[Mb-civic] White Muslim , Part II

Tue Dec 7 15:56:04 PST 2004

White Muslim, Part II

By Brendan Bernhard, LA Weekly
 Posted on December 7, 2004, Printed on December 7, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20682/

To read the first part of White Muslim click here.

Taxi Man

Presumably the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, did not
leave written instructions on how a Muslim should drive a cab in New York
City. Even Vincent, with his long experience in the ultimate car culture of
Southern California, says he has had to learn to be more aggressive in order
to survive in the streets of Manhattan. As Vincent sees it, Islam has not
only granted him a new name  Shu'aib ("Think of 'shoe' and 'Abe' Lincoln,"
he suggests helpfully)  it has also made him into a completely different
person from the happy-go-lucky one known to his friends and family back in
Torrance. Even to himself.

"In L.A., I had no direction. I was absolutely clueless as to what I was
going to do for the rest of my life. I really cared mostly about the
irrelevant things  my music, my hanging out, my friends, my parties.
Anything that had no weight or relevance to it, that was what I was most
concerned about. I was working just like anybody, living for the weekend, to
buy clothes, impress myself, impress others.

"What I can tell you is this," he went on, his voice hoarse and nasal
because of his cold, his thoat dry from fasting. (It was already seven hours
since his last meal.) "There was Vincent, and there's Shu'aib. And literally
it's two different people. Why? Because I could never, God willing, be that
person again. Meaning my character, my mentality, my closed eyes, my
narrowmindedness  everything was just wrong. I use the analogy that I had
to have my vision taken away from me to have my eyes opened. All I can say
is thanks God for Islam, because it teaches you everything about this life,
about this world. It makes you ponder everything, not in a spiritual kind of
way, but in a reality kind of way. So when I see things  "

"What do you see here, for example?" I asked as we sped uptown on a
beautiful fall day past stores selling expensive jewelry and the finest
clothing, past a stunning Japanese woman waiting at the light in a long
white coat, her white poodle, straining on the leash, in a coat as well ...

"Only God knows what's in people's hearts, and how they really are and how
they really feel, but what I see is a lot of people who are misguided,"
Vincent said, frowning behind the wheel. "Where are they going? What are
they doing? What are their objectives today? Did they stop today to say
thanks God for these new clothes I'm wearing? Did they stop today to say
thanks God for the food they ate? Did they stop to call their parents?
That's what I see people lacking."

The life Shu'aib lives now is far more demanding than the one Charles lived
in the past, and he drives himself far harder than the average Muslim. Every
day he must rise before dawn, wash (and during Ramadan, eat), and then hurry
down to the 96th Street mosque for the morning prayer, usually in the
company of 40 or 50 sleepy worshipers. By 5 a.m., he is in his cab, which he
picks up at a depot on 86th Street and Lexington Avenue. The streets are
dark, the air frigid. For the next 12 hours he is both in control and
controlled by others  a driver at the mercy of his passengers. The city is
dotted with mosques, and he must find one of them to pray in at lunch time
(though he won't eat) and again in the middle of the afternoon before
finally turning in his cab at 5 p.m. On an average day his take is $85, and
he doesn't seem to mind how hard he has to work for it. "In Islam, money is
nothing," he says with a trace of contempt. "We don't wake up in the morning
with dollar signs in our eyes. The first thing we do in the morning is
pray."

Four nights a week, he goes to night school at LaGuardia Community College
in Queens, where he takes classes in anthropology, the Bible as literature,
and Western civilization. He has also served as the vice president and
president of the college's Muslim Students Association, which he helped
organize with Avais, a good-humored Pakistani student with a thick mop of
black hair. Last year, Vincent gave a talk titled "How Islam Changed Me" for
the student association. "We wanted to show that he's a Muslim and that he's
part of our family  to make a statement that Muslims are not always South
Asian or Arab," Avais told me one evening, while he, Vincent and a handful
of other Muslim men, including a Jewish New Yorker who is also a convert,
were breaking fast in a room above a mosque on 55th Street. The atmosphere
was convivial and collegiate. "It's time to pig out," one of the party
joked, digging into his food. Then, humorously, he corrected himself: "Maybe
I should say, 'Cow out.'"

Vincent's talk was a success. Afterward, a white student named Eric, now
Farouk, came into Islam. Within a year Eric had converted his mother, sister
and grandmother, Vincent told me, sounding a mite envious. (He longs to
convert his parents, even daydreams about it while he's in his cab, with an
intensity that might startle his mother, who, much as she respects her son's
choice, told me she has no intention of joining an organized faith.) The
college has a sizable Muslim population, and the non-Muslim students are
intrigued by Islam. Vincent gets a lot of inquiries, often from girls, who,
to show off their interfaith sophistication, will start a conversation with
him by saying, "Oh, I know somebody who is an Islamer" or "I know someone
who believes in Muslims."

>From the outside, Vincent's life looks a little grim. He drives a cab  a
job white Americans outsourced long ago to Third World immigrants. He has no
health insurance and, despite a serious back problem, has been going to a
doctor popular with cabdrivers who sounds like someone out of a William
Burroughs novel. A reputable physician won't give you a back injection
without having an MRI taken first, but Vincent got four back injections and
a bottle of painkillers within two visits. ("Where does it hurt?" the doctor
asked, prodding his spine before plunging in the needle.) The painkillers
help, but they make him dopey too  which, on top of the punishing sleep
schedule (near the end of Ramadan, he spent a night praying in the mosque
and then went straight to work), isn't exactly what a passenger hopes for in
a cabdriver.

As for women, not only does he not have a girlfriend, he isn't even
permitted to touch a female hand. He hopes to get married, but his wife will
either have to be Muslim or willing to convert immediately. "Women are just
part of this life," he told me. "They're just part of this world. So they're
not going to be beneficial to you in any way. I'm not speaking of Muslim
women. I'm speaking of regular women on the street. In my opinion, they're
the ones who are oppressed, not the Muslim women. Ask any Muslim woman if
she's oppressed, and they're going to say no. They wouldn't be fighting like
they are with this head-scarf issue in France  you know why? Because they
don't want to take it off. Why would they upset the Creator, rather than the
Creation? They're not going to let the Creation ordain for them what the
Creator has already ordained.

"For sisters, now, they get utmost respect. Not just from Shu'aib but from
any Muslim brother. Ask any Muslim brother, and he'll tell you that just by
seeing a scarf on a woman's face, on her hair, they have nothing but respect
for her. They cannot disrespect this person. Why? Because she's doing what
was ordained for her to do  which is cover herself, have modesty. She's
following what was God's orders."

A woman not following God's orders flagged us down from the curb. Wrapped in
a fashionably cut red coat, she was in her 40s, brisk and business-like,
with lips that were two thin red lines. "Sixty-second and Madison," she
ordained, getting into the cab for a five-block ride.

"Where is she going, what is she doing?" Vincent asked after she got out a
few minutes later. "To me, the way I see it now, people are living and dying
for this world. So much so that nothing else matters, nothing else is
relevant. What is relevant is the bag in her hand. She needs to make sure
she looks good, that she's up to par. She needs to spend her money on ...
nonsense! To me, and from being Muslim, I don't need any of this. I don't
need to waste my time with these people, because they're not here for the
same purpose I'm here for, they don't see things the way I see them. They're
running very fast, and what's going to happen at the end? They're going to
die!"

As we headed down FDR Drive, with the East River streaming past us on our
left, the conversation turned to politics. It was a week or so before the
presidential election, but Vincent said he had no intention of voting.
Democracy is based on compromise, he told me, and Islam does not compromise.
If he could vote for an Islamic state, he would, with Saudi Arabia as the
model. Asked about Taliban-era Afghanistan, he replied cautiously that he
didn't know enough about it to comment. It is his fervent hope that early
next year, in the company of a million or so other Muslims, he will be able
to go on the haj and circle the black stone at Mecca. "Besides wanting my
parents to become Muslim, there's nothing I want more."

The Syrian Islam-Spreader

The floor of the men's room in the 96th Street mosque was awash in water. To
the left of the entrance stood a huge basket of mismatched flip-flops and
sandals, to be put on before going inside. Along one wall men sat on marble
blocks in front of taps for people to perform their ablutions  washing
feet, arms up to the elbow, rinsing nose and eyes  in preparation for
prayer. There were no urinals, just a row of cubicles complete with a tap on
one side (for more ablutions) and a plastic bucket on the other. Talking in
the men's room is strongly discouraged. Achieving cleanliness before God is
a serious business.

It was Friday prayers, the Islamic Sabbath. One Muslim among many, Vincent
found a place on the vast carpeted floor of the main prayer room, and was
soon swallowed up by the crowd. Topped by a dome, the mosque feels light and
airy and comfortable, like the world's biggest yoga studio. There is an
upstairs balcony for the "sisters," a mihrab  a kind of understated altar 
and a minbar, or pulpit, an upright latticed box at the top of five carpeted
steps from which the imam delivers the khutba, or sermon. There are no pews,
no chairs, no furniture of any kind at all  just an immense plush carpet, a
calming green with geometric splashes of color, large enough to accommodate
several tennis courts. With its informality and stretches of empty space,
the mosque can make a church or a cathedral look pointlessly elaborate and
ornate, and it feels curiously modern and user-friendly. Except during
specific prayer times, you don't have to be silent in a mosque, and if a
cell phone goes off, nobody makes a fuss. On the contrary, two people can
sit and talk while, nearby, someone else prays.

By 1:30 or so, the mosque, both upstairs and down, was packed to
overflowing, which meant there were at least 1,300 people there with more
lining up outside. (Carpets had been laid out on the grounds to accommodate
those who couldn't get in, and a mountain of castoff shoes was piled up
outside the front door.) A slender young woman, veiled in unusually filmy
black, rushed in through a side entrance, slipping off a pair of silver-mesh
slippers before continuing barefoot on her way up to the balcony. The shoes
were inlaid with a beaded flower pattern, and the label on the insole said
"SWEET." Lying on the marble floor, inches from the carpet, they looked
deliciously sinful.

Sheik Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, a Syrian preacher with green eyes, milk-white
skin and a clever face framed by a bushy ginger beard (people at the mosque
joked that he and Vincent were brothers) ascended the stairs to the pulpit
to deliver the sermon. Vincent had heard al-Yaqoubi before and approved.
"He's pretty blunt," he told me, suggesting that the Syrian, unlike some
preachers, wasn't afraid to speak his mind. Al-Yaqoubi wore a white hat that
looked like a tassel-less fez, and a long, pale, hooded Moroccan robe.
Holding a pair of black worry beads in one hand, clutching the stair railing
with the other, he made a strikingly archaic and authoritative figure. For a
while he spoke in Arabic, then switched to English.

Al-Yaqoubi, who spends every Ramadan at the New York mosque but is also a
regular visitor to California (he is staying in Orange County this week and
will be at the Zaytuna Institute in the Bay Area later in the month) is what
might be termed an itinerant Islam-spreader. Based in Damascus, he is the
son of a celebrated scholar and delivered his first khutba at the age of 14.
He was the imam in a mosque in Gothenburg, Sweden, for several years (in
1999, he was made mufti of Sweden), and has worked and preached in England,
Canada and Scotland. He has been to the United States 25 times, and, given
the cost of the average flight between New York and Damascus, not to mention
Stockholm and Edinburgh and Strasbourg and L.A., someone must be funding him
handsomely.

Multilingual and media savvy (he quoted Lancet's estimate of 100,000
war-related deaths in Iraq to me hours after it first surfaced on the
Internet), al-Yaqoubi is optimistic about Islam's prospects in the West. He
estimates that he gives shahada to approximately 100 Americans (of whom 20
will be white, the rest African-American, Hispanic and Asian) every Ramadan
in New York, and has had quite a lot of success with whites in the San
Francisco Bay area. The diversity of American society makes it easier for
Islam to take hold, he believes, because there is no dominant culture to
repel it. In England he has had less success, but in Scandinavia "we have
lots of the native people coming, but slowly."

The theme of his sermon, which was titled "The Ongoing Battle  But Who Is
the Enemy?" was jihad. Jihad as self-defense, as peaceful dissemination of
Islam and as self-struggle. Although the 96th Street mosque is the largest
and best-known in the United States, and therefore presumably a showcase for
moderate Islam in America, the sermon was both moderate and inflammatory in
tone, switching from one to the other almost sentence by sentence.

"Anyone who extends peace to us, we extend peace to them," al-Yaqoubi barked
over the heads of the seated congregation. "We fight for the sake of Allah
... We fight those who oppress us, who take our property and our freedom of
speech ... The media depict us as monsters, that we love to fight  No!"

Parts of the sermon were openly political. Al-Yaqoubi, who is considered a
moderate, spoke approvingly of jihad in the battlefield, of "fighting in
order to liberate your country, as the Iraqis are doing." (Asked about this
afterward, he told me that it is natural to fight against an invading army.
As to why Arabs so rarely rise up against their own Arab oppressors, he said
it was un-Islamic to use violence against a local government.)

>From the pulpit, al-Yaqoubi claimed that the early Muslims who came to
countries like Egypt and Syria and Iraq and North Africa did so "not to
occupy land, but to liberate people who were oppressed by their
governments." As for spreading Islam by force, he said, Americans should
understand the concept better than anyone, since "America feels she has the
right to impose democracy all over the world" and "to throw away governments
that don't agree with her policy." But whereas the desire to disseminate
Islam "is based on the divine," the American approach to spreading democracy
"is based on greed."

Having said that, al-Yaqoubi once again took a more conciliatory approach.
"This doesn't mean that we are going to practice jihad in America. We have
to show our neighbors respect. We love people around the world and want them
to become Muslims."

Most intriguing of all, perhaps, were al-Yaqoubi's remarks about the role of
the Muslim immigrant in the West. While many Muslims have come here to earn
money and live a better life, he said, they can justify their decision to
live in a materialistic, non-Islamic country by acting as messengers for
Allah. "What justifies us living in America, other than trying to convey the
Message?" he asked rhetorically.

The sermon built to an impassioned, rapid-fire crescendo, in which, almost
shouting, al-Yaqoubi seemed to divide jihad into foreign and domestic
spheres, with appropriate action for each. "Wherever the American troops are
 wherever they are, they are going to be defeated," he yelped. But "here in
this country," he instructed Muslims to "leave jihad to those who are
fighting jihad," and "work peacefully" to represent Islam.

The end of the sermon signaled the time for prayer, and the atmosphere in
the mosque became electric. An usher, massive and rotund as a bouncer,
rushed around pushing the congregants into precise rows like Japanese
commuters being squeezed into a Tokyo subway car, forcing them to stand
shoulder to shoulder in line after line after line, from the back of the
mosque all the way to the front. There must be no gaps that wily Satan could
slip through, sowing division. As the prayers commenced, thousands of faces
touched the floor with choreographed precision.

"It's a beautifully simple and elegant religion. It's extremely sensible," I
was told by Bruce ("al-Baraa") Randall, a personal trainer and student of
South Asian history from Northern California who recently converted to Islam
and attends Friday prayers at the mosque. Looking at the hundreds of bent
bodies, you could see what he meant. From an observer's viewpoint, it was
rather like a bizarre sartorial demonstration  look, here are the backs of
a thousand jackets and the seats of a thousand trousers! Swatches of fabric
in every color joined to form an immense patchwork tapestry stretching from
one end of the room to the other. To a Christian, it could look strangely
alluring. No hymns  no pretending to be singing. Even the prayers, though
in Arabic, were brief and required only minimal call-and-response.
Curiously, while demanding what to a Christian might appear to be excessive
uniformity and obedience, Islam seemed to permit the individual a
considerable amount of personal breathing space too. And if you were a
non-Arabic speaker, listening to prayers in a foreign language would, I
suppose, be similar to a Catholic attending services held in Latin.

With the prayers under way, there was almost no room for the unbeliever. Two
mild-mannered cameramen from India's STAR channel, who were standing next to
me filming the proceedings, hurriedly folded up their tripods and
disappeared. I decided to go with them. I squeezed my way to the back where
the mountain of shoes was surrounded by more mountains, hundreds of Merrills
and Nikes and Adidas and lace-ups and sandals flung down on top of each
other. Outside more men were praying on the carpets provided, all in equally
precise rows, and two men in wheelchairs had made a mournful duet of their
own.

Afterward, as the mosque emptied, I ran into Vincent, who was shaking hands
and saying "Salaam alaikum, alaikum salaam" to people left and right, many
of whom he knew by name. He looked happy, a big smile of belonging on his
face. Though it has put him at odds with ordinary American society, becoming
a Muslim has also given him a sense of community unavailable to him when he
was just another white dude into loud music, parties and girls. It has
brought him distinction. The mosque was full of young Arab and South Asian
men, sharply dressed businessmen with neat beards, cabdrivers in baseball
caps, diminutive Bangladeshis in white robes and trousers  and religion
came as naturally to them as breathing. They were entirely unselfconscious
about it, and it was obvious that they considered it a source of unity and
solace and power. Not for the first time I found myself wondering how it is
that so many urban whites have managed to turn their own religion into an
object of scorn, even a source of shame, while everyone around them
continues to reap the benefits of organized faith. And, since the religious
impulse shows no sign of dying out, should we be surprised if spiritually
inclined urban whites decide to join a religion which, unlike Christianity,
seems to be alive?

"I consider that absolutely the best day of my life," Vincent said, his face
bright with happiness when I asked him about the day he took shahada three
years ago in this very mosque. "The way I describe it is, it seemed like
physically and symbolically the people were emptying into me. This entire
room was still full. The imam said, 'Is there anyone here who wants to take
shahada?' and my friend stood up and said, 'C'mon, c'mon.' I said, 'Now?
Here? In front of everybody?' And he brought me up, and I took shahada with
another guy. All I remember of that day is that no one seemed to have moved
in the room. The amount of people you saw today? They still remained when I
finished saying, 'I testify there is no god to be worshiped except for
Allah, and Muhammed is his messenger.'"

"That's all you had to do?" I asked, just making sure.

Vincent laughed. "Why, are you ready?"

Everybody Loved Him at the Marriot

For Vincent, Islam has brought meaning, ethics, discipline, purpose and hope
to a life that obviously contained too little of those things before, even
if nobody else seemed to notice. Over the phone, his 38-year-old brother,
Mike, who works in the computer industry, kept using the word nice to
describe his kid brother.

"Chuck, for some odd reason, was extremely nice compared to the rest of us,"
he said musingly, as if he were still scratching his head over it after all
these years. "When we were younger, me and my friends used to say, 'How did
he become so nice when all the rest of us are so aggressive?' One thing I
can see when he's with his Muslim friends is he goes out of his way with the
kids' fathers to help them with English. He's just always been nice."

Joshua Rhodes, a buddy from Vincent's Torrance days, described the L.A.
Vincent as "a real fun guy. In high school there were cliques, and he had
freedom to roam within all the cliques. A little rebellious, not in a
political sense, but he had a wild haircut sometimes, jewelry, more of a
punk or Goth. He liked hard punk, Sisters of Mercy. Everybody loved him over
at the Marriott."

And now everybody loves him at the mosque. Vincent is nice. He is
thoughtful, kind, polite, well-meaning and intelligent, and he has a good
sense of humor. Still, I have to confess I'm a little worried about him.
Though he is quite articulate, when he talks about the Moroccan  usually
referred to vaguely as "my friend" or "my roommate at the time" rather than
by his name  he becomes evasive and speaks stumblingly, as if he were
trying to protect not only the Moroccan from scrutiny but also himself.
Several times I asked to meet his friend but was told that he had no
interest in meeting me. The same went for Vincent's roommate, who is
Egyptian and, like the Moroccan, also a strict Muslim. (Both attend Hunter
College  the Moroccan studies physics, the Egyptian biochemistry. According
to Vincent, they intend to return home as soon as they have their degrees.)
Nor was I permitted to come to the apartment, which is in a Pakistani-owned
building where, he claims, the FBI not only taps the phones but occasionally
sends an agent over to say hello in person. His roommate's mother was
visiting from Egypt, Vincent explained, and it would therefore be awkward to
have me there. Vincent himself won't stay in the apartment if his roommate
isn't present, since being alone with the mother wouldn't be "respectful."

Lately, Vincent and the Moroccan have been going to a mosque in Queens
housed in what was until recently a liquor store. It is, I gather, a
particularly austere-looking mosque in which a particularly austere form of
Islam is preached. Because the people at the mosque follow shari'a  the
code of law based on the Koran  they're considered "extremist," he told me.
The sermons there are in Arabic, but someone is usually on hand to
translate. The 96th Street mosque, though it is one he will always go to
because it happens to be near his apartment, is too mainstream for him. A
fortnight after he'd spoken approvingly about al-Yaqoubi, Vincent had
changed his mind. The Syrian was too open to innovation, to allowing
stylistic changes to the religion, and in Islam that is haram, forbidden, he
said.

The fanaticism, though its expression is muted (it's not really possible to
be an openly fanatical Muslim in America), is undeniable. He told me how
last year he and the Moroccan complained to the sheik at 96th Street because
there were some photos on display in the mosque showing Jordan's Queen Rania
on a visit, and there are not supposed to be any pictures in mosques. As
Vincent remembered it, she may even have been unveiled  another outrage.
When they told the imam about it, the imam gently waved aside their
objections on the grounds that every religion needs about 5 percent room for
deviation, and occasionally you have to bend the rules. According to
Vincent, the Moroccan's jaw nearly hit the floor when he heard this. Even as
he related the story, sitting over a plate of post-Ramadan sushi in a
restaurant, Vincent's eyes widened in appalled amazement. "Bend the rules!"
he said. "I couldn't believe he would say something like that! I was so
stunned I didn't even want to shake his hand afterward!"

Islam is not always political  two weeks after the Friday prayer service, I
heard al-Yaqoubi deliver a far milder, actually quite charming sermon on the
subject of entertainment, complete with puzzled references to Eminem ("He
had a hit song about killing his mother with a shovel. Can you believe it!")
 but it's an open question whether it's possible to become a Muslim in
America without being influenced by inherently adversarial, anti-democratic
Islamic politics. (Sufi Muslims would appear to be the exception, though
al-Yaqoubi is strongly influenced by Sufism himself.) "Mosques in Western
countries are permeated with Wahhabi 'jihad' rhetoric, encountered the
minute one walks in the door," Stephen Schwartz writes in "The Two Faces of
Islam." "Some imams preach jihad; some tolerate it sympathetically; some
oppose it privately but are intimidated into permitting it. But it is
everywhere. If the imam does not advocate jihad, activists hang out on the
premises or on the sidewalks and in the parking lots nearby, spreading the
word."

Following his sermon on entertainment, al-Yaqoubi led the assembly in a
prayer for the just deceased Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat. It did make
me wonder whether the same would happen if Osama bin Laden passed away  or
Saddam Hussein, or al-Zarqawi, the head-chopping leader of the totalitarian,
imam-approved Iraqi "resistance." I asked Bruce Randall, the convert who
attends Friday prayers at the 96th Street mosque, if he was at all bothered
by being asked to say a prayer for the late PLO leader. "Arafat's a
prominent Muslim," he replied. "Why wouldn't we pray for the death of a
prominent Muslim? A couple of weeks ago we did a prayer for the death of a
prominent scholar in Medina. We pray for scholars, we pray for leaders."

Randall also disagreed with the idea that al-Yaqoubi's statement about
American troops had a political motivation. "I can understand how an
outsider would interpret those words in a different way," he allowed, though
he himself had only been an "insider" for a month at the time of the sermon.
"When I hear the sheik say that, I'm hearing a leader of my religion saying
that God will protect the people who are following his righteous path. To my
ears, it's not a political statement, it's a religious one. God will not let
Islam be struck down. If there are Muslims being attacked somewhere in the
world, He will protect them."

When I pressed him further on how he felt about listening to a Syrian imam
implicitly call for the defeat of American troops in the middle of
Manhattan, Randall answered, slightly frostily, that "In America we have
this thing called the First Amendment."

And no doubt the sheik is well aware of it. Listening to him I had the sense
that certain Muslims have studied liberal Western society the way a military
general assesses an enemy position  probing for strengths and weaknesses,
deciding where and how and at what cost penetration can be achieved.

On the subject of Islam and politics, Vincent seems to be in serious denial.
The phrase "Islamic terrorism" is an oxymoron, he once told me, and from my
conversation with his Torrance buddy Joshua, I gather Vincent's Muslim
friends had already given him their own version of "Fahrenheit 9/11"  with
Jews, rather than Saudis, as the principal actors  long before Michael
Moore came up with his own. But should one expect anything else, given the
world he moves in? Two weeks after 9/11, Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, then the
imam of the mosque on 96th Street, abruptly moved back to Cairo, where he
promptly told the Arab media that Muslim children were being poisoned by
Jewish doctors in American hospitals, and that Zionists had masterminded the
attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon.

In Vincent's eyes, Islam can do no wrong because Islam is wonderful and his
own discovery of it a "miracle." I sometimes think about his passion for
this religion, to which he is far more dedicated than the average Muslim,
and wonder how it's all going to end up. "A lot of Muslims don't know a damn
thing about the political side of Islam," says Peter Leitner, a
counterterrorism expert in Washington, D.C., meaning that they are unaware
of the extent to which the religion has been infiltrated for political
purposes. "Politicization is almost always part of the package," says the
Islamic Supreme Council of America's Mateen Siddiqui, referring to hardcore
Islamic converts. But if al-Yaqoubi feels comfortable saying in front of
1,300 people in the heart of mainstream American Islam that American troops
will be defeated wherever they go, then what might be said in Arabic in
small, obscure mosques in Brooklyn, Queens and elsewhere with a translation
murmured into a pale, friendly, naive American ear?

But perhaps there is no need to say anything. When I asked Vincent what he
thought about al-Yaqoubi's statement, he answered, with a touch of defiance,
that he felt just fine about it. "I do wish the American troops would be
defeated," he told me, adding, "I'm a Muslim first, and I just live in this
country." (If he could find a bumper sticker that read "AGAINST THE TROOPS,"
he said, he'd put it on his cab.) And were he ever to find himself in the
Middle East, let's say Iraq, would he fight against American soldiers? "If
there was a jihad," he replied evenly, "I don't see how I could not join
in."