My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  There was no pause, no hesitation on her part. “If that’s where you feel God is leading you, you should follow your convictions,” she said. I had been worried, since my parents were Jewish, that they might disapprove of the direction I was heading in spiritually. But she sounded positively enthused.

  When I finally landed in Venice, I was excited and overwhelmed to be an ocean away from the United States. I found a water taxi that bobbed along the waves, cutting a furrow in water toward the heart of Venice. I couldn’t believe I was actually here.

  We moved past lazily swaying boats tied to the tall wooden poles by the sides of the canals, past stone walkways, bridges, and buildings that looked like they had been ripped straight from a postcard. I finally got off in the Dorsoduro district and lugged my heavy bags past throngs of sweaty tourists and hungry pigeons. Eventually I arrived at Casa Artom, Wake Forest’s palatial house on the Grand Canal.

  I knew that my semester abroad would be a time of change, a time to learn about myself and the world from a vantage point I had never before enjoyed. But the coming changes would eventually take me places that I couldn’t then imagine.

  Within a couple of weeks of arriving in Venice, I e-mailed a Muslim group that al-Husein had told me about. Known as the Naqshbandis, they were a Sufi order that considered it vital to adhere to Prophet Muhammad’s example. One of their distinguishing characteristics was that the men wore the garb of the Prophet, including flowing turbans. The group was located in the coastal city of Rimini, just a few hours away by train.

  Jamaluddin Ballabio, who maintained the Naqshbandis’ Italian Web page, invited me to come out and join them for a Thursday night dhikr. Although I had never heard of dhikr, I accepted the invitation. We had four-day school weeks that semester, and as soon as Thursday classes ended, I headed to the train station.

  When I met Jamaluddin at his shop, a clothing retail store called Body & Soul, I found that he was a scholarly-looking Italian man who seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties. He wore spectacles and had a big, bushy beard. He told me the story of his conversion to Islam. He converted in India. He had been a Buddhist at the time, and was flying to India to see his lama, when he met a Muslim on the flight who held strong yet simple beliefs. Meeting that man caused Jamaluddin to embrace Islam before he returned home.

  On hearing Jamaluddin’s story, I had no doubt about how the past several months had illuminated a new spiritual path for me. I immediately asked, “How do I become Muslim?”

  Jamaluddin said that I would need to repeat the phrase: Ash shadu an laa ilaha illa Allah, wa ash shadu anna Muhammadar Rasulallah. This Arabic phrase, known as the shahadah, or declaration of faith, means: I bear witness that there is no object of worship except Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Jamaluddin said that the phrase had to be repeated in public, before two witnesses.

  “I’d like to do that,” I said. “Here. Today.”

  If Jamaluddin was surprised, he didn’t let it show. “We will do it tonight, then.”

  I had read the Qur’an when I was in North Carolina but didn’t bring a copy to Venice. I told Jamaluddin that one of my concerns was finding a good English-language translation. He said that, unfortunately, they’re hard to find in Italy.

  After Jamaluddin closed the store, we drove to his apartment. Once there, he donned a green turban. Soon, some other Naqshbandi men, mainly Caucasian converts, arrived. Most of them sported bushy beards and turbans. Some wore Arabic-style robes.

  Near the beginning of my semester in Venice, my Italian was lacking. The discussion was hard to follow. I wanted to understand all that was going on, wanted to be able to add to the conversation without someone translating for me. But the speech was too rapid. I felt like a stupid American, in a country where I couldn’t speak the language proficiently, about to perform prayers for which I didn’t even know the words. Then, Jamaluddin said in English that before we began dhikr, I would be converted to Islam.

  Ash shadu an laa ilaha illa Allah, wa ash shadu anna Muhammadar Rasulallah.

  I repeated each word after him while holding out my right pointer finger to signify the Oneness of God. Everybody in the room voiced each Arabic word as I did. There was a moment of silence, then one of the Naqshbandis handed me a beautiful white kufi. The kufi is an Islamic skullcap that, similar to the Jewish yarmulke, signifies that one is a believer. Over the course of the semester, I would come to see the kufi as an important symbol of my faith, a visual reminder of who I am and who I should not be.

  We made salat, and I was better able to follow along now than I had been in Winston-Salem. After salat I found out what dhikr was. Jamaluddin dimmed the lights and we repeated verses from the Qur’an in a melodic chant. At first I wasn’t confident enough to participate, but after a few minutes my voice joined the chorus. Jamaluddin would subtly alter the pace of the words and everybody followed his lead. We all contributed to this unique form of music in our own way, some of the men humming in the background while others chanted in Arabic.

  Eventually we finished. The lights came back on. We hugged and talked about how beautiful the dhikr was. I learned then that dhikr is Arabic for remembrance of Allah. When performed out loud, as we did, it is known as “loud dhikr.” It can also be performed silently. One of the Muslims explained that dhikr is mentioned over a hundred times in the Qur’an. He said, “Through dhikr you can earn Allah’s pleasure and stay away from the sins that come when He slips from your mind.”

  The next day, Jamaluddin and I drove to the countryside for juma prayers, the traditional Friday prayers. The services were held in the home of Abdu Salam Attar, a merchant of aromatherapy and perfumes. Before prayers, he splashed a small amount of musk perfume on all the worshippers’ arms. Although I strained to understand the Italian-language sermon, I was content to be around so many other people who loved God as I did.

  When we stood around, talking after prayers, Abdu Salam asked if I had a Qur’an. When I said that I didn’t, he walked to a bookcase and reached up to the top shelf. He pulled out a green hardbound Qur’an inlaid with gold calligraphy. Inside an English-language translation stood side by side with the original Arabic script. Abdu Salam kissed it and handed it to me.

  “Quanta costa?” I asked, but he refused payment, explaining that this was part of Muslim hospitality. “Grazie,” I said. “Grazie mille!” I was genuinely thankful.

  Later, when it was time to return to Venice, I asked Jamaluddin where I could buy a bus ticket to get back to the train station. He immediately handed me a ticket. I reached into my change purse and pulled out fifty thousand lire (about thirty dollars). It wasn’t extravagant, but was enough to show my appreciation for his hospitality. But he, too, refused payment.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “Thank you for treating me so well here.”

  “It is hospitality that all Muslims show,” he replied. “It is what Allah wills.”

  I ruminated on the treatment I had received from people who barely knew me. “That’s very profound,” I said. We hugged and I left. I wore the kufi that they had given me all the way back to Venice.

  Al-Husein was the first person I told of my conversion. I told him by e-mail and he phoned the next day to welcome me into my new faith.

  For the rest of the semester, I proudly wore my kufi whenever I set foot outside Casa Artom. Other students would often find me in Casa Artom’s main hallway, praying or making silent dhikr with my wooden prayer beads. Nobody harassed me about this.

  I later received a short e-mail from al-Husein saying that he would spend winter break with me in Oregon. As was al-Husein’s custom, he didn’t ask. His e-mail simply informed me that he would spend most of December in Ashland.

  One evening, shortly after my conversion to Islam, I stood on Casa Artom’s wood deck overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal. Another student in Wake Forest’s study-abroad program, Joy Vermillion, was also watching the gondolas make their way through the choppy wa
ters.

  Joy was a native North Carolinian, politically interested, with a beautiful singing voice and a distinctive laugh. She was a practicing Christian, and my conversion caught her interest. At the time, I was sensitive about people challenging my religious beliefs—but Joy’s questions came off as honest inquiries rather than thinly veiled arguments.

  In the course of our conversation, she asked, “Would you ever consider leaving Islam for another faith?”

  She seemed curious rather than probing, but my answer was firm. “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t think there’s a reason that I would leave Islam, because I can find everything I need in this faith. I can have a mystical relationship with God. And if I’m looking for greater literalism, I can find that, too. There are plenty of directions that I can grow within Islam.”

  Later, when I became radicalized, I would think back to this conversation. I would feel that it epitomized all that I had wrong about my understanding of religion.

  My parents loved al-Husein from the moment he arrived in Oregon, in mid-December. At his urging, my dad called him “Big Al.” All four of us—me, al-Husein, and my parents—spent long hours around the kitchen table, talking about religion and politics while sipping yerba maté tea. We found little to disagree about. I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarity between the beliefs I was raised with and al-Husein’s brand of Sufism: al-Husein and my parents were struck by it as well.

  I had come to appreciate Ashland more as I grew older. Part of the reason was that it seemed I could find anything I wanted there. Al-Husein’s visit demonstrated that. Until he came to town, I didn’t know that Ashland had a Muslim community. It was a town of only about fifteen thousand people, and was predominantly white. But one afternoon al-Husein and I were reading through the religion section of the Ashland Daily Tidings newspaper, and found a listing for the Qur’an Foundation, a local Islamic group.

  We saw that they hosted juma prayers, and immediately decided to attend. The services were held near the outskirts of town, past the municipal golf course. When we arrived, we found a small ranch house in the center of a sprawling lot. A metal trailer stood behind the house, along with a couple of cranes bearing the name of a local business, the Arborist. I spotted a couple of horses in a nearby field.

  The property and the Arborist business belonged to Pete Seda, a short, wiry Iranian man who was about forty years old. He had black hair and a beard, and the look of a mischievous grade-schooler. I later learned that his dark skin often made locals mistake him for a Mexican. All in all, Pete didn’t make much of an impression on me during this visit. It was the last time that he would fail to make an impression.

  I rang the doorbell. No one answered. Instead, a woman with a thick Persian accent shouted to us from behind the closed door. We couldn’t tell what she was saying. “We’re here for prayers!” al-Husein shouted back.

  She told us to enter from the back. I was somewhat confused, but al-Husein—who had more experience with different Islamic practices— had a clue.

  At the back of the house, we found a screen door that led to a cramped prayer room. White sheets that hung from the ceiling blocked our view of the other rooms. “The sheets separate the men and women,” al-Husein whispered.

  We were among the first to arrive. As other worshippers trickled in, I saw that there were a lot of Caucasian converts. This was clearly not the same as the mosque I had attended in one of Winston-Salem’s black neighborhoods. As more Muslims came in, I took note of the lumberjackstyle flannel, the work boots, the discussions of horseback riding and shooting. I thought of them as Muslim rednecks. Aside from bushy Islamic beards and the occasional kufi, these guys looked like hicks. I would later learn that most of them were outdoorsmen whose cultural context and theology made them unique: half redneck, half hippie, and one hundred percent Islamic fundamentalist.

  Shortly before prayers, a hefty man named Abdullah showed up. He looked like a blind version of Willie Nelson, but far stockier. Abdullah used to be a truck driver, and his tattooed arms were testament to a well-lived past. He circled the room, bear-hugging his friends, lifting some of them into the air with his powerful arms.

  You think you’ve seen everything, then Ashland throws you a curveball.

  Aside from meeting my first Muslim rednecks, I also heard my first radical sermon that day. Hassan Zabady, a Saudi sheikh who lived in northern California, delivered the sermon to an audience of about twenty men. Sheikh Hassan was thin and slightly effeminate, with pale skin and a full beard. He spoke into a microphone. The microphone wouldn’t have been necessary in the cramped room but for the congregation’s strict sex segregation. It was connected to a speaker in another room that let the women hear the sermon.

  Sheikh Hassan spoke about the duty of hijra, or emigration. Historically, the hijra was when Prophet Muhammad and his followers migrated to Medina after facing severe persecution at the hands of Mecca’s Quraysh tribe. Although the Islamic calendar begins with Muhammad’s hijra, I had never given thought to the duty of emigration in modern times. I had assumed that because the hijra occurred fourteen hundred years ago, the Qur’anic verses mentioning it no longer applied to the lives of Muslims.

  Sheikh Hassan’s sermon argued otherwise. He said that Muslims now living in non-Muslim lands were required to move to Islamic countries because non-Islamic society is so corrupt that it will shatter our devotion to Islam. His style of argument was far different from what I had grown used to in my college classes. He didn’t refute possible counterarguments. He didn’t even acknowledge that another side existed.

  Sheikh Hassan also didn’t try to prove that the duty of hijra was a good idea from a secular perspective. Instead, he said only that it was a religious obligation. He read the relevant Qur’anic verses, referenced the ahadith (a hadith is one of Muhammad’s sayings or traditions, distinct from the Qur’an; ahadith is the plural form of hadith), and that was it.

  “The Holy Qur’an says, ‘Verily, those who believed, and emigrated and strove hard and fought with their property and their lives in the Cause of Allah as well as those who gave asylum and help—these are allies to one another. And as to those who believed but did not emigrate, you owe no duty of protection to them until they emigrate.’ So as Muslims we too must emigrate. We are living in a land ruled by the kufar [infidels]. This is not the way of Muhammad,” he said.

  “Prophet Muhammad, alayhi salaatu was salaam [upon him be prayers and peace], described the risks of living among the kufar. Our beloved prophet said, ‘Anybody who meets, gathers together, lives, and stays with a Mushrik—a polytheist or disbeliever in the Oneness of Allah—and agrees to his ways and opinions, and enjoys living with him, then he is like the Mushrik.’ So when you live among the kufar, and act like the kufar, and like to live with the kufar, then brothers, you may become just like the kufar. If you do not take the duty of hijra seriously, your faith is in danger.”

  Sheikh Hassan used a tone of severe reprimand. He was so disdainful of non-Muslims and the West that I wondered why he had moved here.

  But I was also concerned. I wondered if he was right. I hadn’t before given any thought to whether there was a continuing duty of hijra. What if there was?

  I found myself glancing over at al-Husein through much of the sermon. I shot him quizzical looks, as though to ask Should I take this stuff seriously? Al-Husein answered with a knowing, reassuring, smile: Don’t let it bother you. There’s nothing to this.

  Sheikh Hassan finished speaking and the congregation prayed. When we were done, there was a question-and-answer session with the sheikh.

  The first person to ask a question was a large red-haired man named Charlie Jones. Charlie had a muscular frame and a sizable gut. His eyes were pale blue. Although he was starting to go bald, he had a large beard, the hallmark of a serious Muslim. Charlie’s speaking style reminded me of Eeyore, the perpetually depressed donkey who was friends with Winnie the Pooh. He leaned forward with his head slightly bowed, speaking ear
nestly and with great sadness.

  Charlie spoke into the microphone so that the women in the other part of the house could hear his question. There was no microphone for the women. If they had questions, they would have to write them down on a sheet of paper for Pete’s son Yusuf, who was then around ten years old, to bring to the main prayer room. Today, they did not ask questions.

  “I think if we go to the Muslim world, we need to go ashore ready to fight.” Charlie nodded his head when he said this and his eyes widened. “Those governments don’t practice true Islam. They go from house to house and take their citizens’ guns away. Muhammad, peace be upon him, never took away the Ummah’s weapons.” (The Ummah is the worldwide community of Muslims.)

  A Muslim whose main concern about the corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorships was the lack of Second Amendment rights? I suppressed a chuckle, still amused at stumbling upon a congregation of Muslim rednecks.

  Sheikh Hassan spoke softly in his response and looked away from Charlie. He said that while Middle Eastern governments weren’t practicing true Islam, it was still better to live in the Middle East with other Muslims than to live in this kafir (infidel) society.

  Just as Sheikh Hassan’s style of argument was strange to me, so was the way that he answered questions. His answers were short, and came across as rebukes more than explanations. His message was: I am practicing true Islam, and you should be ashamed of your doubts.

  As a new Muslim, his approach intimidated me. When I first converted to Islam, al-Husein had told me, “No other Muslim will accuse you of not being a Muslim.” His point was that this faith is different from Christianity. We were both struck by how often Christians would accuse certain sects, like the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, of not being true Christians. The thought that other Muslims would accept me as a brother in faith even if we disagreed on some points was comforting.

  But I didn’t get that impression from Sheikh Hassan. He thought that his way was right and all those who disagreed were deviants, or worse.