My Year Inside Radical Islam (7 page)

To my surprise, something was stirring in me. A desire for a stronger version of Islam, a kind of theological clarity at odds with my liberal principles.

Shortly after returning to Wake Forest in January 1998, I met Amy.

I was helping to coach the debate team. On the way to the first tournament of the year, in Carrollton, Georgia, one of the new Wake Forest debaters caught my eye. Her full name was Amy Powell, a second-semester freshman. Amy had a rare beauty that was matched by a powerful intellect. She stood five feet four with blue eyes and long, light brown hair that fell halfway down her back. She wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt over her T-shirt, along with blue jeans and a black beret.

To get Amy’s attention, I winked at her. She smiled in response, a smile that radiated warmth. We had a long talk on the van ride down to Carrollton, and over the next couple of days I asked some of the Wake Forest debaters about her:
Amy seems cool. What’s she like? Is she dating anybody?
Happily, I learned that she was single—and seemed interested.

When the tournament ended, I made sure that Amy and I were put in the same van for the ride back to Winston-Salem. We sat next to each other in the backseat. Our conversation was halting, but the eye contact said everything. When I looked straight into her eyes, she gazed back unblinking and unhesitating. Eventually we stopped trying to talk. Our lips met in a long kiss that communicated far more than talking ever could.

Amy and I began dating shortly after our first kiss. She quickly became a constant presence in my life.

We learned that both of our names meant “beloved,” and soon that was what Amy and I called each other: Beloved.

Amy was three years younger than I was, born in 1979. She grew up in eastern North Carolina, in a town that was about the size of Ashland called Elizabeth City. It was a rural town with an expansive waterfront, a short drive from the Outer Banks. Although Amy was raised Presbyterian, her parents weren’t big churchgoers, and she was never baptized. Religion wasn’t very important to her when we started dating; the fact that I was Muslim didn’t faze her.

At the time, Amy didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. Both of her parents were doctors, and she thought about medical school. She also toyed with ideas like becoming a veterinarian, lawyer, professor, or journalist.

The aspect of Amy’s personality that stood out most at the time was that she was incredibly low-key. This would take on increasing significance in the future.

Almost every night Amy would make the trek to my dorm on the north end of campus. There was much to share. I made Amy learn to love
The Simpsons
, and in return she tried to teach me calculus. She would stay up until all hours with me and al-Husein, listening to our ruminations.

Amy and I had dinner together almost every night, usually macaroni and cheese or some other simple dish that college kids often make. Sometimes we’d watch TV or a movie. Often we’d just do schoolwork. But even if that’s all we did, I loved having her around—being able to chat with Amy, to lean over and kiss her. Soon it was hard to remember what things had been like before we were together.

Al-Husein and I went to Turkey over spring break in March 1998. He was still teaching me new things. This time around, I learned that I could get Wake Forest to fully fund a dream trip to the Islamic world. We received a grant to study Sufism in Istanbul. (During my semester abroad in Venice I traveled to North Africa on my own, but Wake Forest did not foot the bill.)

One night, we returned to our low-end hotel after prayers in an ornate mosque down the road and I flopped down on the hard, lumpy bed, writing in my journal. Although she was half a world away, I found myself thinking of Amy. I mentioned this to al-Husein.

He remained silent for a moment, then said in a soft voice, “Let me ask you something. Is she a comfort to you?”

“Is she a
comfort
to me?”

“Yes. Is she a comfort to you?” Al-Husein paused, realizing that his question wasn’t sinking in. In an atypical effort to be understood, he said, “In a
hadith,
Prophet Muhammad said that wives should be a comfort to their husbands.”

I thought for a short time. “Yes,” I finally said. “Yes, I think she
is
a comfort to me.”

Because of my religion, my passion for social justice, and my college debate background, the topic of my honors thesis came naturally. I wrote about the rhetorical differences between Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and more traditional Muslim groups in appealing to the African-American community.

The mosque I attended in Winston-Salem was part of the Islamic ministry of W. D. Muhammad. W. D. Muhammad, the son of longtime Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, had led his followers from the Nation of Islam’s old black-nationalist teachings toward traditional Islamic practice. As I researched for the thesis, I found my respect for him growing.

The Nation of Islam was founded by W. D. Fard (after whom W. D. Muhammad was named), a carpet salesman who lived in Detroit. Although W. D. Fard’s teachings were steeped in Islamic themes, much of what he taught was actually anti-Islamic, merely designed to appeal to what he thought blacks wanted to hear. The most well known of these teachings was that the black race was the world’s original race, and that whites were a race of devils created by an evil scientist. But far more deviant from an Islamic viewpoint, Fard taught that he was God. This was contrary to the faith’s strict monotheism.

Elijah Muhammad was Fard’s star pupil. On leaving Detroit in 1934 for parts unknown, Fard left him in charge of the fledgling religious group. Under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership, and with the help of national spokesman Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam grew into a powerful organization. At its height, it had eighty-seven temples scattered across the country. When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, W. D. Muhammad inherited the leadership—even though many members thought that Louis Farrakhan would claim the top post.

W. D. Muhammad proved to be a religious man who was committed to true Islam. When he took the Nation of Islam’s reins, he transformed it. He first initiated smaller reforms designed to bring the group’s practices in line with those of the worldwide Muslim community, such as prayer five times a day and fasting during the lunar month of Ramadan rather than December. Eventually he also abandoned the group’s racist teachings and its elevation of W. D. Fard. These changes angered Farrakhan and prompted him to create a splinter group, also called the Nation of Islam, devoted to the old black-nationalist theology.

Eventually W. D. Muhammad abandoned his group’s organizational concept entirely. He told his followers to give up any labels that set them apart from the worldwide community of believers, and to think of themselves simply as Muslims. This left Farrakhan as the only one with a group called the Nation of Islam. I was impressed that although W. D. Muhammad could have gained so much power by fostering the Nation of Islam’s old teachings, he voluntarily moved the group in a different direction. In doing so, he seemed motivated solely by his devotion to God.

I would later work with other Muslims who had a very different view of W. D. Muhammad. Despite his sacrifices, I would learn that he was viewed as a heretic, and even worse, in some circles. But at the time I wrote my honors thesis, I had no idea how hatred could spring from seemingly small doctrinal differences. And at the time, I had no idea that I would eventually come to see these small doctrinal differences as momentous.

Amy and I often hung out in al-Husein’s dorm room. Amy intuitively recognized how important al-Husein was to me. She hadn’t known me before I became Muslim, back when I felt isolated from the world. But she could tell that al-Husein was both a brother and a mentor.

Amy was quiet in general, and this was even more pronounced when we were around al-Husein. And who could blame her? Al-Husein and I would bandy about concepts related to a religion that was alien to her, and were enraptured by our own revolutionary political ideals. Amy was still a work in progress. As was once the case for me, she was still finding her own way politically, spiritually, and socially. I didn’t push my political ideas on her, but always conveyed how important they were to me. One night I got an e-mail from Amy describing her political awakening. She wrote that she hadn’t thought much about issues like discrimination and inequality before, but was coming to see their importance. Her e-mail said that she didn’t want to have her head in the sand. I was so heartened after getting the e-mail that I called al-Husein and read it to him aloud.

Sometimes al-Husein could push too far with Amy. She had a T-shirt that said, “Drink your coffee. There are people in India sleeping.” Al-Husein did not see the humor in the shirt. “There are people doing a lot more than sleeping in India,” he said. “There are people without houses, people living in abject poverty, people without food or running water.”

Al-Husein didn’t get the joke. It was a play on the line that American parents are known to say to their kids: “Eat your peas. There are people in Africa starving.”

Despite that, it would be a long time before Amy wore that shirt again.

Mike Hollister’s wedding was an intimate affair. I returned to Bellingham at the beginning of the summer of 1998 to be one of his groomsmen. Mike was marrying Amy Childers, whom I had met during my last visit. I still had a bad taste in my mouth from our first encounter. It seemed that all she could think about upon meeting me was that I wasn’t Christian.

But when I touched down at Bellingham’s airport, I found that she at least had a sense of humor. Amy and one of her bridesmaids waited in the airport with a fake limo driver’s sign that said Daveed. It was a funny touch for an airport with only one gate.

I was Mike’s only non-Christian groomsman, and the others let me know it. During my last visit to Bellingham, I had been interested in meeting and talking with Mike’s Christian friends. I found the experience more grating now. Last time around, I was spiritually confused. This time, I had found my path. I was Muslim, and resented the fact that Mike’s friends didn’t appreciate that I was also a man of faith. Instead, they seemed intent on proving that their religion was better than mine.

I had a handful of religious debates with Mike’s other groomsmen. I most vividly recall my debate with Tim Prussic, a somewhat pudgy man with sandy blond hair and a sharp wit. Tim was studying to go to seminary, and I would catch him thumbing through flash cards during spare moments, trying to learn biblical (koine) Greek.

In explaining my conversion to Islam to Tim, I touched on the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument with which I had once grappled: “Christianitynever really appealed to me because I couldn’t accept the idea that a man could be God.”

“We don’t really believe that a man became God, though,” Tim replied. “It isn’t a question of whether a man can turn into God. What you’re saying is that you don’t think God is able to turn himself into a man.”

I didn’t appreciate the interruption. I felt that I was trying to explain my deeply held beliefs to Tim, and he was just trying to score a debating point. I see our discussion differently today. Now I realize that Tim had touched on an area of genuine confusion on my part. He had taken my view of Jesus’ divinity—that there was no way a man could become God—and turned it on its head.

But at the time, I was annoyed by Tim’s obstinacy.

At the wedding, it was obvious how happy Mike and Amy made each other. And I found that I now enjoyed Amy much more than when I first met her. At the reception after the ceremony, I caught a few moments alone with Mike and Amy. Amy Hollister asked, “Will we be seeing you in another wedding that includes an Amy in the near future?”

I smiled. “Perhaps,” I said.

I had been dating Amy Powell only since January, and had given no thought to marriage. But you never know how these things will turn out.

After being surrounded by fundamentalist Christians at Mike’s wedding, I looked forward to being among Muslims again. On my first Friday back in Ashland, I went to the local congregation’s
juma
prayers. Because al-Husein’s debate with Sheikh Hassan had been so cordial, I felt no qualms about going back to worship there. The book that Dawood had given me on
salat
had helped, and I looked forward to showing Ashland’s Muslims the progress I had made on my congregational prayers.

When I called ahead to verify the time and place of prayers, I was told that the services had moved to 3800 Highway 99 South, near the freeway exit at the south end of town.

I whistled as I drove toward the new location, impressed. Every house out there was its own little castle with an estate surrounding it—a row of McMansions. The new prayer building fit this mold. The cramped prayer room in the back of Pete Seda’s house was a thing of the past. They had moved to a mansion-sized blue building perched on a hill. Horses, a donkey, and even a dromedary camel roamed the fields in front of it. As my car inched up the paved drive, I got an idea of just how big the property was. They were building a second access road to an area further up the hill, which was covered with blackberry bushes and other shrubs. Two bent palm trees near the fore of this second road brought a bit of the desert to Ashland.

As I got out of my car, I noticed clucking chickens scratching about a henhouse on the hill just past the main building.

When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a beautiful prayer room. It had a thick, blue carpet and its windows looked out on the fields surrounding us. Clearly, the group had more money than ever.

The
khutbah
that day was uneventful compared to my previous visit. I stayed after services were over, speaking with the other worshippers.

Pete Seda walked up to me. Though he didn’t make much of an impression when I went to services in his house the previous December, I now wondered why. Pete, like al-Husein, was obviously gifted with extraordinary social skills.