My Year Inside Radical Islam (10 page)

“I don’t think he should compare their worship to the barking of dogs,” I said.

I was sitting in the corner of the office farthest from the door, by the desktop computer. The office was supposed to hold three workers, and was fairly cramped for those purposes. There were two side doors. One led to a bathroom; the other led to a supply closet packed with thousands of Islamic books, booklets, and pamphlets. There was a CPR poster on one wall. To make the poster more Islamically appropriate, somebody had drawn beards on the illustrated figures demonstrating proper CPR technique, even on the female characters. The same person had also drawn sunglasses over their eyes, although it wasn’t clear why the sunglasses made the illustrations more theologically acceptable.

I had two office mates, Charlie Jones and Dennis Geren. I had already noticed Charlie’s frequent absences, although I didn’t yet know why. Dennis was rarely gone, even after work hours had ended, since he lived in the Musalla. In return for the free housing, Dennis also did custodial chores and let Pete pay him a very low salary. Dawood and his wife and kids also lived in the building, in the downstairs area where the women would pray. They would soon leave for Saudi Arabia, since Dawood didn’t want to raise his kids in the infidel West. Perhaps Sheikh Hassan had gotten to him.

Today, Dennis wasn’t in the office, but Charlie sat next to me, a few feet down the long wooden counter that made a 90-degree turn along the wall and served as a desk for all of us.

Hearing our exchange, Charlie turned and said, “We shouldn’t refer to anybody as dogs. Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that you should be soft on the Muslims and hard on the
kufar.
We shouldn’t go around calling other Muslims dogs.” Charlie spoke softly, nodding emphatically as he spoke.

I knew that dogs were held in low regard in Islam. I learned this when al-Husein and I visited Turkey together. We spent a lot of time with Turkish Muslim groups irate about the forced march to secularization orchestrated by Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey. One night, as we were bemoaning Istanbul’s spiritual emptiness, al-Husein pointed out a dog behind a fence by one of the mosques. He said that many Muslims find scenes such as that offensive. When I asked why, he told me about a
hadith
where the Prophet said that the angels refuse to enter a house with a dog in it. So I understood why Charlie said that you shouldn’t refer to other Muslims as dogs. (Later I’d see that Islamic radicals’ distaste for dogs ran far deeper than I suspected.)

Despite Charlie’s statement, I suspected that he’d agree with Salim that the Naqshbandis were religious deviants. I suspected that his only objection was to actually calling them dogs. After only a few days on the job, I could already sense an environment where religious beliefs that differed from the norm were sniffed out and condemned. But I didn’t ask Charlie his view of the Naqshbandis. I was just starting to settle in at Al Haramain, and didn’t want to begin by drawing out areas of disagreement with my coworkers—especially not those areas of disagreement that could make me unpopular.

Instead, I kept browsing Salim Morgan’s Web page, trying to tune Yunus out. I clicked on the “Naqshabandia Tariqa Exposed” link that first caught my eye. The Web page it led me to reprinted an anonymous pamphlet denouncing the Naqshbandis. The pamphlet stated: “Over the years many deviant movements have arisen in the Muslim world bent on corrupting the teachings of Islaam
¹
and thereby mislead the Muslims.” It said that the Naqshbandis were “one of the most common and dangerous” of these movements. Indeed, the Naqshbandis, “while wearing the cloak of Islaam, are striving to destroy it from within, in a vain attempt to extinguish the light of Islaam and divert the Muslims from the true religion.”

The pamphleteer’s main denunciation of the Naqshbandis was that they were guilty of
shirk:
that is, they had compromised their monotheism by associating partners with Allah. The example that most caught my attention involved Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 874) and Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922). Both men were mystics who attempted to vanish into the object of their love, Allah. They were still revered in mystic Muslim circles because they had
succeeded,
reaching states of spiritual ecstasy where they no longer remembered themselves, but knew only Allah. In this state, Bistami famously declared, “I am the Truth”—as had al-Hallaj. In fact, it is often said that al-Hallaj was executed for these words when the religious authorities mistook his God-consciousness for a declaration of divinity.

Overlooking the nuances of the Sufi desire for the annihilation of self in service of God, the pamphlet declared that the Naqshbandis disregarded a core tenet of Islam, that Allah is the only truth. The book
The Naqshbandi Way
stated, “Whoever recites Bismillaah and the verses Amana’r-Rasul until the end, even a single time will attain a high rank and a great position. . . . He will get what the Prophets and Saints could not get, and will arrive at the stage of Abu Yazid Al-Bistami, the Imam of the order who said: ‘I am the Truth (al-Haqq).’ ”

The pamphlet responded in a rage:

This was the first time I had seen another Muslim laud the execution of al-Hallaj. Until then, I was always told that al-Hallaj’s proclamation was deeply misunderstood by the authorities who killed him. (Although I would later learn that the real reasons behind al-Hallaj’s execution are likely more complex than the Sufi narrative holds, in this instance both the Naqshbandis and their critic accepted the same set of facts.)

I glanced quickly through the rest of the pamphlet. I saw that the Naqshbandis were condemned for believing that Allah was everywhere, rather than being only above in the heavens; for believing that Muslims and non-Muslims are equal; and for believing that there is hidden knowledge within Islam.

I had nothing but good feelings toward the Muslims with whom I had taken my
shahadah.
They were men of intense faith. When I spent time with them in Italy, they seemed to strike a rare balance: rejecting Western civilization’s materialism and licentiousness but remaining skeptical of the extremes of fundamentalism. But I took two clear messages from Salim Morgan’s Web site. The first was that I was not to speak well of the men who were present at my
shahadah.
The second lesson was more general, but just as unmistakable: I needed to watch what I said.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was one of the first steps in my indoctrination. When I was a campus activist at Wake Forest, I was always eager to speak against injustice, and often considered myself courageous when I did. But my approach at Al Haramain was the opposite. I recognized that disagreeing with prevailing religious sentiments could stigmatize me. My approach, starting with my first week on the job, was to avoid making waves, to try to understand where the others were coming from, and to emphasize our religious commonality rather than argue over differences.

But in December of 1998, thinking and believing like a Wahhabi seemed far removed from who I was. It may even have seemed inconceivable.

I was fascinated by how my coworkers started as average Caucasian high school students who grew up in liberal Ashland and eventually grew into Islamic fundamentalists. Although I would eventually come to know Dennis Geren the best, I learned a lot about Dawood and Charlie Jones early on.

At times Dawood’s conservative views on Islam horrified me, but over time I came to look up to him as someone with a strong understanding of the faith, an understanding that was reflected in his practice. Like me, Dawood was an Ashland High School alum; he graduated in the early 1980s. His main passion in high school was football, and he still had the body of an athlete. Dawood once told me about his flippant attitude toward high school classes: he claimed that he told his teachers to let him know if his grade dipped below a C-. As long as he had at least a C-, he wouldn’t give any thought to schoolwork.

Charlie had also graduated from Ashland High. I gathered that he and Dawood went to high school around the same time and had been friends. Charlie never went to college; he was ineligible for student loans because he refused to register for the Selective Service, which would make him eligible for the draft. He wouldn’t register because he found America’s past too sordid.

Charlie was an avid and impressive student of military history, and he often spoke about how he wished he could go to college, get a degree, and become a high school history teacher. But whenever he mentioned this, the specter of not registering for Selective Service returned. “Why do they have to stop me from going to college?” he would ask. “I leave the government alone. I don’t wish it any harm. Why can’t the government leave me alone?”

Often he would follow this up by talking about how disappointed he was in this country. “I would love to have lived in an honorable country, ” Charlie would say while nodding his head. “I wish I could be proud of my country and serve in the military. But when I read about the things that the government did to the Native Americans, when I read about how it stole their land and slaughtered them, I know that I can’t be part of a military that did all that.”

His bitterness was palpable. Charlie felt that if the U.S. government hadn’t been such a disappointment, his life would be different. He could have been a soldier, a college graduate, a military historian. As his emotional problems grew, Charlie would cling more tightly to the idea that had the government not let him down, his life would be far better, his problems more manageable.

It was Pete who turned Charlie and Dawood to Islam. They had met Pete when his car had broken down on one of southern Oregon’s long and lonely roads. As Charlie and Dawood were driving along, Pete came running from out of nowhere, trying to flag down their car. He needed help.

Charlie said that Pete was speaking quickly and they could barely understand his thick accent. They thought at the time that he was Mexican. As with so many seemingly chance events in our lives, this encounter had profound consequences for Charlie and Dawood. Eventually they not only adopted Pete as a friend, but adopted his religion as well.

I told Charlie that I wanted to get the office caught up on its six-month backlog of e-mail messages. He nodded in his peculiar way. First he bobbed his head, then his blue eyes widened expressively, as though he had a hidden thought that he refused to share. Charlie then paused, pursed his lips, and bobbed his head again. When I later learned about Charlie’s emotional problems, they cast his strange nods in a different light.

I spent the next day and a half answering our e-mail backlog. I spotted a message about W. D. Muhammad and read it with interest, since the reforms he had undertaken to bring his followers in line with mainstream Islam had figured prominently in my college honors thesis. Like the discussion of the Naqshbandis on Salim Morgan’s Web site, the e-mail turned out to be a vitriolic attack that cast nuance to the wind.

The e-mail discussed the rise of pseudo-Islamic cults in the twentieth century, including the Nation of Islam. In doing so, it compared W. D. Muhammad to Louis Farrakhan and Rashad Khalifa, saying that all three men “have deceived many and are enjoying their present lives.” (I found the assertion that Khalifa was enjoying his present life odd, since his controversial teachings got him killed by Muslim fundamentalists in 1990. His inclusion may have been a deliberate warning.)

The e-mail included more than a dozen quotes designed to show W. D. Muhammad’s heresy. For starters, it claimed that W. D. Muhammad had publicly declared himself to be the manifestation of God:

By themselves, these words seemed crazy, even blasphemous. But one hallmark of African-American religious rhetoric was the extended metaphor—one that seems outlandish at first, but becomes clearly correct as the speaker fleshes it out. I assumed that the author of the e-mail was trying to make his readers take one of W. D. Muhammad’s metaphorical statements literally. I was also amused that the e-mail capitalized the word
My
in W. D. Muhammad’s statement to reinforce the impression that he was claiming divinity.

I was equally puzzled by the other quotes allegedly showing W. D. Muhammad’s heresy. He once spoke against polygamy, stating: “The teaching of Muhammad and the teaching of the Qur’an is that ‘one is better for you if you but knew.’ No other Prophet did this for the polygamist mankind. It was Prophet Muhammad who worked against polygamy.” What was wrong with saying that one wife is better than multiple wives?

W. D. Muhammad had also said that Christians didn’t need to follow Islam: “I don’t feel that all Christians have to have my religion to improve their lives. . . . I feel that some Christians are living very good lives. They have very good morals, they have a good sense of direction and I wouldn’t want to disturb that for them.” In the view of the e-mail’s author, this offense was compounded by W. D. Muhammad’s statement, “I have no problems with the Pope; I respect him and honor him.”