Pete arranged a meeting at the Musalla that was one part intervention, one part termination. It was getting close to evening and five of us—Charlie, Pete, Dennis Geren, Abdul-Qaadir, and me—sat on the prayer room’s thick blue carpet. The session was far more compassionate than I expected. Pete made clear to Charlie that we all loved him, saw him as our brother, and wanted what was best for him.
“But, bro,” Pete said, “this job isn’t good for you. It isn’t making you better. You’re a guy who loves the outdoors. You love riding horses, being around trees, working with your hands. You’re not gonna be happy cooped up in an office all day long, staring out the windows and wishing that you could be outside instead.”
Charlie quickly became defensive. “Look, I know that sometimes I haven’t shown up for work as I should, but I can honestly say that I’ve never charged a penny for work I didn’t do,” he said. “Things have been rough for me, but I’ve been praying to Allah, and I know Allah can cure me if He wills it.” Charlie nodded at the four of us, his eyes wide.
Pete was whispering in my ear. “Say something,” he said. “Say something. ” Pete and Dennis knew Charlie far better than I did, and Abdul-Qaadir was a superior religious scholar to me. I saw my role as moral support more than anything else—but complied with Pete’s order.
“Charlie,” I said, “I know that you say you haven’t charged anybody for work you didn’t do, and we appreciate that. But it isn’t that simple. Sometimes your failure to show up has other costs, like with the phone bill. We were being charged three hundred and four hundred dollars a month for a few months because we had been so late in payments that they bounced us from their standard plan.”
I instantly wished that I hadn’t followed Pete’s order to speak. Our purpose was not to show Charlie that he’d been an inadequate employee. He already knew that. Our main purpose was to show him compassion, to let him know that we wanted to be with him as he moved forward from this difficult point.
Fortunately, my remark didn’t turn the meeting sour. As the intervention /firing ended, Charlie said, “Thank you, guys. You’re great brothers. I really feel loved, I really feel like you guys would do anything to help me get better. I appreciate it.”
“We love you, bro,” Pete said. “More than anything else, what we care about is that you get well again.” The rest of us nodded.
Although I saw Charlie at
juma
prayers a few times after this, it would be the last conversation of substance that I ever had with him.
As Amy was on the verge of leaving Ashland, we took a walk through Lithia Park together. I had always loved coming to the park, strolling through the trails beside the gurgling creek. It felt peaceful, set apart from the rest of the world.
Over the course of the summer, I hadn’t shared much with her about my changing beliefs. There had been signs, of course. My (thwarted) insistence that we have our
nikah
ceremony now had been one sign. There were others. I would no longer condemn Islamic radicalism to Amy. Occasionally when I came home from work I’d parrot a remark or analogy that Abdul-Qaadir had made in his lecture, thinking it important that Amy get more of an authentic Islamic perspective. I had a harsher edge around Amy and my parents than ever before, and would tell them far less of what was going on in my life. I remembered how, at one point during the summer, my dad remarked sadly that he and I didn’t really talk anymore. He was right; surely Amy saw the difference too.
But when we walked through the park together, I was astounded by the kind of unconditional love she displayed toward me, an unconditional love that I knew I could not possibly deserve. As we chatted about our time together that summer, Amy mentioned that my dad had told her that he expected some of my coreligionists wouldn’t be happy that I was marrying a non-Muslim.
“I told him that I didn’t think that would be a problem,” Amy said. “If they’re not happy with you marrying me, I expect that to be a problem for
them,
not for me.”
I nodded my head, saying nothing. I realized that even here, she perhaps had too much faith in me.
It is the Jews’ plan to ruin everything.”
We were gathered in the prayer room, sitting on the floor, and this was Ahmed Ezzat’s remark.
People often ask me if other Muslims accepted me as one of them despite my Jewish background. The answer is that they did. Sometimes al-Husein would make jokes about my Jewish heritage, but they were always friendly, the kind of ethnic or religious jokes you can make about your friends if you’re truly comfortable with them. I was never the
target
of anti-Semitism during my time as a Muslim. Whether I
witnessed
anti-Semitism during this time is a different question. It would, I submit, have been impossible not to. From anti-Semitic conspiracy theories being peddled in a Turkish bazaar (the merchant blamed Israel for the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution; anyone with a passing familiarity with history will understand that this is quite impossible) to themes pervading the literature that Al Haramain distributed to offhand comments about “the
yahoods,
” anti-Semitism was undeniably present. But never more present than in Ahmed’s remarks that evening.
We were gathered in the prayer room because Abdul-Qaadir was teaching a class that night. I enjoyed seeing Abdul-Qaadir teach: he really
had
helped to transform my practice of Islam. He spoke with the same kind of confidence and world-is-watching-me presence when addressing a group that he used when it was just the two of us in the office. I was impressed by his knowledge of Islam, his knowledge of Arabic, and his thorough methodological approach to the faith.
Because of my Jewish background, other Muslims would often ask me questions about Judaism. We frequently had visitors stay in the Musalla for a few days at a time. One of our visitors this time around was, like Pete, Iranian. I no longer recall his name, but I remember the question he asked me during one of the breaks: “Daveed, what is the Talmud?”
As I was about to answer, Ahmed Ezzat, the Egyptian who worked for Al Haramain in Saudi Arabia, jumped in. “It is the Jews’ plan to ruin everything,” he said. I felt a moment of shock. I had begun to see the world through the same theological lens as these guys, but that didn’t mean that I bought into crude conspiracy-mongering about the Jews. And the Talmud, which is a record of rabbinic discussion of Jewish law, ethics, and customs, was far from a plot to ruin everything.
Ahmed continued, “It shows how the Jews plan to have the gentiles do their will. They planned to create a financial system based on interest, which we now have, and they planned to destroy morals. Why is it that Henry Kissinger was the president of the international soccer federation while he was the president of the United States? How did he have time to do both? It is because part of the Jews’ plan is to get people throughout the world to play soccer so that they’ll wear shorts that show off the skin of their thighs.”
Dennis Geren was lying on his back on the floor. His back often bothered him, causing him to lie down in an effort to relieve his aches and sprains. “Henry Kissinger was the secretary of state, not the president, ” Dennis said. Then he got to his feet and left the room. I wondered what he was thinking. Although Dennis was often possessed by anger, he was no anti-Semite—and I was sure that he thought Ahmed’s paranoid delusions were just as ridiculous as I did.
Pete’s reaction was different. “Wow, bro, this is amazing,” he enthused. “You come to us with this incredible information. You need to get on the microphone so you can tell the sisters about this.” Pete handed the microphone to Ahmed.
Ahmed seemed embarrassed by the attention, but spoke into the microphone anyway. “There is nothing else to say,” Ahmed said. “I have talked about the promoting of interest, soccer, the shorts, and the showing of the thighs. That is all, I’ve covered it.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Ahmed’s statement was false and dangerous. He hadn’t described the Talmud or anything close to it. Instead, Ahmed was thinking of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document produced by Czarist Russia purporting to evidence a vast Jewish conspiracy. It is a document that the scholar Norman Cohn aptly described as part of Hitler’s “warrant for genocide” against the Jewish people.
But I knew how things would go if I argued. Since Ahmed’s Islamic knowledge surpassed my own, he thought he was also more qualified to speak on all other matters, including Judaism. And the others in the room probably agreed. As I had noticed almost two years before, when I first encountered Sheikh Hassan, argument and debate didn’t take place here the way I was accustomed to from college. Purely logical arguments could be brushed away as Islamically improper, and the only time you didn’t have to worry about slipping up in a way that could diminish your standing in the community is when you took the most hard-line position.
What would happen, I wondered, if I took issue with Ahmed’s explanation? Perhaps he would argue with me, using pathos in place of logos.
But this wasn’t an area where I was on unfamiliar ground, grasping for the theologically correct position through the haze of Qur’an and Sunna. I
knew
that what Ahmed said was false, and I knew the impact that this kind of conspiracy-mongering had on Jews in the past.
And yet I remained silent. I knew that if I argued with Ahmed, I would persuade no one.
It was one of the rare moments in which Yunus did not annoy me. He was talking about his father, Pete.
The degree to which Yunus and Yusuf looked up to Pete was apparent. They were both starved for his attention. In the limited time that he spent with his two sons, Pete obviously came across as a hero and a role model. Today, Yunus was telling me how beloved Pete was in the community.
Yunus’s story was a small example, yet also a window into how Pete was seen. In January 1997, there were heavy rains in southern Oregon. Ashland Creek leaped its banks and washed out much of the downtown area. The flooded town was without indoor running water for days. Yunus told me how Pete drove a truck to the nearby town of Talent and returned with drinking water. He glowed when he described how happy this made people.
I thought about how it seemed that everyone knew Pete around Ashland, from all quarters. The hippies, the business owners, and the rabbis would ask me how he was doing and insist that I say hello. Thinking of the teachings within Al Haramain, Pete’s offhand remarks about the
kufar,
his willingness to believe in the truth of alleged Jewish conspiracies, I thought about how none of them knew the real Pete Seda.
Then I further thought about Pete’s almost unwavering sincerity, even when faced with the seeming contradiction between the idea that Islam was a religion of peace and the hateful views that his organization propounded. Even Pete, I realized, may not know the real Pete Seda.
It was a beautiful August day in Lithia Park’s Japanese Garden. Stone paths snaked through the garden, there were scattered benches, flowers of many colors were in bloom. As usual, I didn’t appreciate the beauty.
The film crew from Landmind Productions was there, shooting footage of the local Muslims as we talked about how we came to Islam and what our faith meant to us. I watched them shoot a scene where Yunus Sedaghaty talked about the impact of Islam in his life. It didn’t come across as sincere. I wandered toward our food spread. (When Pete gave the film crew money to buy refreshments, he gave three provisos: “Don’t spend this money on alcohol, pork, or pornography.”)
A man named Muhanid Khuja was sitting by the food, some sandwiches that the crew had picked up from the local Subway. Muhanid was from Guam. He had shown up in Ashland a few weeks back, seemingly at random, saying he was on a mosque tour through the United States. Some of the mosques he had encountered apparently horrified him with their deviant practices. But he took a liking to us, and Pete took a liking to him. Soon, Muhanid became Pete’s new right-hand man. Pete was in the process of buying a new house, and Muhanid was trying to guide him through the thorny process of making the purchase without paying interest.
Muhanid had a large beard and a large gut. I chatted with him for a few minutes, and the topic turned to my impending departure for law school. Muhanid was skeptical. “As a lawyer you have to take a pledge to defend the Constitution. There are some things in the Constitution I like, but a lot of things in the Constitution are completely against Islamic principles.” Muhanid then talked about how he had once served in the U.S. Armed Forces. At the time, when he was a less serious Muslim, he didn’t give much thought to whether it was wrong to do so. Now, in retrospect, he realized that it was wrong—the oaths he had made, the allegiances he had given contradicted his oath and allegiance to Allah.
“What in the Constitution is against Islam?” I asked.
“Well, for example, abortion.”
I shook my head. “No. The word
abortion
is never mentioned in the Constitution, and nothing in the Constitution says that you have to be for abortion rights. There are a lot of Christian lawyers who practice in the U.S. but bring lawsuit after lawsuit trying to overturn
Roe v. Wade.
”
“Well,” Muhanid said, “if you were a Muslim living under the Roman Empire, what would be the right thing to do? Would you practice in Roman courts, or would you steer clear of them entirely?”
During a break in the filming, I caught a piece of Pete’s conversation with John Foote. Pete was describing Yunus’s interest in learning how to make videos, and wanted to see if Yunus could go by Landmind from time to time for training on video production.
“I do landscaping,” Pete said. “I’m a landscaper. If Yunus came by from time to time and you showed him how to do film production, I could do landscaping work for you in exchange.” He smiled conspiratorially. “And then we won’t have to worry about taxes or anything like that, ’cause no money is changing hands.” (When I interviewed John Foote for this book, I learned that the training that Pete envisioned never took place.)