My Year Inside Radical Islam (16 page)

Later that week, I brought copies of the thesis for Dennis and Charlie. It was eighty-four pages long, providing a detailed explanation of the group’s history and theology, its appeal to the black community, and the attempts of more orthodox Muslim groups to appeal to African-Americans. (I homed in on W. D. Muhammad as a more orthodox alternative to the Nation of Islam—an obvious choice since W. D. Muhammad had originally been given the Nation’s top leadership post but decided to bring his followers to more traditional Islam.)

Dennis was excited to get the thesis, but I could tell right away that his expectations were off. “This is great,” Dennis said to Charlie. “Daveed wrote a paper that really exposes the Nation of Islam.” But it was far more than an exposé.

The next day, I saw that Dennis had put the honors thesis aside after reading only twelve pages. He looked angrier than usual. “You’re putting
W. D. Muhammad
forward as the orthodox alternative to the Nation of Islam?” Dennis snorted. “There’s no way that W. D. Muhammad is an
orthodox
Muslim.”

“You understand why I call him that, don’t you?” I asked.

A couple of footnotes in the paper made clear that it used a loose definition of Orthodox Muslim. The main theological distinction that the paper drew was between the Nation of Islam and other groups that professed a more traditional view of Islam. The paper wasn’t attempting to resolve theological controversies beyond that, nor was Orthodox Muslim used as a term of praise.

As I began to explain this, Charlie cut in. He shook his head woefully as he spoke. It seemed that my referring to W. D. Muhammad as an orthodox Muslim saddened him. “We shouldn’t refer to these guys as orthodox Muslims,” he said. “That’s praise they don’t deserve. Maybe they’re Muslims, but
orthodox
Muslims? They aren’t that.”

He stared out the window as he continued. “Why do these guys even call themselves Muslims?” he asked, his thoughts now turning from W. D. Muhammad to Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. “I’d be fine if they just called themselves Black Nazis. But why Muslims? Why are they trying to claim
my
religion?”

A few days later, Dennis showed me a photocopy of a Nation of Islam pamphlet that we had on file. A Muslim prisoner had sent it to us.

Al Haramain’s prison
dawah
program had become quite popular. The group was well known among prisoners for distributing Islamic literature, occasionally in the form of handsome hardcover volumes. There was a somewhat sophisticated system for doing this. When prisoners wrote requesting literature, they were sent a questionnaire designed to evaluate their Islamic knowledge. It asked a number of questions, ranging from the simple—Who is Allah (swt)?
⁴
Who is Jesus (pbuh)?
⁵
—to the obscure—What are the ten
sunan al-fitra
? After a prisoner filled out the questionnaire, his answers were graded. Those who performed better would get more advanced books. As a result of the program’s popularity, prisoners often sent us long letters. (The disturbing frequency with which we received ten-page letters from prisoners borne out of their boredom produced the only pun that I ever heard Pete make: he called the prisoners a “captive audience.”) Sometimes these letters contained interesting items they had come across in prison, such as the Nation of Islam pamphlet that Dennis now clutched in his hand.

The pamphlet tried to justify the Nation of Islam’s bizarre theology. The arguments were so bad that they were embarrassing. Almost every Qur’anic quote was clearly out of context. Particularly amusing was the claim (intended to justify the Nation of Islam’s racism) that Prophet Muhammad had been a black man, and this fact had been covered up for centuries. The claim was accompanied by a picture purporting to show that Muhammad had been black. Aside from the fact that pictures of the Prophet were
haram,
that “proof” was humorous because the pamphlet was a low-quality photocopy. The picture didn’t look like a person, just a splotch of black ink.

After having a good laugh about the pamphlet, I wanted to move the conversation from ridiculing others to the deeper issues that Dennis might be overlooking. I said that racism is a real problem, and even though we sharply disagreed with the Nation of Islam’s theology, we had to be compassionate about why people are drawn to it.

“Compassionate?” Dennis asked. “For those people who are part of the Nation of Islam and believe in black gods and W. D. Fart”—again, he made a farting noise—“you should just hand them this pamphlet and Idris Palmer’s pamphlet and let them choose. And if they choose Farrakhan’s cult, with its mother ship and W. D. Fart”—a farting noise—“then you’d punish them the way heretics have always been punished.”

“Punish them?”

“Yeah, let them choose true Islam or cut off their heads.”

Daveed, if I were you I’d take your necklace off right now.”

I bought the necklace in Chicago the previous February. Since then, I had worn it every day for almost a year. I wanted a physical reminder of my faith—similar to how my kufi served as a visible reminder, only less conspicuous—so I bought a string necklace with a metal star-and-crescent symbol on it. And now Dennis Geren was telling me to remove it.

“Why?”

“Last night, Yunus asked Sheikh Adly if it was okay for men to wear necklaces. Sheikh Adly said that men are not to wear necklaces under any circumstances. He said that necklaces are women’s clothing, and men shouldn’t wear women’s clothing.”

I looked down at the necklace. Another day on the job. New and exciting points of Islamic law to discover.

Dennis shrugged. His tone was apologetic. Far from being one of his hawkish moments, Dennis seemed as bewildered by Sheikh Adly’s pronouncement as I was. “I figured I was doing you a favor,” he said, “by telling you about it before Yunus could get to you.”

I thought of Yunus and his arrogant young man’s way of speaking. Dennis was indeed doing me a favor. I slowly took the necklace off, crumpled it up, and shoved it into my pocket. I never wore it again.

When the Kosovo war began in 1999, Pete walked into the office on one of the rare days that Charlie, the Hawk, and I were all there. He pressed his lips together as though deep in thought, nodded his head, and said, “You know, I think I’m for what the U.S. is doing in Kosovo. They’re actually going in to save Muslims.”

Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević’s crackdown on the ethnic Albanian majority in the province of Kosovo, who were predominantly Muslim, precipitated the war. Many observers feared that the Serbian forces led by Milošević were undertaking a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the ethnic Albanians. This concern led the international community to try to broker a deal to end the crisis early in 1999. When Milošević rejected the deal, U.S.-led NATO forces initiated air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia in March 1999 to try to protect the ethnic Albanian population.

When Pete said that he was for the Kosovo war, the rest of us agreed with him. It was probably the last time that all four of us would back the United States in one of its military engagements, and soon the others’ take on the war would change. Probably the biggest factor in turning Pete, Charlie, and Dennis against the Kosovo war was a torrent of e-mail that Idris Palmer distributed featuring articles from the left-wing British press. Some of these articles argued that the air war had only accelerated the Serbs’ slaughter of the ethnic Albanians; others argued (absurdly) that the Kosovo war was in fact a “war for oil.”

So after Pete, in his infinite fickleness, turned against the Kosovo war, he decided that he was single-handedly going to end it. Pete was one part activist, one part visionary, and one part con man. He would always come up with big, world-changing ideas that would inspire our benefactors in Saudi Arabia and convince them to devote tens of thousands of dollars. But the ideas never panned out the way Pete intended.

He came to the office in the middle of one of his workdays and explained his plan. He wanted to put together a convoy of trucks, manned by private citizens and loaded with humanitarian supplies, that would enter Yugoslavia. Pete believed that when the convoy entered the country to distribute supplies, it would send a powerful signal: the bombing campaign had to end.

Pete dictated a two-page letter to me that we sent to Dradana Ivanovich, the Yugoslav ambassador. In the letter, Pete framed the Serbs’ situation in much the same way as he often framed the plight of the world’s Muslims: “America’s vast military industrial complex needs to create an enemy to justify the billions of dollars spent every year to build up our vast arsenal, and the Western media has aided them in constructing the Serbians as the new threat to the West. I believe that the Serbians are good people, and that innocent men, women, and children are being killed every day during this senseless bombing campaign.”

Pete paused after dictating this, and said, “See, I left that vague. When they read that innocent men, women, and children are being killed, they’ll think that I’m talking about the Serbs. But really, bro, the innocent men, women, and children are the Muslims.”

The letter went on to explain Pete’s peace convoy plan:

Of course, Pete’s idea was doomed from the start. If the Serbs ever gave serious thought to this proposal, they would certainly do a background check on Pete and the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation. What they would find would doubtless convince them that Pete’s scheme was far more trouble than it could possibly be worth.

My favorite person in Ashland’s Muslim community was Abdi Guled. He was a tall Somali, standing six feet eight with a six-foot-ten wingspan. I was told that he used to play basketball for Somalia’s national team and was a hero in that country. If Somalia hadn’t deteriorated into lawlessness, he could perhaps be its president or hold some similarly powerful position.

Abdi was beloved in Ashland, with good reason. He was more full of life than anybody I had met. Even his broad smile reflected the love he had for others, black or white, Muslim or non. He also had a mellifluous accent and punctuated his speech with words that most people didn’t understand, but that sounded endearing.

Abdi’s wife, Mary Foster, was also a wonderful person. I had known her for years, as her son was a friend of mine in elementary school. (Actually, he used to beat me up, but the distinction between friend and bully sometimes erodes over time.) She and Abdi loved to travel together, and would sometimes show me videotapes of the exotic locales they had visited.

One day when we were standing around near the main room in the Musalla, Dennis Geren held both of his hands in front of him and pretended to shoot at cars that were driving by on I-5. Seeing this, Abdi said with a smile, “No,
baba,
peace! You shouldn’t do that!”

“But, Abdi,” Dennis said with a smirk, “they’re
kufar!
”

“Peace,
baba,
peace,” Abdi repeated. And so he put the Hawk in his place with three words and an infectious grin.

One reason that Dennis and I frequently ended up debating was because he had somehow gotten the idea that the most persuasive way of speaking was framing his comments as questions. When you ask questions, he reasoned, it seems that you’re demanding an answer from the listener. So when Dennis ranted about Algeria, he’d rattle off a fiery series of questions: “They cancel the elections in Algeria and leave the Muslims to be slaughtered by the Algerian army. Is this justice? Is this the human rights I always hear them talking about? Do you stop ‘terrorists’ by sweeping through Algerian villages and slaughtering babies?”

The problem for Dennis was that each question
did
seem to demand an answer, particularly because his understanding of the international situations about which he had such strong opinions tended to be off base. After I’d let Dennis’s first three or four questions go by, I’d eventually feel compelled to engage him. We’d then enter into wide-ranging debates in which Dennis tried to recount every evil inflicted by the Western world in the past five centuries, and would make me defend them all. Given my roots as a campus radical, I wasn’t always happy with this role.

One day we were arguing about the Taliban. Ever since I had become Muslim, I had thought it obvious that the Taliban’s brutal rule was contrary to true Islamic principles. I thought it obvious that my religion wouldn’t countenance a dictatorial regime that treated its women like cattle and viewed free intellectual inquiry as a disease.

I remembered how Dennis had defended the Taliban when we made our presentation to Ms. Thorngate’s class. I assumed then that he didn’t understand the full brutality of their rule, and that I could change his mind. But I was in for a surprise.

“Dawood spoke to a man,” Dennis said, “who’s actually
been
to Afghanistan. He said that they were practicing true Islam there, and everything was beautiful.” I probably should have wondered what the man had been doing in Afghanistan. The country wasn’t exactly known for its tourist industry. It was, however, known for its terrorist training camps. But I tended to overlook the small signs back then. I would end up overlooking many, many more.