My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  “Some people believe in God, and others don’t,” I said. “If you can see this through my eyes, you’d understand that the truly surprising move would have been if I simply ceased to believe.”

  Sadik nodded, but I’m not sure he would ever come to understand this second conversion.

  I had come to believe in the resurrection, but I wasn’t yet fully resurrected.

  I still felt uncomfortable telling the story of my religious conversions—not only for personal safety reasons, but also because my story was so unusual that I doubted many other people could understand it. People were more likely, I thought, to see me as crazy, or as someone who couldn’t make up his mind and was bouncing erratically from religion to religion.

  Nor was I finished with the rules that had been drilled into me at Al Haramain. They would crop up at strange times. When Amy and I were shopping for our wedding bands, for example, I remembered the hadith where Muhammad had said that it was forbidden for men to wear gold. While Amy got a yellow gold wedding band, I selected one that was white gold—one that didn’t look like it was made of gold. The only thing that I had in mind when selecting this wedding band was that hadith, even though I was no longer Muslim.

  So Al Haramain’s legacy lived on even after I had left Islam.

  Pete was next, after al-Husein. The last time I’d had substantial interaction with Pete was the previous spring, when he wanted me to meet Soliman al-But’he at the airport and I had refused.

  Pete had called me just a few days earlier. He would greet me with the traditional Islamic greeting when he called: “Assalaamu ’alaykum.” Desiring to live without deception, I wouldn’t offer the Islamic reply. Instead, I’d say something like, “Hi, Pete, how are you?”

  Pete immediately noticed my failure to respond to his Islamic greeting in kind. But during his first phone call, Pete told me what he wanted without remarking on the fact that I didn’t reply to his Islamic greeting.

  “Look, bro,” Pete said. “I know that the Jewish state has elected this Ariel Sharon as its leader. This makes me sick to my stomach. This guy shouldn’t lead a nation-state. He’s a war criminal and should be thrown in prison for what he did to the Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. What I want you to do is to talk to some of your crazy professors there at NYU to see if they have an idea for how we can take this guy to court.”

  I told Pete I would look into it. I knew that I had to tell him that I had left Islam. I figured that the next time we spoke should be the time. As luck would have it, Amy was in town for the second significant conversation that I’d have with Pete in the course of a year. I told her that a phone call with Pete was coming, that I needed to tell him I had left Islam. She could see that I was nervous. “You shouldn’t worry about this,” Amy assured me. “The worst he can do is yell at you and tell you that you’re going to hell.”

  There was so much more he could do, though. But I hadn’t told Amy about the traditional punishment for leaving Islam. I didn’t really speak with anyone about it. I didn’t want to worry her, nor did I want people to know that I could, at some point, face death threats for my new faith. I viewed it as a sign of weakness. All I wanted was a normal life.

  I locked myself in my room for almost an hour and got on the phone with Pete. He could see on the caller ID that I was on the line, and he answered in typical fashion, “Assalaamu ’alaykum, my dear brother Daveed! How are you?”

  “I’m doing well, Pete. Thanks.”

  I again hadn’t responded to his Islamic greeting. So now he had to ask. “Bro, are you even practicing Islam at all?”

  “I’m really having my doubts, Pete. Grave doubts. I don’t think I’d call myself Muslim at this point.”

  Pete, like al-Husein, responded with a soft touch. I should have known that he would. His first wife had left Islam and returned to Christianity: he’d been forced to deal with this kind of thing before.

  Pete made me promise that I’d continue to seek out God. “Bro, you might live for a hundred more years. But what you gotta understand is that this life, long as it is, is nothing compared to the next one. We’re living for the next life, bro, and we’re living to please God.”

  “I agree with all of that, Pete.”

  Pete went into a long-winded story about how he had recently bought a new house, and he took out a loan to do so, a loan that would charge him interest. Paying interest, as I knew, was haram. But here he had a beautiful house, and he began to wonder what the harm was. Wasn’t it easier to just take out a loan? Then Pete found that there was a termite infestation that he hadn’t caught on first inspection. He would have to get new floors put in. That, to Pete, was God’s way of showing him the consequence of taking out an interest-bearing loan.

  The application to what he was telling me was obvious. I might be living a life that I think is good, but if I’m defying God, I will eventually pay for it.

  Pete ended by saying, “Bro, I want you to know that it’s okay with me if you experiment. If you end up belonging to some crazy religion or something else, I won’t be mad at you. What matters to me is that you continue to seek the truth.”

  I was impressed with the way Pete handled that call. For the next couple of years, whenever I returned to Ashland, I’d always think about meeting up with Pete for coffee. I didn’t ever manage to see him, though, and within a few years it would be impossible to do so.

  Amy and I were married on Sunday, June 3, 2001.

  The festivities were a weekend-long affair, kicking off with desserts at her parents’ house in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on Friday. For the first time in years, I was surrounded entirely by friends and by those who wished the best for my future with Amy. I hadn’t seen my parents since wrapping up work at Al Haramain; the expense and travel time between New York and Ashland were prohibitive.

  I had four groomsmen, including Mike Hollister—people who had known me before, during, and after my time as a Muslim. Al-Husein and Liana did not come to the wedding. Although they were invited, it was a tepid invitation; I didn’t know if I wanted al-Husein there. Nor did I know whether I would have made him a groomsman if he was able to come.

  Other friends and family members had made the trip to North Carolina from Florida, New York, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and beyond. My parents would later describe the weekend as “heaven on earth.” They weren’t too far off the mark.

  Some friends of Amy’s family, who had a beautiful riverside home, offered up their property for a Saturday bash. I went out in a kayak with Jacob Bornstein, my best friend from high school and one of my groomsmen. As with most of my other friends, he was aware of my movement toward and eventually away from Islam, and he was interested in hearing about what the journey had meant to me. I was unable to cleanly summarize it. There were so many things that I had been through and believed while at Al Haramain that I didn’t want to acknowledge, let alone discuss.

  The wedding location had been set while I was still a Muslim, and, at the time, I didn’t want to have it in a church. We were married at the Albemarle Plantation, a country club in Hertford, North Carolina, bordered by the Albermarle Sound and Yeopim River. The skies were clear, and everything seemed to glow: the grass, the guests, and the waters behind us.

  The minister asked Amy and me to look into each other’s eyes as we said our vows. As I looked at Amy, I realized how much she had sacrificed for me. She had seen me descend into fundamentalist Islam and emerge on the other side as a Christian. She had politely resisted my demands to have a nikah ceremony before the wedding. I thought of how unpleasant I had been—to Amy, to my parents, to my friends—during my time in radical Islam. It was testament to the strength of Amy’s love for me, the strength of my parents’ love, the strength of my friendships, that they had been able to endure.

  As I looked into Amy’s eyes, I knew that I couldn’t possibly deserve her love. The best I could do was accept it, and try to love her with the same kind of understanding, forgiveness, and p
assion.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working on my computer in my sixth-floor apartment at Mercer Hall, a law school dorm just a block off Broadway in the West Village.

  When I first heard the screams that morning, I thought there might have been a celebrity sighting. That’s what it sounded like from outside the window—like a rock band had shown up, and their fans couldn’t contain themselves. It was only when I looked out the window that I realized something was terribly wrong. I saw NYU students outside, in the brick walkway leading toward Mercer, some of them in the street. They didn’t look happy or excited. They looked scared, anguished. I noticed that the crowd was staring south down the street, toward the World Trade Center.

  I turned on CNN and found that the south tower had already collapsed. The north tower was still standing, with an ominous column of smoke rising from it.

  Amy was upstairs in the computer lab. I rushed up to get her. Another student was there also, but I ignored him. “Have you looked at the news?” I blurted out.

  “No.” We’d been up late the night before, and she was still trying to wake up.

  “There’s been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. One of the towers has collapsed. The other’s on fire.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  We rushed out to the street where the students had gathered. There was a red SUV parked nearby with the tailgate open. The speakers were pointed toward the rear of the car, and they were blaring the news. In the confusion, there were a lot of false reports: bombs outside the Supreme Court, a dozen hijacked airplanes.

  I looked around at the other NYU students, some of them close friends. They looked scared and confused. I saw one guy, blond with pale skin, leaning on a cast-iron fence, his head buried in his arm, bawling. They didn’t see this coming, and they had no idea why it had happened. I felt that I had a better idea. This, after all, was essentially what I had been praying for during all the time that the mujahideen had been in my du’a.

  I thought of the end of my first semester of law school, when I had gone out with the other students in my section. I envied my classmates then for the fact that they didn’t have to think about the issues that radical Islam had thrust upon me. But now, on September 11, as the north tower smoldered and eventually crumbled, I realized that my old world had been vividly brought to them.

  I called Pete shortly after 9/11. It was one of the typical calls that many Americans made to their Muslim friends after the attacks. I wanted to make sure he was okay, and that people on the streets weren’t openly calling for his blood. (As though such vigilante justice could ever find a home in Ashland.)

  He sounded shaken up when we talked. “I haven’t been able to do anything for days,” he said. “I can barely eat. You know me, terrorism makes me real upset.”

  I had never known that about him, but he did sound upset now. I had no reason to doubt his sincerity.

  The 9/11 attacks provided the ammunition for another of Pete’s Rube Goldberg schemes. Although Pete would undertake it a few days after I spoke with him by phone, I wouldn’t learn about this one for a couple of years.

  Pete sent a letter to the White House, the State Department, and prominent members of Congress arguing that “[t]his unusual time calls for unusual answers and unusual actions to cope with these heinous crimes.” He wrote that the key question was who carried out the 9/11 attacks—and to that extent, Osama bin Laden’s knowledge of the inner workings of terror was invaluable, and it would be a tragic loss to kill him without getting information from him.

  So Pete argued in his letter that bin Laden should be interviewed by a four-person team. One of the people on the team should be an American-born FBI agent who is a Sunni Muslim of Afghan descent. Two of the team members should be American-born Christian FBI agents who know the Bible well enough to quote from it. And the final member of the team would be “a U.S. citizen, not an FBI agent, a Muslim male who understands the Afghani, Pakistani, and Saudi cultures and traditions, the intricacies of Muslim sects and laws, and knows the language.” That fourth person, who would serve as the team’s leader, would be . . . Pete Seda himself.

  The team would go into Afghanistan to interview bin Laden. “If bin Laden did not do it,” Pete wrote, “then he should be willing to have these discussions. Under Islamic law, he has to help his Muslim brothers and sisters by helping expose the enemies of Islam. And whoever did this is an enemy of Islam. If it is brought up to him that Muslims are suffering globally because of this . . . he will have to respond.”

  Another grandiose plan. Pete never changed. As usual, nothing ever came of it.

  I shuddered when I heard that the law school would hold a town hall forum for students that Friday to discuss the attacks. I already knew what NYU’s outspoken leftists would say. But I couldn’t keep myself away from the forum.

  It seemed that everybody felt the need to express their feelings about 9/11. Middle Eastern and South Asian students understandably wanted to know if they would be harassed or profiled, and how their lives would change. NYU’s hard left feared an upsurge in patriotic sentiment and nationalism, and needed to express their concerns about people taking a simplistic black-and-white approach to the attacks rather than “thinking critically” (“critical thinking” was code for realizing that the United States bore the ultimate responsibility for the 9/11 attacks).

  I had worked for a Wahhabi charity that stood in solidarity with the enemy ideologically. I myself had become radicalized. Yet while I knew that NYU aspired to be a “safe place” for dialogue, this aspiration was one-sided. It was a “safe place” for those who thought the United States had brought 9/11 upon itself, and not for those who disagreed.

  I knew this prior to NYU’s town hall meeting, but went anyway. Some NYU professors spoke, saying nothing interesting or insightful, before the floor was opened to students. The student speeches were exactly what I had anticipated. Somebody talked about how this was because of U.S. support for Israel over the Palestinians. One woman gave a long-winded and incoherent speech. Flights were just now getting off the ground again, and she began by saying, “It’s important to take a critical view of why this happened. I want you to take a look around and see what’s going on in this country today. There are people of Middle Eastern descent who are, right now, being profiled in airports across the country.” The awkwardly named World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, had reached its conclusion just before the 9/11 attacks. After Arab states hijacked the conference by turning it into another occasion to attack Israel, the United States walked out. The speaker referred to this also, trying to show how all these factors fit together, amounting to U.S. culpability in 9/11.

  Eventually I stood up. When the moderator handed me the microphone, I said, “Let me just say that I love this country. And one of the things that I love most about this country is its freedom of expression.” It was an attention-grabbing opening—one that would also be appropriate for any of the America-bashing speeches of the day. It would be typical for the other students to talk about how they love the country’s freedom of expression before making use of that freedom of expression to excoriate America.

  “Today I’ve heard other students exercise their freedom of expression by talking about how the U.S. brought the attacks upon itself. I understand that there are a lot of things that NYU students don’t like about the U.S. or its foreign policy, but I want to remind people of the bigger picture. I’ve noticed a tendency to assume that the terrorists, in attacking us, are attacking all the things that the average NYU student hates. But the attacks are also aimed at those aspects of the U.S. that most people here love. The attacks aren’t just over our foreign policy. They’re also about the fact that we don’t execute homosexuals; that we don’t make women wear burkas and treat them as second-class citizens; the fact that we have the freedom to question or reject religion, and to p
ractice it as we see fit. You can skewer the U.S. all you want. But I fear that in doing so, a lot of the students here misunderstand the larger context.”

  After the town hall meeting ended, a few people came up to me and thanked me for my speech. I was somewhat surprised when I passed by Stephen Schulhofer, a very left-of-center professor with whom I had taken a criminal procedure class the semester before. He nodded and said, “I appreciated what you said.”

  The response to that speech was atypically positive. I received a much different reaction a few days later in my federal courts class.

  My federal courts professor, Barry Friedman, wasn’t sure how he should respond to 9/11. We had a class e-mail distribution list where he sent out a message shortly after the attacks talking about how anxious he was to get back to class. This was understandable. In the face of a tragedy like 9/11, it’s natural to want to get back to one’s routine. But the 9/11 attacks fundamentally changed our lives, presenting us with a set of problems and moral dilemmas that none of us had anticipated. It was natural to want to get back to our normal routines and schedules, but I thought we would have been better served by time to regroup and assess how our lives had been altered, against our will.

  While Professor Friedman wanted to return to our routine, he also wanted to be sensitive to students by asking if anybody had anything that they wanted to say to the class. I listened to a few student speeches. They were coded, speaking of the need to view the attacks through a “critical lens,” referring cryptically to U.S. misdeeds.

  I had been following the discussions about 9/11 on various NYU leftist e-mail lists, such as that of the National Lawyers Guild. A great deal of weight was given to the “quick reaction” that MIT professor Noam Chomsky penned the day after the attacks. He began by conceding that the 9/11 attacks were “major atrocities,” albeit atrocities that “do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people.” Chomsky then opined that the proper response to 9/11 was to try to enter the minds of the perpetrators:As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing “The wickedness and awe-some cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people,” he writes that “this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia— paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally—hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.” And much more.