New York University Magazine (fall 2007, pp. 28f.)

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FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE SEDUCED BY EXTREME FAITH

by Sabine Heinlein

They were just kids from California who grew up in middle­-class homes, listening to hip-hop and heavy metal. As teenagers they were lon­ers, but bright students with futures rich in opportunity - until they found a radical alternative. Today the images of Adam Gadahn, al-Qaeda's American spokesperson who is on the FBI's most-wanted terrorists list, and John Walker Lindh, the Taliban fighter captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and now in a federal prison in Colorado, embody a threat that hits close to home: They are the Ameri­can face of Islamic terrorism.

These highly publicized cases give the impression that there may be an emerging "fifth column" of homegrown terrorists in the United States. While it's still a rare occur­rence compared to the radicalization of Arabs in the Middle East or even in Europe, the lack of precedent and the unsettlingly familiar faces of these two young men, has experts scrambling to explain why fundamentalist Islam is so attractive to certain youth. “This is an incredibly complex question,” says Charles B. Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Wipf and Stock). “There are no clear templates.” But rather than blaming something intrinsically evil within the fundamentalist strain of Islam practiced by both Gadahn and Lindh, Strozier points to a range of psychological factors, from mental illness to the pressures of modern society, which can drive such con­versions. “Fundamentalism hijacks the religious experience,” he says, adding that it becomes an easy tool for burying both personal and cultural deficiencies.

Experts have long viewed fundamentalism as a response to the confusion inspired by the chaos of modern culture. “People are drawn to fundamentalism out of their own inability to grapple, accept, and live within the enormous complexities and ambiguities that modernism brings,” Strozier explains. Fundamentalism has also been interpreted as a reaction to gender insecurities - what Strozier calls a “deep confusion about sexuality and the fear of women.” He says, “Growing a beard and walking around in a different kind of uniform marks you as being special and holy in an unholy land.”

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (LAW '02) has tried to provide an answer of his own in My Year Inside Radica Islam: A Memoir (Tarcher), which describes his time working in the U.S, headquarters of Al Hara­main Islamic Foundation, an inter­national Wahhabi charity linked to al-Qaeda, where he spent much of 1999 logging e-mails, participating in group rituals, and pondering fundamental Islam. “I was hungry for answers,” he explains. A critical illness as a young adult, coupled with a “religiously ambiguous household,” where his Jewish par­ents drew inspiration from a vari­ety of spiritual persuasions, had left Gartenstein-Ross searching for God. “Islam seemed to offer an­swers,” he says, but “in the process of sincerely searching, I got sucked into an extremist interpretation.”

As Gartenstein-Ross yearned for what he calls “a kind of theo­logical certainty,” he grew a beard, removed his jewelry, threw away his rock albums, refused to shake women's hands, and broke up with his Christian girlfriend. In return for these sacrifices, the close-knit group at Al Haramain offered safe­ty and temporary relief from his nagging philosophical and emo­tional questions.

This theme resonates with many converts who seek a more rigorous or “authentic” religious experience, says Strozier, remem­bering an Evangelical who dis­dained “the easy beliefism of mainstream Christianity.” In fact, Gartenstein-Ross's story is part of a greater tale of religious conver­sion, which has risen steadily dur­ing the past century. According to a 2007 study by the Pew Research Center, 23 percent of the estimat­ed 2.35 million Muslims in the United States are converts - ­a large portion of them African Americans, many of whom con­verted during incarceration. As a comparison, CUNY's American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 notes that 37 percent of one million Evangelicals are con­verts. “Religious switching,” the survey says, may be “a reflection of a deeper cultural phenomenon in contemporary America."

In Islam, Wahhabism offers a “muscular interpretation” of faith, says Bernard Haykel, associate pro- fessor of Middle Eastern and Is­lamic studies at NYU, The Wahhabis follow what they believe to be a pure version of Islam, as practiced by the prophet Muham­mad and the first Muslims. They consider less orthodox Muslims or those of other persuasions to be nonbelievers, barred from heaven. From that, some extremists infer the right to wage war. But, Haykel cautions, this does not mean all Wahhabis are violent or even dif­ferent from other fundamentalists, such as Christians who adopt liter­al interpretations of the Bible. “Think of it this way,” he explains. “You might have some very strict Catholics who are against abortion, but that doesn't make them people who blow up abortion clinics.”

Those who do turn violent might be what Strozier, a psycho­analyst, terms “counter-phobic.” People who are “vulnerable, lost, divided, or traumatized,” he says, sometimes project their worst thoughts and feelings outward. It's an act of self-defense," Strozier says. “In a counter-phobic re­sponse, you construct the other as being evil. You experience yourself in great danger. Therefore you have to attack to avoid being attacked.”

Over time, Gartenstein-Ross's search for meaning led him away from radical Islam, as he began ques­tioning the authoritarian style of his peers at Al Haramain and their enthusiasm for the Chechen mu­jahideen. He moved to New York, reunited with his Christian girl­friend, whom he later married, and embraced Christianity himself, al­though he is less forthcoming about this second conversion.

After Al Haramain’s U.S. head­quarters were raided following 9/11, Gartenstein-­Ross contacted the FBI to share information about his former friends. “The least I could do was try to make the right choices now,” he writes. “I felt a great sense of relief.” This led him to a new career, as a counter-terrorism consultant for the Founda­tion for Defense of Democracies, and trainer of local law enforce­ment on Islam and Jihadist ideolo­gy. “I was obsessed with having a black-and-white answer,” he re­flects. “I'm more comfortable now with shades of gray.”

Additional writings by Sabine Heinlein may be accessed at http://sabineheinlein.org/articles.html . Her bio is at http://sabineheinlein.org/bio.html.