My Year Inside Radical Islam (27 page)

Al-Husein flatly informed her that he was not joking. He wasn’t harsh, but his response suggested that she shouldn’t have had to ask such a question. I thought that al-Husein’s response must have made her feel the same way I felt when al-Husein had no answer to my story about Al Haramain’s head office getting upset over male and female high school students being in the same room together. It was not what she expected, and it suggested this was not the same al-Husein she had known and loved.

She may have realized then that she was losing him, but didn’t realize how much. Al-Husein still joked around with his cousins and seemed to have a genuinely good time around them (although it was surely a good time punctuated by guilt), but he did something that the old al-Husein would not: after he’d been with his cousins and before he went to pray, he would make
wudu,
the pre-prayer ablutions. He would do that because his cousins were female, and coming into contact with members of the opposite sex breaks one’s ritual cleanliness.

I remembered a conversation I had with Abdul-Qaadir. He told me that one of the most difficult things he had to do after becoming a serious Muslim was break off his friendship with his female cousins. “Growing up in D.C.,” he told me, “I’d do everything with my cousins. I thought of them as being just like my
sisters.
But when I became serious about Islam, I realized that I couldn’t be around them anymore. Even if I was close to them growing up, they
aren’t
my sisters. The fact is, they’re
legal
for me to marry, so the normal restrictions for male-female relations apply.” First-cousin marriages are common in the Arab world and expressly permitted in the Qur’an.

On one night leading up to the
nikah,
al-Husein told me that he was going to stay out late with his cousins. “I want to spend some time with them,” he said. “I want to get my time in with them now, because it can’t be like this once I’m married.” I figured that what he said was not what he meant. Being
married
wouldn’t change the way he could spend time with his cousins. It was becoming a more conservative Muslim that changed everything.

In fact, al-Husein’s transformation into a more conservative Muslim had caused him to get married so quickly in the first place. Shortly before the miracle that transformed him, al-Husein had begun to date an attractive woman named Liana Sebastian from an Indian-British background. Liana had been raised Christian, then converted to Sunni Islam after a brief involvement with the Ismaili community. But Sunni Islam was still new to her, and there was so much that she didn’t know.

One thing she couldn’t have anticipated was an e-mail that she got from al-Husein early in the fall, shortly after I began classes at NYU. He sent the message to both me and Liana. The e-mail was a forward of a message that al-Husein received through the Harvard Islamic Society. The message began by discussing how university students needed to avoid the trap of shaking hands with members of the opposite sex. Even though doing so has become customary in Western colleges and universities, it is still sinful. The message then went on to outline relevant
ahadith
about relations between the sexes, and made the case for complete separation. No kissing, no holding hands. Even being alone in a room together before marriage was verboten.

Al-Husein didn’t send this e-mail as a mere point of interest. He wasn’t simply considering its argument; he was
convinced.
I spoke with al-Husein on the phone shortly after he sent the e-mail, and he told me how guilty he felt about becoming emotionally attached to a woman who was not his wife. In the ultra-orthodox version of Islam that al-Husein had come to embrace, this was considered
haram,
impermissible.

There was a certain tone in his voice. My experience with al-Husein was that he was intellectually inquisitive, that almost any argument was on the table for him. But the urgency with which he said this suggested that there was no reasoning with him on this one. He had made up his mind, and to argue with him would be insensitive.

But there was a way out: the
nikah
ceremony. When I spoke with him, al-Husein viewed the
nikah
similarly to how I saw it when I tried to get Amy to agree to it. After the
nikah,
al-Husein and Liana would be husband and wife, and all would be legal. (Of course, al-Husein wanted to have the
nikah
and spend his life with Liana for many more reasons than mere feelings of guilt. But this is what I homed in on at the time because I was grappling with similar feelings.)

Al-Husein went down to Orlando in November to talk things over with Liana, their families, and a local imam who agreed to consult them on the matter. I didn’t learn the details of this meeting at the time, but the end result was that Liana decided she loved al-Husein, wanted to spend her life with him, and thought that sanctifying their relationship through the
nikah
was the right step to take next. They proceeded to have the
nikah
on December 25, which not only marked Christmas Day but also fell in the middle of Ramadan that year.

I was in Orlando as al-Husein’s best man. I would also be a witness to the signing of the marriage contract, and—with the limited skills I had picked up after a semester of law school—even drafted a large section of the
nikah
contract for them.

Al-Husein’s obsession with following the rules could not have been more pronounced when I was in Orlando with him. He had told me to bring my suit and tie when I went down. But the first time I put the suit on, al-Husein looked contemptuously at my tie. He grabbed it, putting two fingers underneath and running his thumb down it. “Is this
silk
?” he asked.

It was. “I don’t know,” I stammered. My response was unimpressive: would Allah forgive you for wearing silk simply because you had forgotten to check?

Al-Husein’s parents were also seeing him in a new light. As Ismailis, they were used to Sunnis regarding them as outside the fold of Islam— and they now realized that their own son saw them that way. They tried to be supportive, but didn’t know what to make of these changes.

Early one morning I overheard a telephone conversation between al-Husein and his parents. There had been a lot of argument because al-Husein wanted to make sure that everything was, as he put it, “done by the Book.” The
nikah
ceremony had to comply entirely with Islamic law—but since his parents were Ismailis, the question frequently arose of
whose
Islamic law should be followed. In this conversation, he told them that under his interpretation of Islamic law, they weren’t Muslims; they were
kufar.
I winced when I heard this, but didn’t say anything. Instead, I was just trying to be a good friend. I was trying to guide al-Husein as best I could, trying to be a calming influence.

Eventually it was time for the
nikah
ceremony. As al-Husein was getting dressed in his wedding robes, his dad handed him a black kufi with gold threads on the outside. Al-Husein looked at the kufi suspiciously. “Is it
real
gold?”

Under Islamic law, men are not to wear gold.

“Husein,” I said, the first time in all the many moments leading up to the
nikah
that my voice had a note of reprimand, “get over it.”

He quickly did and wore the kufi to the ceremony. The ceremony itself was a brief and formal affair that took place in the main prayer area of an Orlando mosque. Al-Husein had mused earlier that for many of his relatives, it would be the first time they had ever set foot in a real mosque. And indeed, I was amused at the time by how clueless some of his relatives were about proper Islamic conduct. There was the uncle who wanted to drink alcohol at the wedding; there was the aunt who thought that al-Husein was a fundamentalist because he was fasting for Ramadan; there were the relatives who wanted to take him to a strip club the night before the ceremony.

I had mixed feelings about the
nikah
as I headed to the Orlando airport when it was finished. I would be traveling to North Carolina to spend the rest of Christmas break with Amy and her family. I thought of how both al-Husein and I had taken a turn for a much more orthodox practice of Islam. Although we were heading in the same direction, our theological transformation was driving a wedge between us. We were not the same people who had first become friends three years ago.

On the other hand, I sensed that Liana was a truly special person, a good influence on al-Husein. I thought of how the religious changes I had gone through made Amy uncomfortable, but never changed the core of her love for me. Liana displayed the same kind of patience, support, and love for al-Husein. I was happy for al-Husein to have a woman like that in his life.

As I boarded the plane, I thought about how much I had changed. At one point, I would have found everything that al-Husein had insisted on over the past several months and at his
nikah
ceremony to be bizarre—al-Husein’s refusing to be alone in the same room as Liana, his interrogation about whether my tie was made of silk, his concern about whether the threads in the kufi he would wear for the ceremony were made of real gold. But over the past few months, I had come to view these as weighty moral issues.

Al-Husein and Liana were now married under Islamic law. He no longer had to feel conflicted about the time he spent with her. He no longer had to worry about contravening any Islamic laws.

Boarding that plane to spend the rest of Christmas break with Amy, I realized that I envied al-Husein. He was marrying a Muslim woman. Even if she didn’t agree with his narrow approach to Islamic law, she was willing to have the
nikah
sooner rather than later. Amy didn’t share my faith and didn’t sympathize with my concerns. And I knew that, while I wanted the days of vacation that I spent with her to be a time of bliss, there would always be guilt lurking just below the surface.

The bottom line is that I realized that the religious proscriptions that I was falling short of
could
be followed. I was
capable
of following them. Having a beard rather than a goatee wouldn’t be difficult. While it might be awkward at first to refuse to shake hands with women, eventually people would understand that this was something I didn’t do and would stop asking. And I could have kept all my money in a checking account rather than a savings account to make sure I didn’t receive interest. (My student loans were another matter; the lenders were unlikely to look kindly upon me refusing to pay the interest that I owed them.)

So what was going on? I was just beginning to admit to myself what my hesitations were. But I vaguely understood that I had trouble separating the small things I did from the big picture. And I was beginning to have grave doubts about that big picture. I had begun to question whether women should really be relegated to the socially inferior position that a Salafist society would place them in. I had begun to question whether ideals like freedom of speech and freedom of religion were really so wrong. I had begun to question whether it was indeed right that my religion should be spread by force. I had even begun to question whether the Chechen mujahideen were really right. They weren’t fighting a war of liberation; instead, they had initiated the conflict by invading Dagestan in an effort to establish an Islamic state governed by Taliban-like rules.

I thought back to my days as a campus activist. I thought about the psychological theory, self-perception theory, that al-Husein and I had both latched on to. The theory holds that people develop their attitudes by observing their own behavior, then reasoning backward from the behavior to determine what their attitudes must be. As campus activists, we embraced the idea that if you could get someone to act in a certain way, their beliefs would eventually fall into line, and we’d try to get people involved so they might come to define themselves as activists.

But I realized that my development into a serious Salafi had been influenced by the same principles. There were the small steps I took. There was my refusal to shake hands with the female schoolteacher who wanted to bring her class to the Musalla. There was my decision to stop listening to music, to grow a full beard, to roll up my pants legs before prayer, to stop wearing shorts or anything that left my thighs exposed. I now saw even these as small but definite steps toward radicalism.

No, it wasn’t that the various strictures were too difficult to follow. I could have happily followed all the rules that were thrust upon me if I knew they were right. But I had developed so many doubts about the big picture.

Islamic radicals want to reestablish the caliphate. Many Muslims feel that a calamity struck the
Ummah
in 1924 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk broke up the Ottoman Empire and replaced it with modern Turkey. Before that, the Ottoman Empire had served as the caliphate; that is, the Muslim world had been under unified leadership. Many radicals believe that modern nation-states are illegitimate, and that only a caliphate is worthy of authority over the Islamic world. The radicals would have this new caliphate ruled by a Taliban-like regime, not by the liberal, progressive “true Islam” that al-Husein and I had once propounded. And the caliphate would become a reality through jihad. Were
these
the mujahideen for whom I was praying?

As my plane lifted off, I prayed to Allah to cure me of the disease of my doubts.

In January 2000, I called Pete and told him that I was going to pay taxes on the money that I was paid while working at Al Haramain.

Ultimately, my parents persuaded me to do this. I had been so surprised when Pete insisted on writing that the first check had been for a computer that I told them about it. They advised that since I was going to law school, I should steer as far from trouble with the law as I could. And I was paid less than $10,000 for my entire time at Al Haramain. I could make more than that in a month as a lawyer. It simply wasn’t worth getting into trouble over such a trivial amount.