Pete sounded surprised when I told him I was going to pay taxes, but didn’t try to talk me out of it. “There was also a computer that you sold to us back in January,” Pete said. “Are you going to pay taxes on that, too?”
“Yes, Pete, I am. There was never a computer. That check was for work that I did for you.”
“I just wanted to check to make sure, bro.”
Later that month, Pete called me to tell me that he had prepared a letter to the Russian ambassador outlining his plan to drive a peace convoy into Chechnya. “Take a look at the letter,” Pete said. “You might need to change some of the language.”
I remembered Pete’s “peace convoy” idea during the Kosovo war—a convoy that would enter Yugoslavia, distribute humanitarian supplies, and send a signal that the war had to end. The peace convoy represented the best and worst of Pete’s thinking. He was able to think big and think creatively, coming up with Rube Goldberg-like solutions to the world’s problems, with himself as the star of the show. But like Rube Goldberg’s fantastic machines, there was always a hitch or two in Pete’s ideas that would prevent them from becoming reality.
Pete had a similar peace convoy plan for Chechnya. He wanted to take a large convoy filled with food and medicine into Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic. There, the convoy would evacuate the wounded and show the world that the Russian invasion of Chechnya had to end. The peace convoy was never a realistic response to the Kosovo war, but at least you could understand why the Serbs might be interested. Sending a signal that the NATO bombing had to end would, after all,
help
them.
There was no such incentive for the Russians, since Pete wanted them to invite him into Chechnya to signal to the rest of the world that the Russians had to end a war that
they still wanted to carry out.
But Pete e-mailed the letter to me. When I opened it, I was greeted by the salutation: “Dear Ambassador Bonehead.” The letter went on to say that if the Russians would allow the peace convoy to enter Chechnya, “I will personally kiss your filthy ass.” The letter was amusing, but also provided a telling look at Pete’s attitude.
There was no question where Al Haramain as a group stood on the war in Chechnya. In January 2000, the charity’s main Web site, run out of Riyadh, featured prayers for the Chechen mujahideen:
O Allah! Aid our Mujaahideen brothers in Chechnya. O Allah! Unify their rows, and gather them on the word of truth. O Allah! Aim their firing and strengthen their determination, and make their feet firm, and descend upon them tranquility, and satisfy their hearts and guide them to that which is all good.
Pete’s sympathy for the mujahideen was also clear from my phone calls with him.
By February, it was obvious that Pete’s full attention was devoted to Chechnya. I received a short e-mail from him on February 8:
Salam
I am outraged this Russians bluntly giving the finger to humanitarian Orgs even killing some smashing cameras and more recently begun a systematic genocide since the western world has told Rus-Putin finish them while we make some noise so as we are against this genocide
ISNA of Canada send us money for Chechnia [sic].
Call me collect ASAP
When I called Pete after getting that message, he was vague about his plans. He wanted to do something about the situation in Chechnya, and he might need my help.
“I’m happy to help, Pete,” I said. “Let me know what you need me to do.”
It would be a little while before I heard from him again.
What I didn’t expect was for Pete to take his anger toward the Russians to the next level, to actually help the mujahideen. But it seems that this is exactly what happened. And but for my growing doubts, I too might have gotten entangled in this plot.
Pete called me in the middle of March 2000. I hadn’t spoken with him in a few weeks, but when I answered the phone, he acted like we were still back in Ashland, like I were still working for him. “Bro,” he said, “Soliman is flying into town tomorrow. I want you to go out to the airport, bring him flowers, tell him how glad you are to see him, and make him feel at home in New York.” He was referring to Soliman al-But’he, another Al Haramain director who worked in the Riyadh office. Although I had never met him, I had spoken with Soliman on the phone several times while I was working in the Ashland office, and had exchanged e-mail with him on countless occasions.
“What?” Amy was visiting me over her spring break. She sat on the bed while I stood by the window of my dorm room, holding the green receiver. No doubt she heard the surprise in my voice.
“Bro, Soliman doesn’t come into the U.S. too often, and it’d be real nice if we could show him the kind of hospitality that people really appreciate in the Arab world.”
“Pete, I have a full schedule, and it’s about a thirty-dollar cab ride to the airport. It’d cost me sixty dollars or more to see him.”
“I know it’s an inconvenience, but look, bro, I’m trying to get you a law school scholarship from Al Haramain. I told them how good you are and said that we
need
this guy. You’re one of those young Muslims who could be a future leader in the
Ummah,
and I wanna make sure that you don’t have to worry about money all the time while you’re in school, and you don’t have to go through the problems with
riba
[interest] that come with taking out loans. So I wanna get you to meet Soliman, so you can treat him like a good host while he’s in New York and he can see that you’re legit. Whaddaya say to that, bro?”
“I don’t know, Pete. You say Soliman is coming into New York tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So look, let me think about this. I’ll get back to you.”
“Okay, bro,” Pete said. “It’d be best if you can meet up with him. That would mean a lot to him.”
I hung up the phone and gave the matter some thought. It seemed like an imposition at first, but Pete claimed he was trying to get something for me. I talked it over with Amy. But, as had become routine, I didn’t give her enough of a window into my world. There was so much that I wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t, explain. There was the fact that my religious inexperience and uncertainty had locked me into an unfortunate pattern with Pete and the others. It was a command-and-respond pattern, where someone would tell me what to do and I would do it. Since religion influences every aspect of one’s life in Islam, this had boiled over into an uncertainty even on secular matters.
And so, even when Pete called to ask me to spend a few hours and about sixty dollars on a lark, my reflexive reaction was to agree. After all, I was beginning to believe that I did not know best. Instead, the people with Islamic knowledge superior to mine knew best.
But then I thought about the reaction I could expect from Soliman. And when I thought about Soliman, my thoughts turned to my facial hair. I grew a full beard when I was at Al Haramain, but shaved it off in favor of a goatee months ago. What would Soliman think? Would I spend sixty dollars to get to the airport only to find Soliman chastising me for my physical appearance?
On top of that, something just didn’t sound right about Pete’s request. What it was, I couldn’t put my finger on. But intuitively, there seemed to be something strange about Pete’s desire to have me go to the airport and meet Soliman.
I called Pete later that day and told him apologetically that I couldn’t go. “I have a lot of work to do and can’t really afford to spend sixty dollars to take a cab out to the airport and back,” I said.
Pete sounded annoyed, but said it was fine. Clearly, though, if he really had been pushing to get me a law school scholarship from Al Haramain, my refusal made him give up on the idea.
My decision not to meet Soliman was more significant than I could have realized. Part of the significance lay in the fact that I had stood up to Pete. This small act of rebellion would grow into something more, although at the time I couldn’t imagine by how much.
And part of the significance lay in what Pete and Soliman may have had planned for me. Since I didn’t go to the airport, there is no way of knowing precisely. But I would later learn that at the time Soliman was passing through New York, he was in the process of smuggling about $130,000 out of the country—money that federal investigators believe was used to fund the Chechen mujahideen. It is only my growing doubts that prevented me from heading to the airport and discovering what they had in mind—and ultimately, these doubts may have saved me from involvement in a plot to fund terrorists.
eleven
RESURRECTION
It was a Sunday morning, and it felt right.
I woke up around nine o’clock, showered, shaved, and put my suit on. I had a quick breakfast, then walked out the front doors of D’Agostino Hall. It was a hot day. As was the case every Sunday morning, the corner of West Third and MacDougal was littered with trash: paper plates, beer bottles, old newspapers, nightclub flyers. I walked past the panhandlers, the early-morning risers, and those who never quite found their way to bed last night.
I walked to the Washington Square Church, a United Methodist church up the street from Washington Square Park. It was the first time I had been to church in four years. Last time was with Mike Hollister in Bellingham. Back then, the experience did nothing for me. This time, I didn’t know what to expect.
The church had a woman pastor, a marked contrast from the various Islamic ceremonies I had been to over the past several years. Although I had little knowledge of Christian doctrine, I realized that most Christians would probably see her sermon as objectionable. It focused on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s book
The Mists of Avalon,
a retelling of the King Arthur legend. The pastor explained that
The Mists of Avalon
has a different holy trinity than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of Christianity—and that the trinity presented in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s book was more woman-affirming.
After the sermon, they invited everyone present, Christian and not, to take communion. The preacher mentioned that their communion used grape juice rather than wine. On hearing this, I decided to participate. I wouldn’t have done it if they used wine, which was
haram
to drink.
Walking home afterward, I tried to gauge my emotional reaction. Despite the questionable religious content, I felt invigorated. Thinking of the reaction that men like W. D. Muhammad and the Naqshbandis received in Islamic extremist circles, it amazed me that in the world of Christianity you could give a sermon like the one I had just heard without instantly being branded a heretic and apostate.
As I walked back into my dorm room, I wondered if I would go to church again. As I faced my prayer rug in the direction of Mecca for my afternoon prayers, I acknowledged the obvious. If everything were all right with my faith, I wouldn’t have set foot in a church in the first place.
I would finish work early in those days. I worked as a summer associate for a small law firm called Cooper, Brown & Behrle, located on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue, near Central Park. There were only four lawyers at the firm, and only one was under fifty. The good part? I was usually out the door by five o’clock.
Once outside, I often found myself strolling through Central Park. Ever since I was young, I would always go to a park when there was something I needed to think about.
But lately, I wasn’t sure what it was I needed to think about. I recognized that I wasn’t the same person who I had been a few years ago. I thought of how I felt when I had graduated from college—full of passion for creating social change, confident in my political and moral convictions,enthused about building a deeper understanding of my faith. All that remained now was a vague, hazy memory of feelings that had probably been illusory at the time. That, and the feeling that I missed the person I had been.
Sometimes, when I got home from work, I would read fatwas online. I used to actively avoid Islamic rulings that I feared I wasn’t prepared for. But lately it seemed there was no point in fleeing from the inevitable.
One day I was reading through a Web site called Islam Q & A, which had an impressive array of fatwas on various subjects. The Web site’s readers would write in with topical questions, and a team of Islamic legal scholars would answer them. One question caught my eye: “Is it permissible to allow a Christian wife to practise her religion in the home?” I immediately thought of Amy, whom I would marry the following summer when she graduated from Wake Forest.
The questioner stated that he knew that Allah permits us to marry Christians and Jews. But, he wondered, “Can she practice her religious rites in the same house and have pictures of the crucifiction
8
of Jesus (A)
9
and celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and etc. Can her kids join her? If no, would not it hurt her feelings? Please, answer me on this issue.”
I felt numb as I read the sheikh’s response:
Praise be to Allaah.
It is not permissible for a Muslim to allow his wife from among the People of the Book to celebrate her festivals in his home, for the man is in charge of that woman and she does not have the right to openly celebrate her festivals in his home, because of the resulting effects of corruption, forbidden things and display of the symbols of kufr [disbelief] in his home. He should keep his children from taking part in those innovated festivals, because the children belong to the father and he should keep them away from these forbidden celebrations. At the same time he should direct them towards what will benefit them, even if that affects his relationship with his wife. The aims of sharee’ah and protecting one’s religion—which is one of the most important aims of sharee’ah—take priority over everything else.
Imaam Ahmad ibn Hanbal was asked about a man who had a Christian wife—could he let her go out to join in the Christian festivals or to go to the church? He said, no.
In
al-Mughni
(1/21), Ibn Qudaamah says: “(Treatment of women): If his wife is a dhimmiyyah [a Jew or Christian living under Islamic rule], he can prevent her from going to the church, because that is not an act of obedience to Allaah.”
If these scholars said that the husband should stop a Christian wife from going to church, then what do you think is the case with regard to her celebrating these innovated festivals in the house of her Muslim husband? Especially when we know the harm that results from these festivals, which is far worse than her merely going to the church. And Allaah knows best.