Read My Year Inside Radical Islam for Free Online

nonexclusivist view of salvation.
    Even before 9/11, I knew that a lot of non-Muslims feared Islam because of so-called “Islamic terrorism.” But as I read more, I decided that terrorism was separable from the religion itself. I was convinced of this by people like Nu’Man, the average Muslim on the street who could testify to the impact that the faith had on him. I was also convinced by some of the Western scholarship I came across. John Esposito’s The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? discussed at length terrorism and Islam. Firmly rejecting what he dubbed “the temptation . . . to view Islam through the prism of religious extremism and terrorism,” Esposito elegantly summarized a conclusion I was rapidly reaching: “The demonization of a great religious tradition due to the perverted actions of a minority of dissident and distorted voices remains the real threat.”
    There was also Huston Smith, the eloquent scholar of comparative religion. In The World’s Religions, Smith addressed four crucial areas of Islam’s social teachings. In each area, Smith either defended Islam against the charges leveled against it or else found it superior to the West. He concluded that Islamic economics wasn’t incompatible with capitalism, but that “[t]he equalizing provisos of the Koran would, if duly applied, offset” capitalism’s excesses. Smith defended Islam against the charge of degrading women. Of Islam and race relations, Smith wrote, “Islam stresses racial equality and ‘has achieved a remarkable degree of interracial coexistence.’ ” Here, Smith explained that Malcolm X discovered in his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca “that racism had no precedent in Islam and could not be accommodated to it.” Finally, Smith defended Islam against the common Western stereotype of being a warrior religion. While he admitted that the Qur’an “does not counsel turning the other cheek, or pacifism,” Smith wrote that the Qur’an only countenanced warfare that was defensive or else intended “to right a wrong.”
    My studies convinced me that the true Islam was moderate. There were undoubtedly some Muslim extremists, but Christianity had its own dark periods, and one couldn’t impute the actions of a few extremists to the entire body of believers. The faith felt not only comfortable, but thanks to my childhood in a hippie town and the religious views of my “Jewnitarian” parents, also familiar.
    The respect for other religions was familiar. The conception of Jesus was familiar. Islam’s position on warfare, as explained by Huston Smith and others, was sensible. And Muslims were encouraged to search for greater social and economic justice. Islam’s success in eliminating racism in its adherents was one proof of the faith in action. The religion had so many deep insights relevant to modern life.
    As the summer came to end, I no longer wondered if I would become a Muslim. Rather, it seemed only to be a question of when.

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    CAMPUS RADICAL
    Al-Husein gave me a ride to the Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro and waited with me for my flight. We played a few games of pinball in the airport’s game room before saying our good-byes. It was fitting that al-Husein was the last friend I would see before I left the country, since the new ideas and concepts to which he had introduced me would profoundly influence the course of my time in Europe.
    It was fall of 1997, and I was heading to study abroad in Venice, a city of canals where I would find a bridge to a new life.
    En route to Italy, I saw a Saudi Arabian businessman making salat in the Chicago O’Hare Airport. When he finished his prayers, I showed him the books I had been reading about Islam. We conversed for as long as his broken English could carry him. I felt a real warmth from him.
    While in the Chicago airport, I called my home in Oregon. My mom picked up. After a minute of small talk, I got to the point. “Mom,” I said, “I wanted to tell you that