by Scott Shane
Muslims attuned to the nuances of language and emphasis had a view of Awlaki that might have surprised the journalists who described him as representing a “new generation” of clerics. “I would not have called Awlaki a moderate,” said Ahmed Younis, a Muslim lawyer and activist who heard him preach several times in the years before 9/11 and pegged him as a conservative, if not rigid, Salafi. “Moderation is not just about violence. It’s about everything. He was not an extremist—just a little politicized, tapping into history. But not especially progressive.”
In retrospect, it is easy to see Awlaki’s views evolving from the initial, emotional reaction that he had shared privately in the e-mail to his brother—that the attacks were “horrible” and that he was “very upset.” As the weeks passed, like many others, he was put off by the notion, commonly voiced at the time, that Americans had suffered a “loss of innocence” and were somehow unique as a target of large-scale killing. He seemed determined not to take sides either with Muslims overseas who cheered the plotters or with an aroused and self-righteous America. When he condemned the attacks on New York and Washington, he simultaneously condemned American actions that, in his view, had resulted in the deaths of innocents—Muslim innocents. He pushed a moral equivalence that few Americans were in a mood to hear. In his segment on Awlaki, Suarez of PBS included a snippet of a sermon in which Awlaki attempted this balancing act, using the early reports that the attacks had left six thousand dead:
The fact that the US has administered the death and homicide of over one million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the US is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians does not justify the killing of one US civilian in New York City or Washington, DC, and the deaths of 6,000 civilians in New York and Washington, DC, does not justify the death of one civilian in Afghanistan. And that is the difference between right and wrong, evil and good, that everybody’s claiming to talk about.
Looking back years later, Suarez gave a shrewd assessment of Awlaki, who clearly had impressed him deeply. “While talking of his feelings of grievance, he chose his words carefully,” Suarez said. “One could walk away from the Friday sermon, or from the interview, struck by how in his rhetoric he could dance right up to the edge of condoning violence, taking the side of anti-American forces in the Muslim world, and then, just as carefully, reel it back in, pulling the punch, softening the context, covering the sharp-edged scalpel of his words in a reassuring sheath.” Despite the reassurances, Suarez said, Awlaki was “uncompromising in his view that the United States had much to answer for in the Islamic world,” saying that “the US needed to change its approach just as much as Muslims did.”
That attempt at balance animated Awlaki’s public statements. Osama bin Laden, Awlaki told the Washington Times in October, “has been able to take advantage of the sentiment that is out there regarding U.S. foreign policy.” Again, he proffered an equipoise of wrongs. “We’re totally against what the terrorists had done. We want to bring those who had done this to justice,” he said. “But we’re also against the killing of civilians in Afghanistan.” In an online chat with the Washington Post, he repeated the mantra, while throwing in, as a sweetener, some praise for American liberties: “Keep in mind that I have no sympathy for whoever committed the crimes of Sept. 11th. But that doesn’t mean that I would approve the killing of my Muslim brothers and sisters in Afghanistan. Even though this is a dissenting view nowadays—but as an American I do have the right to have a contrary opinion.”
To a dispassionate observer, Awlaki’s balancing act looked logical: 9/11 was a horror, after all, because utterly innocent people had died, and equally innocent people had died of malnutrition and disease in Iraq as a result of American-led sanctions and were now dying in the bombardment of Afghanistan. The same two-part, pacifist message ruffled few feathers when it was expressed by Catholic priests or Lutheran ministers, as it often was in that period. But for Muslims, there was no dispassionate standard. The moment demanded that they prove their loyalty to the United States without qualification.
For many Muslims, the resounding phrase of President Bush after 9/11—“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”—seemed to announce a new set of rules, unforgiving and accusatory, to be specially applied to them. Criticize American foreign policy too severely, it implied, and you have effectively decided to join the terrorists. To underscore the point, Bush implied that Al Qaeda’s attacks had nothing to do with American foreign policy—with its stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, for instance, or its support for Israel. “Americans are asking: Why do they hate us?” Bush said. “They hate our freedoms,” he answered, “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” But for American Muslims like Awlaki, those words began to ring ironically in the fraught months after 9/11: for them to exercise freedom of speech by criticizing America’s foreign policy record was to invite suspicion and bitter rejection.
The Bush speech to Congress, interrupted with applause twenty-nine times in forty-one minutes, was widely quoted and framed the mainstream American reaction to the attacks. It was also a frontal assault on Awlaki’s attempt to define himself as the man in the middle. In effect, the president of the United States was saying that in this crisis Muslim Americans had to embrace their country, right or wrong. Any attempt to express a nuanced view, linking Al Qaeda’s atrocities to American foreign policy, was out of line; it meant you were “with the terrorists.” So much for Awlaki’s notion that he and fellow Muslim Americans could serve as a bridge, or for his hope to “use this for the good of all of us.”
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There was a double filtering process going on, as the fall of 2001 progressed and Awlaki tried out this role of bridge builder that he had assigned himself. First, there was the sorting that was natural for journalists, who tended to set aside any dissonant notes in the narrative as they portrayed Awlaki as a peace-loving family man, as appalled as anyone by the September atrocities. In the outtakes of the Washington Post video, for instance, Awlaki strongly condemned the US war in Afghanistan, said he didn’t trust the American media, and said he relied on Arabic and European news sources to tell the truth about the war. He had been upset by the Gulf War as a college student, and now, he suggested, history was repeating itself: “We have the memories of Iraq fresh in our minds—we were told in 1990 this was going to be a war against Saddam Hussein. Well, after ten years he’s still in power and the ones who are suffering are the Iraqi people—one million in Iraq died.” Now, with the new war in Afghanistan, he said, “we’re hearing that, well, the reason is to get the terrorists—but then, here we go, I mean—casualties for the civilians.” He described a bomb flattening a mud house in Afghanistan, killing a father and his seven children—an episode he claimed was omitted from US press coverage. “This leaves a strong imprint on us,” he said, arguing that such mistakes were bloody disasters “that our fellow citizens in America don’t see.” None of those comments made it into the final Ramadan video, and not because of any sinister intent. It just didn’t fit the story.
Second, there was the imam’s own careful calibration of how to reach out through the national media to Americans who, after years of never giving Islam a thought, were suddenly obsessed with it and frightened by it. Asked by NPR to discuss the competitive voices of Osama bin Laden and Muslim moderates—implicitly including him—Awlaki said, “It is the radical voices that are taking over” and “All of the moderate voices are silenced in the Muslim world.” When the religion reporter for The New York Times called him for a story about how prominent Muslims had toned down the pre-9/11 rhetoric that had been fiercely critical of the United States, Awlaki was happy to oblige. As often in this period, he displayed a subtle skill in gauging what the reporter was looking for and then delivering it. “In the past we were oblivious,” he said. “We didn’t really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might
have tolerated in the past, we won’t tolerate any more.” He acknowledged that previously “there were some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way.”
Actually, though the Times and NPR made no mention of it, Awlaki himself made a few inflammatory statements in the days after 9/11. Like any politician who offers a restrained performance on Meet the Press on Sunday morning and takes a different tone while speaking to a fired-up partisan crowd on Sunday night, Awlaki adjusted his message to his audience. On September 17, answering questions on the Egyptian theologian Qaradawi’s IslamOnline.net, a popular gathering spot for Muslims on the web, Awlaki was indeed “moderate” in most of his answers. He framed the 9/11 attacks as a “heinous crime,” praised Bush and other top American officials for warning against discrimination against Muslims, and said that “many Muslims” were among the fallen police officers and firefighters “who are the heroes of this tragedy.” He acknowledged “extremism” among Muslims and declared: “We should come out strong in our disapproval and condemnation. This is a chance for us to show the real face of Islam.” But when he fielded a question about the hidden hand of Israel in the September 11 plot, a ridiculous conspiracy theory beginning to circulate online, Awlaki not only accepted the premise—he went on to fan the flames:
Q: What do you think about the possibility of involvement by Israeli Mossad?
A: Add to that the fact that there has been an uprising in Palestine that was becoming very popular while the popularity of the Israeli response was plummeting. Israel was going through a serious PR crisis. Israel has even hired U.S. public relations firms to try to clean up its reputation and Ariel Sharon’s damaged image.
Also there were lawsuits filed against the war criminal Ariel Sharon in Belgium. That was a serious blow to Israel to have its highest official in such a position.
Now doesn’t the timing of the attacks raise a question mark???
Later in the same exchange, Awlaki called the evidence emerging in the first few days “perplexing” and floated a cockamamie theory of his own to steer the blame for the attacks away from Muslims, noting the sinful lifestyles of the accused hijackers: “You have a right to be confused. It appears that these people were victims rather than hijackers. It seems that the FBI went into the roster of the airplanes and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default.”
It was hard, Awlaki wrote, to imagine “someone who was drunk the previous night, or in a strip bar, things that are agreed upon among Muslims as major sins in Islam, to give up their lives the next day for the sake of a religious claim. It doesn’t make sense at all. There is something peculiar happening???”
Awlaki’s willingness to engage in such errant speculation was revealing. But he didn’t repeat the outlandish claims, at least publicly, after evidence clearly implicating Al Qaeda was reported. Like many Muslims in the first days after the attacks, he was trying to make sense of a befuddling set of facts and engaging in wishful thinking that his own beleaguered religious minority might yet avoid blame for the tragedy.
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In sorting out what Awlaki really felt or believed as he coped with the aftershocks of 9/11, it is worth taking note of just how young and unformed he was as he started the job outside Washington in January 2001. He had not yet turned thirty. He was just seven years out of college. He had not made a final decision on what career to pursue—or whether to settle permanently in the United States or Yemen. His father, after losing the battle to keep him on an engineering track, had switched tactics and now hoped his eldest child would still follow in his footsteps by earning an American doctorate that could prepare him for high-level posts in Yemen, which desperately needed talent like Anwar’s. His application to the doctoral program at George Washington University was quite revealing. It required a two-page “Statement of Purpose,” written in the summer or fall of 2000, in which he came across as strikingly uncertain, even immature, hardly the smooth-talking imam mastering media interviews just a year later. The statement was a mix of boasts about academic achievements, half-baked apologies for academic lapses, and a not-quite-convincing claim that all his life has been a preparation for an EdD degree at George Washington. It was a combination any veteran admissions officer would recognize, but it did not suggest a fully formed worldview or a settled career plan.
In the national high school examinations given in his graduation year, Awlaki asserted, he had scored in the top twenty out of fifty-two thousand students who took the exams. “My inclination was towards human and social sciences,” he wrote. “But the tradition was that students with high grades should go into medicine or engineering,” he added, tactfully leaving his father out of it. Hence his choice of civil engineering as his major at Colorado State. He blamed his abysmal grades his sophomore year on his unsuitability for the engineering field (not mentioning his Afghan adventure): “I wasn’t enjoying my major at all. At the same time I was enjoying and doing well in the elective courses, which I handpicked to satisfy my true desires.” After he graduated from college in 1994, he said, he had learned of a World Bank program starting up in Yemen to build four community colleges and to train the faculty and staff to serve in them. “That provided me with an opportunity to enter into the field I loved most: Teaching,” he wrote. He had talked with the Yemeni officials in charge of the community college project, and “They are granting me a full scholarship to pursue a doctorate degree.” He had delayed starting the degree, he said, only to “thoroughly investigate my options. I spent lengthy days and nights surfing the net, visiting one university website after another.” And then, the requisite flattery: “The only curriculum that perfectly satisfied my aspirations was the HRD program at GWU,” he wrote, adding italics to emphasize his attraction to the human resource development program.
A strong recommendation from his adviser at San Diego State predicted that after he finished his doctorate “he will become an education leader in the higher education system of Yemen,” running one of the new community colleges or helping to train faculty for other institutions. In case that seemed like mere speculation, it was backed up by another recommendation from a top official of Yemen’s Ministry of Education, who wrote that he had been advising Awlaki for three years on his training. “We are preparing Mr. al-Awlaki to lead a Technical Education Department at the University of Sanaa, Faculty of Education,” the official wrote. “A new department in the making.” Awlaki ended his “Statement of Purpose” with a banal description of his “research interests,” whose vagueness betrays indecision at best: “My research interests,” he wrote, “would be in the integration of the different skills and knowledge learned in the program.” If anything might have sunk his application, surely it would have been this hapless declaration of…nothing at all. But he was a student with a decent record, an evident eagerness to learn, and sponsors back in Yemen. George Washington had dispatched a letter admitting him to the doctoral program, with a major field of education administration and policy studies, on December 12, 2000, just a few weeks before Awlaki was to report for duty at Dar Al-Hijrah.
What was most astonishing about all the paperwork Awlaki submitted for the degree was what he left out. He did not say a single word about his work as an imam at two mosques over the previous seven years. In his statement of purpose, he wrote at length about his one year of teaching elementary school in Yemen when he was eighteen and did not mention the teaching experience he had undoubtedly accumulated as a cleric and counselor in Denver and San Diego from age twenty-three to twenty-nine. That this was no oversight is proven by the résumé he prepared for the George Washington application. Under “Experience” it lists the stint in the Yemeni elementary school more than a decade earlier, and an even older part-time job as a “data analyst” on a World Bank project when he was in high school. But it omits the successively more impressive jobs he had held as an imam. It made for a strangely skimpy
résumé for a twenty-nine-year-old, to say the least.
What could possibly have motivated Awlaki to censor the vast majority of his work experience—experience quite relevant to the field of education—as he applied to the doctoral program? George Washington officials clearly learned about his clerical experience, since they offered him the Muslim chaplain post. But the written application remains a puzzle. Conceivably Awlaki, or someone who advised him, thought George Washington University might look askance at his mosque career and doubt his claimed devotion to the field of education. Perhaps, even in the pre-9/11 period, he was worried about anti-Muslim or antireligious sentiments among American university administrators. What seems beyond dispute is that when Awlaki started at Dar Al-Hijrah at the beginning of 2001, with the encouragement of his father, he was seriously considering taking up a post in academic administration in Yemen. His father confirms it. “I convinced him that he should have a career in education,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “And I said, ‘If you want to record things about Islam, that’s no problem.’ ” In other words, his father suggested that he pursue a conventional academic path and relegate his preaching to a part-time affair, sort of a hobby. That would be another road not taken.
If he began his work in Falls Church with doubts about how it would go, they must soon have been put to rest. He connected with the more sophisticated Muslim community of northern Virginia just as he had in Denver and San Diego. Umar Lee, a young American convert who was active at Dar Al-Hijrah, recalled a dynamic, friendly preacher with a winning personal touch. By comparison with older immigrant clerics, “Anwar was just a much cooler guy,” Lee said. “He was walking through the lobby one day, and he said, ‘Hey, Umar, how you doing?’ I don’t think we’d even been introduced,” but Awlaki had figured out who Lee was and remembered his name. “He’d see us playing basketball and walk over and play with the ball. He wouldn’t join the game, but he’d talk to us,” Lee said.