Free My Year Inside Radical Islam by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

the enormous bathroom with its multiple sinks, he explained that he wanted to redesign it with benches and footbaths to make it easier for worshippers to make wudu (the pre-prayer ablutions). He wanted to re-carpet and redesign the downstairs area, where the women would pray.
    Pete ended the tour in the office, which overlooked the drive leading up from Highway 99. It had a breathtaking view of the surrounding mountains. They were bucolic, with peaks and trees that looked like a bumpy green fur that you could run your fingers through.
    It was no coincidence that Pete ended the tour in the office. He was a consummate salesman, and the tour had been one big sales pitch. The finale was explaining how the group managed to afford all of this. He said the congregation had just become affiliated with a Saudi Arabian charity called the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation. Al Haramain had given them a grant to buy the prayer building, which the locals called the Musalla.
    At the time, I didn’t know how active Al Haramain was in the United States, and didn’t know whether it had other offices elsewhere in the country. It turns out that the group’s U.S. headquarters was located in my hometown of Ashland, Oregon, and that this was in fact Al Haramain’s only office in the United States at the time. (Al Haramain would later open another office in Springfield, Missouri, proudly declaring it the first mosque “in the heart of the Bible Belt.”)
    Pete had countless ideas for what he could accomplish in partnership with the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation. He was a visionary who had found a group to bankroll his vision. Among his dozen ideas for the future, the one that most captured my imagination was called the Medina Project. It was a plan to build an Islamic village here in the United States. The village would be run by sharia to the extent that U.S. law allowed. While they wouldn’t have beheadings and amputations, the women would be veiled, pork would be banned, and so would alcohol.
    “America is my home,” Pete said. “I don’t want to go overseas to practice Islam. I want to bring Islam here to America. The U.S. gives us freedoms as Muslims that we couldn’t imagine in the Middle East. We need to take advantage of those freedoms.”
    I nodded. The difference between this vision and Sheikh Hassan’s was not lost on me.
    Pete then concluded his sales pitch. “Bro, with Al Haramain backing us, we’re gonna do a lot. We’re trying to hire another person for the office, and I think you’re perfect.” He rummaged around, then handed me a copy of an Islamic publication called Al-Jumuah magazine that featured their employment ad. It explained that there was a job opening in the Ashland office, and set the salary at $2,000 a month.
    I told Pete that I would graduate from college in December (withdrawing from school when I was sick with Crohn’s disease had set me back by a semester). I planned on going to law school in the fall, but was looking for something to do between college and law school.
    “Bro, do you have a résumé?” Pete said. “Why don’t you drop it off before you leave town?”
    Pete brought me some of the trademark spiced mint tea that I tried the first time I encountered Ashland’s Muslims. I liked the gesture; it was nice after a debate, or after talking business, to be able to slow the pace down, drink tea together, and turn to more personal matters.
    Our brief talk after Pete had made his sales pitch convinced me that he was what we might call a character. He was completely controlled by his passions. Sometimes these passions were for the bizarre and destructive, but I thought at the time that when Pete was seized with passion for the right thing, he could be an amazing force for good. Since I was a newer Muslim, Pete—in his rambling way, changing topics before he could even finish a thought—told me why Islam was such a great religion. He talked about a documentary he’d seen on split-brain