My Year Inside Radical Islam Read Online Free Page A

Also, I wasn’t used to or comfortable with the wealth on display at Wake Forest. So the other students had unfamiliar values that differed immeasurably from those of the hippie mecca of Ashland, Oregon. Even Winston-Salem’s restaurants seemed less friendly, less inviting than those that I had known in Ashland.
    I flung myself into my work, which was like a many-headed hydra. Whenever I finished one project, two more filled the void. I would drink or go out to movies with friends, but had no confidants. It sometimes seemed that even my surface-level friendships were too much effort. I remember driving home one night from dinner in downtown Winston-Salem. Instead of thinking about the food we had eaten or the conversations we’d had, the only thing on my mind was my looming deadlines. I wished I had stayed in and worked. It struck me then that it was always this way: every night out with friends was tinged with feelings of regret rather than fulfillment. Many people go through periods where they feel alone, separated from their surroundings. For me, this lasted through my first two years at Wake Forest.
    My friendship with al-Husein Madhany started to bring me outside myself. Al-Husein was aggressive about inserting himself into my life. He would constantly burst into my room without knocking and, seeing me working, would insist that there were more important things to do. Al-Husein often asked me to walk around Wake Forest’s idyllic grass-covered quad with him while he smoked a pipe and philosophized. Once he found me playing a game of Risk (the board game where you try to conquer the world with your armies) on my computer. After learning that the game could take multiple players, al-Husein roped in four other students. We played one six-player game of Risk after another until two in the morning.
    I never regretted a moment that I spent with al-Husein, and soon came to think of him as my best friend. I couldn’t wait until the next time we’d circle the quad together. I couldn’t wait to see what new things I’d learn about the world—and about myself.
    My first experience with student political activism was a spur-of-the-moment thing in early April 1997. It was a warm day, with a slight breeze rustling the leaves of the magnolia trees dotting campus.
    “There’s a rally on the quad,” al-Husein said as he entered my room unannounced. “You should come.”
    “What’s the rally?” I was looking for an excuse to get out, but was having trouble pulling myself away from my work.
    “It’s for a new student group called VOICE, Voices Organized in the Interest of Collective Equality. Knox founded the group.”
    Knox was a wiry, dreadlocked black intellectual with a range of talents and a far-left outlook. He and I were close during my first semester at Wake Forest, when we took an introductory poetry class together. Knox tended to speak as though he were the only person in the room: he was the topic of all his conversations. We had a falling-out later in my freshman year when another friend and I made fun of Knox for his self-centeredness. It was the kind of rough humor with a serious undertone that isn’t uncommon among friends, but Knox didn’t find it funny. He didn’t speak to me for a few months, and we were never close again.
    So I hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if going to a student rally is the best way to spend the day.”
    “Do you care about racism?” al-Husein said, moving into his didactic mode. “Are issues like homophobia, religious discrimination, and white heterosexual Christian male hegemony on campus important to you?” Al-Husein had lost his student government election, but remained a major force in campus politics. Now he was helping to bring me outside of myself in yet another way, by pushing me toward political activism.
    “Well, they are, but—”
    “Then you should come.”
    Al-Husein and I walked out the front door of the Huffman dorm and onto the quad. A small