My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  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.

  My dad patted his forehead and repeated, “My good dad. My good dad.”

  When I returned to Wake Forest in the spring of 1997, I was ready to find answers.

  That was the semester I became friends with al-Husein Madhany, a tall Keny
an-born man of Indian-American parents (the South Asian variety of Indian). He was a serious Muslim who prayed five times a day, but could also date five women at once. It was through al-Husein that I began to learn about Islam.

  My first real interaction with al-Husein came when he was running to be the student government secretary. I gave him some speaking advice while down at Wake Forest’s student TV studios to watch the televised “debates” among the candidates for office. These debates featured no interaction between the candidates. Instead, a host interviewed one person at a time, asking each of them three questions. I had won the national championship in policy debate a few weeks before, and was riding high on the idea that I had mastered the art of public speaking. I noticed that none of the candidates looked into the camera when answering the questions. Instead, they looked at the host. The viewers could see only the sides of their faces. I didn’t think this displayed enough confidence, so I suggested that al-Husein speak directly into the camera.

  If anything, my advice only hurt him. Shortly after the debates, another student complained to me that al-Husein looked “arrogant.” She said, “He didn’t look at Matt [the host] when Matt asked him questions. He just looked into the camera and acted like Matt wasn’t there.” Despite my bad advice, al-Husein kept me around to help with the campaign. We became fast friends.

  I took to al-Husein quickly because he had a depth that most people lack. This depth was a double-edged sword that often resulted in brooding. Al-Husein generally wanted to focus his conversations and thoughts not on small day-to-day matters, but on big, significant issues. He believed that others should focus on the big issues as well. One night, another student told me that he had decided to write a term paper about Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Al-Husein butted in. “Kurt Cobain? Why aren’t you writing about racism?”

  The other student stuttered out a bashful explanation, but al-Husein had made his point. Why are you wasting your time writing about some singer when we have real and pervasive social problems? It was classic college thinking.

  Al-Husein had a definite sense of the image he projected. He usually spoke slowly and softly, as though parsing every word, as though he had no doubt that he would hold the listener’s attention. Although he spoke with a soft voice, his words were like a victory speech, to be savored and passed down for generations.

  Al-Husein was also socially daring. One frequent exchange was the unanswered question that he’d return to days later. One day, I saw al-Husein in the hall and asked him to recommend a good book. He looked at me quizzically and walked off without saying a word. When I saw him three days later, he said, without introduction, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You asked me to recommend a book three days ago. That’s my recommendation. ”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me when I asked?”

  “I wanted to think about it.”

  This habit initially struck me as both rude and impressive. I had never met someone with enough social confidence to ignore people seemingly completely, only to continue the discussion after a few days’ hiatus.

  My view shifted slightly when I learned more about Sufism, the mystical strain of Islam to which al-Husein adhered. Sufism’s emphasis on emptying the heart of attachment to anything but God can produce idiosyncratic behavior in its devotees. As I learned about how Sufis value patience, I realized there may have been a deeper reason for al-Husein’s behavior. In a famous story, the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi was asked by his sheikh to explain the meaning of a specific Qur’anic verse. After some contemplation, Ibn ‘Arabi left without saying a word—and didn’t return for four years. The sheikh wanted a deeper interpretation than he could give. On Ibn ‘Arabi’s return, his sheikh said, “Give me your answer. After four years, the time is ripe for it.”

  Al-Husein may have had this or a similar Sufi example in mind when he decided to wait three days before answering a basic question of mine.

  Before I knew al-Husein, I was living in my own world, divorced from other people’s needs and struggles. I was an island that longed to be a peninsula. My time was divided between my studies and intercollegiate debate, and little else. The three biggest things that were missing from my life were friendship, a sense of purpose, and a relationship with God.

  I had opportunities to get involved in matters of importance to other students, but always let them pass by. Wake Forest is north of downtown Winston-Salem, a city where crime rates in every major category are worse than the national average. Since a campus crawling with rich kids makes a tempting target for criminals, a handful of armed robberies rocked the campus during my sophomore year. When the school announced that it would therefore erect gatehouses staffed with security personnel, student activists responded in a rage. They were concerned that people of color would face greater scrutiny at the gates. I understood their concerns, but when friends asked me to join the protests, I refused. I had far too busy a life, it seemed, to get involved in causes of that kind.

  I was also cut off from other people socially. Moving to the South was a culture shock. Also, I wasn’t used to or comfortable with the wealth on display at Wake Forest. So the other students had unfamiliar values that differed immeasurably from those of the hippie mecca of Ashland, Oregon. Even Winston-Salem’s restaurants seemed less friendly, less inviting than those that I had known in Ashland.

  I flung myself into my work, which was like a many-headed hydra. Whenever I finished one project, two more filled the void. I would drink or go out to movies with friends, but had no confidants. It sometimes seemed that even my surface-level friendships were too much effort. I remember driving home one night from dinner in downtown Winston-Salem. Instead of thinking about the food we had eaten or the conversations we’d had, the only thing on my mind was my looming deadlines. I wished I had stayed in and worked. It struck me then that it was always this way: every night out with friends was tinged with feelings of regret rather than fulfillment. Many people go through periods where they feel alone, separated from their surroundings. For me, this lasted through my first two years at Wake Forest.

  My friendship with al-Husein Madhany started to bring me outside myself. Al-Husein was aggressive about inserting himself into my life. He would constantly burst into my room without knocking and, seeing me working, would insist that there were more important things to do. Al-Husein often asked me to walk around Wake Forest’s idyllic grass-covered quad with him while he smoked a pipe and philosophized. Once he found me playing a game of Risk (the board game where you try to conquer the world with your armies) on my computer. After learning that the game could take multiple players, al-Husein roped in four other students. We played one six-player game of Risk after another until two in the morning.

  I never regretted a moment that I spent with al-Husein, and soon came to think of him as my best friend. I couldn’t wait until the next time we’d circle the quad together. I couldn’t wait to see what new things I’d learn about the world—and about myself.

  My first experience with student political activism was a spur-of-the-moment thing in early April 1997. It was a warm day, with a slight breeze rustling the leaves of the magnolia trees dotting campus.

  “There’s a rally on the quad,” al-Husein said as he entered my room unannounced. “You should come.”

  “What’s the rally?” I was looking for an excuse to get out, but was having trouble pulling myself away from my work.

  “It’s for a new student group called VOICE, Voices Organized in the Interest of Collective Equality. Knox founded the group.”

  Knox was a wiry, dreadlocked black intellectual with a range of talents and a far-left outlook. He and I were close during my first semester at Wake Forest, when we took an introductory poetry class together. Knox tended to speak as though he were the only person in the room: he was the topic of all his conversations. We had a falling-out later in my freshman year when another friend and I made fun of Knox for his self-cen
teredness. It was the kind of rough humor with a serious undertone that isn’t uncommon among friends, but Knox didn’t find it funny. He didn’t speak to me for a few months, and we were never close again.

  So I hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if going to a student rally is the best way to spend the day.”

  “Do you care about racism?” al-Husein said, moving into his didactic mode. “Are issues like homophobia, religious discrimination, and white heterosexual Christian male hegemony on campus important to you?” Al-Husein had lost his student government election, but remained a major force in campus politics. Now he was helping to bring me outside of myself in yet another way, by pushing me toward political activism.

  “Well, they are, but—”

  “Then you should come.”

  Al-Husein and I walked out the front door of the Huffman dorm and onto the quad. A small knot of people gathered for the rally by the steps of Wait Chapel, which towered over the north end of the quad. Even though it was a rally for diversity, the demonstrators were mostly black and the onlookers were mostly white.

  Knox stood on the chapel steps with a megaphone. He seemed disappointed with the lackluster turnout, but mustered all the enthusiasm that a man with a megaphone can.

  He asked a few other minority students to address the rally, some of whom pointed to the clutch of campus cops who had come to watch, saying that their presence revealed Wake Forest’s racism. “Anyone who doesn’t believe that racism exists on this campus need only look at that cop,” said an African-American sophomore named Ronetta. “Think about all the scrutiny that black people face next time you’re wondering where the cops are when students are getting raped and cars are getting broken into.”