American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion
By Paul M. Barrett
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
304 pages, $25
My Year Inside Radical Islam
By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Tarcher/Penguin
293 pages, $24.95
Mustafa Saied appears to be a typical American guy: a sports fan who takes his kids trick-or-treating and relaxes at home in jeans and a college football jersey. But while Saied was a student at the University of Tennessee, he led a much different life, as a member of a radical Islamic group that preached hatred of Jews and endorsed violence against them.
Saied now speaks out against fundamentalist Islam in favor of a progressive approach. His journey to radical Islam and back is told in “American Islam,” a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Paul M. Barrett that examines what it means to be Muslim in the U.S. today.
Soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when Muslims in the U.S. were subject to scrutiny and suspicion, Barrett set out to learn what a normal American life was for Muslims. Through hundreds of interviews around the country, he came up with the answer: There isn’t one. American Muslims are traditional and progressive, assimilated into American culture and trying to remain separate. What they do have in common is that they were all touched, though in different ways, by the events of 9/11, when Muslim terrorists hijacked planes and shattered Americans’ sense of security.
Barrett writes in his introduction:
“Muslims in the United States represent an intricate mixture of creeds and cultures: immigrant and native-born, devout and secular, moderate and radical, integrated and isolated. Even as many American Muslims thrive in material terms, pockets of fanaticism fester.”
“American Islam” contains profiles of Saied and six other Muslims, many of whom are influencing the debate about what it means to follow Islam in the U.S. Barrett’s subjects range from a feminist who pushes for women to be given equal stature at a mosque in Morgantown, W.Va., to an African-American man who leads a mosque in Brooklyn and refuses to denounce Osama bin Laden. He profiles the wealthy publisher of an Arab newspaper in Michigan who is courted by American politicians but openly endorses the guerrilla group Hezbollah, and an Egyptian-born scholar who is striving to reintroduce intellectual debate to Islam and the true meaning of Quran verses often wielded as weapons against non-Muslims. Barrett’s subjects represent bigger themes and conflicts within Islam, and he does an exceptionally good job of putting personal beliefs, history and politics into context and explaining the bigger picture.
The subtitle of the book is “The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion,” and it’s a theme Barrett returns to again and again. He focuses in on the conflict of ideas and tensions within communities, mosques and even individuals. It is in those struggles that readers get a true sense of the good and the bad in Islam today.
In “The Feminist,” Barrett profiles Asra Nomani, a 38-year-old writer born in India and living in West Virginia who fights with the men of the local mosque to allow women to enter the front door and pray with the men. In telling her story, Barrett touches on the beliefs about men’s and women’s roles in Islam, how the influx of fundamentalist Arab Muslims is affecting university communities and Muslim student groups, as well as the personal struggles of Nomani and her parents. They find themselves on the outside of a community they helped to grow when their daughter takes on the idea that in Islam, the men and women should be kept separate.
Even though Barrett knew Nomani as a former colleague, he doesn’t give her, or any of his other subjects, a free pass. Barrett shows how she alienates some of the community by moving the fight to a bigger stage: the opinion pages of The Washington Post. And he shows readers the impact Nomani’s actions have on her parents.
Barrett has written a rich book full of insights into a religion many Americans don’t know enough about. He provides fresh information on a subject that has been written about extensively, and he does it in a way that lets readers — from those who know little about it to those with deeper background — learn something new about how Islam is practiced today.
Barrett weaves in his opinions about the dangers of radical Islam. At the end he leaves readers with what the title of his conclusion calls “The Way Ahead”: steps that Muslims and the American government can take so moderate Islam beats out the extremist take held by a minority that continues to fuel violence and terrorism around the world.
Another book about fundamentalist Islam approaches the topic from a different perspective: inside the mind of someone who adopted extremist beliefs and learned from those who preached them.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’ memoir, “My Year Inside Radical Islam,” details his journey from liberal Jew to Muslim convert employed by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi-funded charity that promoted Wahhabism, the ultraconservative version of Islam that insists on a literal reading of the Quran, and was linked with bin Laden.
The first line promises a rare look inside a secretive society:
“Before I was an FBI informant, an apostate, and a blasphemer, I was a devout believer in radical Islam who worked for a Saudi-funded charity that sent money to al-Qaeda. At the time, it all seemed pretty normal.”
Unfortunately, the rest of the book fails to live up to that opening. While the book offers some insight into how one person can go from moderate to extreme beliefs, Gartenstein-Ross is no John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban from California who was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Instead he is an office worker in Oregon who knows people who may have helped funnel money to help the Muslim fighters in Chechnya.
The book is as much about Gartenstein-Ross’ quest for spiritual fulfillment — at the end of the book he becomes a Christian — and his relationship with his college friends and girlfriend as it is a glimpse into what a fundamentalist group looks like from the inside.
The book moves along when Gartenstein-Ross, who converts in college, describes how he starts changing his life in small ways as he takes advice from his Al-Haramain co-workers. Music is forbidden; so is shaving and wearing silk or jewelry. Gartenstein-Ross believes they have the correct answers because they seem so sure of what the Quran and writings of Muhammad say. They support the Taliban and believe in jihad; he stops questioning whether he thinks that is right or moral.
“Weren’t God’s decrees superior to the shifting sands of modern morality?” he writes. “Why shouldn’t the state ban homosexuality? Why shouldn’t the state enforce the modesty of women?”
He explains the appeal of a religion that sees things only in black and white, haram and halal. “I didn’t want to be racked by doubts and uncertainty,” he says.
But coming from someone who describes himself as a campus activist and championship debater, that explanation isn’t satisfying. Ultimately, readers may wish Gartenstein-Ross had delved deeper into the reasons why strict Islam holds an appeal for so many.
Like Barrett, Gartenstein-Ross ends with a message about the way out of radical Islam, telling people who know someone involved to have hope, because he found his way out and others can too.
One wishes Barrett had a crack at his story, applying the same scrutiny to Gartenstein-Ross as he did to Saied and coming up with a deeper look into Gartenstein-Ross’ experience and what we can (and should) learn from it about the spread of radical Islam today.
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Kathryn Masterson, a former staff reporter for the Tribune’s RedEye edition, is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
