Why Yasir Qadhi Wants to Talk About Jihad,has Yasir a right to talk with his people
On a chilly night in the dead of a New England winter, Yasir Qadhi hurried down the stairs of Yale University’s religious-studies department, searching urgently for a place to make a private call. A Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies, Qadhi was a fixture on the New Haven campus. He wore a trim beard and preppy polo shirts, blending in with the other graduate students as he lugged an overstuffed backpack into Blue State Coffee for his daily cappuccino. A popular teaching assistant, he exuded a sprightly intensity in class, addressing the undergraduates as “dudes, But Qadhi had another life. Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam, drawing a tide of followers in the fundamentalist movement known as Salafiya. Raised between Texas and Saudi Arabia, he seemed uniquely deft at balancing the edicts of orthodox Islam with the mores of contemporary America. To many young Muslims wrestling with conflicts between faith and country, Qadhi was a rock star. To law-enforcement agents, he was also a figure of interest, given his prominence in a community considered vulnerable to radicalization. Some officials, noting his message of nonviolence, saw him as an ally. Others were wary, recalling a time when Qadhi spouted a much harder, less tolerant line. On this night, however, it was Qadhi’s closest followers who were questioning him.
Two weeks earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a young Nigerian tried to blow up a jet headed for Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear. The suspect had been a student of Qadhi’s at the AlMaghrib Institute, which teaches Salafi theology in 21 American cities. F.B.I. agents were demanding interviews with Qadhi’s students. He urged them to cooperate, but many pushed back, and Qadhi found himself caught between two seemingly irreconcilable forces: a deeply suspicious government and a young following he could lose.
In the basement of the religious-studies building, Qadhi settled into an empty room, flipped open his MacBook Pro (encased in Islamic apple green) and dialed in to an Internet conference call with more than 150 of his AlMaghrib students. “I want to be very frank here,” Qadhi said, his voice tight with exasperation. “Do you really, really think that blowing up a plane is Islamic? I mean, ask yourself this.”
None of the students defended the plot, but some sympathized with the suspect, said several students who participated in the call, one of whom provided a recording to The Times. Was it not possible, they asked, that he had been set up? And how could they trust the F.B.I. after all they experienced — the post-9/11 raids, the monitoring of mosques, the sting operations aimed at Muslims? A few went as far as to say that they could not turn against a fellow Muslim who was trying to fight the oppressive policies of the United States.
Qadhi paced the worn, gray carpet. “There were even Muslims on that plane!” he said. “I mean, what world are you living in? How angry and overzealous are you that you simply forget about everything and you think that this is the way forward?”
Over the next year, Qadhi was thrust into the center of a crucial struggle — for the minds of his young students, the trust of his government and his own future as America was waking to a new threat. Since 2008, more than two dozen Muslim-Americans have joined or sought training with militant groups abroad. They are among the roughly 50 American citizens charged with terrorism-related offenses during that time. These suspects are a mixed lot. Some converted to Islam; others were raised in the faith. They come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and have migrated to different fronts in their global war, from Somalia to Pakistan. Their motivations differ, but the vast majority share two key attributes: a deep disdain for American foreign policy and an ideology rooted in Salafiya.
In the spectrum of the global Salafi movement, Qadhi, who is 36, speaks for the nonmilitant majority. Yet even as he has denounced Islamist violence — too late, some say — a handful of AlMaghrib’s former students have heeded the call. In addition to the underwear-bomb suspect, the 36,000 current and former students of Qadhi’s institute include Daniel Maldonado, a New Hampshire convert who was convicted in 2007 of training with an Al Qaeda-linked militia in Somalia; Tarek Mehanna, a 28-year-old pharmacist arrested for conspiring to attack Americans; and two young Virginia men held in Pakistan in 2009 for seeking to train with militants.
Qadhi said that none of those former students had approached him for counsel. But in recent years, countless others have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad. “We’re finding ourselves on the front line,” Qadhi said. “We don’t want to be there.”
During the months I spent in the insular world of young American Salafis, it became clear how pressing those questions are for many conservative Muslims who have come of age after 9/11. They have watched as their own country wages war in Muslim lands, bearing witness — via satellite television and the Internet — to the carnage in Iraq, the drone attacks in Pakistan and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. While the dozens of AlMaghrib students I interviewed condemned the tactics of militant groups, many share their basic grievances. They are searching for the correct Islamic response, turning to the ancient texts that guide their American lives. Their salvation, they say, hangs in the balance.
This is what makes Qadhi such a pivotal figure in a subculture that is little understood, even by the law-enforcement officials who monitor it. He is the rare Western cleric fluent in the language of militants, having spent nearly a decade studying Islam in Saudi Arabia, steeped in the same tradition that spawned Osama bin Laden’s splinter movement. Arguably few American theologians are better positioned to offer an authoritative rebuttal of extremist ideology. But to do that, Qadhi says he would need to address the thorny question of what kinds of militant actions are permitted by Islamic law. It is a forbidden topic for most American clerics, who even refrain from criticizing their country’s foreign policy for fear of being branded unpatriotic.
Source Nytimes by Abdirahman Ahmed