by Scott Shane
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There was some irony in the fact that the student who had spent the holidays in Saudi Arabia had maintained his freewheeling American lifestyle, while the student who stayed in Colorado had embraced Islam. But the pattern of a Muslim visitor to the United States seeking solace in the clarity of religion when faced with the disorienting temptations and excesses of an American campus was well established. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, had spent several years in North Carolina in the 1980s, earning an engineering degree at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro while spending his free time with the bearded religious students whom other Muslims on campus mocked as “the mullahs.” The Egyptian scholar and Muslim Brotherhood leader known as the father of radical, anti-Western Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, had a famously allergic reaction to American materialism and sexual openness. While in the United States on a fellowship for teachers in 1948–49, Qutb (pronounced KOO-tub) spent time in New York, Washington, DC, California, and Greeley, Colorado, just a forty-minute drive from Fort Collins. It was a dry town of ten thousand people, known as “the city of churches,” hardly Sodom or Gomorrah. Nothing captures Qutb’s horror at what he considered American licentiousness better than his description of a church dance, of all things, overseen by a pastor: “The dance floor was lit with red and yellow and blue lights, and with a few white lamps. And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.”
The atmosphere was not the only thing “full of desire,” one is tempted to add, upon reading this 1951 Qutb essay, entitled “The America I Have Seen.” And it gets worse, or perhaps better:
The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it. She knows it lies in clothes: in bright colors that awaken primal sensations, and in designs that reveal the temptations of the body—and in American girls these are sometimes live, screaming temptations! Then she adds to all this the fetching laugh, the naked looks, and the bold moves, and she does not ignore this for one moment or forget it!
Qutb’s reverie is by no means exclusive to Islam; there are plenty of analogical anecdotes in the history of Christian fundamentalism and Orthodox Judaism. But apart from its entertainment value, the essay sheds a fascinating light on Awlaki, for whom sex would become a dangerous trap and Qutb would become a critical influence.
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The tension between Khan and his devout roommate grew, coming to a head not long after the Super Bowl confrontation. During one cold spell, Khan decided not to go to Friday prayers, a standard ritual even for many casually observant Muslims. Awlaki could not believe it. “He kept knocking on my door. I said, ‘You go, I’m not going.’ He said, ‘What do you mean you’re not going?’ ”
Awlaki told Khan he didn’t want the television—Khan’s television—turned on when he was home, a condition Khan grudgingly accepted. But one day a few weeks later, Awlaki came home to find Khan watching a movie on cable—nothing racy, Khan said, though he didn’t remember which film. Awlaki flew into a rage. “He came into the living room and threw the TV on the floor and smashed it,” Khan recalled. Khan told Awlaki, “This isn’t working,” and moved out. After that, when they met on campus, Awlaki was polite but unrepentant.
“He didn’t apologize—not at all,” Khan said. “I saw him a couple of weeks later, and he said, ‘You left some books.’ He brought them by. I ended up sleeping on a couch with friends the rest of the semester.”
Yemen is a conservative Muslim country, but Awlaki did not bring this prudish intolerance from Sanaa to Fort Collins. It smacks of the callow certainty of the recent convert. And there was another factor, as Ghassan Khan pointed out. In both Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Khan said, social contacts can be quite stratified by class and religious views. As a teenager in Sanaa, Awlaki would have been unlikely to spend much time with religious hard-liners. In America, a very diverse Muslim minority was thrown together by circumstances. “I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and I never met people like the Tablighi,” Khan said. “If Anwar had stayed in Yemen, I don’t think he would have changed.” Nasser al-Awlaki shared that view. He told a visitor years later of his son’s embrace of piety, “What happened, happened in America.”
Nasser al-Awlaki was conventionally religious, family members say; to grow up as a Muslim in Yemen is a bit like growing up as a Baptist in the rural American South—the fundamentals of belief, scriptural knowledge, spiritual vocabulary, and worship come with the territory. But along with his first cousin, Saleh bin Fareed al-Awlaki, Nasser had attended the British-run Aden College, a private high school on the Arabian Sea that was no hotbed of Islamism. And unlike Qutb, he was overjoyed with what he found in America after arriving on a Fulbright scholarship in 1966. He was the classic aspiring Third World technocrat, coming to America in search of education and taking his new skills and broadened worldview home to try to help his struggling country. In that mission he succeeded spectacularly, serving as minister of agriculture and in high-level university posts, and eventually dispatching two of his three sons, first Anwar and then Ammar, to America with the expectation that they would follow a similar path. Religion was very much a sideshow in the family’s life, and Nasser was concerned that it might derail his sons, family members say. When the middle son, Omar, began to visit the mosque in Sanaa too often for his father’s liking, Nasser actually prohibited him from going there. “He said, ‘If you want to pray, pray at home and don’t congregate with others,’ ” said the youngest brother, Ammar. “He was afraid he’d be politically inclined toward the Muslim Brotherhood,” which had a branch in Yemen, Ammar recalled.
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Anwar’s American citizenship was an accident of his father’s education. He was born on April 22, 1971, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where his father was a graduate student in agricultural science at New Mexico State University. Four months later, the family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where Nasser worked on his PhD at the University of Nebraska. Finally the family relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota, moving into a house near Nasser’s teaching job at the College of Agriculture of the University of Minnesota. Anwar went to Chelsea Heights Elementary School near Como Park in St. Paul, and his father described him as “a cute little boy who enjoyed himself very much in school and outside.” His parents had parties with other graduate students from around the world and went on vacation to northern Minnesota’s lake country in the summers, swimming, fishing, and hiking. “Anwar had a beautiful childhood in America,” his father said. Nasser and Saleha’s second child, a girl, was also born in the United States.
But work in Yemen called, and the family arrived back in Sanaa on the last day of 1977. Anwar was enrolled in Sanaa’s only private school, Azal Modern School, where he quickly caught up, though his English was better than his Arabic. He stayed in the school, favored by Yemen’s elite, until graduation in 1989, a kid who carried piles of books on vacation and took a particular interest in history. Islam was part of the curriculum at Azal, as at every school in Yemen, and Anwar prayed and fasted during Ramadan like everyone else, his father said. He showed no special interest in religion and in his high school days never spoke of becoming an imam. In fact, his brother Ammar remembers their mother repeatedly putting a prayer rug in Anwar’s suitcase before he left for Colorado State and Anwar repeatedly taking it out; his attitude seemed to be, Ammar said, “I’m going to America and I won’t need this.”
But Anwar, like his schoolmates, was excited by the jihad of the mujahedeen, the holy warriors fighting for Islam—with the help of the United States—against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The concept of jihad, malleable and disputed within modern Islam, would become central to Anwar
al-Awlaki’s evolution, and here it makes its first notable appearance. For boys of their generation, said Walid al-Saqaf, a neighbor of the Awlaki family in Sanaa in the 1980s, the guerrilla war to oust the godless Soviets was an inspiring, heroic cause. “There was constant talk of the heroes who were leaving Yemen to join the fight and become martyrs and go to paradise,” recalled Saqaf, now an Internet activist in Yemen. In the Awlakis’ neighborhood, families would regularly gather to watch the latest videotapes brought by young men returning from the war. “I recall Anwar as a skinny teenager with brains,” Saqaf said.
Students who did especially well in school were permitted to opt out of military service and instead spend a year teaching. For Anwar, who was no athlete, this escape from the drudgery and physical toll of army service held great appeal. So for a year after high school he taught in an elementary school in Dhela’a, an hour’s drive from Sanaa. A decade later, applying to start a doctoral program in education, he recalled the stint with pleasure: “That was my first exposure to the field of teaching, and I loved it.”
By all accounts Nasser was a loving and supportive father, but he did not hesitate to direct his son’s education. He thought Anwar should get an engineering education and specialize in hydrology and water resources, a topic Nasser had himself written about and a critical need in Yemen, where groundwater sources have been dwindling for decades. Nasser spoke with friends at the US Agency for International Development in Sanaa, who advised him to consider Colorado State, which had a strong hydrology program. According to Nasser, his USAID friends also advised him to have Anwar apply for an American government scholarship reserved for foreigners and say he was Yemeni, which was not untrue—he grew up with dual citizenship. (Much later, Anwar wrote: “My father at the time was a Minister of Agriculture and the Americans were happy to make some exceptions for him.”) The day after he landed in Chicago on June 5, 1990, however, Anwar applied for a Social Security card and listed his place of birth as Sanaa, presumably a deliberate misstatement to protect his scholarship offer. Some twelve years later, after the country had been unimaginably altered and Awlaki had taken an unexpected path, government officials would discover and pursue the old teenage falsehood.
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At some point after the blowup with Ghassan Khan, Awlaki seems to have settled into a less obstreperous, more reasonable style. But his new devotion to Islam lasted. He became an active member of Colorado State’s Muslim Student Association, serving for two years as association president and chairman of dawah, or outreach, at the little mosque at the edge of campus, said Yusuf Siddiqui, a friend and fellow MSA activist. Siddiqui said that in the wide range of Muslim students Awlaki would have been considered a moderate, somewhere between the most rigid conservatives and the libertines who shrugged off bans on drinking and sex. He was elected MSA president in a race against a Saudi student who was far stricter. “I remember Anwar saying, ‘He would want your mom to cover her face. I’m not like that,’ ” Siddiqui said.
But in the pre-9/11 era, few university officials paid much attention to the internal politics of the Muslim minority on campus, and the most conservative contingent expressed quite extreme social and political views. “I felt like the MSA was a bunch of radicals and fundamentalists,” said a Muslim woman, born and raised in Kuwait, who studied at Colorado State when Awlaki was there but didn’t know him. She recalled an aggressive male student with a big beard declaring in a panel discussion that Muslims who lived like most American students on campus “were going to hell.” The woman ended up settling in the United States but said she was no longer a practicing Muslim.
Siddiqui said that Awlaki’s flawless American English sometimes made fellow students forget that his adolescence, and the shaping of his personality, had taken place in the very foreign setting of Yemen. “If you made some pop culture reference, he might not recognize it,” said Siddiqui, who had grown up in Colorado. Once, on a picnic jaunt to Big Thompson Canyon about a half hour’s drive from campus, Anwar astonished his American and Americanized friends by climbing a nearby mountain barefoot. “He just said, ‘That’s how we do it in Yemen,’ ” Siddiqui recalled. Sometimes it was hard to know whether Awlaki’s behavior reflected his upbringing in Yemen or his newfound religiosity. Once, when a female American student stopped by the MSA to ask for help with math homework, “He said to me in a low tone of voice, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ ” Siddiqui said. The budding ladies’ man that Khan had observed in the early months of freshman year now, after his embrace of Islamic piety, felt uncomfortable being alone with a female student.
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As an MSA activist, Awlaki was becoming more overtly political, and naturally his attention fell on the Afghan jihad that had been so powerful a part of his milieu as a teenager in Sanaa, where he had spent many hours watching videotapes of the jihad and hearing the tales told by Yemeni men returning from battle. In the winter break of his sophomore year, in late 1991, he took off for Afghanistan, by then legendary among Muslims around the world as the place where a band of devout warriors of Allah had defeated a superpower. After the Gulf War, he wrote later, in a possibly embellished account published in Inspire magazine, “I started taking my religion more seriously and I took the step of traveling to Afghanistan to fight.” The notion of a skinny, pampered American college student taking up arms in a brutal guerrilla war may seem like a stretch, and it is quite possible that Awlaki was glorifying a bit of jihad tourism. The Soviet Army had pulled out nearly two years earlier. But it was not implausible that he aspired to join the fight: as he prepared to leave, the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul still held power, and various rival factions of mujahedeen were still battling government forces, though the combat was scattered and nothing like it was at the height of the war.
Not surprisingly, the experience appears to have been a letdown. Anwar’s younger brother, Ammar, later asked him about his Afghanistan trip. Anwar said he had not fought because there was so much snow and it was so cold. According to Ammar, Anwar had responded disgustedly, “We did nothing.” Ammar added, “When Anwar says we did nothing, it means that Anwar, who used every minute of his day, was frustrated.” Undoubtedly anticipating resistance, Anwar did not tell his father about the Afghan trip until after it had occurred, Nasser al-Awlaki said. “I actually only knew about that trip after he returned to the US, and I was glad he had returned to continue his studies,” Nasser said. “I think he stayed only a few weeks and it was after the war ended there, when Americans were traveling there freely.”
In the version published later in Inspire, Anwar himself suggested that he had found the experience so moving that he was prepared to drop out of Colorado State and join the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, but his plans were overtaken by events. “I spent a winter there,” he wrote, returning to Colorado “with the intention of finishing up in the US and leaving to Afghanistan for good. My plan was to travel back in the summer.” But in the spring of 1992, the last Soviet-backed leader, Najibullah, resigned: “Kabul was opened by the mujahedeen and I saw that the war was over and ended up staying in the US.” But if Afghanistan had been a frigid disappointment, he didn’t let on. He wore a distinctive Afghan hat all over campus, a please-ask-me-about-it affectation that spoke of a young man trying on an identity. He started quoting Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian scholar who provided theological justification for the Afghan jihad and was a mentor to Osama bin Laden.
Given Awlaki’s later career, his belated visit to the most famous and celebrated modern jihad takes on special meaning, even if he never got near combat. It is also an opportunity to set aside the indelible coloring of 9/11 and recall that the stirring saga of the Afghan mujahedeen, with which Awlaki had grown up and which inspired his college travel, was an American-funded, American-backed, American-celebrated affair. Each year of his presidency, Ronald Reagan had lavished praise on the grizzled, bearded Islamists he called “freedom fighters,” and he had backed their David-and-Goliath battle with billions in cov
ert aid via the CIA. “To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple handheld weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom,” he wrote in one of his annual Afghanistan Day proclamations. “Their courage teaches us a great lesson—that there are things in this world worth defending.” Like the CIA strategists and American politicians whose vision would be hailed in the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War, Awlaki was inspired by the victory of the mujahedeen. But while the Americans credited the outcome to the Stinger missile and an open congressional checkbook, Awlaki attributed the triumph to Allah.
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Awlaki’s extended absence in the wilds of Afghanistan had left him way behind in his studies. Ghassan Khan remembers him turning up in a fluid dynamics class late in the spring semester and pleading with his former roommate to share his notes from the class. “He said, ‘I really need to get an A on the final, because I got a zero on everything else,’ ” Khan said. Not long after that, Awlaki learned that he had lost his US government scholarship, a move he later suggested might have been punishment for his growing Islamic activism. But by his own admission, and the recollection of some classmates, he had missed many classes because of both his travels and his extracurricular interests, so his suggestion of political martyrdom is not especially convincing. “Shortly after my scholarship was terminated, I enquired for the reason behind such a drastic step,” he wrote. “The answer I got was that my grades were dipping too low. It is true that my focus had now shifted away from school and my grades suffered because of my travel to Afghanistan and my role as head of the Muslim Student Association on campus.” His Colorado State transcript confirms the deteriorating grades: despite borrowing Khan’s notes, he got an F in that fluid dynamics course, and his grade point average for the whole 1991–92 school year was a meager 1.0, a D average. His father said he thought the scholarship had ended because of USAID budget cuts, which is possible, though it is easy to imagine his embarrassed son offering his father that explanation rather than owning up to his woeful performance. Nasser confirmed that he had paid his son’s tuition and expenses for his last two years at Colorado State.