by Scott Shane
Now, at midnight, Anwar al-Awlaki began his brief message to his brother with the abbreviation for As-salamu alaykum, or “Peace be upon you,” the standard Muslim greeting.
AA Ammar
I personally think it was horrible. I am very upset about it. Anyway, maybe tomorrow they will have me on for an hour. I will let you know if it will go ahead. The media are all over us. At Jummah today we had ABC, NBC, CBS, and the Washington Post. I hope we can use this for the good of all of us.
The quick reply captured in capsule form the chaos that had engulfed Anwar al-Awlaki’s world as the imam at Dar Al-Hijrah, one of the country’s largest mosques in one of the globe’s most saturated media markets. It was an unfiltered glimpse, in a private message to a family member, of Awlaki’s condemnation of the 9/11 attacks as “horrible,” a notable clue for tracing his evolution. But it also showed how the tragedy had catapulted a young preacher into a spotlight of blinding brightness, with television cameras jostling for space at jummah, or Friday prayers. And perhaps it contained a hint of Awlaki’s ambition, which might have sounded crass in a public message, to take advantage of the tragedy for some collective moral purpose—to “use this for the good of all of us.”
The next morning the national trauma would become intensely personal for Awlaki. The FBI’s frantic quest to identify the hijackers and track their activities in America quickly found that two of them, Nawaf al-Hazmi, twenty-five, and Khalid al-Mihdhar, twenty-six, childhood friends from Saudi Arabia, had worshipped at Awlaki’s mosque in San Diego for months while he was the imam. Hazmi and a third Saudi hijacker, Hani Hanjour, twenty-nine, had later turned up across the country at Dar Al-Hijrah. It was an alarming pattern that brought two FBI agents to the door of Awlaki’s modest brick rancher on Kaywood Drive in Falls Church just hours after he had sent the e-mail to his brother. It was the first of at least three interviews over the next few days.
From the FBI’s written account of the interviews, notes recorded on a standard form called a 302, Awlaki appears to have been alternately cooperative and combative. The agents walked him through his biography and his extensive travels of the previous months, but when they asked about the hypersensitive topic of jihad, Awlaki balked. “When questioned as to whether or not AWLAKI lectured on the Jihad, AWLAKI stated, ‘I would like not to comment on that,’ ” the agents wrote. “However, he further stated that he ‘absolutely strongly condemns the attacks.’ ” Under the circumstances, Awlaki may have been wary of addressing the complexities of the concept of jihad in Islam for fear of fueling the agents’ suspicions, preferring to stick to a straightforward condemnation of the plot. Likewise, when the agents asked to see Awlaki’s passport, he declined: Awlaki “advised that he did not feel like showing it to the SAs at this time because it was upstairs,” they wrote, using the abbreviation for “special agents.” Awlaki’s motive here is hard to discern, but he may have been concerned that the agents would use the stamps in the passport to try to trip him up on details of his travels—or confiscate the passport to prevent him from leaving the United States.
Three more times, agents visited. In the second interview, two days after the first, Awlaki had to correct the misspelling of his first name—the agents, showing their unfamiliarity with common Arabic names, had written it as “Answar.” The agents thought they might have caught the imam in a lie. He had said in the first meeting that he had been absent from the mosque when FBI investigators showed around an array of photos of the suspected hijackers. This time Awlaki said he had recognized a face from the photo array: it was one of the hijackers from the San Diego mosque, Hazmi. Awlaki told the agents that on one occasion, when he had just returned from a visit to Saudi Arabia, Hazmi had stopped him in the mosque and complained that the imam had not contacted him during the trip, since Hazmi had been home in Saudi Arabia on a visit at the time. Awlaki said he had never pegged Hazmi as especially devout because he didn’t wear a beard or pray five times a day. He described Hazmi as soft-spoken and shy.
The cleric said he did not recognize al-Mihdhar, Hazmi’s roommate and constant companion, though he recalled Hazmi often being with another man, who he had assumed was his brother. The agents met Awlaki for a third interview on September 19—three interviews in five days—but this time, recognizing that the intensity of the FBI scrutiny called for legal representation, he told them to come to the Springfield, Virginia, office of his lawyer. He expressed skepticism about the notion that Hazmi could have been a hijacker, saying he was “so slight of build that he might have trouble slaughtering a chicken.”
What they learned during the repeated questioning, along with simultaneous interviews with Awlaki’s West Coast contacts and a review of travel and credit card records, did not persuade the agents to arrest Awlaki. That was notable, since in those anxious days it did not take much to prompt the FBI to take a Muslim suspect into custody. But agents remained suspicious. At least one worshipper at the San Diego mosque described long, closed-door meetings between Awlaki and Hazmi, and an FBI document later described Awlaki as Hazmi’s “spiritual adviser.” Awlaki’s cagey manner and intermittent hostility prompted the agents to open a formal investigation of him. His phones would be monitored and a surveillance team would watch his movements day and night, though for months he would remain unaware of the cars trailing him through DC traffic. The FBI decision would have far-reaching and unintended consequences.
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Reporters run in packs, and never more so than when a big news story is driving news competition. In the history of the modern United States, there had never been a news story bigger than 9/11, nor one more difficult for Americans to grasp. Why, went the instantly clichéd question voiced by cable anchors and news magazine covers, do they hate us? Newspapers needed quotes, authoritative voices to frame and begin to answer difficult questions. Television needed talking heads and pictures—images beyond the relentlessly looping video of the jetliners hitting the towers.
So it was that the phones began to ring incessantly at Dar Al-Hijrah. Falls Church was an inner suburb—even in the capital’s unpredictable traffic, a TV crew could hop across the Potomac from downtown Washington and get to the big mosque in less than half an hour. Word spread fast: here was an imam with near-perfect American English and a knack for the sound bite. Just as important, he seemed to be a moderate, a vague label but one that meant a news organization could be pretty safe in treating him as legit. He was unlikely, in other words, to say anything crazy on the air. The interview requests poured in—the networks, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, the Washington Post—everyone wanted a little time with Anwar al-Awlaki. And no, the television producers would say, we don’t have any agenda. And yes, I’m afraid next Tuesday is not soon enough. And what’s the lighting like inside the mosque? “He was enjoying the limelight,” said Johari Abdul Malik, who joined the staff at Dar Al-Hijrah at about this time. “And he wore it well.”
After issuing a press release condemning the attacks, Awlaki and the mosque’s leadership had decided to close the building for a few days, concerned that Dar Al-Hijrah might become a target for public rage. “Most of the questions are, ‘How should we react?’ ” Awlaki told a reporter, describing the concerns of worried Muslims. “Our answers are, especially for our sisters who are more visible because of the dress: Stay home until things calm down.” There were threats, and Awlaki told a reporter that one Muslim woman had stumbled into the mosque after being attacked by a man with a baseball bat.
But mosque leaders were also surprised and heartened by the outpouring of support from non-Muslim neighbors. Some nearby churches offered volunteers to escort Muslim women worried about venturing out. One neighbor, Patricia Morris, noticed the big iron gates at Dar Al-Hijrah closed for the first time and consulted a Palestinian friend, who said Muslims in Falls Church were “very scared.” So Morris organized a candlelight vigil around the reopened mosque at 7 p.m. on the Friday after the attacks, drawing about thirty people. Muslims leaving evenin
g prayers gave white roses to those at the vigil as a gesture of thanks for their solidarity. Awlaki posed for the Washington Post, smiling alongside Morris inside the mosque’s school and expressed relief at the “very positive” responses from other neighbors as well, including eighty people in a nearby apartment building, who sent a statement saying, “We want your congregation to know that we welcome you in this community.”
At that first Friday jummah after the attacks, with reporters awkwardly perched around the sanctuary, Awlaki was quite aware of the expectation that he would denounce the bloodshed in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. He had every reason to believe that the FBI would be monitoring the service. He began by reading a condemnation of the attacks from a prominent Egyptian-born Islamist scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, citing a voice with particular authority for Dar Al-Hijrah’s immigrant-heavy congregation: “Our hearts bleed for the attacks that targeted the World Trade Center as well as other institutions in the United States,” Qaradawi wrote, before adding a quick caveat to make clear that he was not fully embracing America’s record—“despite our strong opposition to the American biased policy toward Israel.”
Then Awlaki offered his own, distinctly American spin. “We came here to build, not to destroy,” he declared. “We are the bridge between America and 1 billion Muslims worldwide.”
It was a fascinating, tantalizing notion, put forward at an especially charged moment. In the conflict that had suddenly roared to life between America and Muslims, American Muslims were, whether they liked it or not, the bridge. Perhaps now, Awlaki suggested, they could become the mediators, the peacemakers, the explainers. And this bespectacled imam, with his Arabic garb and his American speech, epitomized the possibilities. That was what the journalists had seen and why they rushed to question him. An article in The New York Times took note of Awlaki’s sudden prominence, identifying him as a rising star who “at 30 is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University.” On NPR, a reporter said that Awlaki “sees himself as a Muslim leader who could help build bridges between Islam and the West.”
Awlaki was himself just beginning to grasp his potential, the possible scale of his influence and future renown. Some have greatness thrust upon them, Shakespeare wrote—with comic intent, in Twelfth Night, it was true, but then there was something comically absurd about the television trucks maneuvering in the mosque parking lot, the reporters’ sincere but woefully ignorant questions, the ego boost of catching one’s own name in the country’s most important newspapers, one’s own bearded face on the evening news. Some have greatness thrust upon them, and Awlaki—an Internet addict who had rushed to Best Buy after the attacks to buy a television to watch the coverage—sensed it was happening to him. I hope we can use this, he had written to his brother, for the good of all of us.
In October, he sat down for questions from Ray Suarez of NewsHour on PBS, who stopped by after visiting the Old Town Islamic Bookstore in nearby Alexandria, where four bricks and a note threatening Muslims had come through the window the night after the attacks. At Awlaki’s little house, a few minutes’ drive from the mosque, Suarez later recalled, the reporter and the preacher “drank tea and snacked on nuts and dried fruit while seated on the carpet in his comfortable, book-lined basement.” The lanky Awlaki “had to fold his long bony legs like a grasshopper to join me on the floor.” They “talked about world history, US relations with Muslim countries, and speculated on how the coming era would be shaped by the terror attacks,” Suarez said.
In the resulting NewsHour segment, Awlaki described the pressure on all Muslims in the wake of Al Qaeda’s assault: “I think that every one of us now feels that if we go on a plane, we would be looked at with some suspicion. And for a whole community to feel like that, I mean, it makes the community feel that they are under siege, they’re under scrutiny. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling.”
In a sermon excerpted on the show, Awlaki denounced the carnage of 9/11—and in the same breath condemned what he considered to be American crimes, in particular the deaths attributed to years of American-led sanctions against Iraq. But in addition he played up the unique perspective of Americans who also happened to be Muslims:
You would find that the perception of the Muslims in the Muslim world about America is quite different than the perception of the American Muslims about America. Why? Because the American Muslims, they know what America is about. Yes, we disagree with a lot of issues when it comes to the foreign policy of the United States. We are very conservative when it comes to family values. We are against the moral decay that we see in the society. But we also cherish a lot of the values that are in America. Freedom is one of them; the opportunity is another. And that’s why there is more appreciation among the American Muslims compared to the Muslims in other parts of the world.
It was a comment, echoing Bush’s paeans to American freedom, that might be cheered even by American conservatives who at that moment were reflexively hostile to Islam. The United States had just invaded Afghanistan, an aggressive patriotism was being expressed with ubiquitous flags and country-music anthems—and here was a Muslim imam endorsing American exceptionalism in language any patriot could appreciate.
In the traumatic weeks after the attacks, Awlaki participated with seeming sincerity in interfaith services and discussions, sharing stages and microphones with rabbis and priests. “My recollection of him at that point was as a voice for moderation,” said Father Gerry Creedon, then priest at a Catholic parish in Arlington, Virginia, who repeatedly encountered Awlaki on the circuit and spoke with him privately as well. “He struck me in his personality as a gentle man, very well read and intelligent.” Simon Amiel, an organizer with the campus Jewish organization Hillel, recalled working with Awlaki on an event to bring together Jewish and Muslim students at George Washington University. Awlaki spoke about the parallel traditions of Islam and Judaism and was “cordial and friendly,” Amiel recalled.
In November, for the video unit of the Washington Post, Awlaki agreed to star in a sort of Islam-101 film explaining Ramadan, the month of fasting in the Islamic calendar. It was an intimate view, with Awlaki at home and in the mosque, in Western clothing and traditional robes and cap. He was shown eating dates and praying quietly at home before dawn, then leading a subdued crowd in the morning prayer at the mosque. “Ramadan is a chance for us to get away from the worldly indulgences, everything that is material,” he said. Awlaki addressed some of the issues that he knew bothered or puzzled non-Muslims, such as the separation of the sexes during worship. “There’s a section for the sisters and a section for the brothers,” he explained, speaking without defensiveness or condescension. “The reason for the separation during all the worship services is because in the time of worship there should be no distraction.”
Awlaki offered some mild political comments in the Post video, but without rancor. “I think that in general Islam is presented in a negative way,” he said. “I mean there’s always this association between Islam and terrorism, when that is not true at all. I mean, Islam is a religion of peace.” With close-ups of the imam’s wire-rims as he checks his e-mail, a shot of his six-year-old son, Abdulrahman, sitting on his lap, and a pan of his family breaking the day’s fast with dinner in a friend’s modest suburban apartment, the video was warm and appealing. (It won a first prize that year for the videographer, Travis Fox, from the White House News Photographers Association.) Years later, it would still be easy to find on YouTube. It would hint at a path not taken: Awlaki as a respected American spokesman for Islam, helping Muslims negotiate between their religion and their country, speaking out critically on American foreign and domestic policy while gently reassuring non-Muslims that they had nothing to fear from their neighbors.
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It was also, unquestionably, not the whole story of Awlaki’s evolving views of terrorism and of A
merica. In the tangled, complex world of American Islam, there were many competing influences and divisions, and sorting them out was difficult even for well-informed believers. As an imam serving a diverse congregation and speaking publicly, Awlaki had to be tactful and inclusive. He readily joined the interfaith gatherings that were suddenly so popular after 9/11 and played down the schisms within his own faith. Non-Muslims probably would not have noticed it, but he was clearly on the conservative side of the spectrum of Islam in America. Most scholars would have characterized him in 2002 as clearly part of the Salafi movement—the conservative school of Islam that called for a return to the original ways of the early Muslims, the salafs or ancestors. His lectures and sermons invariably began with stories from one of three sources considered legitimate in the Salafi assessment: the Koran; the hadith, or sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad; and the lives of the companions of Muhammad and the other prophets of Islam. His style resembled that of a fundamentalist Christian preacher who begins with what he sees as the literal truth of the Bible, finds the right passages, and then applies them to contemporary life. By default, Awlaki, like many Muslim clerics, thought of humanity as divided into two camps: Muslims and non-Muslims. Implicit in his sermons was the assumption that for Muslims loyalty to the ummah, the global community of believers, took precedence over loyalty to any particular nation. Muslim Americans, in Awlaki’s view, were first of all Muslims and only secondarily Americans.
