Getting struck down with a serious bout of Crohn’s disease, a potentially life-threatening intestinal ailment, while still a freshman in college can make someone lose faith, or perhaps go looking for it. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross was forced to drop out of school and return home, where his mother helped him put back the 40 pounds he lost during his illness.
Finally, his body was healthier, but his spirit was still ailing him as it always had; Daveed was a serious young man who always seemed to be looking for something he could not find. A middle-class only child of nominally Jewish parents who were prone to their own spiritual odysseys, Daveed went through high school on auto pilot; there were girls and friends and sports and homework but mostly just a pervasive feeling of emptiness that he carried within him everywhere.
By 22, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross was a devout believer in radical Islam. What makes someone vulnerable to extreme religious ideology? What allows them to shun the belief systems upon which they have been weaned? The author of “My Year Inside Radical Islam,” a talented and seductive writer, tries desperately to tell us, but the reader feels as if the wall he has erected around himself for most of his life keeps getting in his way. The authentic and raw voice of an ex-fanatic who has finally landed on solid ground seems to still elude him.
Daveed’s introduction to Islamic thought and religious practice was ignited by a college friendship with a moderate Muslim with whom he would take long walks. The two young men would blissfully discuss their shared view of a progressive form of Islam that promoted tolerance and equality. Daveed remembers their conversations as highly charged, almost “an anarchic free-flow of ideas. The topics we discussed would bounce from Islam to class and race and foreign policy to social justice to progressive politics to the shortcomings of the radical view of the faith.”
Yet, soon thereafter, Daveed became interested in a far more extreme expression of Islam after working at a Wahhabi Saudi-funded charity in Ashland, Ore., that later was accused of funding al-Qaeda. How did he get from A to Z?
He never sufficiently explains how he became so quickly radicalized to beliefs that would have repelled him only months earlier. He stops listening to music, feels differently toward women and remains silent while his colleagues engage in vitriolic anti-Semitic mockery. He comes to believe that Jews and all other nonbelievers in his stringent notion of Islam must be conquered and ruled as the inferiors he now believed them to be.
Reflecting on the chaos he felt at that time, Daveed offers only this “I wanted to live a life of conviction-I wanted a clear guide for telling right from wrong. Was there a better guide than Allah’s own word-the Qur’an-and the example of his last prophet?” Daveed, a former college debating champion who was always able to eloquently express both sides of any argument, could no longer see any truth other than his own.
The author’s foray into radical Islam did not last very long. He soon found himself drawn to Christianity, married, became a lawyer and now works for the FBI as a counterterrorism consultant. He often writes about terrorism, religious extremism and the law.
There is an uncomfortable convenience to the author’s many metamorphoses that may disturb the reader. We never really fully grasp how Daveed was able to surrender so quickly into the darkness of extreme radicalism, or how he was able to emerge from it. There are too many ghosts hovering amid these pages but Daveed is unable or unwilling to let them out. His parents remain almost invisible apparitions throughout the book; it is almost as if they never had sufficient pull over him; he seems neither afraid of them nor in awe of them, nor does he seem particularly interested in pleasing them. Certainly some of the seeds of his discontent were sown here, but he doesn’t go near it, and it is unfortunate; because it is the story he really needed to tell.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
—————————————-
My Year Inside Radical Islam
A Memoir
By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Penguin, 320 pages, $24.95
