is to God,” al-Husein said. “The question isn’t what I want; the question isn’t one of my pleasure. The question is what is pleasing to God.”

  “I agree with that,” I said. “I remember at Al Haramain we used to call it fi sabil Allah, that which is for the pleasure of Allah.”

  Al-Husein nodded. “That is a vital concept. Your intentions matter. As you struggle with your spiritual questions, you need to make sure that you’re seeking God’s desires and not following your own.”

  After the meal, al-Husein asked if there was a place around here where he could make salat. I told him that he could pray in Vanderbilt Hall, the building where the bulk of the law school’s classes were held. The dining area where snacks were served during the day was empty at night; I had made salat there during my first week at NYU. I suggested that al-Husein go there to pray.

  I walked al-Husein to the bathroom, where he would purify himself before prayer with wudu, the Islamic ablutions. “Why don’t you come and pray with me?” al-Husein asked.

  The offer was made with genuine warmth, and it was the right thing to ask. But I had the right counter. “It wouldn’t be fi sabil Allah,” I said. We had already discussed the importance of intentions. If I were to pray with al-Husein, my intentions wouldn’t have been pure. I wouldn’t have been trying to please God. The prayers would have been for al-Husein’s pleasure.

  We parted with a long hug. I told al-Husein that I would be there for him if he needed anything. If I could do anything for him as a friend, as a lawyer, whatever. Al-Husein had treated me in the way that a brother would. I realized that I should have told him about my new beliefs. But I couldn’t bring myself to do so, not yet. And he wasn’t the only one who I couldn’t yet bring myself to tell.

  It wasn’t until Amy’s last semester of college that she finally settled on law school. She had given some serious thought to going into education, but decided against it after a semester as a student teacher in a Winston-Salem high school convinced her that she had not the gift.

  She thought about getting a policy degree and thought about Pe
ace Corps, something that wouldn’t fit too well with married life. Even if law school was a last-minute choice for Amy (as it is for many people), she unsurprisingly aced her LSATs and got into most of the top schools to which she applied. When she finally decided to join me at NYU in the fall of 2001, I was overjoyed.

  I was at lunch with Sadik Huseny, the lapsed-Muslim classmate who took civil procedure with me during our first year. The first-year experience is intense in law school. You take all your academic courses with the same group of about a hundred other students. It makes for very large classes, but you nonetheless end up getting to know the other hundred students quite well. Sadik and I had formed a study group together in our first year, and he became a close friend. But we had seen far less of each other in our second year. He seemed a little uncomfortable around me, like there was something he wanted to discuss.

  I let him direct the conversation. There was some small talk about classes and our plans for the summer, but Sadik finally got to what must have been the purpose of the lunch. “So you’re Christian now?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  “Why is that?” he asked. “I first get to know you and you’re a devout Muslim, you’re praying five times a day, then suddenly you’re Christian. If you were dissatisfied with Islam, why didn’t you just stop believing in anything? Why did you latch on to Christianity so quickly?”

  “Because I believe in God,” I said. I wasn’t sure Sadik would understand this; I knew that many people would not. “I believe in God, and Islam was part of my search to understand who God really is. I didn’t just leave Islam and become Christian because I was unhappy with Islam, Sadik. I left Islam and became Christian because I became convinced that my earlier ideas about God were wrong. I became convinced that I could find the truth in another faith.”

  Sadik shrugged. “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure it makes sense.”