by Theo Padnos
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Sana’a, Autumn 2006
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Ramadan, the Shariqain Mosque, Sana’a, 1427h
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Hem, France, June 2007
Chapter 51
Copyright
I dedicate this book to everyone who taught me about Islam, to everyone who fixed my bike when it was really broken, and to everyone who gave me money when I really needed it (thanks, Mom).
Undercover
Muslim
A JOURNEY INTO YEMEN
THEO PADNOS
Introduction
The Yemeni American internet imam, Anwar Awlaki, came into his own in the summer of 2008. He had previously been known to a small collection of admirers mostly through cassettes and pamphlets but now, leveraging the power of the internet, his popularity grew. That summer, as wider audiences tuned in, he often wrote about reading. ‘Thrice,’ he said, he read Hard Times; he also read Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield (twice). He concluded that Uriah Heep was ‘similar to some pitiful Muslims today’, that ‘the thick and boastful Mr Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was similar to George W. Bush’ and that he did not like Shakespeare: ‘Probably the only reason he became so famous is because he was English.’
In general, Awlaki felt that books written by unbelievers were a kind of weak medicine which one could administer to oneself or not, whereas books by and for Muslims affected the soul. The best literature of this kind brought the reader into proximity with God.
Such books were not to be read as, say, one might read Hard Times. Instead Muslims were to position themselves within the range of these books, and then to allow the power of the text to consume the reader. In describing his encounter with In the Shade of the Koran, a twelve-volume commentary on the Koran by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian radical, Awlaki described what a reading experience of this order was like:
Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100-150 pages a day. In fact I would read until my eyes got tired. My left eye would get exhausted before the right eye so I would close it with my hand and carry on reading with my right eye until it can handle it no more and would just shut down. My vision started deteriorating especially in my left eye. Was it because of too much reading, or was it because of poor lighting? Allah knows best.
For the fans who read this essay where it was originally published, at anwar-awlaki.com, Sayyid Qutb, and Dickens and Shakespeare, for that matter, were beside the point. Occasionally, readers used to write in to the website to enquire if the Islamic histories and commentaries Awlaki wrote about were available in translation. Sometimes the fans asked Awlaki if Sayyid Qutb was upon the haq (the truth) or if he had strayed from it. The great majority of Awlaki’s admirers, however, skipped over Sayyid Qutb – and the older, greater philosophers the blogger wrote about – entirely.
The fans were rather interested in the writing of one person in particular: Anwar Awlaki.
‘Sheikh,’ wrote a blog fan, Abu Dharrar after Anwar had posted his In the Shade of the Koran review: ‘We need to know more about a scholar from whom we take these precious pearls of knowledge. Please write your biography.’
‘i was thinking,’ wrote another fan,
why not know more about the one [sheikh] we listen [to] the most. For the ones that havent met you but InshAllah we will
If its possible:
Your daily life?
Your Profession?
your hobbies if you have any?
are you married if so do you have children?
Imam Malik liked Bananas haha what foods do you enjoy?
Who were your teachers?
Anwar Awlaki’s pronouncements hadn’t always generated such enthusiasm but the summer of 2008 was a turning point in his career. In the spring of that year, Yemeni police released him from eighteen months of detention in Sana’a, without a trial.
Shortly thereafter, a group of fans in England set up anwar-awlaki.com. Now for the first time in his career, the itinerant preacher was in minute-to-minute contact with a world of blog fans. He opened a Facebook page.
‘Alhamdulillah that you are online Sheikh!’ wrote an Abdallah. ‘You have benefited the Ummah greatly (already) but we want more! :)’
‘I make dua [prayer] that i meet you in person, pray behind you and learn under you,’ wrote a correspondent from Australia. He signed himself, ‘Your brother on the other side of the earth, Muhammad Hassan.’
‘Every person that I have come across who has already listened to the talk of Imam Anwar,’ wrote another admirer, ‘would like to be close to him and ask more questions or learn more about Islam. Is this not a spirit of Muslim brotherhood?’
That summer, as Anwar wrote about his reading, his eating habits in prison, and the advisability of Muslims playing guitar (not advisable) the level of fan admiration kept ratcheting upwards. The fans wrote in to say that they loved their ‘beloved brother, Sheikh Anwar’, that they missed him, needed immediate advice and were wondering why he wrote private emails so rarely.
Others, fearing that Yemeni and American intelligence officials might harm Awlaki, wrote to supply spiritual support: ‘Fear ye not!’ assured one fan, Muslimah314, quoting from the Koran, ‘we are your protectors in this life and in the hereafter. Therein shall ye have all that ye desire.’
Many of these fans had resigned themselves to lives in the West. They spoke of settled families and commitments. But many other fans were not tied down at all; instead they were in a mood to travel. On 14 July, jihad4life wrote with a query about travel study:
Asalam alikum brother Anwar
Since you live in Yemen. I was wondering if you can tell
me if Yemen is [a] good place to seek knowledge.
Other fans like this one, Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum, were more direct:
Dear Shaykh … I have a very short question and that is; Do you accept students in Jemen? Please answer it dear shaykh, as it is very important for me.
Over time during the summer of 2008, anwar-awlaki.com became an unsettling place to hang out online. The site, which has since been removed from the internet, plied its visitors with news of upcoming Paltalk lectures and links to lectures already delivered. The speeches themselves were learned but often wool-gathered or quoted at too conspicuous length from the scriptures, or combined these oratorical flaws somehow into fifty
-megabyte blocks of speechifying. Nevertheless the ardour of the fans knew no bounds. There they were on page after page of anwar-awlaki.com, down in the comments section, declaring themselves prepared to do ‘whatever you think best’, ‘to study with you one day as well as join you on any front’, and to ‘go and study overseas inshaAllah’. Many of the fans said they couldn’t speak Arabic. Many others were still having issues with English. Now, it seemed, they were ready to pick up sticks, to move to Yemen, and to plunge into the study of the early medieval Arabic in which the Koran was written.
It would have been entirely reasonable for an outsider, happening by for the first time, to wonder: what on earth is going on here?
Because I was imprisoned in Yemen myself, and because, in other respects, I have followed Awlaki’s footsteps – the travel to Yemen, the settling into a mosque there, the years of Koranic study – the atmosphere at Awlaki’s website has always been a relatively familiar thing to me. Though I never recognised any of the fans personally, I’ve studied with this demographic for years, in Yemen and Syria, and by now I know enough about its enthusiasms to know that the excitement has almost nothing to do with Awlaki’s preaching and still less to do with his writing. Awlaki’s extraordinary accomplishment is his life.
It’s no less extraordinary for its familiar opening chapters. Awlaki’s story begins where the stories of his fans begin: in suburban tranquillity in the West. In his case, it was Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the heart of a middle-class family, the elder generation of which had recently arrived from Yemen. For Awlaki, there was normal schooling in America followed by a standard university degree (BS Civil Engineering, Colorado State, 1994). Later, there was an abandoned attempt at an advanced degree (Human Resource Development, George Washington University, 2001— ) and a period of drifting between his parents’ homeland and American Muslim communities in San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia.
The story picks up momentum after 2001 when ‘a climate of fear and oppression’ (the phrase belongs to a fellow imam in Falls Church) caused him to flee, first to London, and from there to Yemen.
In Yemen, Awlaki returned to his parents’ native village, an ancient incense capital, now called Shabwa. He established a household here with a local wife, and a string of children.
It’s worth pausing at this point in the story to mention an important sub-theme in Awlaki’s blog and lectures: the slightly unbelievable piety and silence with which he discusses women. As an American imam, Awlaki was arrested for soliciting prostitutes three times, twice in San Diego and once in Virginia.
Many of the young Westerners who’ve been turning up in Yemen over the past ten years have also left behind a history of troubled – in some cases anguished – relations with women. Many of them have likewise arrived in Yemen with visions of a local bride – the deep, submissive eyes, the black clothing – dancing in their heads. Some of these young men marry once. Many marry several women.
Awlaki doesn’t allow a trace of his former ambivalence to enter his blog. Where women are mentioned – and they are not mentioned much – a spirit of paternal protectiveness hovers over the writing. He is magnanimous. He is wise. The women are grateful and dignified but much too modest to speak.
One reads a lot about this particular model of male–female togetherness in the Koran and in the record of the Prophet Muhammad’s deeds and sayings, the hadith. Since women scarcely speak in public in Yemen and rarely reveal details of their domestic lives to anyone under any circumstances, it would be difficult to maintain that such harmony doesn’t exist. Perhaps it does. Perhaps in Yemen it is widespread. In any case, to the young men who read Awlaki’s blog in the partner-swapping suburbs of the West, the Yemeni model presents a fantasy of love and stability. Sex may be out of control in the West, Awlaki’s blog hinted, but out here in Yemen it is not. On the contrary, in a believing society, all is domestic harmony and fruitfulness in the desert.
Awlaki’s domestic harmony was interrupted in August 2006, when the Yemeni government arrested him as he was trying to mediate a tribal dispute. It’s unlikely that he was doing anything criminal. He was never charged. Still, the local authorities have never looked kindly on self-styled Americo-Yemeni religious figures who turn up in Yemen, particularly when they meddle in local affairs. He was sent off to a basement cell in the political security prison in Sana’a.
For the young sheikh with the international blog audience, the prison spell was a gift from Allah. It bound him much more tightly to his fans and generated writing that is by far his greatest accomplishment as a preacher. It’s much better than anything he’s done before or since:
I was in an underground solitary cell made up of four concrete walls, with an iron gate on one side and on the opposite side a small window - rather a hole - covered with iron mesh to allow for some fresh air to come in … Then there was the roof with a bulb hanging from it which was on continuously day and night. Then the floor with a mattress 2-3 inches thick, a blanket, a worn off pillow, a plastic plate, a bottle for water …
And then there was a Quran. In this environment there is nothing to do and nothing to read but the Quran, and that is when the Quran reveals its secrets. When the hearts are clean; when there is nothing clouding the spirit, the Quran literally overwhelms the heart.
This is Awlaki at his best. The writing works because it discovers the oldest, most heroic Islamic themes – the striving towards virtue, to transcendence of one’s oppressors, the communion with the Koran, the cleanliness of the heart – in a crappy Yemeni jail cell.
The fans in cyberspace responded predictably: ‘Subhanallah! – With tears i read the last few lines of your post,’ wrote Naeem from … he doesn’t say where. ‘Allahu akbar!’ exclaimed Muhammad Hassan from Australia.
Zachir (from America?) was also impressed but drew a conclusion that Awlaki probably did not intend: ‘Maybe I should go Prison, coz whenever i read the Quran it dont hit me as it used to, my heart has gone too hard.’
This of course is the real source of Awlaki’s power and it has nothing to do with his theology or his fluency in Arabic (or English for that matter), as some of the terrorism experts seem to believe. Awlaki has had a deeper experience of the Koran than most of the other young men, and he’s had it in Arabic, and he’s had it under extreme conditions. In short, he has taken a voyage of the spirit, as all heroes must.
His was as classical as any: when his conventional schooling had run its course, he left home. Finding himself on the far side of the earth, in a land both dangerous and magical, he faced his enemies. The battle in which he then engaged was a physical one that had a powerful spiritual dimension. It purified his soul, and opened up the mysteries of the sacred writings to him. The ordeal, as several of his fans pointed out on the website, could well have killed him. But instead because he relied on his faith in God – never wavering, never losing an iota of dignity – his inner powers were strengthened.
Luke Skywalker has lived out a similar tale, as did Jesus, Jason of the Argonauts, Joseph and the other figures discussed in Joseph Campbell’s study, The Hero with a Thousand Faces – including, by the way, the Prophet Muhammad. In Awlaki’s case, the story is true. He lived it, and wrote it up himself, day by day, and published it on his blog.
To paraphrase another spiritual voyager, Walt Whitman, there is miracle enough in this to stagger sextillions of infidels.
Nowadays, young Muslims are unlikely to invoke the myth of the hero when they speak of leaving the West. They’re likely to say, ‘In my religion, I’m required to seek beneficial knowledge. It happens to be in Yemen’, or simply, ‘I left England because the country is spiritually dead.’ Nevertheless, the Awlaki model, his voyage to the Koran, is the dream that hovers over the lives of ambitious young Muslims in the West.
One of Awlaki’s most popular internet lectures is called ‘Allah is Preparing us for Victory’. If I were one of the investigators charged with discovering how middle-class kids are turning into terrorists, I wo
uld pay special attention to this theme – the triumph to come – on anwar-awlaki.com. Better yet, I would spend a few hours people-watching in one of the mosques in Yemen where foreign students are welcomed. To do so is to undergo a speedy but deep education in what victory means to this particular class of young men.
These are not the lucky golden children of life. Not one of them has the winning good looks of the star athlete on the football team; not one of them knows how to charm a room with his smile. Many have the mousy air of people who’ve been overlooked in life. Which doesn’t mean they intend to renounce popularity. They do want it. Most of all, they want women.
Islam in Yemen makes a promise to these – and to all – young male believers. The ummah, the global family of believers, will smooth away problems concerning the female sex, it says. We will bring you your helpmeet, it promises. She will have been raised on the Koran. She will love you for your Islamic learning, and for your dedication to the deen, or religion.
Westerners who come to Yemen in search of brides believe this – and with good reason. Many of their older friends have asked the local imam for a wife, have paid the bride price, have gone through an Islamically proper engagement, and have married. The bride is now the property of the groom. He will decide if she will study, or work outside the home – and where and when and with whom. It has always been thus in Yemen.
Often, these arrangements work. Anyway, when you bring up the subject of marriage with young men in the mosque, the unions they discuss certainly seem promising. There is trust. There is a religious law. There is the backing of the community and 1,400 years of local tradition supporting the couple. Now the young men can stop worrying about how to get along with women. What does this species really want? No one in Yemen asks this question. The sheikhs and the students already know: they want to become mothers in pious, Koran-reading families.
To have reached this level of certainty is in itself a major victory for many young men. With proper prayer, say the mosque authorities, there will be other, greater victories to come.
