But my concern was not to score any debating points. My concern was al-Husein himself. I grew up without siblings, but while I was in college I had come to regard al-Husein as my brother. That may have changed after I left Islam, but I still cared for him. At the very least, he was still my half-brother.
“Your ultimate duty is to God,” al-Husein said. “The question isn’t what I want; the question isn’t one of
my
pleasure. The question is what is pleasing to God.”
“I agree with that,” I said. “I remember at Al Haramain we used to call it
fi sabil Allah,
that which is for the pleasure of Allah.”
Al-Husein nodded. “That is a vital concept. Your intentions matter. As you struggle with your spiritual questions, you need to make sure that you’re seeking God’s desires and not following your own.”
After the meal, al-Husein asked if there was a place around here where he could make
salat.
I told him that he could pray in Vanderbilt Hall, the building where the bulk of the law school’s classes were held. The dining area where snacks were served during the day was empty at night; I had made
salat
there during my first week at NYU. I suggested that al-Husein go there to pray.
I walked al-Husein to the bathroom, where he would purify himself before prayer with
wudu,
the Islamic ablutions. “Why don’t you come and pray with me?” al-Husein asked.
The offer was made with genuine warmth, and it was the right thing to ask. But I had the right counter. “It wouldn’t be
fi sabil Allah,
” I said. We had already discussed the importance of intentions. If I were to pray with al-Husein, my intentions wouldn’t have been pure. I wouldn’t have been trying to please God. The prayers would have been for al-Husein’s pleasure.
We parted with a long hug. I told al-Husein that I would be there for him if he needed anything. If I could do anything for him as a friend, as a lawyer, whatever. Al-Husein had treated me in the way that a brother would. I realized that I should have told him about my new beliefs. But I couldn’t bring myself to do so, not yet. And he wasn’t the only one who I couldn’t yet bring myself to tell.
It wasn’t until Amy’s last semester of college that she finally settled on law school. She had given some serious thought to going into education, but decided against it after a semester as a student teacher in a Winston-Salem high school convinced her that she had not the gift.
She thought about getting a policy degree and thought about Peace Corps, something that wouldn’t fit too well with married life. Even if law school was a last-minute choice for Amy (as it is for many people), she unsurprisingly aced her LSATs and got into most of the top schools to which she applied. When she finally decided to join me at NYU in the fall of 2001, I was overjoyed.
I was at lunch with Sadik Huseny, the lapsed-Muslim classmate who took civil procedure with me during our first year. The first-year experience is intense in law school. You take all your academic courses with the same group of about a hundred other students. It makes for
very
large classes, but you nonetheless end up getting to know the other hundred students quite well. Sadik and I had formed a study group together in our first year, and he became a close friend. But we had seen far less of each other in our second year. He seemed a little uncomfortable around me, like there was something he wanted to discuss.
I let him direct the conversation. There was some small talk about classes and our plans for the summer, but Sadik finally got to what must have been the purpose of the lunch. “So you’re Christian now?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“Why is that?” he asked. “I first get to know you and you’re a devout Muslim, you’re praying five times a day, then suddenly you’re Christian. If you were dissatisfied with Islam, why didn’t you just stop believing in anything? Why did you latch on to Christianity so quickly?”
“Because I believe in God,” I said. I wasn’t sure Sadik would understand this; I knew that many people would not. “I believe in God, and Islam was part of my search to understand who God really is. I didn’t just leave Islam and become Christian because I was unhappy with Islam, Sadik. I left Islam and became Christian because I became convinced that my earlier ideas about God were wrong. I became convinced that I could find the truth in another faith.”
Sadik shrugged. “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure it makes sense.”
“Some people believe in God, and others don’t,” I said. “If you can see this through my eyes, you’d understand that the truly surprising move would have been if I simply ceased to believe.”
Sadik nodded, but I’m not sure he would ever come to understand this second conversion.
I had come to believe in the resurrection, but I wasn’t yet fully resurrected.
I still felt uncomfortable telling the story of my religious conversions—not only for personal safety reasons, but also because my story was so unusual that I doubted many other people could understand it. People were more likely, I thought, to see me as crazy, or as someone who couldn’t make up his mind and was bouncing erratically from religion to religion.
Nor was I finished with the rules that had been drilled into me at Al Haramain. They would crop up at strange times. When Amy and I were shopping for our wedding bands, for example, I remembered the
hadith
where Muhammad had said that it was forbidden for men to wear gold. While Amy got a yellow gold wedding band, I selected one that was white gold—one that didn’t
look
like it was made of gold. The only thing that I had in mind when selecting this wedding band was that
hadith,
even though I was no longer Muslim.
So Al Haramain’s legacy lived on even after I had left Islam.
Pete was next, after al-Husein. The last time I’d had substantial interaction with Pete was the previous spring, when he wanted me to meet Soliman al-But’he at the airport and I had refused.
Pete had called me just a few days earlier. He would greet me with the traditional Islamic greeting when he called: “
Assalaamu ’alaykum.
” Desiring to live without deception, I wouldn’t offer the Islamic reply. Instead, I’d say something like, “Hi, Pete, how are you?”
Pete immediately noticed my failure to respond to his Islamic greeting in kind. But during his first phone call, Pete told me what he wanted without remarking on the fact that I didn’t reply to his Islamic greeting.
“Look, bro,” Pete said. “I know that the Jewish state has elected this Ariel Sharon as its leader. This makes me sick to my stomach. This guy shouldn’t lead a nation-state. He’s a war criminal and should be thrown in prison for what he did to the Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. What I want you to do is to talk to some of your crazy professors there at NYU to see if they have an idea for how we can take this guy to court.”
I told Pete I would look into it. I knew that I had to tell him that I had left Islam. I figured that the next time we spoke should be the time. As luck would have it, Amy was in town for the second significant conversation that I’d have with Pete in the course of a year. I told her that a phone call with Pete was coming, that I needed to tell him I had left Islam. She could see that I was nervous. “You shouldn’t worry about this,” Amy assured me. “The worst he can do is yell at you and tell you that you’re going to hell.”
There was so much more he could do, though. But I hadn’t told Amy about the traditional punishment for leaving Islam. I didn’t really speak with anyone about it. I didn’t want to worry her, nor did I want people to know that I could, at some point, face death threats for my new faith. I viewed it as a sign of weakness. All I wanted was a normal life.
I locked myself in my room for almost an hour and got on the phone with Pete. He could see on the caller ID that I was on the line, and he answered in typical fashion, “
Assalaamu ’alaykum,
my dear brother Daveed! How are you?”
“I’m doing well, Pete. Thanks.”
I again hadn’t responded to his Islamic greeting. So now he had to ask. “Bro, are you even practicing Islam at all?”
“I’m really having my doubts, Pete. Grave doubts. I don’t think I’d call myself Muslim at this point.”
Pete, like al-Husein, responded with a soft touch. I should have known that he would. His first wife had left Islam and returned to Christianity: he’d been forced to deal with this kind of thing before.
Pete made me promise that I’d continue to seek out God. “Bro, you might live for a hundred more years. But what you gotta understand is that this life, long as it is, is nothing compared to the next one. We’re living for the next life, bro, and we’re living to please God.”
“I agree with all of that, Pete.”
Pete went into a long-winded story about how he had recently bought a new house, and he took out a loan to do so, a loan that would charge him interest. Paying interest, as I knew, was
haram.
But here he had a beautiful house, and he began to wonder what the harm was. Wasn’t it easier to just take out a loan? Then Pete found that there was a termite infestation that he hadn’t caught on first inspection. He would have to get new floors put in. That, to Pete, was God’s way of showing him the consequence of taking out an interest-bearing loan.
The application to what he was telling me was obvious. I might be living a life that I think is good, but if I’m defying God, I will eventually pay for it.
Pete ended by saying, “Bro, I want you to know that it’s okay with me if you experiment. If you end up belonging to some crazy religion or something else, I won’t be mad at you. What matters to me is that you continue to seek the truth.”
I was impressed with the way Pete handled that call. For the next couple of years, whenever I returned to Ashland, I’d always think about meeting up with Pete for coffee. I didn’t ever manage to see him, though, and within a few years it would be impossible to do so.
Amy and I were married on Sunday, June 3, 2001.
The festivities were a weekend-long affair, kicking off with desserts at her parents’ house in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on Friday. For the first time in years, I was surrounded entirely by friends and by those who wished the best for my future with Amy. I hadn’t seen my parents since wrapping up work at Al Haramain; the expense and travel time between New York and Ashland were prohibitive.
I had four groomsmen, including Mike Hollister—people who had known me before, during, and after my time as a Muslim. Al-Husein and Liana did not come to the wedding. Although they were invited, it was a tepid invitation; I didn’t know if I wanted al-Husein there. Nor did I know whether I would have made him a groomsman if he was able to come.
Other friends and family members had made the trip to North Carolina from Florida, New York, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and beyond. My parents would later describe the weekend as “heaven on earth.” They weren’t too far off the mark.
Some friends of Amy’s family, who had a beautiful riverside home, offered up their property for a Saturday bash. I went out in a kayak with Jacob Bornstein, my best friend from high school and one of my groomsmen. As with most of my other friends, he was aware of my movement toward and eventually away from Islam, and he was interested in hearing about what the journey had meant to me. I was unable to cleanly summarize it. There were so many things that I had been through and believed while at Al Haramain that I didn’t want to acknowledge, let alone discuss.
The wedding location had been set while I was still a Muslim, and, at the time, I didn’t want to have it in a church. We were married at the Albemarle Plantation, a country club in Hertford, North Carolina, bordered by the Albermarle Sound and Yeopim River. The skies were clear, and everything seemed to glow: the grass, the guests, and the waters behind us.
The minister asked Amy and me to look into each other’s eyes as we said our vows. As I looked at Amy, I realized how much she had sacrificed for me. She had seen me descend into fundamentalist Islam and emerge on the other side as a Christian. She had politely resisted my demands to have a
nikah
ceremony before the wedding. I thought of how unpleasant I had been—to Amy, to my parents, to my friends—during my time in radical Islam. It was testament to the strength of Amy’s love for me, the strength of my parents’ love, the strength of my friendships, that they had been able to endure.
As I looked into Amy’s eyes, I knew that I couldn’t possibly deserve her love. The best I could do was accept it, and try to love her with the same kind of understanding, forgiveness, and passion.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working on my computer in my sixth-floor apartment at Mercer Hall, a law school dorm just a block off Broadway in the West Village.
When I first heard the screams that morning, I thought there might have been a celebrity sighting. That’s what it sounded like from outside the window—like a rock band had shown up, and their fans couldn’t contain themselves. It was only when I looked out the window that I realized something was terribly wrong. I saw NYU students outside, in the brick walkway leading toward Mercer, some of them in the street. They didn’t look happy or excited. They looked scared, anguished. I noticed that the crowd was staring south down the street, toward the World Trade Center.
I turned on CNN and found that the south tower had already collapsed. The north tower was still standing, with an ominous column of smoke rising from it.
Amy was upstairs in the computer lab. I rushed up to get her. Another student was there also, but I ignored him. “Have you looked at the news?” I blurted out.
“No.” We’d been up late the night before, and she was still trying to wake up.
“There’s been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. One of the towers has collapsed. The other’s on fire.”
“What?”
“Let’s go outside.”