My Year Inside Radical Islam by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Read Free Book Online

beads. Nobody harassed me about this.
    I later received a short e-mail from al-Husein saying that he would spend winter break with me in Oregon. As was al-Husein’s custom, he didn’t ask. His e-mail simply informed me that he would spend most of December in Ashland.
    One evening, shortly after my conversion to Islam, I stood on Casa Artom’s wood deck overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal. Another student in Wake Forest’s study-abroad program, Joy Vermillion, was also watching the gondolas make their way through the choppy waters.
    Joy was a native North Carolinian, politically interested, with a beautiful singing voice and a distinctive laugh. She was a practicing Christian, and my conversion caught her interest. At the time, I was sensitive about people challenging my religious beliefs—but Joy’s questions came off as honest inquiries rather than thinly veiled arguments.
    In the course of our conversation, she asked, “Would you ever consider leaving Islam for another faith?”
    She seemed curious rather than probing, but my answer was firm. “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t think there’s a reason that I would leave Islam, because I can find everything I need in this faith. I can have a mystical relationship with God. And if I’m looking for greater literalism, I can find that, too. There are plenty of directions that I can grow within Islam.”
    Later, when I became radicalized, I would think back to this conversation. I would feel that it epitomized all that I had wrong about my understanding of religion.
    My parents loved al-Husein from the moment he arrived in Oregon, in mid-December. At his urging, my dad called him “Big Al.” All four of us—me, al-Husein, and my parents—spent long hours around the kitchen table, talking about religion and politics while sipping yerba maté tea. We found little to disagree about. I wasn’t the only one to notice the similarity between the beliefs I was raised with and al-Husein’s brand of Sufism: al-Husein and my parents were struck by it as well.
    I had come to appreciate Ashland more as I grew older. Part of the reason was that it seemed I could find anything I wanted there. Al-Husein’s visit demonstrated that. Until he came to town, I didn’t know that Ashland had a Muslim community. It was a town of only about fifteen thousand people, and was predominantly white. But one afternoon al-Husein and I were reading through the religion section of the Ashland Daily Tidings newspaper, and found a listing for the Qur’an Foundation, a local Islamic group.
    We saw that they hosted juma prayers, and immediately decided to attend. The services were held near the outskirts of town, past the municipal golf course. When we arrived, we found a small ranch house in the center of a sprawling lot. A metal trailer stood behind the house, along with a couple of cranes bearing the name of a local business, the Arborist. I spotted a couple of horses in a nearby field.
    The property and the Arborist business belonged to Pete Seda, a short, wiry Iranian man who was about forty years old. He had black hair and a beard, and the look of a mischievous grade-schooler. I later learned that his dark skin often made locals mistake him for a Mexican. All in all, Pete didn’t make much of an impression on me during this visit. It was the last time that he would fail to make an impression.
    I rang the doorbell. No one answered. Instead, a woman with a thick Persian accent shouted to us from behind the closed door. We couldn’t tell what she was saying. “We’re here for prayers!” al-Husein shouted back.
    She told us to enter from the back. I was somewhat confused, but al-Husein—who had more experience with different Islamic practices— had a clue.
    At the back of the house, we found a screen door that led to a cramped prayer room. White sheets that hung from the ceiling blocked our view of the other rooms. “The sheets separate the men and women,” al-Husein whispered.
    We were among