Path of religious awakening for an American convert

EVEN before Sept. 11, this unusual memoir would have made a good story: A young man born Jewish, raised by loving, tolerant, hippie parents, gravitates toward Islam in college, converts, gets drawn into a radical Islamic group, reverses gears, leaves said group, goes to law school, converts to Christianity and then, post-9/11, becomes a counter-terrorism expert.

But in light of what has happened within the United States and in the world at large during the last five years, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has something rare to offer, namely the perspective of someone who has ties with each of the major monotheistic faiths and whose upbringing also exposed him to a hodge-podge of New Age beliefs, another under-examined current feeding into the post-9/11 maelstrom.

Though his eyes were opened to Islam by a close college friend of Indian descent, his initial conversion occurred in Italy with a group of Italian Muslims. His brush with fundamentalism took place in Oregon when he went to work for an office of the Saudi Al Haramain Foundation that was later indicted by the U.S. government on charges of illegally funneling money to Muslim Chechen guerrillas.

The office was headed by an Iranian-born American who had embraced Sunni Islam and was staffed by a variety of American-born converts. One of the more commanding of these was Abdul-Qaadir, who had been raised Christian in Berkeley but had an epiphany after eating dinner with some Muslim musicians at a Church’s Chicken.

He then moved to Saudi Arabia and became an activist and teacher who encouraged new Muslims such as Gartenstein-Ross to embrace the rigid Salafi Islam favored by groups such as Al Qaeda.

The New Age element of the story may seem innocuous, but it is important. The only generalization that one can make about New Age beliefs -- Gartenstein-Ross’ parents followed the teachings of a group known as the Infinite Way, founded by a nonpracticing Jew and former Christian Scientist -- is its smorgasbord approach to religion.

One can pick and choose from many religious traditions to create one’s own way -- a bespoke faith. In many respects, that is how Gartenstein-Ross approached his peregrinations.

Later, as he was on the verge of leaving Islam for Christianity, he explained to a close friend that for any believer, “If you think that God exists, the next step is to compare various faiths.”

While that may seem a perfectly normal approach for some Americans, it is not for many others. But that perspective informs how Gartenstein-Ross donned the mantle of Islam and then cast it off to become an ardent opponent of much of what he once believed.

Though he writes with great self-awareness about why he was entranced by and seduced into Islam, his memoir is less than the sum of its parts, largely because he never seems to accept one basic fact about the Muslims he encounters: They were, like him, converts.

Converts are well known for often embracing a faith more adamantly than those born into it. They also cannot help but be self-conscious and, at first, somewhat insecure about their new religion, and that can lead to a need to demonstrate their bona fides, if not to others, then to themselves.

The small Muslim community that Gartenstein-Ross lived in outside Ashland, Ore., was almost entirely composed of converts, who, like him, felt that they were not true Muslims unless they adopted the most rigid forms of Islam.

Though those forms can certainly be found, they are no more representative of Islam than all of the other flavors of Islam that one can find among the 1 billion Muslims worldwide. Unfortunately, Gartenstein-Ross makes them representative.

He had already left Islam before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the events of that day confirmed his sense that Islam was all encompassing, that it left “no doubt about the smallest detail” of life, and that it allowed for little freedom of choice.

His experiences also led him to view the struggle waged by Muslim extremists as grounded in their hatred of American and Western freedoms rather than as triggered by American and Western actions.

In the end, this memoir confirms rather than challenges conventional wisdom. As a seeker, Gartenstein-Ross is genuine, and his struggles are resonant. But the book he has written feels surprisingly naive.

Though he clearly knows there are multiple Islams, he regards the Muslims he encountered in the Ashland community (he refers to them as “Muslim rednecks”) as representative of all Islam. And because that group was implicated in an alleged plot to fund Chechens, it became for him emblematic of Muslim terrorism.

Yet if the Muslims in Ashland -- who may have been zealous but are hardly what one would call organized -- are somehow representative of international Islamic terrorism, then the reader must conclude that the United States is overestimating the threat.

Finally, though Gartenstein-Ross has remained close to the Muslim college friend who introduced him to Islam, he ultimately views Islam as an alien faith.

Without saying so directly, he seems to believe that coexistence among Muslims, Christians and Jews is hard to imagine, given the nature of Islam as he sees it.

Though it is hard to imagine denizens of a New Age religion waging war against those who reject it, the same can’t be said of Jewish and Christian fundamentalists. But even their tolerance for other faiths and other mores may be greater than that of today’s radical Muslim fundamentalists.

Having had a personal experience with the three traditions, Gartenstein-Ross had an opportunity to shed light on all of them. Unfortunately, his memoir does little to dispel the troubling ignorance that still stands in the way when each of these faiths approaches the others.

Zachary Karabell is the author of the forthcoming “Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Coexistence.”