My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  As I walked back into my dorm room, I wondered if I would go to church again. As I faced my prayer rug in the direction of Mecca for my afternoon prayers, I acknowledged the obvious. If everything were all right with my faith, I wouldn’t have set foot in a church in the first place.

  I would finish work early in those days. I worked as a summer associate for a small law firm called Cooper, Brown & Behrle, located on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue, near Central Park. There were only four lawyers at the firm, and only one was under fifty. The good part? I was usually out the door by five o’clock.

  Once outside, I often found myself strolling through Central Park. Ever since I was young, I would always go to a park when there was something I needed to think about.

  But lately, I wasn’t sure what it was I needed to think about. I recognized that I wasn’t the same person who I had been a few years ago. I thought of how I felt when I had graduated from college—full of passion for creating social change, confident in my political and moral convictions,enthused about building a deeper understanding of my faith. All that remained now was a vague, hazy memory of feelings that had probably been illusory at the time. That, and the feeling that I missed the person I had been.

  Sometimes, when I got home from work, I would read fatwas online. I used to actively avoid Islamic rulings that I feared I wasn’t prepared for. But lately it seemed there was no point in fleeing from the inevitable.

  One day I was reading through a Web site called Islam Q & A, which had an impressive array of fatwas on various subjects. The Web site’s readers would write in with topical questions, and a team of Islamic legal scholars would answer them. One question caught my eye: “Is it permissible to allow a Christian wife to practise her religion in the home?” I immediately thought of Amy, whom I would marry the following summer when she graduated from Wake Forest.

  The questioner stated that he knew that Allah permits us to marry Christians and Jews. But, he wondered, “Can she practice her religious rites in the same house and have pictures of the crucifiction8 of Jesus (A)9 and celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and etc. Can her kids join her? If no, would not it hurt her feelings? Please, answer me on this issue.”

  I felt numb as I read the sheikh’s response:Praise be to Allaah.

  It is not permissible for a Muslim to allow his wife from among the People of the Book to celebrate her festivals in his home, for the man is in charge of that woman and she does not have the right to openly celebrate her festivals in his home, because of the resulting effects of corruption, forbidden things and display of the symbols of kufr [disbelief] in his home. He should keep his children from taking part in those innovated festivals, because the children belong to the father and he should keep them away from these forbidden celebrations. At the same time he should direct them towards what will benefit them, even if that affects his relationship with his wife. The aims of sharee’ah and protecting one’s religion—which is one of the most important aims of sharee’ah—take priority over everything else.

  Imaam Ahmad ibn Hanbal was asked about a man who had a Christian wife—could he let her go out to join in the Christian festivals or to go to the church? He said, no.

  In al-Mughni (1/21), Ibn Qudaamah says: “(Treatment of women): If his wife is a dhimmiyyah [a Jew or Christian living under Islamic rule], he can prevent her from going to the church, because that is not an act of obedience to Allaah.”

  If these scholars said that the husband should stop a Christian wife from going to church, then what do you think is the case with regard to her celebrating these innovated festivals in the house of her Muslim husband? Especially when we know the harm that results from these festivals, which is far worse than her merely going to the church. And Allaah knows best.

  I thought back to 1998, when I spent Thanksgiving with Amy’s family in her hometown of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. When Thanksgiving ended, they began to prepare for Christmas. Their enthusiasm was infectious. I watched as Amy and her sisters decorated the tree, putting up ornaments and sprinkling it with tinsel. They put old Christmas records on the phonograph that they had listened to from the time they were kids.

  Growing up, I had never celebrated Christmas. Seeing Amy and her sisters preparing for the holiday, my instinctive response was to seriously engage the idea of Christmas from a Muslim perspective. I paid close attention to the lyrics of one of the songs about Santa Claus:He sees you when you’re sleeping

  He knows when you’re awake

  He knows if you’ve been bad or good

  So be good for goodness sake

  My first impression was that Santa Claus sounded an awful lot like God: keeping track of your good deeds and bad, constantly aware of whether you’re sleeping or not. But almost immediately, I realized that I was taking myself too seriously. They didn’t believe in Santa Claus. They didn’t think he was actually watching them when they were sleeping and awake and keeping a balance sheet of their deeds. Santa was one of the myths of Christmas, one that everyone recognized as a myth. Eventually, Amy persuaded me to put on a Santa hat.

  I thought of the photograph that one of Amy’s sisters later took of Amy and me, sitting on the couch in her parents’ living room with these hats on. We looked so happy together. I had managed to put aside my instinctive and overblown objections to Christmas, and was—like the rest of Amy’s family—enjoying the spirit of the season.

  But my thoughts quickly turned from my memories of Christmas to the fatwa I had just read. Was I really to prohibit Amy from celebrating Christmas in our home? This was the kind of idea I once would have laughed at. But now I resisted that impulse. Instead of laughing, I repeated one of my mantras: It isn’t about what you want. It is what Allah wants.

  So there was no neat conclusion when I finished reading the fatwa, no elegant way to summarize its meaning. I just felt numb.

  A few days later, I again found myself wandering through Central Park. High-rises towered over the glistening waters of the lake at the south end of the park. I walked down a stone path, past the large rock formations. There were ice cream vendors, Frisbee tossers, furiously pedaling bicyclists.

  Something felt different this time, though. Before, I felt lost when walking through the park—feeling that I needed to think about something, but unable to pinpoint what it was. It was as though my time as an Islamic fundamentalist had dulled me, stripping me of the ability to think for myself.

  But this time I started to work my way through a few basic, glaringly obvious principles.

  When you became Muslim, you thought that the moderate interpretation was clearly right. You thought that extremists were either ignorant or manipulating the faith for their own gain. Your time at Al Haramain has made you question this. As your cherished vision of Islam collapses, you’re left feeling depressed, helpless, confused.

  I stopped and bought an ice cream sandwich. These thoughts were self-apparent. I already knew them. What I hadn’t done before was systematically analyze my state: why was I unhappy?

  At Al Haramain, you began to do things that you never would have before. You once ridiculed a legalistic approach to Islam, but you’ve now adopted it as your own. You once unreservedly condemned the “extremists”; now you say prayers for the mujahideen. But you still have doubts, and you’re not happy with where you are.

  I finished the ice cream sandwich and tossed the wrapper in a trash can. It was starting to grow dark, so I turned to leave the park and head back to the subway. There wasn’t much more to think about anyway: the conclusion was obvious.

  Allah has given you a summer job where you’re off work around five o’clock every day. You need to take advantage of all the time you have. Your problem is that you don’t know where you stand. Sheikhs and learned members of the community have been trying to spoon-feed you answers since the minute you arrived at Al Haramain. You need to find your own answers. Reread the Qur’an, study the ahadith, study the works of scholars whom you trust and respect. Disco
ver where you stand.

  I continued to read through the Islam Q & A Web site, and continued to come across interesting fatwas.

  One questioner wanted to know if it was okay for a husband to marry a second wife without the consent of his first wife. The answer was that he didn’t need the first wife’s permission, since “no evidence appears either in the Qur’an nor sunnah requiring the permission of the first wife if her husband wishes to marry another wife, and therefore he is not required to ask her permission.”

  I also found a question about the punishment for apostasy in Islam. Although I already knew the answer, it may have come as a surprise to the questioner. His question took a deeply skeptical tone: “I am currently in a philosophy of religion class and my teacher is an atheist. He claims that under an Islamic state if a born Muslim converts to another religion he is killed. Please tell me if this is true.”

  The answer:Praise be to Allaah.

  The punishment for apostasy (riddah) is well-known in Islaamic Sharee’ah. The one who leaves Islaam will be asked to repent by the Sharee’ah judge in an Islaamic country; if he does not repent and come back to the true religion, he will be killed as a kaafir and apostate, because of the command of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him): “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.”

  It is well-known in Sharee’ah that the punishments (hudood) are not carried out on minors, because they have not yet reached the age of responsibility; but in the case of those who have reached the age of responsibility, the punishment (hadd) applies, without a doubt.

  The person who knows the truth and believes in it, then turns his back on it, does not deserve to live. The punishment for apostasy is prescribed for the protection of the religion and as a deterrent to anyone who is thinking of leaving Islaam. There is no doubt that such a serious crime must be met with an equally weighty punishment. If the kufar do not give people the freedom to cross a red light, how can we give freedom to people to leave Islaam and disbelieve in Allah when they want to?

  That last line actually made me laugh. “If the kufar do not give people the freedom to cross a red light, how can we give freedom to people to leave Islaam?”

  Islam Q & A wasn’t an amalgamation of fringe rulings. Rather, these were the kind of fatwas that I had grown accustomed to during my time at Al Haramain. And I had learned that the theological basis for these rulings was far more sound than you might glean from throwaway lines comparing apostasy laws to traffic lights.

  Fatwas like the two I had just read, with conclusions that my moral impulses rebelled against, once made me deeply uncomfortable. But increasingly, the effect these rulings had on me had changed. It used to be that I’d go numb and withdraw when I read them. Now, I felt emboldened.When I read that there was no need to get your first wife’s permission before taking on a second wife, when I read about the killing of apostates, I felt that this knowledge helped me build my case. I didn’t know what this case was for, or what it was against—but the feeling was there.

  I thought about Prophet Muhammad frequently. Al-Husein had recently told me that whenever he heard of someone’s approach to Islam, he would ask himself one question: “Would it embarrass the Prophet?” That is, would Muhammad see this interpretation as such a distortion that he would disavow it?

  I wondered what Muhammad would think of me and my practice of Islam. And whenever I thought of Muhammad, the feeling of inevitability crept back. Where my views diverged from those of the Salafis, wouldn’t my ideas embarrass the Prophet?

  More and more, I found myself in church on Sundays. I would go alone each time, and would generally try a new church each week. I found something satisfying in church that I did not find in my daily life. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

  The churchgoing experience was no longer punctuated by guilt. I no longer wondered whether it was wrong to enter a church in the first place, whether I should avoid a worship service so heavily based on music, whether I was sinning by taking communion. I often thought about the summer of 1996, when I had visited Mike Hollister in Bellingham and he had asked me to become a Christian. At the time, the idea that I would convert to Mike’s religion seemed far-fetched. Now I wondered how my life might be different had I done so. Would I be happier?

  I was thinking about that decision on the way back from church one day as I wandered through Washington Square Park. I paused for a couple of minutes to join the crowd watching the break-dancers in the park’s enormous fountain but mainly I just walked, lost in thought. But you made your choice, I told myself. You chose Islam, not Christianity.

  That was the brick wall I always hit when thinking about Mike and Christianity. I had made my decision, and I knew the rules. Islam was not an easy-in, easy-out religion.

  Suddenly, another glaringly obvious point came to me, one that I was surprised hadn’t occurred before. It was as though I was just now awakening from a long intellectual slumber in which I had missed both the subtle and also the obvious. I realized that my goal was to please God, not to cower before Islam’s apostasy strictures. And I realized that I wasn’t sure that I had found the truth in Islam.

  The biggest reason I converted to Islam in the first place was that it felt comfortable. I paused when I fully understood that. A man in blue jeans and a wife-beater shirt pushed past, almost running into me. Shifting my focus away from myself for a moment, I looked at the throngs of people in the park. Some of them watched the dancers and other street performers; some were here to sell drugs; others rushed through the park at a breakneck pace on a Sunday afternoon. The familiar feeling of inhabiting a different universe than other New Yorkers hit me. But this time, I didn’t envy them. Instead, I was on the cusp of discovering something, and it felt exhilarating.

  I took a seat on one of the benches. I noticed a big-haired African-American magician, one of my favorite showmen, performing nearby. I smiled ruefully upon seeing him. When I first encountered him a couple of months back, I was determined not to enjoy his act. Magic was haram. One of Muhammad’s companions even had a punch line of sorts after beheading a magician: “Let him use his magic for his own benefit now.” Just as attending church no longer made me feel guilty, I now watched his act free of moral questions.

  As I watched, I turned back to my realization that I had converted to Islam because it felt comfortable. I now believed that one’s level of comfort shouldn’t be a factor in any religious decision; the only consideration was God’s will, not one’s own. But if my original decision to become Muslim was based on what felt comfortable, maybe it too was wrong.

  I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t understood this before. And this realization changed everything.

  When I got back to my apartment that evening, the first thing I did was call Mike Hollister. It had been a while since we’d spoken. Certainly, he was surprised by what I asked when he picked up the phone.

  “Is there a particular translation of the Bible that you like, Mike?”

  “Um, well, there’s a great New International Version student bible that Amy and I like to use.”

  “Could you send me a copy? I want to read the Bible.”

  I didn’t really discuss my spiritual struggles with anyone else, not even Amy. But sometimes I’d drop a hint.

  I got an e-mail from Amy in the middle of the summer with a link to an NPR story critical of the madrassas in Pakistan (the Islamic religious schools where many of the Taliban were educated). Along with the link, Amy commented, “Talk about stereotypes!”

  She was suggesting that the story contained unfair stereotypes about Islam. At one point I would have agreed without even considering the matter, simply assuming that the piece was full of bias. But this time, I sent Amy a message that said that the radical teachings in Pakistan’s madrassas were indeed a problem. My e-mail included a number of links to articles describing in greater depth these teachings and the radicalization that they produced.

  It felt strange to send that e-mail. I was so used t
o defending Islam against people’s misconceptions, and accusing the Western media of distorting the faith. It was the first time I weighed in to defend an article critical of some facet of my religion.

  When I spoke with Amy on the phone later that day, I asked if my e-mail had surprised her. She said that it did. I knew that there were more surprises in store for her.

  When I opened the cardboard box that arrived a few days after I spoke with Mike, I found a religious “care package.”

  There was a beautiful leather-bound New International Version student edition of the Bible. There was a book by Josh McDowell, whose exposition of the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” dilemma I remembered well. There was a book defending the doctrine of predestination by the acclaimed reformed theologian R. C. Sproul. Mike had also thrown in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

  The books that Mike had sent were soon joined in my dorm room by stacks of religious volumes. If you were to walk into my room during this time, I would seem mired in study for a very difficult exam—and that impression wouldn’t be far off the mark. Various books covered the floor, the desk, the shelves.

  I listened to audio debates between Christian and Muslim scholars, read books of apologetics on both sides, followed debates between Muslims and Christians on the Internet, pored through the Bible and Qur’an and filled both holy books with yellow tabs.

  I still prayed five times a day, but my supplications to God after I finished my prayers were now drastically different.

  It used to be that in my supplications, I would ask for what I thought God wanted me to ask for—like the mujahideen’s victory. This notion of what God wanted was filtered through my experiences at Al Haramain. I was afraid to ask for anything too liberal, anything that might conflict with what the sheikhs and visiting scholars assured me was right.