wantobeMumin
Junior Member
by Tom Junad from 2006 ESQUIRE issue
Arabic must be one hell of a language. It must indeed be preeminent among all languages on earth, because it is the language of revelation in Islam. It is not only the language that the Prophet, peace be upon him and his family, spoke to all of humankind; it is the language that God spoke to the Prophet. It is the language that God chose to make His wishes for humankind known. In Islam, there are none of the bewildering textual controversies that have beset Judaism and Christianity; in Islam, there are no authors with competing claims. There is only one God, giving one specifically Arabic Koran to his final Prophet. Let other religions divide themselves with their warring tongues, their disjointed canons. In the singular Arabic of the singular Koran, humankind has found its answer to Babel.
And so it is that the Holy Koran cannot exist in translation. There are many translations of the Koran, but they are not the true Koran itself, for it is only the Arabic that transforms God's repetitive instructions and injunctions and warnings and threats--and his repetitive hatred of the infldel--into a miraculous song impervious to every challenge.
And so it is that every Muslim must try to master Arabic. It is not necessary that every Muslim succeed in his effort, for God made every man with different capabilities. But it is necessary for every man to try, once he becomes a Muslim. The effort is his obligation, his fard. God is merciful, wise.
And so it is that when a sixteen-year-old American named John Walker Lindh converts to Islam in 1997, he begins calling himself Suleyman al-Faris and sets about trying to master the language of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
And so it is that Suleyman travels alone from California to Yemen when he is seventeen years old and attends an Arabic language school. Two years later, he goes again, this time with the intention of absorbing not only the singular language of Arabic but also what he hopes will be a singular Islamic culture. He does not find singularity in Yemen, and so he tries finding it in a madrassa--an Islamic school--in Pakistan, and then a military training camp in Afghanistan.
And so it is that for months, Suleyman speaks almost nothing but Arabic in the mountains of Afghanistan, for Muslims come to Afghanistan from all over the world, seeking to fulfill their religious obligations by engaging in jihad--by taking up the cause of Afghans fighting to maintain a pure Islamic state. The Afghans he is fighting for are called the Taliban, and speak their own language, Pashto. The Muslims who come in their cause speak Arabic and go to the front lines in the Afghan civil war as Al Ansar--the Arabic term for "the helpers." By the time Suleyman reaches the front on September 6, 2001, carrying his rifle and his grenades, he is just twenty years old and already fluent in the one language of the one God. He is a prodigy waiting to become a saint.
And so it is that after September 11, when the Americans come to Afghanistan with their planes and their bombs, and they capture Suleyman and put him in front of a camera, he speaks his English with a slight Arabic accent, and millions of people in America and all over the world believe they hear the mottled tongue of treason.
And so it is that when an American dies in the battle that led to his capture, Suleyman is accused of conspiring to kill him.
And so it is that now he is imprisoned in America for twenty years, and part of his sentence is that America will not allow him to speak Arabic. He cannot teach; he cannot even pray with an open mouth. It is forbidden. And yet the brothers in the prison speak Arabic to him, because they know he is learned, patient--a serious scholar. He doesn't call himself Suleyman anymore, but he hasn't gone back to calling himself John, either. He calls himself Hamza, after the uncle of Muhammad, peace be upon him. He is Hamza Walker Lindh, still caught between the language of the Islamic imperium and the language of the American empire. And one day in late 2003, when he is on line for chow and one of the brothers says to him, "Assalamu alaikum," he has a decision to make. Assalamu alaikum is the traditional Muslim greeting. It means "Peace be upon you," and when a Muslim hears it, it is customary for him to respond not only in kind but in excess of the original greeting--in slightly more effusive language. But the language is Arabic. And Hamza is standing within earshot of a guard. And he, with his pinioned tongue, knows that to speak is to be punished. And he has to choose, as he has always had to choose. And his choice has always been one choice, as his God has always been one God.
And so it is that Hamza speaks.
He is a better person than you or I. He has gone away, but his story hasn't, because his story is about something no prison can extinguish. Even in prison, he has a glow, a light on his face. He has a spiritual presence. His list of don'ts stretches further than your list of dos, and his list of dos keeps him occupied in the vast chronological wasteland of prison. He's very kind. He has no anger, no dark testosteronal currents. He has a sad story to tell, but he doesn't tell it as a sad story. He is not bitter. He's funny, in fact. His father, on the lecture circuit now, says that when he visits his son in prison, they sit for five and six hours at a time, talking, laughing. The guards look at them. Not that he's flippant, a wiseguy. He's very, very serious. He's very concerned about the poor--so concerned that he's lived among them. He's committed to social justice, though he's the first to admit that he's made some bad decisions in that regard. But that's another thing about him. He never lies. He never changes his story, even when he has every reason to. He's very consistent, to put it mildly.
If you happen to be a Muslim: Well, he's a better Muslim than you are, too. If you want to know him--why he did what he did, why he does what he does--all you have to do is open the Koran and read. It's all there. In Islam, more than in Christianity or Judaism, perfection is a possibility, and that's what he strives for. Islam has no apparatus for the official recognition of saints, but it has a word, waliyy, that means in the Arabic "one of God's special slaves." Well, that's him. When he went to Yemen in 2000--the trip that took him to Pakistan and Afghanistan and back to America in shackles--he went to memorize the Koran. He got a quarter of the way through before he was captured on December 1, 2001. He finished at the federal prison in Victorville, California, where he lives now. In the Muslim world, that's not only an honor to him; it's an honor to his entire family.
But then: Maybe you're not a Muslim. Maybe you're just an . . . American, and you don't particularly care if John Walker Lindh is waliyy or not. You don't particularly care if he's a better Muslim or even a better person, because neither of those things makes him a better American. Even if he didn't do what the government originally said he did, he did something, and what he did was put Islam first. Islam is the Arabic word for "submission," and John Walker Lindh submitted. He was free to do so, of course, because he was an American. But his freedom to practice any religion he wanted eventually put him in the service of a cause that had nothing to do with freedom. His search for purity within himself eventually led him to search for a pure Islamic state--and to serve the comprehensively oppressive Taliban. And now he is supposed to be pure in thought and in word and in deed. Well, that purity is what makes him problematic to Americans, because it's Muslim purity, and Muslim purity and American freedom seem to be on a collision course. Indeed, they have already collided in the person of John Walker Lindh, and American freedom was the worse for it, while Muslim purity found its perfect, silent spokesman.
Hamza does not have to speak. He does not have to answer the brother's greeting, even after the brother says, "Assalamu alaikum" on the chow line. It is not an obligation. Oh, sure, he knows what is customary among Muslims. There is no one at the federal medium-security prison in Victorville who knows better. He has made a study of proper Islamic etiquette, as he has made a study of most things relating to the Prophet, peace be upon him. The way Hamza shakes hands--with a lingering refusal to be the first to break the clasp--is the Muslim way. So is the way he engages his teachers. "In the Islamic spirit of learning, there is an elaborate etiquette to be followed," says Shakeel Syed, an imam from Los Angeles who served as a contract chaplain at Victorville through the summer of 2005. "If your teacher is wrong, and you know he is wrong, there is no public correction. There is only public praise. And even in private, criticism is implied and inferred. And even after all that, it is customary for the student to say, 'God knows best--maybe both of us are wrong.' Well, that's Hamza. He has the kind of knowledge you don't get from Islam 101 books. We used to have circle discussions after Friday prayers. And in one of the historical stories I mentioned, I referred to a person as a cousin of Muhammad. Hamza waited till everyone left. Then he said, very politely: 'You might want to double-check that. You may very well be right, but you might want to check--and I'll check, too.' There's nothing he does that's not in the Islamic spirit."
And yet, because Hamza knows his etiquette, he knows it would not be a violation of etiquette to stay silent after the brother's greeting, for God is generous, forgiving. Indeed, God says that He has given his Koran to the faithful to make life easier for them, not harder. God calls Islam the middle way, not only the straight path but the path of moderation. He allows many exemptions from the practice of faith if the practice of faith puts the faithful in peril. He even allows the faithful to disavow their faith, so long as their hearts stay true. And surely Hamza faces peril from the practice of his faith and the expression, in Arabic, of his true heart.
He was in chains, after all, when he returned from Afghanistan to America on January 23, 2002. He faced spending the rest of his life in prison after a federal grand jury returned charges two weeks later that he had conspired to kill Americans and had lent "material support" to Al Qaeda. Even after the Justice Department offered a plea bargain in July 2002 and dropped eight of the ten charges against him, even after prosecutors finally admitted that there was no evidence that he had joined Al Qaeda or threatened to kill Americans, even after he wound up pleading guilty only to carrying a rifle and grenades for the Taliban, the government and its negotiator, Michael Chertoff, made his silence a condition of the plea. And so, although it dropped all charges against the defendant relating to terrorism, the administration would continue to treat the defendant as a terrorist through the course of his incarceration by imposing what is known by statute as special administrative measures and by common parlance simply as a gag order. He would not spend his life in jail. He would spend, instead, twenty years in jail, and during that time not only would he be unable to have any visitors but his attorneys and his father and his mother and his brother and his sister and his grandmother; not only would his visitors be forbidden to relate to the public anything he said or thought; not only would the FBI have to read and clear any letter he sent or received and the government reserve the right to bug his conversations with his cellmates and monitor his phone calls. No, he would also have to abide by the following provision of the SAM: "All communications with others will be in English."
He is, by virtue of the strictures on his speech, regarded as a political prisoner inside prison walls. And so surely the brother who greets him would forgive Hamza his silence. Surely Hamza could just mouth the proper Arabic words, or speak them under his breath, or whisper them so quietly that no guard could hear him. Surely God would forgive such an exercise in discretion. . . .
"Walaikum assalam," Hamza says, loud enough for the brother--and the guard--to hear.
Maybe the guard is new, and zealous. Maybe Hamza knows the guard is new and zealous and wants to be zealous in return. For, as Shakeel Syed says, "he has an option to lead a normal Muslim prison life. Instead, he chooses to defy every norm the prison is used to--both the administration and the inmates." And so the zealous guard reports that zealous prisoner 45426-083 has spoken words in the forbidden tongue. And when prisoner 45426-083 returns to his cell, he is ordered to back up to the feeding slot in his cell door. He is handcuffed through the slot and led away to the Special Housing Unit--also known as the SHU, also known as the hole. There he has to strip naked and is searched under his testicles and in the cavity of his ass. And there Hamza settles into his cell, with the Arabic singing in his head, where no one can stop it.
He was the first.
The first American to get Abu-Ghraibed, long before Americans knew they were capable of such an exotic verb. The first to inspire Donald Rumsfeld to issue the order "Take the gloves off," and the first to be on the order's receiving end. The first to be denied medical treatment, the first photographed naked and bound, the first taunted while blindfolded, the first--certainly the first--to have *!*!*!*!HEAD scrawled on his blindfold, the first whose digital photos made their way round the world as souvenirs, the first denied access to the Red Cross, the first to be ushered into a legal limbo created ex nihilo by the administration's notions of executive power. He served as a test case for an administration eager to see what it could get away with, and what it tried to get away with was, well, this: His father hired him a lawyer as soon as he saw his son on MSNBC. The lawyer immediately wrote to John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and George Tenet and informed them that John Walker Lindh had counsel, and counsel was ready to fly to Afghanistan to meet him. They did not write him back, but John Ashcroft did not believe he was obliged to. He operated on the theory that John Walker Lindh had a lawyer only if he, not his father, hired one, even though at the time John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. "Of course, there are no lawyers here," the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted.
The treatment John Walker Lindh received while in American hands is not only an affront to conscience. It manages to make someone described by everyone who knows him as "singular" and "one of a kind" somehow representative of betrayed American innocence, and that indeed is how Frank Lindh characterizes him when he talks about him in public. When John Walker Lindh was being reviled as a traitor, Frank Lindh was being reviled for allowing him to become one. When no less successful a parent than George Herbert Walker Bush was lampooning John Walker Lindh for being a "misguided Marin County hot-tubber," Frank Lindh was being lampooned for actually raising his son in a place like Marin County, and then for divorcing his wife, Marilyn Walker, and living with a man. And when, after his sentencing, John Walker Lindh began his imposed silence, Frank Lindh began an elective one, along with the rest of his family. Now, though, John Walker Lindh's lawyers have petitioned the administration to commute his sentence. Yaser Hamdi--the other American citizen who was taken prisoner alongside John Walker Lindh during the rout of the Taliban and was in the same place at the same time doing the same things--has, after spending three years in a Navy brig without being charged with any crime, been sent home to Saudi Arabia, where he was raised. And Frank Lindh, a lawyer himself, has sensed an opportunity not only to press his son's case but also to tell his son's story the way he sees it--the way he has always seen it, even when his son was extolling the virtues of martyrdom on CNN.
It has always been difficult for John Walker Lindh's parents to reconcile the classically American innocence and idealism they perceive in their son with the extremism of his eventual actions and allegiances. And to the extent that Frank Lindh does it, while speaking one April evening on the stage of a private school in Oakland, he does it by characterizing John Walker Lindh as extremely innocent, extremely idealistic, and, above all, extremely American. A teenager who found God, or, as his family thought of it, his passion. A seventeen-year-old who travels with his father to Ireland in full Islamic dress and wins over the local Catholics with the simplicity and fervor of his love for God. A nineteen-year-old who is bold and brave enough to say goodbye to his weeping family and travel for the second time on his own to Yemen in search of the true Arabic. A twenty-year-old who in late April 2001 e-mails his parents from an Internet cafÃf© in Pakistan with a request for permission to go into the mountains for the summer--and neglects to mention that he means the mountains of Afghanistan. A young trainee who believes he has chosen the right side in the civil war between the mujahideen of the Taliban and the corrupt warlords of the Northern Alliance. A dedicated student who knows after meeting Osama bin Laden in the summer of 2001 that bin Laden is not a serious scholar--and who falls asleep during bin Laden's speeches. A green soldier who does sentry duty at the front lines and never flres his gun. A homesick American who like all Americans dreams of coming home for Christmas . . . until, that is, America comes for him. And not the America he knew, not the America he left just a year earlier--an America changed by 9/11 and determined to show the world that the innocent empire that might have forgiven someone like John Walker Lindh is gone forever.
It is an American story, all right. It is so American that Frank Lindh, in his trimmed beard and his gray suit, sometimes seems to be offering his own innocence--at once wounded and breathless--as proof of his son's. When he gave his permission to John to travel into the mountains in the spring of 2001, he wrote in an e-mail, "I trust your judgment and hope you have a wonderful adventure." After all that has happened since Frank wrote those words, he still lives by them. He still trusts and he still hopes. He still has such complete faith in his son that he has become a kind of fundamentalist on his son's behalf--a fundamentalist who discounts his son's own fundamentalism. In Frank's recounting, John Walker Lindh is not a religious figure but rather a romantic one, whose e-mails from his travels "are still a delight to read, full of wonderful observations and wry comments," and who while abroad "met a lot of interesting people" from places like Indonesia and Chechnya. "John's views are very much those of a mainstream Muslim," he says, in answer to a question. "He's not an extremist in any sense." Never, in the hour and a half he's onstage, does he acknowledge that the interesting people John met were, like John, perfectly willing to die in defense of Islam. Never does he suggest that it's John's very talent for extremity of faith and feeling that has sustained him through his trials and sustains him still. And never does he call John by the name John calls himself.
Never does Frank Lindh call his son Hamza.
Hamza spends a lot of time in the hole, according to two Muslims recently released from Victorville. He doesn't even have to do anything. Other people do it, and Hamza goes into the hole. Other Muslims do it, and Hamza goes into the hole. Whenever there's a big terrorist attack and Muslims take the blame, there goes Hamza for his own protection. He went to the hole after Madrid, and he went to the hole after London. He went because he was the most visible Muslim in the prison, and therefore representative. The prison didn't want him to be the object of anti-Islamic anger. It did not want Hamza to provoke violence just by being quiet, gentle Hamza.
He was always a Muslim, his father says. He was born a Muslim on February 9, 1981--already still, already centered, already disciplined. The Men at Work album was popular at the time, and his father and his mother and his older brother used to sing one of the songs to him: Boy, you sure are a funny kid, Johnny, but I like you. So tell me what kind of boy are you, John?
It's one of the things Frank Lindh has a hard time getting people to believe, even from the podium--that his son became a Muslim not because of what went wrong in his childhood but because of what went right. What kind of boy was John? He was a rare boy indeed--a boy who consolidated all his frailties into a fantastic tensile strength and used all his stumbling to find exactly what he was looking for. He was a boy who loved music and language but was immediately skeptical of Santa Claus. He was a boy who went to Catholic church with Frank but who couldn't accept the Trinity. He was a boy who loved his family but didn't have a lot of friends. He was a boy who was physically robust but also suffered terribly from allergies. When he was ten years old, his family moved from a suburb of Washington, D. C., to San Anselmo, outside San Francisco, and he got sick. He had chronic diarrhea. It was caused by a parasite, but it was thought to be psychosomatic, and he wound up being home-schooled for four years, developing the habits of the solitary scholar. Not particularly comfortable in his own skin, he sought to transcend it, and after he saw Spike Lee's Malcolm X with his mother when he was twelve years old, he followed Malcolm's own course from militancy to Islamic submission in accelerated fashion. In his early adolescence, he presented himself as a militant black rapper on hip-hop message boards, composing epic rhymes that castigated the rest of "his" race for selling out to the commercial interests of the white man. At the same time, he studied Islam, and when he was sixteen, before he could even drive, he showed up at the mosque in Mill Valley, California, a half hour from his home, and met a devout young Muslim named Abdullah Nana.
"Most people, when they come to mosque for the first time, have questions, and ask for reading materials," Abdullah Nana says at a halal restaurant in downtown San Francisco. "John Walker came in and said, 'I want to be a Muslim.' He'd already made the decision on his own. He didn't ask any questions. He didn't have any doubts. He was unique, in my experience."
He converted that day. He took his shahada, right then and there. He declared, in front of the few brothers assembled at the mosque, that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad, peace be upon him, is His Messenger. Then he went home and took his symbolic shower and left his old--his young--life behind. He did not tell Frank and Marilyn, though, until one night Marilyn picked up the phone and a voice she had never heard before--the voice of an older man--asked for her son. When she asked John for an explanation, he said that the man was from the mosque and that he, John Walker Lindh, was now a Muslim. His father and his mother both wound up taking John back and forth to the mosque nearly every day, and John found himself with few encumbrances for his new faith. The Koran asked him to quit the association of infidel friends, but in Abdullah Nana's memory there were no friends to quit. The Koran asked him to avoid women who were not devout, but in Abdullah Nana's memory there were no women, no girlfriends back in San Anselmo. There were only the trips to the mosque in Mill Valley and then other mosques in San Francisco, and the two- or three-hour discussions he and Nana and a few other strictly orthodox young Muslims would have after Friday prayers, sitting bearded and robed and shoeless in a circle on the mosque's carpeted floor.
"He was an example to other Muslims," Nana says. "He was very pious, very dedicated. Within six or seven months, he was wearing full Muslim dress. And after a year and a half, he decided to leave the country. His first objective was to memorize the Koran. The fact that John accepted Islam and within a year and a half had left his country for study in a Third World country--this could only happen with a person who had dedication, discipline, and commitment."
Abdullah Nana and the teenager he still calls John Walker often spoke of going abroad to study Arabic and Islamic law. John went first. Abdullah went a year later, and now, at twenty-seven, he's the co-imam of the Mill Valley mosque. He's married, and in public his wife covers her face completely. He wears a long white robe and a white flat-topped headdress. His face is curtained by a thick black beard, and he speaks in a soft monotone that is occasionally inaudible. He does not listen to any music with a beat, because "music with a beat is not permissible--it causes hypocrisy of the heart." He eats without a fork, with his right hand, because that is how the Prophet, peace be upon him, is said to have eaten. He tries to sleep as the Prophet is said to have slept, and to deal with his relatives as the Prophet dealt with his relatives. When he speaks of his own conversion to a devout and orthodox brand of Islam, he recalls his years attending Cal-Berkeley, where, he says, "it does bother you a little, to see too much freedom." He offers, in short, a glimpse of the kind of Muslim John Walker would be if John Walker had gone abroad, completed his studies, and come home to Marin County. Of course, John Walker never did come home. Although Abdullah's devotion nearly matched John Walker's, he wound up following the course of study most Muslims from secularized countries follow--that is, he chose to study in another relatively secularized country. He studied in South Africa. John Walker, on the other hand, chose to study in a country untouched by modernism, much less secularism. He chose to study in Yemen, where men wear daggers and carry guns and chew khat all day. Now he is in Victorville, and what he has in common with Abdullah Nana is . . . well, almost everything, because they have both offered their freedom to God, and while Abdullah continually checks the time to make sure he's not missing his obligatory prayers, John Walker is doing the same thing four hundred miles away, an anchorite in a desert prison.
Each day, just before dawn, Hamza wakes up to pray in a world of men. It is not easy to wake up in a prison before the wake-up call, but as an inmate and a Muslim there are two clocks he has to obey. There is the clock set by the prison and the clock set by the Creator, all praise be upon Him, when He bid the earth to move in its wobbly cycles around the sun. And so Hamza gets out his prayer mat and bends toward Mecca in the dark at the time prescribed on the downloaded prayer schedule posted in the prison chapel. As a free man, he made himself a prisoner of God's will. Now this imprisonment is his only freedom. It is all one, to the one God.
He never misses the predawn prayer. He is known for not missing the predawn prayer, for even the most devout sleep past the prayer occasionally. But not Hamza, because Hamza is waliyy. There are about fifty Muslims at Victorville, and they all know Hamza is a beautiful brother. His cellie is a Muslim, an older white man. His closest friend is a Muslim, a slim, bespectacled black man who--according to former inmates--killed another soldier while in the military. Hamza doesn't have many friends, though, for he is in for the long haul and doesn't want anyone to suffer from their association with him. He also doesn't watch TV, or play cards, or play basketball, or talk about politics. He just prays with the other Muslims. He studies with the other Muslims. And he eats with them--for they all eat together, away, by choice, from the other inmates--when he is not fasting. He fasts twice a week, Monday and Thursday, from sunup to sundown. Like all his brothers, he feasts at the end of Ramadan.
Arabic must be one hell of a language. It must indeed be preeminent among all languages on earth, because it is the language of revelation in Islam. It is not only the language that the Prophet, peace be upon him and his family, spoke to all of humankind; it is the language that God spoke to the Prophet. It is the language that God chose to make His wishes for humankind known. In Islam, there are none of the bewildering textual controversies that have beset Judaism and Christianity; in Islam, there are no authors with competing claims. There is only one God, giving one specifically Arabic Koran to his final Prophet. Let other religions divide themselves with their warring tongues, their disjointed canons. In the singular Arabic of the singular Koran, humankind has found its answer to Babel.
And so it is that the Holy Koran cannot exist in translation. There are many translations of the Koran, but they are not the true Koran itself, for it is only the Arabic that transforms God's repetitive instructions and injunctions and warnings and threats--and his repetitive hatred of the infldel--into a miraculous song impervious to every challenge.
And so it is that every Muslim must try to master Arabic. It is not necessary that every Muslim succeed in his effort, for God made every man with different capabilities. But it is necessary for every man to try, once he becomes a Muslim. The effort is his obligation, his fard. God is merciful, wise.
And so it is that when a sixteen-year-old American named John Walker Lindh converts to Islam in 1997, he begins calling himself Suleyman al-Faris and sets about trying to master the language of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
And so it is that Suleyman travels alone from California to Yemen when he is seventeen years old and attends an Arabic language school. Two years later, he goes again, this time with the intention of absorbing not only the singular language of Arabic but also what he hopes will be a singular Islamic culture. He does not find singularity in Yemen, and so he tries finding it in a madrassa--an Islamic school--in Pakistan, and then a military training camp in Afghanistan.
And so it is that for months, Suleyman speaks almost nothing but Arabic in the mountains of Afghanistan, for Muslims come to Afghanistan from all over the world, seeking to fulfill their religious obligations by engaging in jihad--by taking up the cause of Afghans fighting to maintain a pure Islamic state. The Afghans he is fighting for are called the Taliban, and speak their own language, Pashto. The Muslims who come in their cause speak Arabic and go to the front lines in the Afghan civil war as Al Ansar--the Arabic term for "the helpers." By the time Suleyman reaches the front on September 6, 2001, carrying his rifle and his grenades, he is just twenty years old and already fluent in the one language of the one God. He is a prodigy waiting to become a saint.
And so it is that after September 11, when the Americans come to Afghanistan with their planes and their bombs, and they capture Suleyman and put him in front of a camera, he speaks his English with a slight Arabic accent, and millions of people in America and all over the world believe they hear the mottled tongue of treason.
And so it is that when an American dies in the battle that led to his capture, Suleyman is accused of conspiring to kill him.
And so it is that now he is imprisoned in America for twenty years, and part of his sentence is that America will not allow him to speak Arabic. He cannot teach; he cannot even pray with an open mouth. It is forbidden. And yet the brothers in the prison speak Arabic to him, because they know he is learned, patient--a serious scholar. He doesn't call himself Suleyman anymore, but he hasn't gone back to calling himself John, either. He calls himself Hamza, after the uncle of Muhammad, peace be upon him. He is Hamza Walker Lindh, still caught between the language of the Islamic imperium and the language of the American empire. And one day in late 2003, when he is on line for chow and one of the brothers says to him, "Assalamu alaikum," he has a decision to make. Assalamu alaikum is the traditional Muslim greeting. It means "Peace be upon you," and when a Muslim hears it, it is customary for him to respond not only in kind but in excess of the original greeting--in slightly more effusive language. But the language is Arabic. And Hamza is standing within earshot of a guard. And he, with his pinioned tongue, knows that to speak is to be punished. And he has to choose, as he has always had to choose. And his choice has always been one choice, as his God has always been one God.
And so it is that Hamza speaks.
He is a better person than you or I. He has gone away, but his story hasn't, because his story is about something no prison can extinguish. Even in prison, he has a glow, a light on his face. He has a spiritual presence. His list of don'ts stretches further than your list of dos, and his list of dos keeps him occupied in the vast chronological wasteland of prison. He's very kind. He has no anger, no dark testosteronal currents. He has a sad story to tell, but he doesn't tell it as a sad story. He is not bitter. He's funny, in fact. His father, on the lecture circuit now, says that when he visits his son in prison, they sit for five and six hours at a time, talking, laughing. The guards look at them. Not that he's flippant, a wiseguy. He's very, very serious. He's very concerned about the poor--so concerned that he's lived among them. He's committed to social justice, though he's the first to admit that he's made some bad decisions in that regard. But that's another thing about him. He never lies. He never changes his story, even when he has every reason to. He's very consistent, to put it mildly.
If you happen to be a Muslim: Well, he's a better Muslim than you are, too. If you want to know him--why he did what he did, why he does what he does--all you have to do is open the Koran and read. It's all there. In Islam, more than in Christianity or Judaism, perfection is a possibility, and that's what he strives for. Islam has no apparatus for the official recognition of saints, but it has a word, waliyy, that means in the Arabic "one of God's special slaves." Well, that's him. When he went to Yemen in 2000--the trip that took him to Pakistan and Afghanistan and back to America in shackles--he went to memorize the Koran. He got a quarter of the way through before he was captured on December 1, 2001. He finished at the federal prison in Victorville, California, where he lives now. In the Muslim world, that's not only an honor to him; it's an honor to his entire family.
But then: Maybe you're not a Muslim. Maybe you're just an . . . American, and you don't particularly care if John Walker Lindh is waliyy or not. You don't particularly care if he's a better Muslim or even a better person, because neither of those things makes him a better American. Even if he didn't do what the government originally said he did, he did something, and what he did was put Islam first. Islam is the Arabic word for "submission," and John Walker Lindh submitted. He was free to do so, of course, because he was an American. But his freedom to practice any religion he wanted eventually put him in the service of a cause that had nothing to do with freedom. His search for purity within himself eventually led him to search for a pure Islamic state--and to serve the comprehensively oppressive Taliban. And now he is supposed to be pure in thought and in word and in deed. Well, that purity is what makes him problematic to Americans, because it's Muslim purity, and Muslim purity and American freedom seem to be on a collision course. Indeed, they have already collided in the person of John Walker Lindh, and American freedom was the worse for it, while Muslim purity found its perfect, silent spokesman.
Hamza does not have to speak. He does not have to answer the brother's greeting, even after the brother says, "Assalamu alaikum" on the chow line. It is not an obligation. Oh, sure, he knows what is customary among Muslims. There is no one at the federal medium-security prison in Victorville who knows better. He has made a study of proper Islamic etiquette, as he has made a study of most things relating to the Prophet, peace be upon him. The way Hamza shakes hands--with a lingering refusal to be the first to break the clasp--is the Muslim way. So is the way he engages his teachers. "In the Islamic spirit of learning, there is an elaborate etiquette to be followed," says Shakeel Syed, an imam from Los Angeles who served as a contract chaplain at Victorville through the summer of 2005. "If your teacher is wrong, and you know he is wrong, there is no public correction. There is only public praise. And even in private, criticism is implied and inferred. And even after all that, it is customary for the student to say, 'God knows best--maybe both of us are wrong.' Well, that's Hamza. He has the kind of knowledge you don't get from Islam 101 books. We used to have circle discussions after Friday prayers. And in one of the historical stories I mentioned, I referred to a person as a cousin of Muhammad. Hamza waited till everyone left. Then he said, very politely: 'You might want to double-check that. You may very well be right, but you might want to check--and I'll check, too.' There's nothing he does that's not in the Islamic spirit."
And yet, because Hamza knows his etiquette, he knows it would not be a violation of etiquette to stay silent after the brother's greeting, for God is generous, forgiving. Indeed, God says that He has given his Koran to the faithful to make life easier for them, not harder. God calls Islam the middle way, not only the straight path but the path of moderation. He allows many exemptions from the practice of faith if the practice of faith puts the faithful in peril. He even allows the faithful to disavow their faith, so long as their hearts stay true. And surely Hamza faces peril from the practice of his faith and the expression, in Arabic, of his true heart.
He was in chains, after all, when he returned from Afghanistan to America on January 23, 2002. He faced spending the rest of his life in prison after a federal grand jury returned charges two weeks later that he had conspired to kill Americans and had lent "material support" to Al Qaeda. Even after the Justice Department offered a plea bargain in July 2002 and dropped eight of the ten charges against him, even after prosecutors finally admitted that there was no evidence that he had joined Al Qaeda or threatened to kill Americans, even after he wound up pleading guilty only to carrying a rifle and grenades for the Taliban, the government and its negotiator, Michael Chertoff, made his silence a condition of the plea. And so, although it dropped all charges against the defendant relating to terrorism, the administration would continue to treat the defendant as a terrorist through the course of his incarceration by imposing what is known by statute as special administrative measures and by common parlance simply as a gag order. He would not spend his life in jail. He would spend, instead, twenty years in jail, and during that time not only would he be unable to have any visitors but his attorneys and his father and his mother and his brother and his sister and his grandmother; not only would his visitors be forbidden to relate to the public anything he said or thought; not only would the FBI have to read and clear any letter he sent or received and the government reserve the right to bug his conversations with his cellmates and monitor his phone calls. No, he would also have to abide by the following provision of the SAM: "All communications with others will be in English."
He is, by virtue of the strictures on his speech, regarded as a political prisoner inside prison walls. And so surely the brother who greets him would forgive Hamza his silence. Surely Hamza could just mouth the proper Arabic words, or speak them under his breath, or whisper them so quietly that no guard could hear him. Surely God would forgive such an exercise in discretion. . . .
"Walaikum assalam," Hamza says, loud enough for the brother--and the guard--to hear.
Maybe the guard is new, and zealous. Maybe Hamza knows the guard is new and zealous and wants to be zealous in return. For, as Shakeel Syed says, "he has an option to lead a normal Muslim prison life. Instead, he chooses to defy every norm the prison is used to--both the administration and the inmates." And so the zealous guard reports that zealous prisoner 45426-083 has spoken words in the forbidden tongue. And when prisoner 45426-083 returns to his cell, he is ordered to back up to the feeding slot in his cell door. He is handcuffed through the slot and led away to the Special Housing Unit--also known as the SHU, also known as the hole. There he has to strip naked and is searched under his testicles and in the cavity of his ass. And there Hamza settles into his cell, with the Arabic singing in his head, where no one can stop it.
He was the first.
The first American to get Abu-Ghraibed, long before Americans knew they were capable of such an exotic verb. The first to inspire Donald Rumsfeld to issue the order "Take the gloves off," and the first to be on the order's receiving end. The first to be denied medical treatment, the first photographed naked and bound, the first taunted while blindfolded, the first--certainly the first--to have *!*!*!*!HEAD scrawled on his blindfold, the first whose digital photos made their way round the world as souvenirs, the first denied access to the Red Cross, the first to be ushered into a legal limbo created ex nihilo by the administration's notions of executive power. He served as a test case for an administration eager to see what it could get away with, and what it tried to get away with was, well, this: His father hired him a lawyer as soon as he saw his son on MSNBC. The lawyer immediately wrote to John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and George Tenet and informed them that John Walker Lindh had counsel, and counsel was ready to fly to Afghanistan to meet him. They did not write him back, but John Ashcroft did not believe he was obliged to. He operated on the theory that John Walker Lindh had a lawyer only if he, not his father, hired one, even though at the time John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. "Of course, there are no lawyers here," the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted.
The treatment John Walker Lindh received while in American hands is not only an affront to conscience. It manages to make someone described by everyone who knows him as "singular" and "one of a kind" somehow representative of betrayed American innocence, and that indeed is how Frank Lindh characterizes him when he talks about him in public. When John Walker Lindh was being reviled as a traitor, Frank Lindh was being reviled for allowing him to become one. When no less successful a parent than George Herbert Walker Bush was lampooning John Walker Lindh for being a "misguided Marin County hot-tubber," Frank Lindh was being lampooned for actually raising his son in a place like Marin County, and then for divorcing his wife, Marilyn Walker, and living with a man. And when, after his sentencing, John Walker Lindh began his imposed silence, Frank Lindh began an elective one, along with the rest of his family. Now, though, John Walker Lindh's lawyers have petitioned the administration to commute his sentence. Yaser Hamdi--the other American citizen who was taken prisoner alongside John Walker Lindh during the rout of the Taliban and was in the same place at the same time doing the same things--has, after spending three years in a Navy brig without being charged with any crime, been sent home to Saudi Arabia, where he was raised. And Frank Lindh, a lawyer himself, has sensed an opportunity not only to press his son's case but also to tell his son's story the way he sees it--the way he has always seen it, even when his son was extolling the virtues of martyrdom on CNN.
It has always been difficult for John Walker Lindh's parents to reconcile the classically American innocence and idealism they perceive in their son with the extremism of his eventual actions and allegiances. And to the extent that Frank Lindh does it, while speaking one April evening on the stage of a private school in Oakland, he does it by characterizing John Walker Lindh as extremely innocent, extremely idealistic, and, above all, extremely American. A teenager who found God, or, as his family thought of it, his passion. A seventeen-year-old who travels with his father to Ireland in full Islamic dress and wins over the local Catholics with the simplicity and fervor of his love for God. A nineteen-year-old who is bold and brave enough to say goodbye to his weeping family and travel for the second time on his own to Yemen in search of the true Arabic. A twenty-year-old who in late April 2001 e-mails his parents from an Internet cafÃf© in Pakistan with a request for permission to go into the mountains for the summer--and neglects to mention that he means the mountains of Afghanistan. A young trainee who believes he has chosen the right side in the civil war between the mujahideen of the Taliban and the corrupt warlords of the Northern Alliance. A dedicated student who knows after meeting Osama bin Laden in the summer of 2001 that bin Laden is not a serious scholar--and who falls asleep during bin Laden's speeches. A green soldier who does sentry duty at the front lines and never flres his gun. A homesick American who like all Americans dreams of coming home for Christmas . . . until, that is, America comes for him. And not the America he knew, not the America he left just a year earlier--an America changed by 9/11 and determined to show the world that the innocent empire that might have forgiven someone like John Walker Lindh is gone forever.
It is an American story, all right. It is so American that Frank Lindh, in his trimmed beard and his gray suit, sometimes seems to be offering his own innocence--at once wounded and breathless--as proof of his son's. When he gave his permission to John to travel into the mountains in the spring of 2001, he wrote in an e-mail, "I trust your judgment and hope you have a wonderful adventure." After all that has happened since Frank wrote those words, he still lives by them. He still trusts and he still hopes. He still has such complete faith in his son that he has become a kind of fundamentalist on his son's behalf--a fundamentalist who discounts his son's own fundamentalism. In Frank's recounting, John Walker Lindh is not a religious figure but rather a romantic one, whose e-mails from his travels "are still a delight to read, full of wonderful observations and wry comments," and who while abroad "met a lot of interesting people" from places like Indonesia and Chechnya. "John's views are very much those of a mainstream Muslim," he says, in answer to a question. "He's not an extremist in any sense." Never, in the hour and a half he's onstage, does he acknowledge that the interesting people John met were, like John, perfectly willing to die in defense of Islam. Never does he suggest that it's John's very talent for extremity of faith and feeling that has sustained him through his trials and sustains him still. And never does he call John by the name John calls himself.
Never does Frank Lindh call his son Hamza.
Hamza spends a lot of time in the hole, according to two Muslims recently released from Victorville. He doesn't even have to do anything. Other people do it, and Hamza goes into the hole. Other Muslims do it, and Hamza goes into the hole. Whenever there's a big terrorist attack and Muslims take the blame, there goes Hamza for his own protection. He went to the hole after Madrid, and he went to the hole after London. He went because he was the most visible Muslim in the prison, and therefore representative. The prison didn't want him to be the object of anti-Islamic anger. It did not want Hamza to provoke violence just by being quiet, gentle Hamza.
He was always a Muslim, his father says. He was born a Muslim on February 9, 1981--already still, already centered, already disciplined. The Men at Work album was popular at the time, and his father and his mother and his older brother used to sing one of the songs to him: Boy, you sure are a funny kid, Johnny, but I like you. So tell me what kind of boy are you, John?
It's one of the things Frank Lindh has a hard time getting people to believe, even from the podium--that his son became a Muslim not because of what went wrong in his childhood but because of what went right. What kind of boy was John? He was a rare boy indeed--a boy who consolidated all his frailties into a fantastic tensile strength and used all his stumbling to find exactly what he was looking for. He was a boy who loved music and language but was immediately skeptical of Santa Claus. He was a boy who went to Catholic church with Frank but who couldn't accept the Trinity. He was a boy who loved his family but didn't have a lot of friends. He was a boy who was physically robust but also suffered terribly from allergies. When he was ten years old, his family moved from a suburb of Washington, D. C., to San Anselmo, outside San Francisco, and he got sick. He had chronic diarrhea. It was caused by a parasite, but it was thought to be psychosomatic, and he wound up being home-schooled for four years, developing the habits of the solitary scholar. Not particularly comfortable in his own skin, he sought to transcend it, and after he saw Spike Lee's Malcolm X with his mother when he was twelve years old, he followed Malcolm's own course from militancy to Islamic submission in accelerated fashion. In his early adolescence, he presented himself as a militant black rapper on hip-hop message boards, composing epic rhymes that castigated the rest of "his" race for selling out to the commercial interests of the white man. At the same time, he studied Islam, and when he was sixteen, before he could even drive, he showed up at the mosque in Mill Valley, California, a half hour from his home, and met a devout young Muslim named Abdullah Nana.
"Most people, when they come to mosque for the first time, have questions, and ask for reading materials," Abdullah Nana says at a halal restaurant in downtown San Francisco. "John Walker came in and said, 'I want to be a Muslim.' He'd already made the decision on his own. He didn't ask any questions. He didn't have any doubts. He was unique, in my experience."
He converted that day. He took his shahada, right then and there. He declared, in front of the few brothers assembled at the mosque, that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad, peace be upon him, is His Messenger. Then he went home and took his symbolic shower and left his old--his young--life behind. He did not tell Frank and Marilyn, though, until one night Marilyn picked up the phone and a voice she had never heard before--the voice of an older man--asked for her son. When she asked John for an explanation, he said that the man was from the mosque and that he, John Walker Lindh, was now a Muslim. His father and his mother both wound up taking John back and forth to the mosque nearly every day, and John found himself with few encumbrances for his new faith. The Koran asked him to quit the association of infidel friends, but in Abdullah Nana's memory there were no friends to quit. The Koran asked him to avoid women who were not devout, but in Abdullah Nana's memory there were no women, no girlfriends back in San Anselmo. There were only the trips to the mosque in Mill Valley and then other mosques in San Francisco, and the two- or three-hour discussions he and Nana and a few other strictly orthodox young Muslims would have after Friday prayers, sitting bearded and robed and shoeless in a circle on the mosque's carpeted floor.
"He was an example to other Muslims," Nana says. "He was very pious, very dedicated. Within six or seven months, he was wearing full Muslim dress. And after a year and a half, he decided to leave the country. His first objective was to memorize the Koran. The fact that John accepted Islam and within a year and a half had left his country for study in a Third World country--this could only happen with a person who had dedication, discipline, and commitment."
Abdullah Nana and the teenager he still calls John Walker often spoke of going abroad to study Arabic and Islamic law. John went first. Abdullah went a year later, and now, at twenty-seven, he's the co-imam of the Mill Valley mosque. He's married, and in public his wife covers her face completely. He wears a long white robe and a white flat-topped headdress. His face is curtained by a thick black beard, and he speaks in a soft monotone that is occasionally inaudible. He does not listen to any music with a beat, because "music with a beat is not permissible--it causes hypocrisy of the heart." He eats without a fork, with his right hand, because that is how the Prophet, peace be upon him, is said to have eaten. He tries to sleep as the Prophet is said to have slept, and to deal with his relatives as the Prophet dealt with his relatives. When he speaks of his own conversion to a devout and orthodox brand of Islam, he recalls his years attending Cal-Berkeley, where, he says, "it does bother you a little, to see too much freedom." He offers, in short, a glimpse of the kind of Muslim John Walker would be if John Walker had gone abroad, completed his studies, and come home to Marin County. Of course, John Walker never did come home. Although Abdullah's devotion nearly matched John Walker's, he wound up following the course of study most Muslims from secularized countries follow--that is, he chose to study in another relatively secularized country. He studied in South Africa. John Walker, on the other hand, chose to study in a country untouched by modernism, much less secularism. He chose to study in Yemen, where men wear daggers and carry guns and chew khat all day. Now he is in Victorville, and what he has in common with Abdullah Nana is . . . well, almost everything, because they have both offered their freedom to God, and while Abdullah continually checks the time to make sure he's not missing his obligatory prayers, John Walker is doing the same thing four hundred miles away, an anchorite in a desert prison.
Each day, just before dawn, Hamza wakes up to pray in a world of men. It is not easy to wake up in a prison before the wake-up call, but as an inmate and a Muslim there are two clocks he has to obey. There is the clock set by the prison and the clock set by the Creator, all praise be upon Him, when He bid the earth to move in its wobbly cycles around the sun. And so Hamza gets out his prayer mat and bends toward Mecca in the dark at the time prescribed on the downloaded prayer schedule posted in the prison chapel. As a free man, he made himself a prisoner of God's will. Now this imprisonment is his only freedom. It is all one, to the one God.
He never misses the predawn prayer. He is known for not missing the predawn prayer, for even the most devout sleep past the prayer occasionally. But not Hamza, because Hamza is waliyy. There are about fifty Muslims at Victorville, and they all know Hamza is a beautiful brother. His cellie is a Muslim, an older white man. His closest friend is a Muslim, a slim, bespectacled black man who--according to former inmates--killed another soldier while in the military. Hamza doesn't have many friends, though, for he is in for the long haul and doesn't want anyone to suffer from their association with him. He also doesn't watch TV, or play cards, or play basketball, or talk about politics. He just prays with the other Muslims. He studies with the other Muslims. And he eats with them--for they all eat together, away, by choice, from the other inmates--when he is not fasting. He fasts twice a week, Monday and Thursday, from sunup to sundown. Like all his brothers, he feasts at the end of Ramadan.