My Year Inside Radical Islam (3 page)

My dad patted his forehead and repeated, “My good dad. My good dad.”

When I returned to Wake Forest in the spring of 1997, I was ready to find answers.

That was the semester I became friends with al-Husein Madhany, a tall Kenyan-born man of Indian-American parents (the South Asian variety of Indian). He was a serious Muslim who prayed five times a day, but could also date five women at once. It was through al-Husein that I began to learn about Islam.

My first real interaction with al-Husein came when he was running to be the student government secretary. I gave him some speaking advice while down at Wake Forest’s student TV studios to watch the televised “debates” among the candidates for office. These debates featured no interaction between the candidates. Instead, a host interviewed one person at a time, asking each of them three questions. I had won the national championship in policy debate a few weeks before, and was riding high on the idea that I had mastered the art of public speaking. I noticed that none of the candidates looked into the camera when answering the questions. Instead, they looked at the host. The viewers could see only the sides of their faces. I didn’t think this displayed enough confidence, so I suggested that al-Husein speak directly into the camera.

If anything, my advice only hurt him. Shortly after the debates, another student complained to me that al-Husein looked “arrogant.” She said, “He didn’t look at Matt [the host] when Matt asked him questions. He just looked into the camera and acted like Matt wasn’t there.” Despite my bad advice, al-Husein kept me around to help with the campaign. We became fast friends.

I took to al-Husein quickly because he had a depth that most people lack. This depth was a double-edged sword that often resulted in brooding. Al-Husein generally wanted to focus his conversations and thoughts not on small day-to-day matters, but on big, significant issues. He believed that others should focus on the big issues as well. One night, another student told me that he had decided to write a term paper about Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Al-Husein butted in. “Kurt Cobain? Why aren’t you writing about racism?”

The other student stuttered out a bashful explanation, but al-Husein had made his point. Why are you wasting your time writing about some singer when we have real and pervasive social problems? It was classic college thinking.

Al-Husein had a definite sense of the image he projected. He usually spoke slowly and softly, as though parsing every word, as though he had no doubt that he would hold the listener’s attention. Although he spoke with a soft voice, his words were like a victory speech, to be savored and passed down for generations.

Al-Husein was also socially daring. One frequent exchange was the unanswered question that he’d return to days later. One day, I saw al-Husein in the hall and asked him to recommend a good book. He looked at me quizzically and walked off without saying a word. When I saw him three days later, he said, without introduction, “
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
”

“What?” I said.

“You asked me to recommend a book three days ago. That’s my recommendation. ”

“Why didn’t you just tell me when I asked?”

“I wanted to think about it.”

This habit initially struck me as both rude and impressive. I had never met someone with enough social confidence to ignore people seemingly completely, only to continue the discussion after a few days’ hiatus.

My view shifted slightly when I learned more about Sufism, the mystical strain of Islam to which al-Husein adhered. Sufism’s emphasis on emptying the heart of attachment to anything but God can produce idiosyncratic behavior in its devotees. As I learned about how Sufis value patience, I realized there may have been a deeper reason for al-Husein’s behavior. In a famous story, the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi was asked by his sheikh to explain the meaning of a specific Qur’anic verse. After some contemplation, Ibn ‘Arabi left without saying a word—and didn’t return for four years. The sheikh wanted a deeper interpretation than he could give. On Ibn ‘Arabi’s return, his sheikh said, “Give me your answer. After four years, the time is ripe for it.”

Al-Husein may have had this or a similar Sufi example in mind when he decided to wait three days before answering a basic question of mine.

Before I knew al-Husein, I was living in my own world, divorced from other people’s needs and struggles. I was an island that longed to be a peninsula. My time was divided between my studies and intercollegiate debate, and little else. The three biggest things that were missing from my life were friendship, a sense of purpose, and a relationship with God.

I had opportunities to get involved in matters of importance to other students, but always let them pass by. Wake Forest is north of downtown Winston-Salem, a city where crime rates in every major category are worse than the national average. Since a campus crawling with rich kids makes a tempting target for criminals, a handful of armed robberies rocked the campus during my sophomore year. When the school announced that it would therefore erect gatehouses staffed with security personnel, student activists responded in a rage. They were concerned that people of color would face greater scrutiny at the gates. I understood their concerns, but when friends asked me to join the protests, I refused. I had far too busy a life, it seemed, to get involved in causes of that kind.

I was also cut off from other people socially. Moving to the South was a culture shock. Also, I wasn’t used to or comfortable with the wealth on display at Wake Forest. So the other students had unfamiliar values that differed immeasurably from those of the hippie mecca of Ashland, Oregon. Even Winston-Salem’s restaurants seemed less friendly, less inviting than those that I had known in Ashland.

I flung myself into my work, which was like a many-headed hydra. Whenever I finished one project, two more filled the void. I would drink or go out to movies with friends, but had no confidants. It sometimes seemed that even my surface-level friendships were too much effort. I remember driving home one night from dinner in downtown Winston-Salem. Instead of thinking about the food we had eaten or the conversations we’d had, the only thing on my mind was my looming deadlines. I wished I had stayed in and worked. It struck me then that it was always this way: every night out with friends was tinged with feelings of regret rather than fulfillment. Many people go through periods where they feel alone, separated from their surroundings. For me, this lasted through my first two years at Wake Forest.

My friendship with al-Husein Madhany started to bring me outside myself. Al-Husein was aggressive about inserting himself into my life. He would constantly burst into my room without knocking and, seeing me working, would insist that there were more important things to do. Al-Husein often asked me to walk around Wake Forest’s idyllic grass-covered quad with him while he smoked a pipe and philosophized. Once he found me playing a game of Risk (the board game where you try to conquer the world with your armies) on my computer. After learning that the game could take multiple players, al-Husein roped in four other students. We played one six-player game of Risk after another until two in the morning.

I never regretted a moment that I spent with al-Husein, and soon came to think of him as my best friend. I couldn’t wait until the next time we’d circle the quad together. I couldn’t wait to see what new things I’d learn about the world—and about myself.

My first experience with student political activism was a spur-of-the-moment thing in early April 1997. It was a warm day, with a slight breeze rustling the leaves of the magnolia trees dotting campus.

“There’s a rally on the quad,” al-Husein said as he entered my room unannounced. “You should come.”

“What’s the rally?” I was looking for an excuse to get out, but was having trouble pulling myself away from my work.

“It’s for a new student group called VOICE, Voices Organized in the Interest of Collective Equality. Knox founded the group.”

Knox was a wiry, dreadlocked black intellectual with a range of talents and a far-left outlook. He and I were close during my first semester at Wake Forest, when we took an introductory poetry class together. Knox tended to speak as though he were the only person in the room: he was the topic of all his conversations. We had a falling-out later in my freshman year when another friend and I made fun of Knox for his self-centeredness. It was the kind of rough humor with a serious undertone that isn’t uncommon among friends, but Knox didn’t find it funny. He didn’t speak to me for a few months, and we were never close again.

So I hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if going to a student rally is the best way to spend the day.”

“Do you care about racism?” al-Husein said, moving into his didactic mode. “Are issues like homophobia, religious discrimination, and white heterosexual Christian male hegemony on campus important to you?” Al-Husein had lost his student government election, but remained a major force in campus politics. Now he was helping to bring me outside of myself in yet another way, by pushing me toward political activism.

“Well, they are, but—”

“Then you should come.”

Al-Husein and I walked out the front door of the Huffman dorm and onto the quad. A small knot of people gathered for the rally by the steps of Wait Chapel, which towered over the north end of the quad. Even though it was a rally for diversity, the demonstrators were mostly black and the onlookers were mostly white.

Knox stood on the chapel steps with a megaphone. He seemed disappointed with the lackluster turnout, but mustered all the enthusiasm that a man with a megaphone can.

He asked a few other minority students to address the rally, some of whom pointed to the clutch of campus cops who had come to watch, saying that their presence revealed Wake Forest’s racism. “Anyone who doesn’t believe that racism exists on this campus need only look at that cop,” said an African-American sophomore named Ronetta. “Think about all the scrutiny that black people face next time you’re wondering where the cops are when students are getting raped and cars are getting broken into.”

After the minority speakers addressed the crowd, Knox said, “Anybody else want to speak? White people, you got anything to say?” While his remark was said with humor, the serious undertone was that white people did not care about racism.

All those walks on the quad and talks with al-Husein had affected me. I found that I had something to say. In response to Knox’s call, I climbed the chapel steps and took the megaphone. Despite all my public speaking experience as a college debater, I was nervous. I wasn’t making abstract arguments to persuade a judge; instead, I was talking to my peers about something I cared about. My speech was short and disjointed. It was about how white people, as members of the majority culture, needed to confront racism when we saw it. I finished the speech to a mixture of scattered applause and long stares. Still, I felt good.

As I walked down the steps, I felt that I was changing. I was moving from spectator to participant. Al-Husein clapped me on the back. “It’s nice to see you taking a stand. We need more people like you involved,” he said.

Later that day, al-Husein brought me to a meeting of a group he had founded, the Asian Student Interest Association (ASIA), a minority student group for those of Asian descent. Al-Husein opened the meeting by introducing each attendee. When it was my turn, he jokingly described me as a “token white member,” then said I had given a speech at the VOICE rally that caught people’s interest. My speech probably caught no one’s interest, but this was al-Husein’s way: he made people feel that their contributions, however small, were valued. Al-Husein asked me to tell the others why I had decided to address the rally.

I told the group that I had always been aware of racism at Wake Forest, but that I—like too many white people—often shrugged it off as someone else’s problem. Over time, I realized that racism
wasn’t
someone else’s problem. Racism was
everyone’s
problem, and it was time for all of us to take a stand. As I spoke those words, I knew that this was the beginning of
my
stand.

I was also intrigued by al-Husein’s religious views. From the beginning, one of the things I liked about him was that he was Muslim. He was, in fact, the first practicing Muslim I knew. The difference between al-Husein’s faith and Mike’s was pronounced. While fundamentalist Christianity seemed to shut Mike’s mind, al-Husein’s practice of Islam spurred him to new levels of inquiry and interest in the world.

Islam, al-Husein told me, is “a simple faith.” Its defining characteristic is its steadfast monotheism. I learned that Muslims believe in the same God as Christians and Jews, even though they often use the Arabic term “Allah” to refer to the Lord. Muslims also believe in the same prophets as Christians and Jews. The line of prophets in Islam begins with the first man, Adam, and includes the likes of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims believe that Muhammad was the final prophet. They believe that God revealed Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an, to Muhammad, and that the Qur’an is God’s direct, literal word. I was also interested to learn that Muslims believe that the Old and New Testaments are earlier holy books inspired by God—but that those books became corrupted over time and are no longer completely reliable.

After my long, intense discussions with Mike about Christianity, I was especially interested in Islam’s view of Jesus. Al-Husein explained that Islam holds, similar to what I believed, that Jesus was a prophet of God and had a special relationship with Him, but that Jesus was still just a man. He was in no way divine.

When Mike first told me the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument, I was sure that it must have a fatal flaw. Islam seemed to make that flaw explicit. Josh McDowell’s argument could only be true if Jesus really did claim to be God—and Islam held that he never did so. Instead, the holy books that purport to show Jesus claiming his own divinity have been corrupted over time and can’t be trusted on that point.