My Year Inside Radical Islam (2 page)

In an effort to make the spiritual foremost in their own lives, my parents spent a lot of time meditating. Often I would burst into the living room—excited to share something I had seen or read or some small accomplishment, the way kids so often want to—only to find my parents sitting on the couch silently, their eyes closed, their focus on another world.

My parents’ love for spiritual figures and religious traditions didn’t end with Jesus, Buddha, and the Old Testament prophets. They also cherished the wisdom of Rumi, St. Augustine, and Ramana Maharshi. And they drew lessons from Zen, Taoism, and Sufism. Upon hearing of my parents’ syncretistic views, a friend once jokingly referred to them as “Jewnitarians.”

People often present the stories of their religious conversions as though their lives were completely normal, and then there was some great thunderclap. My experience, and the experience of other converts I have known, suggests that it’s not that straightforward. Instead, a religious conversion comprises a series of seemingly unrelated events that are later revealed to have had a purpose: they are pointing toward devotion to a god that you never knew. And strange as it may seem, my debates with fundamentalist Christians were milestones on the path to radical Islam.

These debates came when Christian friends tried to push me on my spiritual views. Mike Hollister is the one I remember best. We met at a debate tournament when I was a high school sophomore. Mike was from the state of Washington. Unlike most high school debaters, he was also an athlete. Six feet tall with light brown hair, Mike played varsity soccer. His athleticism set him apart from other debaters by giving him an unusually strong presence.

Given the geographic distance between us, there’s no easy way to explain why our chance meeting grew into a friendship. We shared a passion for policy debate and a similarly quirky sense of humor—but these alone don’t make a friendship. The best explanation is that Mike found me interesting because I was unlike his other friends, and I felt the same about him. Mike appreciated my intensely analytic approach to the world, my willingness to debate and discuss every imaginable subject, from politics to economics to baseball. And I was interested in how Mike’s worldview differed from that of my other friends. He was traditional and conservative, values alien to my parents’ Ashland.

Although we remained friends through college, Mike’s descent into fundamentalist Christianity disturbed me. Having been a nominal Christian through high school, he started to become serious about his faith soon after he started classes at Western Washington University, in Bellingham. Christianity became more central to his identity—and I noticed him becoming less fun and less open-minded.

While Mike stayed close to home, I went three thousand miles away for college, to Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the fall of 1994. I was drawn mainly by scholarship money. My parents had more books than dollars, and paying for a private college without a scholarship would have been hard.

With its closely trimmed lawns, tennis courts, and golf course, Wake Forest’s campus looked like a country club. While this may seem welcoming, and surely was to the majority of students who would eventually join country clubs, it made me feel all the more the stranger. I did not make the coast-to-coast drive in my beat-up red 1985 Toyota Tercel that it would have taken to have the car on campus. But if I had, the car would have stuck out among the BMWs, Mercedeses, and new sports sedans that packed the parking lots. From the day I arrived on campus in red Chuck Taylor sneakers and a flannel shirt, I stuck out almost as much as my car would have. For my first couple of years there, I felt isolated, alone.

I decided to visit Mike early in the summer of 1996, driving up to Washington to see him. Since Wake Forest’s school year ended earlier than Western Washington’s, classes were still in session when I arrived. By then Mike had become deeply involved in a group called Campus Christian Fellowship. I hung out with him and his college friends, who were also fundamentalist Christians, for about a week. They were perfectly nice, but struck me as dangerously naive. They seemed to shut themselves off from so much of the richness and ideas that life had to offer.

I met Mike’s girlfriend over lunch during that visit. Amy Childers stood about five feet nine and had intense blue eyes. Within the first three minutes of meeting her, she asked me: “So why aren’t you Christian?”

I was taken aback and offended. What business of hers was it? Though my identity as a Jew was far from central to my life, I immediately shot back, “Because I don’t need to be Christian. Remember, I’m one of God’s chosen people.”

I found the Old Testament notion that the Jews were the “chosen people” rather absurd, but thought that might be an effective parry.

My response caught her off guard. Amy muttered something about how it was true that I was one of God’s chosen people, but she envied Jews who became Christian because they were doubly loved by God. “I mean, God loves everybody,” she said, “but Jews who convert get to have a special relationship with Him because they’re part of God’s chosen people, and also get to accept Christ as their savior. They get to be doubly special.”

I managed to steer the discussion in a different direction. We didn’t talk about Jesus again for the rest of lunch.

I don’t think Mike realized how much Amy’s question offended me. He simply would not drop the subject of Christianity.

Like many people, I had adopted most of my parents’ spiritual beliefs when growing up. Or, at least, I had adopted as much of these beliefs as I could understand; true to their liberal vision, my parents were careful not to push their views of God onto me. I believed that truth could be found in most religions—that Jesus had an amazing connection to God, but so did Buddha, so did many other religious figures. I rejected the Christian idea that Jesus had been God: no matter how deep a person’s spiritual insight, there’s a fundamental difference between the Creator and his creation.

Knowing my analytical approach to the world, Mike thought he spotted a logical problem that could make me rethink these ideas. He wanted to make me consider the case for Christianity.

Mike homed in on my respect for Jesus. At the time, Mike’s favorite Christian author was Josh McDowell, an apologist with a gift for making his arguments accessible to college-age readers. Mike shared a passage from one of McDowell’s books,
Evidence That Demands a Verdict
, with me.

In the passage, McDowell discussed at length C. S. Lewis’s claim in his classic book
Mere Christianity
that there were three possible things Jesus could have been: a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Both McDowell and Lewis concluded that those were the only three alternatives, and there could be no middle ground. This is because Jesus claimed to be God in the New Testament. If this claim were true, then one should accept him as Lord. But if Jesus’ claim was false, and he knew the claim was false, he would be a liar who had nothing to offer his students. On the other hand, if Jesus believed he was God but wasn’t, then he would be a mad-man. The one thing Jesus could not be, according to this logic, was exactly what I thought he was: a good and wise teacher.

While I found the passage compelling, I was sure that I must be overlooking some fatal flaw. But the argument was put to me forcefully enough that it made me uncomfortable because it suggested that there was some incoherence in my ideas about God.

Contrary to Mike’s intentions, this discomfort started me down the path to Islam, and ultimately to radical Islam.

As I was leaving Bellingham a few days later, Mike walked me to my car, past the sloping lawns that dotted Western Washington’s campus. The setting sun gave the sky a pink hue. Some of the college kids tossed Frisbees around. A few people who had been studying outside were folding up their beach towels and heading back to the dorms.

Mike made one last effort. “Have you thought about devoting your life to Christ?”

We had spent enough of the visit discussing Christianity that the question wasn’t unexpected. But I was a bit annoyed by it—and still didn’t have a good answer. “I’m not ready to do that,” I said. “I’m young. I have a lot of living to do before I could commit myself to any religion.”

“But you never know what will happen to you. You’re driving home to Oregon now. What happens if you have a car crash and die? Will you go to heaven?”

I smiled and shook my head slightly. This was another of Mike’s clumsy attempts at evangelism. I was one of the first people with whom he tried to share his faith, and his lack of experience showed. I found myself wondering why he cared which god I worshipped.

I looked Mike dead in the eyes. “I’ll take my chances.”

When I returned home, I asked my dad about the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument. My dad was a short man with a New York accent who liked to discuss big ideas. He had a beard and black hair speckled with patches of white. Although he worked as a physical therapist, he devoted himself to family life. When I was a kid we had endless walks and talks, and constantly created new games to play together.

Although very few topics were off-limits for my dad, I could tell that my question upset him. My dad had certain hot buttons, and apparently I had unwittingly touched one. He wouldn’t yell or become belligerent, but there were signs—slight coloration of his face, speaking faster and louder, biting of the lip—that tipped me off to his anger. After I told him Mike’s argument, my dad blurted out, “As far as I’m concerned, that’s just a kind of idolatry.”

My parents had a live-and-let-live attitude toward spiritual matters, so I was surprised by my father’s strong reaction. But my thoughts quickly turned to the first of the Ten Commandments, which barred idolatry. There was a reason, I knew, that it came first. (When I was writing this book, my dad told me that I had misinterpreted his idolatry point. Rather than referring to idolatry in the standard Jewish way, my dad’s thinking was that every person and thing is divine: it’s idolatry, in his view, to say that one person is divine but nobody else is. His intended meaning speaks volumes about my parents’ beliefs.)

Beside Dad’s response, Christianity felt wrong. The Christians I knew lived shuttered lives, conforming to a model of morality and political opinion that missed out on so much of the big picture.

But Mike’s efforts at evangelism came at a time when I had some intense spiritual questions. Not only did I feel isolated at Wake Forest, but I also came close to dying twice before I turned twenty-one. After a couple of brushes with death, I was acutely aware of the emptiness in my life.

I came down with pneumonia during my final semester of high school. By the time I was admitted to Ashland Community Hospital, I was within a few days of death. I spent ten days in a hospital bed. Perhaps it was my relatively quick recovery or my young age, but I didn’t have the life-changing experience that people sometimes do when they almost die. I somewhat generically resolved to live a fuller life, but beyond that I remained a normal kid.

The spiritual questions came after the second time I faced mortality. That happened in the fall of 1996, shortly after I visited Mike in Bellingham. I felt very sick when I returned to North Carolina for the next semester. I tried to go on living a normal life despite feeling like I was in the grip of a disease. I was able to tough it out for almost a month, but the lesions in my mouth kept coming, and my stomach grew angrier and angrier. I felt my body gradually breaking down. I wore a bulky winter coat and was always shivering even though it was a warm September. Some days it was a real challenge just to walk across campus.

I went to Wake Forest’s notorious student health services a few times to see what was wrong. On one visit the nurse dismissively told me that I had a fever and gave me some aspirin (charging me five dollars for a couple of tablets). Finally, near the end of a miserable month, one of the doctors in student health services recognized that my condition was beyond their expertise, and transferred me to North Carolina Baptist Hospital, in downtown Winston-Salem.

At North Carolina Baptist, they diagnosed me with a digestive condition called Crohn’s disease. I stayed in the hospital for about two weeks and had to withdraw from school for the semester. I went back to Oregon to recover. I lost more than forty pounds while I was sick, and was a 119-pound skeleton by the time I got home.

When you’re deprived of something you love for a long time, you’re sometimes treated to a wonderful process of rediscovery. In the fall of 1996, my rediscovery was the joy of food. My mom would cook me five or six meals a day to help me put weight back on. I would first smell the aromas wafting from the kitchen. I relished the olfactory experience almost as much as the meal itself. And every time I passed one of Ashland’s new restaurants, I’d stop to look at the menu, savoring the thought of applewood smoked bacon or five-spice chicken.

It was just one of the parts of my life that I was reexamining.

I was already asking hard questions because of my illness. My grandfather’s death added urgency to them. My grandfather had suffered a stroke about a decade earlier. He had led a brilliant life, eventually becoming the dean of the medical school’s clinical campus at Stony Brook University in New York. But everything changed with the stroke. By the fall of 1996, he stayed in Hearthstone, a single-story brick nursing home in Medford, Oregon, where my dad worked.

One day we got a phone call. My grandfather was very sick. Shortly after darkness began to cover the valley, another call informed us that he had died. My dad and I drove through ten miles of downpour to get to my grandfather’s room. Near the end of his life, Grandpa could no longer stand the debilitating effects of the stroke. Sometimes he’d cry or scream. But when we got to his room and saw him lying there with the warmth fleeing from his body, Grandpa finally looked at peace.