My Year Inside Radical Islam (15 page)

To Idris, every news story he distributed showed the conspiracy to physically subjugate Islam and to undercut the moral principles on which it stood. Just as Idris was angered by every article that he distributed, so was Dennis. And even though Dennis and I had access to the same e-mail accounts and both got Idris’s messages, he would rant to me about them anyway. Dennis was a man who needed to emote.

I saw Dennis as a human parrot. He’d read an e-mail that was supposed to make him angry and he’d be angry. An imam would tell him about a fine point of Islamic law and Dennis would instantly agree (provided that the imam’s view was sufficiently conservative). He’d read a fatwa in one of Al Haramain’s books and would instantly accept it.

Despite this, I was well aware of our relative positions in the local Muslim community. Dennis was viewed as more theologically mature because he accepted those aspects of Wahhabi theology of which I was still skeptical.

I was in the uncomfortable position at work of disagreeing with the prevailing political and theological sentiments, but lacking the confidence to challenge them. But if this was true for me, the feeling was no doubt greater for many of the non-Muslims who visited the Musalla.

A local reporter, Traci Buck of the
Ashland Daily Tidings,
visited near the end of Ramadan to write a “local Muslims celebrate Ramadan” article. She was a very pretty young woman. After she left, Charlie Jones commented on her tight sweater. It was the style of comment that I would become used to during my time at Al Haramain. The point was not simply to objectify her, but to make clear that you
couldn’t help
objectifying her since she had chosen to dress inappropriately.

But while she was in the Musalla, Traci got more than she bargained for. I was ready for a typical, and no doubt boring, interview: some information about Islam, some background on Ramadan, some complaints about how our faith was misunderstood. But Dennis Geren didn’t have the standard script in mind.

When Traci arrived, she wanted to shake our hands. Not wanting her to feel uncomfortable, I did shake hands with her. But Dennis refused. “You probably shouldn’t shake my hand,” he said, “unless you want to marry me.”

As the interview began, Dennis sat in a chair in a corner of the office. Looking at Traci with an unblinking gaze, he reeled off a series of political statements dressed up as questions. “Muslims are getting battered throughout the world,” he said. “Look at Algeria. They blame all the violence on Muslim ‘fundamentalists.’ But there are videotapes showing the men who’ve been going around slaughtering villagers. These guys are wearing headbands that say, There is no God. Is this the kind of thing a Muslim ‘fundamentalist’ would wear? Or have the government troops been doing this and trying to blame it all on the Muslims?”

Traci was speechless. She had probably never heard of the Algerian civil war, and had no idea what Dennis was talking about—but his anger was unmistakable. “In France, they’re making schoolgirls take off their
hijabs.
There are twelve-year-old girls who just want to wear their head scarves to class, and teachers are going on strike to make them leave their
hijabs
at home! Is this the freedom of religion that I hear so much about in the West? Is this an example of the human rights that people keep talking about?” Dennis laughed contemptuously.

I couldn’t stop Dennis. The best I could do was wait until Traci looked frantically around the room, trying to find someone who inhabited the same universe as her.

When she made eye contact with me, I smiled broadly and spoke in a calm, soft voice about the religious aspects of Ramadan. When all was said and done, only my remarks made it into the paper. The reporter was looking for a stock story line—Ramadan is a time of spiritual purification for local Muslims, adherents of a misunderstood religion—and I gave it to her. There was no mention of Dennis’s rant in the article.

And so, as I often did myself, the reporter chose not to acknowledge that a real clash of values existed here. But for me, this clash of values would become increasingly difficult to ignore.

At the end of January, it was time for my first paycheck. It was dark outside, nobody else was in the office, and Pete was filling out the check. When he showed it to me, I saw that the memo line said “computer.”

I didn’t know what to say. My very first job after college, and Pete intended to pay me under the table.

Going into salesman mode, Pete said, “Bro, if we say we gave you this check because you sold us a computer, you won’t have to pay taxes on it. Can you stick to that?”

This isn’t what I wanted, but I worried about what would happen if I refused. Would I be fired? I needed the money. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I can stick with that.”

Pete leaned forward, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “Are you ready to get on the stand and testify and tell the court that we paid you over two thousand dollars for an old computer?”

I didn’t realize it was this serious. “Yeah,” I said, uncertain.

Pete smiled and slapped me on the back. “We’ll just say you were real persuasive,” he said, chortling. “A champion debater, you got us to give you a real good price on that old computer.”

This moment would take on greater significance years down the road.

HAWK

Dennis Green was in his midthirties. He had served in the navy as a younger man, and seemed to have led a shiftless life after that. After deciding to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile-long trail that runs from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Canadian border, he discovered Ashland. Like my parents, he instantly fell in love with the town. And like my parents, he decided to stay.

Dennis’s first job in Ashland, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, took him to Charlie Jones’s apartment. Once invited inside, Dennis was intrigued by the Qur’anic calligraphy on a poster on the wall, and by the sight of Charlie’s wife in a
hijab.
They ended up in a long conversation, and Charlie gave Dennis a Qur’an. Soon after reading it, Dennis converted.

Perhaps because Dennis was a new Muslim, he was generally easier than the others to talk with and debate on the theological issues with which I was wrestling. We spent countless hours in intense religious discussion.

While Pete had once been known as Falcon, Dennis took after a different bird of prey. Charlie had given Dennis the nickname Hawk because of his hawkish views. The nickname fit.

Dennis could have a pleasant demeanor. He was modest and self-effacing, and genuinely cared about others. One day, from the office window he glimpsed a car pulling onto the gravelly shoulder just off Highway 99, seemingly with mechanical problems. Thinking the people in the car might need help, Dennis immediately told me to head down there and see what was going on. We weren’t that far from town, and most people would probably have left them alone. I was struck by this gesture. In part, I was struck because it displayed such an altruistic side of Dennis. But I was also struck because Dennis usually had so much anger toward the
kufar,
launching scathing verbal attacks on non-Muslims and placing the blame for most of the world’s problems on their shoulders— yet here he was concerned about whether these same non-Muslims needed help getting their car to a mechanic.

The angry side of Dennis was on display more frequently than the compassionate side. One thing that made him angry was current events. While I was often skeptical of Idris Palmer’s e-mail purporting to detail injustices inflicted on Muslims half a world away, Dennis’s first reaction was not skepticism but anger. It wasn’t just that he was certain that the injustices described in these e-mail messages had really occurred; it was as though they were happening before his eyes.

Another thing that made him angry was fellow Muslims who he believed were distorting Islam. Sometimes he’d get angry because they were too liberal; other times deviant practices and beliefs caught his ire. We both thought that Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam had little in common with real Islam—but I was never able to muster the anger toward them that Dennis did.

To me, one of the pamphlets that Al Haramain distributed perfectly encapsulated Dennis’s vituperative attitude toward the Nation of Islam. Appropriately enough, Idris Palmer wrote it. The title was
The Nation of Islam Exposed.

The pamphlet argued, in heated language, that Farrakhan wasn’t a Muslim and the Nation of Islam’s doctrine was not Islam:

I wouldn’t have used the same heated language, but agreed with the substance of his argument. There were two key tenets in the
shahadah,
the declaration of faith that makes one a Muslim: there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger. The Nation of Islam fell short on both counts. They didn’t believe that there was no god but Allah: they held that God had lived on this earth in the person of W. D. Fard. And while the Nation of Islam believed that Muhammad was a prophet, he had specifically claimed to be Allah’s
final
prophet. Believing that Elijah Muhammad was also a prophet thus seemed to violate the second part of the
shahadah.

Al-Husein and I disagreed in our approach to the Nation of Islam. Whenever we discussed them, I’d criticize their theology as un-Islamic. But al-Husein saw a deeper, political purpose behind the group. Once, in college, we were driving back from a community event in downtown Winston-Salem that dealt with racism. Another Wake Forest student in the car asked about the Nation of Islam. As I was explaining how its theology took it outside the fold of Islam, al-Husein politely interrupted. “Don’t you think it’s really all about opposing racism?”

“That
is
a large part of what the group is all about,” I said. “But they also claim to be Muslim, and there’s an objective standard you can use to see if they are.”

When I finished writing my honors thesis, I sent it to al-Husein, who went to Harvard Divinity School after Wake Forest. Because this had been a small point of contention between us, I was interested to see his reaction. The thesis went into detail about why the Nation of Islam wasn’t actually Muslim, but also acknowledged that the group’s appeal lay in its willingness to take a stand against racism in America. The thesis urged more traditional Muslim groups to take a similar stand.

After reading it, al-Husein sent back an e-mail that began with the word
“alhamdulillah,”
Arabic for “all praises due to God.” (It is a word that Muslims use when they receive compliments or accomplish something of significance. It is a word of modesty: this is not
my
accomplishment, but rather God has allowed me to do it.) While the thesis took a definitive stand about the Nation of Islam’s heterodox theology, al-Husein praised it for being compassionate at the same time. He added in the e-mail that he wasn’t sympathetic with the approach of Idris Palmer’s pamphlet because Palmer lacked any empathy for the Nation of Islam and its adherents. Al-Husein’s praise, at the time, made me feel a glow.

The difference between my honors thesis approach and that of Idris Palmer’s pamphlet left me with mixed feelings about Dennis Geren’s rants about the Nation of Islam. They were certainly a pleasant change from his rants about, say, Algeria—where he blamed the Algerian government for all the violence, completely absolving Islamic terror groups of any responsibility. Here, at least we agreed that the Nation of Islam had a non-Islamic theology. But the depth of his anger puzzled me.

The news had just come out that Farrakhan had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Idris Palmer had distributed an e-mail addressing how Muslims should respond if Farrakhan died. The answer: there was a series of supplications we could use to thank Allah for Farrakhan’s death.

Dennis was amused by Farrakhan’s illness. He asked with a laugh, “If Farrakhan really is a god, why doesn’t he just heal himself?”

Dennis was mixing up the teachings of the Nation of Islam with those of the Five Percent Nation offshoot, which held that every black man was his own god. He often made this mistake. “He doesn’t claim to be a god,” I said. I wasn’t trying to stick up for Farrakhan, just correct a factual error. “He believes that God appeared as a man, but as far as I know he never claimed to be God.”

“That’s right,” Dennis said. “God appeared as W. D. Fart.” Dennis then made a farting noise.

“You know,” I said, “I wrote my college honors thesis about the Nation of Islam. Their theology is a lot stranger than you even realize.”

Dennis’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Yeah. They believe that the mountains were created when black scientists used drill bombs to create explosions beneath the earth’s surface. The drill-bomb explosions caused the mountains to form.” Dennis laughed. “And the end of the world will come when the black scientists return and rain down drill bombs that destroy civilization. Before they do, the mother ship will return to pick up all the black Muslims who don’t weigh more than one hundred fifty pounds, ushering them to safety.”

Dennis was almost giddy at the thought of more ammunition to use against the Nation of Islam. I told him that I’d bring him a copy of the thesis. Inwardly, I hoped the thesis might help Dennis understand why people were attracted to the Nation of Islam; I hoped it would make him feel less hatred toward them. Clearly, the idea that my differences with my coworkers could be ironed out through dialogue hadn’t left me.