My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  I thought about that. “You have a point,” I said.

  “These kufar think they can just go in and brutalize the Muslims. But they’re gonna learn that it isn’t that easy.”

  I didn’t know at the time that Pete may already have had in mind plans to ensure that the Russians wouldn’t have it that easy.

  My classes, at least, were going well. My favorite professor was Larry Kramer, who taught civil procedure. Kramer was in his early forties, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school and a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan. He would later go on to become the dean of Stanford’s law school.

  The thing I appreciated most about the class was Kramer’s Socratic method. He was able to pierce to the heart of a student’s argument and eviscerate it in a way that none of our other professors could. Because of that, the class’s opinions on Kramer were sharply divided. He was simultaneously loved, hated, and feared—at times all by the same person. Testament to Kramer’s skill as a teacher is the fact that I found his class engrossing, even though it focused on the technical details of civil litigation.

  Part of the reason I enjoyed the class was that it didn’t force me to compromise my Islamic principles. My criminal law course often focused on theories of punishment. I knew that it would never be acceptable to say in class, “The right punishment for a thief is to have his hand cut off, because that’s what the Qur’an demands.” In contrast, what could be inappropriate Islamically about a system of civil procedure? Sharia-compliant courts would also need to have procedures for dealing with civil litigation.

  As part of his Socratic method, Kramer would often put his students into roles, as lawyers or judges. One day, Kramer put me and one of my friends, a leftist from California named David Alonzo-Maizlish, into the role of attorneys who were supposed to debate the legal issues from one of the cases we had read.

  My background in college debate did me well. From debate I had garnered a certain approach to analyzing arguments and organizing my thoughts. The margin notes in my casebook broke down all of the court’s analysis comprehensively, detailed the arguments that had been presented to the court in a manner I could quickly assess.

  After my brief debate with David Alonzo-Maizlish was done, my friend Sadik Huseny—himself a lapsed Muslim of Albanian descent— whispered to me, “That’s the best I’ve seen anybody do in this class.” Sadik, who was a remarkably articulate individual, had described the “flush effect” that occurred when you were called on in Kramer’s class: suddenly everything you had thought of, everything you had prepared for, was flushed right out of you.

  When I saw Professor Kramer in the hallway later, he nodded and said, “Good job today in class.” I appreciated his manner of giving the compliment. He didn’t even slow down to say it. Instead, he nodded and congratulated me while walking past, never breaking his stride. But I also knew that Kramer wouldn’t give a compliment lightly.

  But in the end, I wished that I felt like my good performance in class mattered.

  I found my studies to be an excellent diversion. I knew that most students thought it was tedious to come back to their rooms and pore carefully through the massive red-and-black casebooks with highlighters and pens in hand. To me, class preparation—like my five daily prayers— was a moment to get away. When I was preparing for class, I felt that I was inhabiting a more whimsical universe than usual. The universe of the law was one where I could approach analytical problems using pure logic, where I could venture my own moral opinions. Not, I thought, like the real world. There was a pronounced difference between how I felt when I picked up my Aspen Law casebook to read about tort law and how I felt when thumbing through the Noble Qur’an and trying to reason through the obligation of jihad, or hijrah.

  Anytime al-Husein announced that he had a question for me, I would brace for what was coming. Today it seemed that he was probing my practice of Islam. “I know that at one time you and I both believed in the need for an Islamic reformation,” he said. “I want to know if this is something that you still believe in.”

  I looked at the street outside while holding the receiver. There was one guy in the dirty clothes of a homeless man aggressively shaking his coffee mug at passersby, looking for change. “I never really believed in an Islamic reformation,” I said. That was true, at least partially. I would never have used that phrase to describe what I had believed. I had tried to reconcile my passion for social justice with a sincere belief in Allah and an effort to stay true to His religion. I used to think the two could be reconciled. But I was rapidly concluding that I had simply been wrong about that.

  I continued, “An Islamic reformation was far more at the forefront in your thinking than in mine. I always wanted to be as true as possible to the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet, alayhi salaatu was salaam. What has changed is my idea of what it means to be true to the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad, alayhi salaatu was salaam.”

  It seemed that Al-Husein was satisfied with the response, and our conversation continued. I wondered how he would have responded if I had told him that I was still committed to the idea of an Islamic reformation.It seemed like, as during my time at Al Haramain, he was probing for deviant beliefs.

  The end of finals was not as sweet for me as for most first-years. The other students saw the end of finals as a last hurdle cleared, allowing them—at least for the next three weeks—to go back to enjoying life. I continued to see law school and exams in the opposite way. They were no obstacle, but rather a somewhat pleasant escape.

  After our last finals were done, there was a champagne toast to celebrate. John Sexton, NYU’s legendary law school dean (and now the university’s president) came out to lead the toast. I of course did not drink, but afterward went with other students to a bar to celebrate.

  Looking at the other students, it was obvious that I was living in a different universe. They were jubilant. There was drinking, some dancing, loud music often drowning out tepid attempts at conversation. They seemed happy. Though I wasn’t drinking, I wondered if even this was wrong: being around alcohol and loud music, in a place where the sexes mixed freely.

  The other students were blissfully unaware of the various rules that I struggled with constantly. They never had to worry about whether a full beard was required, whether it was okay to shake hands with a woman, whether you could wear shorts in the summer. They didn’t have to worry about whether music was unlawful, about rolling up their trousers before they prayed. And they never had the burden of wondering whether the Taliban and the holy warriors of Chechnya were right.

  I thought back to when al-Husein visited me when I was moving into my dorm room, and our trip to NYU’s professional bookstore. I thought of al-Husein’s remark—“Astaghfirullah!”—when we heard the frat boy-looking guy talking about his drinking exploits. Things had seemed so clear to me at the time. That confused kid was lost in his own sins and error, unlike me.

  But now, as I watched my classmates, I had to wonder: if I had the truth and they were in error, why did I envy their ignorance? Why did I wish that I too could suck down a beer and ignore events that were unfolding half a world away?

  The pervert Jews whine about their so-called Holocaust. But how much worse is this, when it is being done in the open with all the world watching? ”

  These were not Abdul-Qaadir’s words, but he was the cause of this e-mail arriving in my in-box. Indeed, one thing that made it difficult to ignore events occurring half a world away was the constant stream of e-mail that discussed these events.

  Abdul-Qaadir, the black convert to Islam who had helped mentor me down the road to Salafism, had set up an e-mail list just as I was beginning law school. On it, he would send out information on the Chechen mujahideen. I never doubted what his perspective would be on events in Chechnya, and he did not disappoint with his raw enthusiasm for the holy warriors. Sometimes he would send out his own reports on the fighting. Other times, he would send out e-mail that came from
other sources, like the fiercely pro-Chechen Qoqaz information group, which included e-mail written by people throughout the world who sympathized with the Chechens’ cause. (Qoqaz was the Arabic word for the Caucasus region, where Chechnya is located.)

  The message about the “pervert Jews” and their “so-called Holocaust” was part of a compilation of messages that had been sent to Qoqaz expressing various Muslims’ support for the Chechen mujahideen. These messages were compiled in a single e-mail. I presumed that the e-mail had been sent from the Qoqaz group to Abdul-Qaadir, and from Abdul-Qaadir it had been passed along to me. Some of the messages sent to the Chechens were about as innocuous as messages sent to a group of holy warriors trying to establish a sharia state by force could be—but the innocuous ones were the minority. The message that struck me, the message about the pervert Jews whining about their so-called Holocaust, went on about how the so-called Holocaust was at least carried out in secret by the Germans, while here the Russians were slaughtering the Chechens with all the world watching. So how much worse is this than the Holocaust? With my old activist impulse, I thought about replying with a message saying that you don’t have to attack the Jews to support the Chechens or the Muslims—perhaps even pointing out that I was from a Jewish background but had come to embrace Islam. But what good would that have done?

  Abdul-Qaadir eventually established his own Internet news group about the events in Chechnya. It was called Ansaarul-Mujahideen, “News from the Chechen Mujahideen point of view.” It may be somewhat difficult to believe in the post-9/11 world, but Abdul-Qaadir ran this news group right out of Yahoo.com. This was the world before the September 11 attacks, where the jihadists weren’t under much scrutiny, and little seemed out of place about running this news group on one of the Internet’s most popular destinations. (After 9/11, Abdul-Qaadir sent out an indignant e-mail stating that “some views, such as those I have passed forth in this egroup now for two years, may now be viewed not just as passing on of information but advocacy of terror!” He added, “I do know that as a person, a MUSLIM American, who has a hard time shutting up or being told he has no right to have an opinion, I find it repugnant that the only things that can be said or expressed are those things which are deemed suitable by those who do not share our faith. I believe this breeds extremism and hatred, exaggeration and misunderstanding.”)

  In this pre-9/11 world, Abdul-Qaadir’s news group even featured reports sent to him directly from the field of combat. One of them stands out to this day. I remember coming back to my dorm room after class, opening my e-mail, and seeing a message from Abdul-Qaadir announcing that he had “bittersweet news”: One of the Chechen mujahideen, with whom Abdul-Qaadir had carried on a long-running correspondence, had been killed. The holy warrior had longed for martyrdom. He was a long-time international jihadist, fighting on battlefields that ranged from Afghanistan to Southeast Asia to the Caucasus. Wherever he went, this young man sought to die in Allah’s cause. Abdul-Qaadir had received a report of the death from some of his comrades-in-arms. They reported that when the young man died, he had been standing up and praying for death—and then had been hit by an incoming Russian rocket.

  Abdul-Qaadir finished the e-mail by imploring the readers to think of how much more the dead mujahid had done for the Ummah than any of us, the readers.

  But was that really what the religion was about? Fighting in various battlefields scattered throughout the world, trying to topple secular governments, and praying for death? Even though the mujahideen were in my prayers, my doubts were growing.

  A Web site that al-Husein showed me in December made me feel that I was the only one with doubts. I was in Orlando, where al-Husein grew up, because he was about to get married. It was a few days before the nikah ceremony, and al-Husein was only partially focused on his own wedding. He was preoccupied with guilt, Islamic rules—and the Chechen mujahideen. Al-Husein was showing me his favorite Internet picture of those holy warriors.

  It was a photo of the Chechen mujahideen lined up for a battlefield prayer. Al-Husein explained that he had this photo up on the wall of his room back in Boston.

  A number of al-Husein’s cousins had come to Orlando for the wedding. They were young, beautiful, and vivacious Indian-American women. One of them looked at the computer screen and asked what to her must have been the obvious question: “Are you joking?”

  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 intellec
tually 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?