My Year Inside Radical Islam Read Online Free PDF Page A

Qur’an, to Muhammad, and that the Qur’an is God’s direct, literal word. I was also interested to learn that Muslims believe that the Old and New Testaments are earlier holy books inspired by God—but that those books became corrupted over time and are no longer completely reliable.
    After my long, intense discussions with Mike about Christianity, I was especially interested in Islam’s view of Jesus. Al-Husein explained that Islam holds, similar to what I believed, that Jesus was a prophet of God and had a special relationship with Him, but that Jesus was still just a man. He was in no way divine.
    When Mike first told me the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument, I was sure that it must have a fatal flaw. Islam seemed to make that flaw explicit. Josh McDowell’s argument could only be true if Jesus really did claim to be God—and Islam held that he never did so. Instead, the holy books that purport to show Jesus claiming his own divinity have been corrupted over time and can’t be trusted on that point.
    The logic underlying the faith appealed to me, as did al-Husein’s Sufi-oriented practice of Islam. He had actually undergone a set of religious transformations by the time I met him. Al-Husein was raised as an Ismaili. There are two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, of which Sunnis comprise about 90 percent of the world’s Muslims. The Ismaili branch of Islam is Shia, and its adherents follow the Aga Khan. They believe the Aga Khan is Prophet Muhammad’s rightful successor, and many Ismailis refer to him as a “living guide” or even “the living Qur’an.” Every Ismaili I’ve known has had a moderate religious outlook. However, Sunni Muslims often regard them as heretics because of the Ismaili notion that the Aga Khan can interpret the Qur’an for his followers. Many Sunni Muslims believe that, rather than showing fidelity to the text of the Qur’an and Islamic traditions, the Ismailis are faithful to a man who changes the religion over time.
    Shortly before al-Husein and I became friends, he converted to Sunni Islam. He didn’t provide too many details when we discussed it, but apparently he had been briefly sucked into a very conservative practice of Islam. Al-Husein once said that the semester before he met me, he would walk around campus feeling anger and loathing toward the Christians and Jews around him. He would think of the Christians, with their belief in the divinity of Jesus, as polytheists; he would think of the Jews, with their idea that they were God’s chosen people, as racists. Because of this, he earned the nickname “angst-ridden al-Husein.”
    But he abandoned those views before I met him. When I got to know al-Husein, he was a Sufi.
    Sufism is generally thought of as a mystical strain of Islam that emphasizes spirituality over religious formalism. While this view of Sufism doesn’t hold true in all contexts, it generally fits Sufism as practiced in the West—and was certainly true of al-Husein’s practice. The kind of Sufism that al-Husein adhered to didn’t claim a monopoly on religious wisdom. This resonated with the spiritual views with which I had been raised. In his introduction to Essential Sufism , Robert Frager explains, “Most Sufis believe that the great religions and mystical traditions of the world share the same essential Truth. The various prophets and spiritual teachers are like the light bulbs that illuminate a room. The bulbs are different, but the current comes from one source, which is God.”
    I viewed my parents as spiritual outliers when I was growing up, but now I had seemingly found a venerable religious tradition.
    When I went to a mosque for the first time, it was al-Husein who took me. I spent the summer of 1997 in Winston-Salem, teaching at Wake Forest’s summer debate institute for high school students. It was then that al-Husein brought me to the juma prayers (the traditional Friday prayers) at Masjid al-Mu’minun.
    Masjid al-Mu’minun