My Year Inside Radical Islam (11 page)

The e-mail suggested that for these minor offenses, W. D. Muhammad was at best a heretic. Disturbed by the tone used in addressing a man who had been responsible for bringing so many former Nation of Islam members to true Islam, I asked Charlie Jones about it.

“The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that there will be seventy-three divisions of Islam,” Charlie said. “All these except one will be paths to the hellfire. You need to be very careful that your faith doesn’t stray from the Straight Path.” He paused, nodding. “If W. D. Muhammad is misleading other Muslims, he needs to be corrected.”

“But it’s so vitriolic. They’re saying that W. D. Muhammad isn’t even a Muslim because they disagree with some things he’s said.” I wasn’t arguing the substance; I knew better than to defend his statements. The only option left was protesting the tone.

Charlie shrugged. It didn’t disturb him.

Later I talked with Dawood about the attacks on W. D. Muhammad. He replied in a loud, unwavering voice. “W. D. Muhammad needs to be exposed. All I can say is that this guy let his daughter marry a Christian.” Dawood laughed contemptuously, as though this fact took W. D. Muhammad to a place where no defense would dare to tread.

Although I was skeptical of the attacks on W. D. Muhammad, I had already learned to watch what I said, and to be cautious of praising or defending Muslims whom I had once admired.

Of all the people at Al Haramain, Pete was initially the one I felt most drawn to. Although I was learning to watch what I said in daily life at the office, Pete made me feel comfortable. His ability to do so was part of the remarkable Social skills that I sensed soon after meeting him.

On the day that Pete convinced me to apply for a job at Al Haramain, he gestured at the rippling, tree-covered mountains that surrounded us. Unlike Sheikh Hassan, who saw homosexuals reflected in the hills, Pete was looking at the same mountains as me. “Why did we both come to Islam?” he had mused. “I could make so much more money if I weren’t Muslim, if I just threw myself into business and didn’t worry about how Allah was watching me. But, bro, something brought both of us to this faith, and there’s a reason for that.”

Although born into Iran’s Shia Islam, Pete had converted to Sunni Islam somewhere along the way. I never learned exactly why Sunni Islam, and in particular Wahhabism, appealed to Pete. He had left Iran around the time of the revolution. In the early 1980s Pete was known as Falcon, a long-haired young man who was a committed environmental activist. His enthusiasm for the environment remained, reflected in his passion for his tree-care business. Pete once told my dad that he started to become serious about Islam when his mother was sick and he prayed to Allah to make her well. Pete regarded her subsequent recovery as miraculous. After that, Pete said, he decided to take his religion more seriously.

I would find Pete increasingly difficult to figure out during my time at Al Haramain. He had an activist side that I could identify with, but there was another side as well. He was friends with the local rabbis; years later, when Pete’s legal troubles came, a local rabbi would be his biggest defender. Pete had taken part in local meditation groups where people, including Jews and Muslims, would pray together for peace. But he would just as readily derisively refer to Rand McNally, which produced maps and atlases, as a “real
yahoodi
company”—that is, a sinister Jewish company. He would similarly refer to non-Muslims derogatorily as
kufar,
infidels, and make clear his belief in their inferiority. I would later see his eyes light up with belief when confronted with anti-Semitic conspiracy yarns.

Pete had some progressive activist impulses, but coupled them with the exact opposite impulses, too. His own family was Shia, yet Al Haramain would distribute books at the Musalla with the provocative title
The Difference Between the Shee’ah and the Muslims,
along with booklets alleging that Shia Islam was part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the faith. Thing is, Pete seemed perfectly sincere at both ends. He seemed as sincere about interfaith dialogue as he did when he busied himself learning about Jewish conspiracies. He seemed sincere while speaking of Islam’s tolerance and also while launching verbal assaults on non-Muslims.

I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to what Pete Seda actually stood for. The answer isn’t entirely clear. He may have been a simple con man. Or perhaps, in his fits of schizophrenic passion, he was sincere the entire time despite the apparent contradictions. This is one part of the puzzle that nobody has solved, even though there are now many strong views on the matter.

While Amy was in town for Christmas break, I shared all that I loved about Ashland with her. We hiked the trails above town, walked through Lithia Park hand in hand, went to my favorite restaurants. But she had to return to North Carolina a few short days after I began work. Before she left town, I broke up with her.

We were in my room, sitting on the bed. It was Amy’s last night here.

For days, I had been asking myself where our relationship was going now that I had graduated from college and would be living three thousand miles from her. I didn’t know if it could survive. Not only had all of my long-distance relationships failed, but each had caused great pain in the process. I ran the fingers of my right hand through Amy’s long hair, leaned in, and kissed her gently on the lips. I loved Amy.

I took a deep breath before speaking. “I love you, Amy,” I said. “And you love me. But I’m worried about what will happen now that I’ve graduated from college. We’re going to be three thousand miles apart.”

Amy nodded, her eyes downcast. This had been on her mind, too.

I wasn’t sure what to say. I had conflicting feelings, but my biggest fear was of a long-distance relationship where we felt bound to each other—but never saw each other, didn’t know where we were headed, and where our interactions became increasingly tense as we struggled against the inevitable fate of such arrangements. “I’ve been in long-distance relationships before,” I said, “and they’re tough. They’re tough because of all the time apart, because of the uncertainty. I’m worried that this won’t work.”

Amy spoke no words, but her expressive face said everything. She had the same worries, the same concerns. “I think the only way this’ll work is if we know where we’re headed,” I said. “I think we either need to get engaged or break up.”

I didn’t know what I would say to Amy when we sat down to discuss this. And I still wasn’t entirely sure where I was headed. Part of me wanted to propose to her right there. But we had been together for less than a year, and were both so young. That would be crazy— wouldn’t it?

So we broke up. Afterward, we held each other in a long, tight, sad embrace. I could tell that Amy was devastated, and there was nothing I could say to make it better.

I felt the same way.

Early in my time on the job, Pete would often come by the office to chat with me. He would talk to me about work, then throw in some lessons about Islam and life. Pete was obviously trying to foster a mentor relationshipwith me. And I did see him as a bit of a mentor, but also as a bit of a clown.

I thought Pete’s fascination with plural marriage fell on the clown side of the ledger. After work one day, Pete sat in the office with me, expounding about how wonderful it was that Islam allows you to have more than one wife. I had heard this before, and it was somewhat less entertaining than the first time around.

Then Pete surprised me. “Let me tell you, though,” he said, “it can be a real problem when you have a young wife and also wives who are older. The older wives will feel threatened by the young one and gang up on her.”

“You have more than one wife?” I asked.

Pete smiled broadly. This was a point of pride. “I have two wives,” he said. “I recently had a third wife from Persia. She was a Zoroastrian, they’re a religious group that worships the sun. But since they only believe in one god, she was legal for me to marry under Islamic law.” His smile broadened. When I didn’t say anything, he continued the story. “But she was younger than my other two wives, and they’d always gang up against her. Eventually I had to divorce her because of them.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I had no idea that Pete was no mere advocate of plural marriage, but also a practitioner. I would later learn, from other members of the Muslim community, that the history of Pete’s wives was even more sordid than he let on in this conversation.

I was told that his first wife was an American woman whom Pete had converted to Islam. She was the mother of Yunus and Yusuf. At some point she divorced Pete and returned to Christianity. Pete then married a woman from Morocco who left him after about a year, supposedly because she was horrified when Pete told her that he wanted four wives. After a brief marriage to a woman from Seattle, Pete went to Iran to marry a Persian woman—only he married a Russian immigrant before the trip to Iran. Pete’s Persian wife was probably surprised when she landed in Ashland, only to find that another wife was already there. Sometime after that, Pete took on his young Zoroastrian wife.

Nor did things end there. After his other two wives managed to push the Zoroastrian away, Pete had the audacity to find her a new husband and hold the wedding in his house. The Russian left Pete soon thereafter, but Pete’s Persian wife wouldn’t have him to herself for long. Pete soon found another wife, a college student from a southern Oregon town called Grants Pass.

So Pete had no fewer than seven wives over the course of his life, at least four of whom were involved in a plural marriage.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time. And, as was always the case with Pete, he quickly veered to another topic.

As I continued to pore through Al Haramain’s backlog of e-mail, I saw that Muslims and non-Muslims often wrote with questions about Islam. We should be ready to answer these questions quickly, I thought. We should try to become a recognized clearinghouse of information on Islam, one that people can turn to when they have inquiries.

One of the e-mail messages in the inbox said, “I’m a SOU [Southern Oregon University, a college located in Ashland] student and I’m writing a paper about infibulation. I know that this is practiced in a lot of Muslim countries, especially in Africa. Is infibulation required by Islam?”

Infibulation is a severe form of female genital mutilation that involves the removal of all or part of the clitoris, removal of all or part of the labia minora, and cutting of the labia majora. After the procedure, raw surfaces are created which are often stitched together to form a cover over the vagina, with only a small hole left where urine and menstrual blood can pour out.

The e-mail had been sent over a month ago, but hopefully the writer was still working on his paper. I relished the opportunity to educate non-Muslimsabout how brutal things done in the name of Islam had no real connection to the faith.

I sent back an e-mail telling the writer that it was important to distinguish between true Islam and cultural practices. Female genital mutilation is not prescribed by the faith, and is in fact brutal. I included a quote from a human rights group’s Web site that said that Muslim and Christian tribes in Africa practice female genital mutilation, but that the practice is rooted in culture rather than faith.

I got an e-mail from the writer a few hours later thanking me. I didn’t give the exchange much thought until I came in to work a couple of days later and Dennis Geren had a grave look on his face. I addressed him with the traditional Muslim greeting:
“Assalaamu ’alaykum.”

“Wa alaykum salaam,”
Dennis said. “Bro, Dawood was not happy with your e-mail.”

“What e-mail?”

“You sent out an e-mail about infibulation. Dawood was very upset. Pete thought it wasn’t a big problem, just a mistake that you made because you’re new and enthusiastic.”

My mind raced back to the exchange. I was already on guard at work, knowing the kind of condemnations that “deviants” face. But I couldn’t think of any problems with what I had written. “Well,” I stammered, “what was wrong with it?”

“Basically, you and I aren’t in a position to issue fatwas on our own. We shouldn’t issue rulings about complex areas of Islamic law.”

I gave a quizzical look but said nothing.
Removing a woman’s vulva is a complex area of Islamic law?
I thought. But debating, I realized, would have been futile. Dennis had been told by Pete and Dawood—two men who had been serious Muslims far longer than either of us—that my e-mail shouldn’t have been sent. He wasn’t going to argue with them.

Dennis added, almost apologetically, “Isn’t infibulation where they actually take out the whole vulva?”

“Yeah.”

He cringed. “That’s so disgusting.”

But, of course, we were not to speak against it publicly.

Dennis’s warning wasn’t the last I would hear of that e-mail. Pete took me aside later that day. He made me feel more comfortable than Dennis had, as he was gentle and didn’t seem reproachful. Instead, it seemed that his main goal was helping me to learn proper Islamic conduct.

I had signed my e-mail “Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Al Haramain Islamic Foundation.” Pete told me I shouldn’t do that. “That way,” he said, “if you send out an e-mail that says something crazy, it’ll just have your name and not Al Haramain’s.”

I nodded. That, at least, made sense.

Then, Pete addressed the substance of the e-mail. “Bro,” he said, “there are a bunch of sheikhs in Saudi Arabia just waiting to answer questions like that. We can send them a question and they’ll sit around for a whole day discussing it. So if someone sends you a question about Islam in the future, you don’t even have to try to answer it. We can take the question, send it to Saudi Arabia, and they’ll get back to us with the right answer.”

I was still puzzled that the prevailing view was that I shouldn’t speak out on a subject like infibulation, which seemed glaringly obvious. But the objection to my e-mail—at least, the objection that had been relayed to me—was not that my coworkers believed in infibulation. Rather, it was that I wasn’t qualified to issue an Islamic ruling.