By Marcus Noland, Wednesday, March 16, 12:05 PM
On Sept. 1, 1923, a 7.9-magnitude temblor struck Tokyo. More than 100,000 people lost their lives and more than 3 million were left homeless in the Great Kanto Earthquake. Fueled by rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning water wells, mobs killed thousands of Koreans in the days that followed. The Japanese government declared martial law, but the civilian authorities’ inability to deal with the disaster contributed to an eventual military takeover.
Seventy-one years later, on Jan. 17, 1995, Kobe was hit by a 6.9-magnitude quake. The Great Hanshin Earthquake killed 6,400 people. Damage was estimated at more than $100 billion, or 2.5 percent of Japanese national income — similar to current estimates of the toll of last week’s 9.0-magnitude temblor in the Tohoku region of northern Japan. Yet, within 18 months, economic activity in Kobe had reached 98 percent of its pre-quake level. A state-of-the-art offshore port facility was built, housing was modernized — and a scruffy port city became an international showpiece.
It is tempting to regard the different responses to these tragedies as proof that a more advanced society will respond more constructively to adversity. The simpler truth is that disasters can quickly transform a nation — for better, or for worse.
Which way will Japan go?
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami devastated a society that, for all its wealth, was stuck in a rut. Over the past two decades, Japan’s economic growth averaged an anemic 1 percent a year. Politically, the country was rudderless. The Liberal Democratic Party, which had governed almost continuously since the end of the U.S. military occupation following World War II, had finally worn out its welcome. And the novice Democratic Party of Japan, which had assumed power in 2009, was flailing.
For four decades after the war, Japan experienced cozy politics backed by a robust economy. Lightly populated rural districts had a disproportionate effect on national politics. The government financed multibillion-dollar bridges to nowhere, expensive port facilities for small fishing villages and bullet trains to traverse bucolic rural areas — and seemingly lined every riverbed in Japan in concrete.
But in 1990, the bubble burst. The working-age share of the population began to fall. In 1998, the labor force started to shrink, and a decade later, the country’s population began to decline. Eventually, voters concerned about the mounting costs of wasteful projects tossed out the LDP.
Before the earthquake and tsunami devastated the Tohoku region on March 11, the country was already facing a slowing economy, fiscal strain and deflation, and decades of wasteful spending had saddled the country with a debt more than twice the size of the economy. Now, beyond the tragedy’s human toll, the economic costs are still being counted — and could be vastly expanded if the nuclear reactor damage is closer to that of Chernobyl than to Three Mile Island. But if rebuilding is handled skillfully, there is hope that a different kind of Japan will emerge.
Despite its weak starting point, the government holds a few cards. Ninety-five percent of Japan’s debt is owned by its citizens, not foreign hedge funds; it’s unlikely that those citizens would dump their bond holdings if the government takes on more debt to rebuild the city of Sendai, for example. Financially, the government has more maneuvering room than might seem apparent.
Some rebuilding can be financed by redirecting spending from useless white-elephant projects to the higher priority of remaking Tohoku. The quality of public investment in the nation could improve, perhaps permanently, as a result of this crisis.
Japan’s shrinking labor force could constrain the country’s ability to rebuild — thus forcing politicians and the public to confront its misgivings about immigration. Japan has long exerted tight control of its borders and makes it difficult for foreigners to live and work in the country. Among leading industrial nations, only South Korea has a lower share of foreigners in its workplaces. The foreigners now in Japan fall into various niches: highly skilled white-collar expatriates; low-skilled, often illegal, laborers; imported rural brides. Economists have long argued that Japan needs to welcome more workers to remain economically competitive. The imperative to rebuild housing and infrastructure on a massive scale could force this immigration challenge into the open.
The rebuilding process can also help slow, if not reverse, the extraordinary concentration of economic power in Tokyo. Over the past 10 to 20 years, hundreds of Japanese corporations have moved their headquarters from cities such as Osaka and Kitakyushu to the Japanese capital. The nation’s transition to a post-industrial society (with its greater emphasis on white-collar services), the decline of regional financial institutions and a cultural emphasis on face-to-face communication in business have encouraged the clustering of economic life in Tokyo. But post-earthquake rebuilding could help spread economic activity across the country. If pursued creatively, this could help jump-start an entirely new source of economic strength in northern Japan.
But what is really at stake — and what will determine whether these other changes have any chance of coming to pass — is the structure of Japanese politics. If the incumbent DPJ successfully manages this emergency, the episode could reassure Japanese voters that this fledgling party represents a credible alternative to the LDP. Japan would then have a true two-party system in which political power and ideas are genuinely contested.
Such a transformation could make governing Japan more messy and complicated, but it also could allow the nation to confront in a forthright way sensitive issues that it has avoided for too long: the coddling of its heavily subsidized farmers, its self-defeating trade policy, its unwillingness to face immigration reform, its awkward defense policy, and its uncertain place in Asia and in the world. Japan could emerge as a more conventional and modern country with more genuinely democratic politics.
But if the government does a poor job in the crisis — if the Great Tohoku Earthquake becomes Japan’s Hurricane Katrina — then the country’s aging and cautious electorate could flock back to the LDP and reestablish the status quo of much of the past half-century.
So which will it be? No doubt, Japan — resilient and socially cohesive — will rebuild Sendai and other devastated areas. But will that push the country back into its past, or propel it into a more ambitious future?
The safe bet is a return to the status quo: comfortable decline in experienced hands. But Japan has been changed by natural disasters before. The Great Tohoku Earthquake could be the shock that pushes Japan not only to rebuild a city, but to remake itself politically for the 21st century.
outlook@washpost.com
Marcus Noland is deputy director and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is the co-author of “No More Bashing: Building a New Japan-United States Relationship.”
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© 2011 The Washington Post Company
Sunday, March 20, 2011
19/03 Reeling From Crises, Japan Approaches Familiar Crossroads
March 19, 2011
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
TOKYO — Such was the power of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11 that it bent the tip of Tokyo Tower, the 1,093-foot Eiffel-like structure that has stood as the symbol of Japan’s postwar rebirth for half a century. For the first time since it was erected in 1958, the tower no longer points directly upward, the direction that Japan followed for much of its history after World War II.
The earthquake, whose epicenter was more than 200 miles north of here, and the resulting nuclear crisis, will change this nation. The open question is how, and how much. Will it, along with the bent Tokyo Tower, be a final marker of an irreversible decline? Or will it be an opportunity to draw on the resilience of a people repeatedly tested by calamity to reshape Japan — in the mold of either the left or the right? This disaster, like the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the 1995 Kobe earthquake, could well signal a new era.
Among the concerns raising questions are the shrinking, starting in 2005, of Japan’s population, the country’s loss to China last year of its vaunted status as the world’s second-largest economy and the aggressive pursuit of nuclear power.
Japan’s economy is likely to suffer, at least in the short term, as power disruptions hobble its industries. If the reactors do melt down, in the worst case, or even if there is a steady release of radioactive vapor, there are implications for public health; on Saturday, the Japanese government announced that some foodstuffs from farms near the nuclear plant contained elevated levels of radiation. Japan’s reputation — and its self-image — as an efficient, prosperous and smoothly functioning society has been dealt a blow.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that we will think of Japan in terms of pre-earthquake and post-earthquake because it has already fundamentally changed Japanese society,” said Yasuyuki Shimizu, a 39-year-old who has drawn attention in Japan for the work of his organization, Life Link, in preventing suicides. “The values of postwar Japan, and the postwar feeling of security, also now lie in ruins. Whether Japan will change in a positive or negative way, we don’t know yet.”
But others argue that the long-term impact on Japan will be more limited — so long as the troubled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, about 170 miles north of here, do not suffer a complete meltdown and affect Tokyo, the nation’s heart. Despite the psychological shock to the nation, the earthquake and tsunami devastated a thinly populated region far from Tokyo and the nation’s other center of gravity, Osaka in western Japan.
“If the nuclear problem doesn’t get bigger, and there’s no panic in the Tokyo area, and no curfew that’s imposed, I don’t think this disaster will be remembered as that significant an incident,” said Eiji Oguma, 49, a professor of policy management at Keio University, adding that he thought it would be compared instead with the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which, rather than spurring lasting change, came to be seen as a symbol of the end of Japan’s bubble era.
Still others saw the disaster as a moment for change, including Takafumi Horie, 38, an entrepreneur who lost his Internet company, Livedoor, in 2006 on minor charges of securities fraud after brashly challenging the business establishment.
“It’s possible that this calamity will rid Japan of its old order,” Mr. Horie, now one of Japan’s most popular authors and bloggers, wrote in an e-mail, adding, “It’s an opportunity to build a new Japan.”
But first is the rebuilding. There are many factors working against Japan’s ability to carry it out as successfully as it has in the past: the absence of strong national leadership, the country’s declining economic strength and the simple lack of young people in the northern region.
When Japan resurrected itself after even bigger disasters, like the 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo or the war that ended with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was a vigorous, young and growing country, said Kazutoshi Hando, 80, a historian of the period between the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan began its drive to modernize, and World War II. Today, the population is expected to keep shrinking.
“Just as we were thinking this was a problem we had to tackle now, this catastrophe occurred,” Mr. Hando said of the declining population. “This has slowed us down. That’s the biggest problem. We’ll simply run out of workers.”
Still, Mr. Hando, who survived the American wartime firebombings that destroyed much of Tokyo, said that Japan had defied everyone’s expectations by rising quickly from the ashes.
“Based on my experience of the war and its aftermath, I think Japan will be all right,” he said.
Mr. Hando talked of tapping the Japanese people’s “hidden strength” — an expression that has appeared repeatedly in the Japanese news media in the past week, one that politicians have also seized. Implicit in the praise of Japanese traits of endurance, perseverance and grace — strengths evident in the orderly response to the unfathomable destruction up north — is a criticism of the perceived values that led to the nuclear accidents: the postwar blind pursuit of material wealth and comfort that put 55 nuclear reactors on some of the world’s most unstable land, despite Japan’s singular history as the target of atomic bombs.
“Japan stood at the top once before, so it’s all right if it becomes second class,” said Mitsuru Nakamura, 62, who was chatting with a friend in front of an apartment building near Tokyo Tower on Friday morning. He added: “It should become a country where the elderly and children can live safely. The improvement of people’s lives should become important.”
Being No. 20 in the world was enough, his friend added.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, nationalist politicians — who have long said that postwar Japanese have become selfish and unwilling to sacrifice for the nation’s good — are already trying to harness those sentiments in a different direction.
Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, said the quake and tsunami were “divine punishment” that “should be used” to “sweep away” the Japanese people’s “selfishness,” “materialism” and “worship of money.”
Sitting inside her small tobacco shop in the Toranomon neighborhood, Mitsuko Watanabe, 80, also pointed to selfishness and untrustworthy leaders as factors undermining Japanese society.
“When a country’s leaders are bad, natural disasters occur,” she said and, unprompted, referred to the governor. “I’m not Shintaro, but I think divine punishment isn’t wrong.”
Ms. Watanabe and her husband have owned the tobacco shop, which faces Tokyo Tower, for close to six decades. She said she had watched construction workers raise the tower, which instantly became a symbol of Japan’s rise after World War II. The nation hailed its soaring height, the claim that it was the world’s tallest self-supported steel structure and its use to transmit a new technology, television.
Yoshihiro Watanabe, a spokesman for Nippon Television City, said that it was the first time that an earthquake had bent Tokyo Tower. The company has yet to decide when to straighten it.
In Toranomon shop owners facing the tower said they were confident that Japan would pull itself up.
“Rebuilding after World War II was much more difficult,” said Hayato Kikukawa, 32, the owner of a small cafe, adding that straightening Tokyo Tower should not be a priority.
But at a nearby udon restaurant, where he was getting ready for the lunchtime crowd, Keiichi Shimoda, 48, said, “If they fix Tokyo Tower, then I’ll think, now things are all right.”
Fuhito Shimoyama contributed reporting.
More in Asia Pacific (2 of 52 articles)
Pressure Stabilizes at Japanese Nuclear Reactor, Operator Says
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
TOKYO — Such was the power of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11 that it bent the tip of Tokyo Tower, the 1,093-foot Eiffel-like structure that has stood as the symbol of Japan’s postwar rebirth for half a century. For the first time since it was erected in 1958, the tower no longer points directly upward, the direction that Japan followed for much of its history after World War II.
The earthquake, whose epicenter was more than 200 miles north of here, and the resulting nuclear crisis, will change this nation. The open question is how, and how much. Will it, along with the bent Tokyo Tower, be a final marker of an irreversible decline? Or will it be an opportunity to draw on the resilience of a people repeatedly tested by calamity to reshape Japan — in the mold of either the left or the right? This disaster, like the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the 1995 Kobe earthquake, could well signal a new era.
Among the concerns raising questions are the shrinking, starting in 2005, of Japan’s population, the country’s loss to China last year of its vaunted status as the world’s second-largest economy and the aggressive pursuit of nuclear power.
Japan’s economy is likely to suffer, at least in the short term, as power disruptions hobble its industries. If the reactors do melt down, in the worst case, or even if there is a steady release of radioactive vapor, there are implications for public health; on Saturday, the Japanese government announced that some foodstuffs from farms near the nuclear plant contained elevated levels of radiation. Japan’s reputation — and its self-image — as an efficient, prosperous and smoothly functioning society has been dealt a blow.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that we will think of Japan in terms of pre-earthquake and post-earthquake because it has already fundamentally changed Japanese society,” said Yasuyuki Shimizu, a 39-year-old who has drawn attention in Japan for the work of his organization, Life Link, in preventing suicides. “The values of postwar Japan, and the postwar feeling of security, also now lie in ruins. Whether Japan will change in a positive or negative way, we don’t know yet.”
But others argue that the long-term impact on Japan will be more limited — so long as the troubled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, about 170 miles north of here, do not suffer a complete meltdown and affect Tokyo, the nation’s heart. Despite the psychological shock to the nation, the earthquake and tsunami devastated a thinly populated region far from Tokyo and the nation’s other center of gravity, Osaka in western Japan.
“If the nuclear problem doesn’t get bigger, and there’s no panic in the Tokyo area, and no curfew that’s imposed, I don’t think this disaster will be remembered as that significant an incident,” said Eiji Oguma, 49, a professor of policy management at Keio University, adding that he thought it would be compared instead with the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which, rather than spurring lasting change, came to be seen as a symbol of the end of Japan’s bubble era.
Still others saw the disaster as a moment for change, including Takafumi Horie, 38, an entrepreneur who lost his Internet company, Livedoor, in 2006 on minor charges of securities fraud after brashly challenging the business establishment.
“It’s possible that this calamity will rid Japan of its old order,” Mr. Horie, now one of Japan’s most popular authors and bloggers, wrote in an e-mail, adding, “It’s an opportunity to build a new Japan.”
But first is the rebuilding. There are many factors working against Japan’s ability to carry it out as successfully as it has in the past: the absence of strong national leadership, the country’s declining economic strength and the simple lack of young people in the northern region.
When Japan resurrected itself after even bigger disasters, like the 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo or the war that ended with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was a vigorous, young and growing country, said Kazutoshi Hando, 80, a historian of the period between the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan began its drive to modernize, and World War II. Today, the population is expected to keep shrinking.
“Just as we were thinking this was a problem we had to tackle now, this catastrophe occurred,” Mr. Hando said of the declining population. “This has slowed us down. That’s the biggest problem. We’ll simply run out of workers.”
Still, Mr. Hando, who survived the American wartime firebombings that destroyed much of Tokyo, said that Japan had defied everyone’s expectations by rising quickly from the ashes.
“Based on my experience of the war and its aftermath, I think Japan will be all right,” he said.
Mr. Hando talked of tapping the Japanese people’s “hidden strength” — an expression that has appeared repeatedly in the Japanese news media in the past week, one that politicians have also seized. Implicit in the praise of Japanese traits of endurance, perseverance and grace — strengths evident in the orderly response to the unfathomable destruction up north — is a criticism of the perceived values that led to the nuclear accidents: the postwar blind pursuit of material wealth and comfort that put 55 nuclear reactors on some of the world’s most unstable land, despite Japan’s singular history as the target of atomic bombs.
“Japan stood at the top once before, so it’s all right if it becomes second class,” said Mitsuru Nakamura, 62, who was chatting with a friend in front of an apartment building near Tokyo Tower on Friday morning. He added: “It should become a country where the elderly and children can live safely. The improvement of people’s lives should become important.”
Being No. 20 in the world was enough, his friend added.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, nationalist politicians — who have long said that postwar Japanese have become selfish and unwilling to sacrifice for the nation’s good — are already trying to harness those sentiments in a different direction.
Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, said the quake and tsunami were “divine punishment” that “should be used” to “sweep away” the Japanese people’s “selfishness,” “materialism” and “worship of money.”
Sitting inside her small tobacco shop in the Toranomon neighborhood, Mitsuko Watanabe, 80, also pointed to selfishness and untrustworthy leaders as factors undermining Japanese society.
“When a country’s leaders are bad, natural disasters occur,” she said and, unprompted, referred to the governor. “I’m not Shintaro, but I think divine punishment isn’t wrong.”
Ms. Watanabe and her husband have owned the tobacco shop, which faces Tokyo Tower, for close to six decades. She said she had watched construction workers raise the tower, which instantly became a symbol of Japan’s rise after World War II. The nation hailed its soaring height, the claim that it was the world’s tallest self-supported steel structure and its use to transmit a new technology, television.
Yoshihiro Watanabe, a spokesman for Nippon Television City, said that it was the first time that an earthquake had bent Tokyo Tower. The company has yet to decide when to straighten it.
In Toranomon shop owners facing the tower said they were confident that Japan would pull itself up.
“Rebuilding after World War II was much more difficult,” said Hayato Kikukawa, 32, the owner of a small cafe, adding that straightening Tokyo Tower should not be a priority.
But at a nearby udon restaurant, where he was getting ready for the lunchtime crowd, Keiichi Shimoda, 48, said, “If they fix Tokyo Tower, then I’ll think, now things are all right.”
Fuhito Shimoyama contributed reporting.
More in Asia Pacific (2 of 52 articles)
Pressure Stabilizes at Japanese Nuclear Reactor, Operator Says
18/03 Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You
March 18, 2011
By PAMELA PAUL
NOBODY calls me anymore — and that’s just fine. With the exception of immediate family members, who mostly phone to discuss medical symptoms and arrange child care, and the Roundabout Theater fund-raising team, which takes a diabolical delight in phoning me every few weeks at precisely the moment I am tucking in my children, people just don’t call.
It’s at the point where when the phone does ring — and it’s not my mom, dad, husband or baby sitter — my first thought is: “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” My second thought is: “Isn’t it weird to just call like that? Out of the blue? With no e-mailed warning?”
I don’t think it’s just me. Sure, teenagers gave up the phone call eons ago. But I’m a long way away from my teenage years, back when the key rite of passage was getting a phone in your bedroom or (cue Molly Ringwald gasp) a line of your own.
In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all. According to Nielsen Media, even on cellphones, voice spending has been trending downward, with text spending expected to surpass it within three years.
“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.”
“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’ ” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’ ”
Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward. “Thank you for noticing something that millions of people have failed to notice since the invention of the telephone until just now,” Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners, said by way of opening our phone conversation. “I’ve been hammering away at this for decades. The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people.”
Though the beast has been somewhat tamed by voice mail and caller ID, the phone caller still insists, Ms. Martin explained, “that we should drop whatever we’re doing and listen to me.”
Even at work, where people once managed to look busy by wearing a headset or constantly parrying calls back and forth via a harried assistant, the offices are silent. The reasons are multifold. Nobody has assistants anymore to handle telecommunications. And in today’s nearly door-free workplaces, unless everyone is on the phone, calls are disruptive and, in a tight warren of cubicles, distressingly public. Does anyone want to hear me detail to the dentist the havoc six-year molars have wreaked on my daughter?
“When I walk around the office, nobody is on the phone,” said Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president and publisher at HarperCollins. The nature of the rare business call has also changed. “Phone calls used to be everything: serious, light, heavy, funny,” Mr. Burnham said. “But now they tend to be things that are very focused. And almost everyone e-mails first and asks, ‘Is it O.K. if I call?’ ”
Even in fields where workers of various stripes (publicists, agents, salespeople) traditionally conducted much of their business by phone, hoping to catch a coveted decision-maker off-guard or in a down moment, the phone stays on the hook. When Matthew Ballast, an executive director for publicity at Grand Central Publishing, began working in book publicity 12 years ago, he would go down his list of people to cold call, then follow up two or three times, also by phone. “I remember five years ago, I had a pad with a list of calls I had to return,” he said. Now, he talks by phone two or three times a day.
“You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail,” he said.
Phone call appointments have become common in the workplace. Without them, there’s no guarantee your call will be returned. “Only people I’ve ruthlessly hounded call me back,” said Mary Roach, author of “Packing for Mars.” Writers and others who work alone can find the silence isolating. “But if I called my editor and agent every time I wanted to chat, I think they’d say, ‘Oh no, Mary Roach is calling again.’ So I’ve pulled back, just like everyone else.”
Whereas people once received and made calls with friends on a regular basis, we now coordinate such events via e-mail or text. When college roommates used to call (at least two reunions ago), I would welcome their vaguely familiar voices. Now, were one of them to call on a Tuesday evening, my first reaction would be alarm. Phone calls from anyone other than immediate family tend to signal bad news.
Receiving calls on the cellphone can be a particular annoyance. First, there’s the assumption that you’re carrying the thing at all times. For those in homes with stairs, the cellphone siren can send a person scrambling up and down flights of steps in desperate pursuit. Having the cellphone in hand doesn’t necessarily lessen the burden. After all, someone might actually be using the phone: someone who is in the middle of scrolling through a Facebook photo album. Someone who is playing Cut the Rope. Someone who is in the process of painstakingly touch-tapping an important e-mail.
For the most part, assiduous commenting on a friend’s Facebook updates and periodically e-mailing promises to “catch up by phone soon” substitute for actual conversation. With friends who merit face time, arrangements are carried out via electronic transmission. “We do everything by text and e-mail,” said Laurie David, a Hollywood producer and author. “It would be strange at this point to try figuring all that out by phone.”
Of course, immediate family members still phone occasionally. “It’s useful for catching up on parenting issues with your ex-husband,” said Ms. David, who used to be married to Larry David, the star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “Sometimes when you don’t want to type it all, it’s just easier to talk.”
But even sons, husbands and daughters don’t always want to chat. In our text-heavy world, mothers report yearning for the sound of their teenage and adult children’s voices. “I’m sort of missing the phone,” said Lisa Birnbach, author of “True Prep” and mother of three teenagers. “It’s warmer and more honest.”
That said, her landline “has become a kind of vestigial part of my house like the intercom buttons once used in my prewar building to contact the ‘servants quarters.’ ” When the phone rings, 9 times out of 10, it’s her mother.
There are holdouts. Radhika Jones, an assistant managing editor at Time magazine, still has a core group of friends she talks to by phone. “I’ve always been a big phone hound,” she said. “My parents can tell you about the days before call waiting.” Yet even she has slipped into new habits: Voice mails from her husband may not get listened to until end of day. Phone messages are returned by e-mail. “At least you’re responding!”
But heaven forbid you actually have to listen — especially to voice mail. The standard “let the audience know this person is a loser” scene in movies where the forlorn heroine returns from a night of cat-sitting to an answering machine that bleats “you have no messages” would cause confusion with contemporary viewers. Who doesn’t heave a huge sigh of relief to find there’s no voice mail? Is it worth punching in a protracted series of codes and passwords to listen to some three-hour-old voice say, “call me” when you could glance at caller ID and return the call — or better yet, e-mail back instead?
Many people don’t even know how their voice mail works. “I’ve lost that skill,” Ms. Birnbach said.
“I have no idea how to check it,” Ms. David admitted. “I can stay in a hotel for three days with that little red light blinking and never listen. I figure, if someone needs to reach me, they’ll e-mail.”
“I don’t check these messages often,” intoned a discouraging recorded voice, urging callers to try e-mail. And this is the voice-mail recording of Claude S. Fischer, author of a book on the history of the telephone and more recently, “Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970.”
“When the telephone first appeared, there were all kinds of etiquette issues over whom to call and who should answer and how,” Dr. Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me when finally reached by phone. Among the upper classes, for example, it was thought that the butler should answer calls. For a long time, inviting a person to dinner by telephone was beyond the pale; later, the rules softened and it was O.K. to call to ask someone to lunch.
Telephones were first sold exclusively for business purposes and only later as a kind of practical device for the home. Husbands could phone wives when traveling on business, and wives could order their groceries delivered. Almost immediately, however, people began using the telephone for social interactions. “The phone companies tried to stop that for about 30 years because it was considered improper usage,” Dr. Fischer said.
We may be returning to the phone’s original intentions — and impact. “I can tell you exactly the last time someone picked up the phone when I called,” Mary Roach said. “It was two months ago and I said: ‘Whoa! You answered your phone!’ It was a P.R. person. She said, ‘Yeah, I like to answer the phone.’ ” Both were startled to be voice-to-voice with another unknown, unseen human being.
More in Fashion & Style (4 of 35 articles)
Virtual Visitation Rights
By PAMELA PAUL
NOBODY calls me anymore — and that’s just fine. With the exception of immediate family members, who mostly phone to discuss medical symptoms and arrange child care, and the Roundabout Theater fund-raising team, which takes a diabolical delight in phoning me every few weeks at precisely the moment I am tucking in my children, people just don’t call.
It’s at the point where when the phone does ring — and it’s not my mom, dad, husband or baby sitter — my first thought is: “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” My second thought is: “Isn’t it weird to just call like that? Out of the blue? With no e-mailed warning?”
I don’t think it’s just me. Sure, teenagers gave up the phone call eons ago. But I’m a long way away from my teenage years, back when the key rite of passage was getting a phone in your bedroom or (cue Molly Ringwald gasp) a line of your own.
In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all. According to Nielsen Media, even on cellphones, voice spending has been trending downward, with text spending expected to surpass it within three years.
“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.”
“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’ ” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’ ”
Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward. “Thank you for noticing something that millions of people have failed to notice since the invention of the telephone until just now,” Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners, said by way of opening our phone conversation. “I’ve been hammering away at this for decades. The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people.”
Though the beast has been somewhat tamed by voice mail and caller ID, the phone caller still insists, Ms. Martin explained, “that we should drop whatever we’re doing and listen to me.”
Even at work, where people once managed to look busy by wearing a headset or constantly parrying calls back and forth via a harried assistant, the offices are silent. The reasons are multifold. Nobody has assistants anymore to handle telecommunications. And in today’s nearly door-free workplaces, unless everyone is on the phone, calls are disruptive and, in a tight warren of cubicles, distressingly public. Does anyone want to hear me detail to the dentist the havoc six-year molars have wreaked on my daughter?
“When I walk around the office, nobody is on the phone,” said Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president and publisher at HarperCollins. The nature of the rare business call has also changed. “Phone calls used to be everything: serious, light, heavy, funny,” Mr. Burnham said. “But now they tend to be things that are very focused. And almost everyone e-mails first and asks, ‘Is it O.K. if I call?’ ”
Even in fields where workers of various stripes (publicists, agents, salespeople) traditionally conducted much of their business by phone, hoping to catch a coveted decision-maker off-guard or in a down moment, the phone stays on the hook. When Matthew Ballast, an executive director for publicity at Grand Central Publishing, began working in book publicity 12 years ago, he would go down his list of people to cold call, then follow up two or three times, also by phone. “I remember five years ago, I had a pad with a list of calls I had to return,” he said. Now, he talks by phone two or three times a day.
“You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail,” he said.
Phone call appointments have become common in the workplace. Without them, there’s no guarantee your call will be returned. “Only people I’ve ruthlessly hounded call me back,” said Mary Roach, author of “Packing for Mars.” Writers and others who work alone can find the silence isolating. “But if I called my editor and agent every time I wanted to chat, I think they’d say, ‘Oh no, Mary Roach is calling again.’ So I’ve pulled back, just like everyone else.”
Whereas people once received and made calls with friends on a regular basis, we now coordinate such events via e-mail or text. When college roommates used to call (at least two reunions ago), I would welcome their vaguely familiar voices. Now, were one of them to call on a Tuesday evening, my first reaction would be alarm. Phone calls from anyone other than immediate family tend to signal bad news.
Receiving calls on the cellphone can be a particular annoyance. First, there’s the assumption that you’re carrying the thing at all times. For those in homes with stairs, the cellphone siren can send a person scrambling up and down flights of steps in desperate pursuit. Having the cellphone in hand doesn’t necessarily lessen the burden. After all, someone might actually be using the phone: someone who is in the middle of scrolling through a Facebook photo album. Someone who is playing Cut the Rope. Someone who is in the process of painstakingly touch-tapping an important e-mail.
For the most part, assiduous commenting on a friend’s Facebook updates and periodically e-mailing promises to “catch up by phone soon” substitute for actual conversation. With friends who merit face time, arrangements are carried out via electronic transmission. “We do everything by text and e-mail,” said Laurie David, a Hollywood producer and author. “It would be strange at this point to try figuring all that out by phone.”
Of course, immediate family members still phone occasionally. “It’s useful for catching up on parenting issues with your ex-husband,” said Ms. David, who used to be married to Larry David, the star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “Sometimes when you don’t want to type it all, it’s just easier to talk.”
But even sons, husbands and daughters don’t always want to chat. In our text-heavy world, mothers report yearning for the sound of their teenage and adult children’s voices. “I’m sort of missing the phone,” said Lisa Birnbach, author of “True Prep” and mother of three teenagers. “It’s warmer and more honest.”
That said, her landline “has become a kind of vestigial part of my house like the intercom buttons once used in my prewar building to contact the ‘servants quarters.’ ” When the phone rings, 9 times out of 10, it’s her mother.
There are holdouts. Radhika Jones, an assistant managing editor at Time magazine, still has a core group of friends she talks to by phone. “I’ve always been a big phone hound,” she said. “My parents can tell you about the days before call waiting.” Yet even she has slipped into new habits: Voice mails from her husband may not get listened to until end of day. Phone messages are returned by e-mail. “At least you’re responding!”
But heaven forbid you actually have to listen — especially to voice mail. The standard “let the audience know this person is a loser” scene in movies where the forlorn heroine returns from a night of cat-sitting to an answering machine that bleats “you have no messages” would cause confusion with contemporary viewers. Who doesn’t heave a huge sigh of relief to find there’s no voice mail? Is it worth punching in a protracted series of codes and passwords to listen to some three-hour-old voice say, “call me” when you could glance at caller ID and return the call — or better yet, e-mail back instead?
Many people don’t even know how their voice mail works. “I’ve lost that skill,” Ms. Birnbach said.
“I have no idea how to check it,” Ms. David admitted. “I can stay in a hotel for three days with that little red light blinking and never listen. I figure, if someone needs to reach me, they’ll e-mail.”
“I don’t check these messages often,” intoned a discouraging recorded voice, urging callers to try e-mail. And this is the voice-mail recording of Claude S. Fischer, author of a book on the history of the telephone and more recently, “Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970.”
“When the telephone first appeared, there were all kinds of etiquette issues over whom to call and who should answer and how,” Dr. Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me when finally reached by phone. Among the upper classes, for example, it was thought that the butler should answer calls. For a long time, inviting a person to dinner by telephone was beyond the pale; later, the rules softened and it was O.K. to call to ask someone to lunch.
Telephones were first sold exclusively for business purposes and only later as a kind of practical device for the home. Husbands could phone wives when traveling on business, and wives could order their groceries delivered. Almost immediately, however, people began using the telephone for social interactions. “The phone companies tried to stop that for about 30 years because it was considered improper usage,” Dr. Fischer said.
We may be returning to the phone’s original intentions — and impact. “I can tell you exactly the last time someone picked up the phone when I called,” Mary Roach said. “It was two months ago and I said: ‘Whoa! You answered your phone!’ It was a P.R. person. She said, ‘Yeah, I like to answer the phone.’ ” Both were startled to be voice-to-voice with another unknown, unseen human being.
More in Fashion & Style (4 of 35 articles)
Virtual Visitation Rights
18/03 On the Web, Every Day Is Casual Friday
March 18, 2011
By AUSTIN CONSIDINE
LAST year found Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook creator and 26-year-old billionaire, topping a lot of short lists. Time chose him as 2010’s Person of the Year. He headed the Vanity Fair 100 list of most influential people. Then Esquire pinned him to its 2010 list of the most unfortunately dressed men. Ouch.
Anyone familiar with Mr. Zuckerberg’s typical attire — the baggy jeans, T-shirts or hooded sweatshirts and casual shoes — knows he’s hardly a paragon of posh. But lately it seems as if Mr. Zuckerberg’s famously anti-fashion styling is spawning imitators, or at least has come to symbolize success for a new generation of would-be billionaires.
“It seems that if you dress up too much, you run the risk of not being taken seriously,” said Erica Zidel, a Seattle-based Web entrepreneur who attended Harvard around the same time as Mr. Zuckerberg. “There is an unspoken rule in entrepreneurial culture that your look should be laid back.”
It’s a reality that some have been loathe to embrace. In September, Rebecca Dana argued in The Daily Beast that the director David Fincher had “given us a new sartorial standard for success in the Internet age” with his film about Mr. Zuckerberg, “The Social Network,” just as films like “Wall Street” did in the 1980s. But the article provoked swift rebuttal around the fashion blogs, which scoffed at the notion that Silicon Valley’s enfant terrible could (or should) be a fashion icon.
Still, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t the first large-scale symbol of creative-class casualness (see Bill Gates) and won’t be the last. Deserving or not, his style has implications that are taken seriously by observers.
Mark-Evan Blackman, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said start-up slackerdom was part of “a shared vocabulary” of stylistic affectations among young entrepreneurs, the kind of silent language one finds in other subcultures like the music and art scenes.
But the trend bespeaks to a more fundamental American attitude, he said. “It goes back to a mind-set that I think we’ve had in this country for a long time, and that is, ‘I don’t have to work very hard to prove it if I actually have it, if I actually own it.’ ”
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone embraced some of the irony — and, like any good entrepreneur, decided to sell it. To that end, Nathan Tone, a blogger based in Austin, Tex., created Mark by Mark Zuckerberg, an online store (and esoteric joke) that takes its name from the Marc by Marc Jacobs fashion line, selling branded items like T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags.
Until recently, Mr. Tone said, informality was simply a benefit of working at start-ups. “Now it’s like one of the mandatory steps along the way,” he said. “Like you can’t get VC funding if people aren’t wearing sweat pants,” referring to venture capital.
Which would merely be funny if it weren’t also proving true on occasion. Ms Zidel said she recently attended a competition to win start-up investment for her site, SittingAround.com. “My four competitors all showed up in suits,” she said. “I wore jeans and wound up winning. Not only did the audience look past my outfit, I actually think it helped convey the confidence I had in my company.”
More in Fashion & Style (6 of 35 articles)
On the Runway: A Look at Alaïa’s Fall Collection
Read More »
By AUSTIN CONSIDINE
LAST year found Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook creator and 26-year-old billionaire, topping a lot of short lists. Time chose him as 2010’s Person of the Year. He headed the Vanity Fair 100 list of most influential people. Then Esquire pinned him to its 2010 list of the most unfortunately dressed men. Ouch.
Anyone familiar with Mr. Zuckerberg’s typical attire — the baggy jeans, T-shirts or hooded sweatshirts and casual shoes — knows he’s hardly a paragon of posh. But lately it seems as if Mr. Zuckerberg’s famously anti-fashion styling is spawning imitators, or at least has come to symbolize success for a new generation of would-be billionaires.
“It seems that if you dress up too much, you run the risk of not being taken seriously,” said Erica Zidel, a Seattle-based Web entrepreneur who attended Harvard around the same time as Mr. Zuckerberg. “There is an unspoken rule in entrepreneurial culture that your look should be laid back.”
It’s a reality that some have been loathe to embrace. In September, Rebecca Dana argued in The Daily Beast that the director David Fincher had “given us a new sartorial standard for success in the Internet age” with his film about Mr. Zuckerberg, “The Social Network,” just as films like “Wall Street” did in the 1980s. But the article provoked swift rebuttal around the fashion blogs, which scoffed at the notion that Silicon Valley’s enfant terrible could (or should) be a fashion icon.
Still, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t the first large-scale symbol of creative-class casualness (see Bill Gates) and won’t be the last. Deserving or not, his style has implications that are taken seriously by observers.
Mark-Evan Blackman, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said start-up slackerdom was part of “a shared vocabulary” of stylistic affectations among young entrepreneurs, the kind of silent language one finds in other subcultures like the music and art scenes.
But the trend bespeaks to a more fundamental American attitude, he said. “It goes back to a mind-set that I think we’ve had in this country for a long time, and that is, ‘I don’t have to work very hard to prove it if I actually have it, if I actually own it.’ ”
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone embraced some of the irony — and, like any good entrepreneur, decided to sell it. To that end, Nathan Tone, a blogger based in Austin, Tex., created Mark by Mark Zuckerberg, an online store (and esoteric joke) that takes its name from the Marc by Marc Jacobs fashion line, selling branded items like T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags.
Until recently, Mr. Tone said, informality was simply a benefit of working at start-ups. “Now it’s like one of the mandatory steps along the way,” he said. “Like you can’t get VC funding if people aren’t wearing sweat pants,” referring to venture capital.
Which would merely be funny if it weren’t also proving true on occasion. Ms Zidel said she recently attended a competition to win start-up investment for her site, SittingAround.com. “My four competitors all showed up in suits,” she said. “I wore jeans and wound up winning. Not only did the audience look past my outfit, I actually think it helped convey the confidence I had in my company.”
More in Fashion & Style (6 of 35 articles)
On the Runway: A Look at Alaïa’s Fall Collection
Read More »
17/03 Ultimate Box of Jazz? Not Exactly
March 17, 2011
Chad Batka for The New York Times
The Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko wraps up the new boxed set, “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.”
By BEN RATLIFF
LOOK out: there’s a new jazz canon coming toward you. A boxed set of six discs to be released on March 29, it emanates from the Smithsonian Institution; it is called “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.” It surveys jazz chronologically, from its complicated beginnings to its just as complicated near-present.
It was assembled by scholars and critics and broadcasters: serious names. It begins with a solo-piano composition by a Texas-born composer whose father had been a slave (Scott Joplin) and ends with a quartet track led by a Polish trumpeter (Tomasz Stanko) who loves Miles Davis. Text drips from the package, an essay for each of its 111 tracks.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Louis Armstrong is also featured in the anthology.
You’re energized, right? Your heartbeat just picked up, your amygdala’s plumping out. You want to know what canons usually address: how and where the anthologizers claim jazz started, how they frame it now. And in the middle, how do they really feel about Coltrane, about late Billie Holiday and Lester Young, about Ahmad Jamal, Miles at the Plugged Nickel, Afro-Latinism, cool and free and fusion, live vs. studio, unsung heroes? More: Is jazz a musical language or a philosophy of action, or is it merely a genre, the art that descends from a body of recorded masterpieces? What’s its relation to race, or sensuality, or geography? And what is the deal with its rhythm sections — why do they sound so incredibly different every 15 years? What keeps the music changing? What makes it tick? What is jazz?
I am both invested in and sick of the subject, having written a kind of jazz-canon book myself, 10 years ago. So, caveat lector. But I ask rhetorically, because I’m still working it out: How could such a righteous cultural product, full of so many sublime parts, feel so cumulatively limp?
My first reaction was that maybe we’ve reached our limit, jazz-canon-wise. In the past one of the primary functions of projects like “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology” was simply to get this music in print, because in some cases you could not otherwise find it: probably not in your local record store or library, not on the radio, nowhere. Back then there was a causal link between a recording’s availability and the possibility of its influence. Now almost every recording ever made is buyable or poachable online: easy come, easy go, and therefore no music needs protection or special pleading. But that’s nonsense. There is still a need for cultural advocacy, even if the culture is easy to find. Meade Lux Lewis’s ferocious “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” on Disc 1 of this collection, was popular in its time and remains easy to locate online. Still, you’ll most likely never hear it unless someone points you there.
Then I wondered if maybe it’s no longer worth exploring what the new jazz reality — say, New York groups like the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s or the drummer Dafnis Prieto’s, or the New York-Los Angeles band Kneebody — might have in common with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. But of course that’s wrong too. The connections are there, the closer you listen: in instrumentation, in the compressed balance between composition and improvisation, in the spirit of revision. And all those new jazz musicians have studied the jazz tradition. They may run far and wide, but they know who their parents are.
But maybe the true problem is that “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology” isn’t really a canon at all. It’s a House of Representatives. What’s missing is its desire to be any more than a list, rather than an argument or a thesis.
It does not lack for facts, this hundred-dollar toolbox. It is not underinformed. It does more, for instance, with free jazz and Afro-Latin music than some others have done. It represents both popular taste and scholarly consensus. It is balanced in all things, even in its split between popular choices and critics’ favorites. So there’s Miles Davis’s “So What,” Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby,” Getz and Gilberto’s “Girl From Ipanema,” Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin,’ ” etc. — as well as solid to questionable wild-card choices like the Clark Terry-Bob Brookmeyer Quintet’s “Haig & Haig,” Mary Lou Williams’s “Virgo” and Cab Calloway’s “Hard Times.” Its final disc stops at 2003 — a minor alarm, though I’m resigned to low hopes for the final chapters of these kinds of things. You’ll always disagree about the music of your own time.
The new Smithsonian anthology is fair minded, which is to say strangely anonymous. Though the essays are signed, one can’t be sure whether the signers chose the tracks, and you won’t find out how the anthologizers, individually or as a body, really feel about anything in particular. (The boxed set was created by an executive committee of five — the scholars David Baker, Jose Bowen, John Edward Hasse, Dan Morgenstern and Alyn Shipton — and 42 more on the advisory panel: 47 ! And that’s not including yet a few more writers, who wrote track notes.) It comes with no particular orientation or obsession; it can seem as if there’s little at stake.
It is chronological, which of course carries its own logic, if kind of a dull one. It contains a few inspired sequences, like its tour of the mid-’50s, winding through mostly nonobvious tracks from Chico Hamilton, Lucky Thompson, Sonny Rollins, Sun Ra, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong. But in general the individual tracks don’t talk to one another much, or linger on an artist and take a stand; and while the boxed set represents styles and eras and trends, it seldom leads you toward deeper questions.
The act of listening to it can also elicit a retrospective sympathy for past canons, on page and disc and screen. For instance Charles Edward Smith’s in “The Jazz Record Book”; Marshall Stearns’s in “The Story of Jazz”; Joachim E. Berendt, Gunther Huesmann and Kevin Whitehead’s, in the second edition of Berendt’s “Jazz Book”; Ken Burns’s, in the television documentary and CD series “Jazz;” Allen Lowe’s “That Devilin’ Tune,” covering jazz up to 1951 in 36 discs and a book; and Gary Giddins’s and Scott Deveaux’s, in their judicious book-length history and CD-ROM project from 2010, also called “Jazz.”
All these had causes to defend or stories to tell: the development of jazz as a self-conscious art form; the centrality of the music’s prehistory; the importance of prescient or outlying musicians to jazz history; the role of jazz in healing America’s race trauma. But what the new anthology might make you miss the most is the object it has been designed to replace: “The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz,” compiled in 1973 and revised in 1987 by the critic Martin Williams.
The American jazz-education movement was just taking shape when Williams’s “Smithsonian Collection” appeared, on six vinyl LPs. (It was eventually transferred to CD; it’s been out of print for a while.) The Williams anthology became standard for jazz-appreciation classes, and on first inspection it appeared only to help you demarcate a big story and save time. Stealthily, it also advanced theories. Williams, who died in 1992, could write as if he didn’t know what fun was. But he listened with great depth and vigor, and his canon had funk in its step.
It favored rhythmic innovation above all else. It had little time for singers. It acknowledged masterpieces, but not reflexively or out of obligation. It bestowed major real estate to a small group of creators — particularly Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman — and gave John Coltrane an informed kind of short shrift. If you resented any of his grudges from his writing, you saw them carried over into the anthology. (He found Coltrane tedious and Ahmad Jamal shallow.)
Yet the Williams canon radiated a meta-consciousness of jazz as a creative act. It segued versions of the same song by different people; it knitted together Charlie Christian’s guitar solos from different takes of “Breakfast Feud” with the Benny Goodman Sextet into one long, five-chorus improvisation. And it really engaged with Charlie Parker, presenting pairs of alternate takes of “Embraceable You” and “Crazeology,” cutting them off after Parker’s solo, to demonstrate how true an improviser Parker was. This could seem fanciful or time wasting when telling a big story in a small space; but he picked his spots.
All of that was radical, if not even remix-oriented or bloggy before its time. He seemed to understand implicitly that canon making itself was an act of creativity and revision; that a survey of an art form wasn’t the same thing as a survey of its reception. In any case, Williams’s anthology was argued over because it was worth arguing over.
What I’m saying is: If ever there was a place for style to follow subject, for form to follow function, this is the place. A jazz anthology has got to have spark and tension and originality. In order for jazz to feel like an open subject, we need more challenging suppositions about it, whether they translate as pluralistic or exclusive. But perhaps this just can’t be done by committee. I’ve never heard good jazz from a 47-member band.
19/03 ‘Too Late’ for Some Tsunami Victims to Rebuild in Japan
March 19, 2011
By MICHAEL WINES
KESENNUMA, Japan — A week after the tsunami obliterated most of this northern Japanese city’s seafront and not a little of its inland, the first handful of shopkeepers and their employees were outdoors shoveling mud and hauling wreckage from their businesses, signs of rebirth after this region’s worst catastrophe in memory.
Kunio Imakawa, a 75-year-old barber, was not among them.
Mr. Imakawa and his wife, Shizuko, lost his three-chair barber shop, their second-floor apartment and all their belongings in the tsunami. Rebuilding would mean starting from scratch. And he said that simple math, calculated in yen and in years, showed it was not worth the effort.
“Young people would think, ‘Maybe there’s another way,’ ” he said last week as he sprawled with 1,600 other refugees in a chilly local sports arena. “But I’m too old. My legs have problems.
“It’s too late to start over.”
And as this rural corner of northeastern Japan tries to start over, his spent resilience is a telling indicator of the difficulties ahead. Well before disaster struck, this region was an economic and social laggard, leaching people and money to Japan’s rich urban south, sustained — even as opportunity moved elsewhere — by government largess and an unspoken alliance with the nuclear-power industry.
Now a week of calamity threatens to upend those compacts, with unpredictable consequences.
“The young people left these rural communities long ago for jobs in Sendai, in Tokyo and in Osaka,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, a Purdue University professor who is an expert not only on the region’s economy, but also on the aftereffects of natural disasters like the tsunami.
“These are declining areas. With an exogenous shock like this, I think it’s possible that a lot of these communities will just fold up and disappear.”
Some have been hollowing out, albeit slowly, for a long time. Japan’s population as a whole is shrinking and graying, but the Japanese prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami — Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate — often outpace the national trends, and their workers’ average incomes are shrinking as well.
Kesennuma’s home prefecture, Miyagi, claims one comparatively prosperous hotspot: its capital, Sendai, a million-person city that boasts some technology firms and a far younger population. But even Sendai has prospered at the expense of the surrounding countryside, which is significantly poorer and older.
Less than 19 percent of Sendai residents are older than 64, below the 22 percent national average. In contrast, over-64 citizens officially make up nearly 27 percent of Kesennuma’s population, and city officials say the total is closer to 30 percent.
People — especially young people — are leaving for the same reason as migrants everywhere: they see fewer opportunities here than in Japan’s bigger, flashier cities. For centuries, inland residents farmed and coastal residents fished. Over the years, farming declined in importance, and village fishermen have increasingly been routed by huge and more efficient factory ships.
“It’s a declining industry. That was so before the tsunami,” said Satsuki Takahashi, a University of Tokyo cultural anthropologist who has long studied the coastal villages in the tsunami area.
Unable to compete, but saddled with debt from purchases of boats and equipment, many fishermen troll in small boats near the coast, catching just enough to pay their bills.
“It’s usually the case that the first son has to stay with the home,” Ms. Takahashi said. “Those who can leave town are the second and third sons or daughters. Many of them do.”
Like governments everywhere, Tokyo has tried to manage the region’s decline. For pensioners — retired fishermen, and folks like Mr. Imakawa who serve them — there is a generous tax break for people who operate even marginal businesses from their homes. Japan’s small towns are filled with first-floor shops below second-floor apartments.
For job-hungry workers, Mr. Aldrich says, the government took another tack: it promoted the construction of nuclear power plants along the coast. Two reactor complexes were built in Fukushima Prefecture; one in Miyagi, near Sendai.
“There’s really no economic engine in these communities,” said Mr. Aldrich, whose 2010 book “Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West” details the government’s strategy for locating reactors in struggling areas. “These facilities bring $20 million or more to depopulating, dying towns. Many people saw these power plants as economic lifelines at a time when their towns are dying.”
And they were, until an earthquake and tsunami changed the economic equation last week.
Now at least one of the Fukushima complexes appears destined never to reopen. Part of the prefecture could remain off limits for years because of radiation. The future of similar plants could be thrown into doubt, along with the jobs and supporting businesses that sprung up around the nuclear industry.
At the same time, the tsunami wiped out thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of homes, many of them owned by retirees who lack the spirit or money to rebuild. And Mr. Aldrich — also the author of a long-term study of the societal impact of major disasters like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans — says the dislocation caused by the tsunami threatens to permanently rend the social fabric that keeps many coastal villages afloat in hard times.
Whether disproportionately elderly coastal towns will be resilient enough to absorb such blows is an open question. Whether Japan’s central government, already facing unprecedented debt, can afford to take on a colossal reconstruction of marginally economic areas is another. And then there is a third question: whether, in political terms, it can afford not to.
“We faced exactly the same question after Katrina,” said John Campbell, an expert on aging at the University of Michigan and visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. “There was a big discussion about whether we should rebuild the Ninth Ward, since it was below sea level, and so on. In terms of economic rationality, it didn’t make any sense, really. But on the other hand, it’s where these people lived, and there were emotional reasons to do it.
“These villages may not have the same sentimental attachment. Nonetheless, there’s an emotional argument that’s going to be made, and I think it will be a potent one.”
Moshe Komata contributed research.
By MICHAEL WINES
KESENNUMA, Japan — A week after the tsunami obliterated most of this northern Japanese city’s seafront and not a little of its inland, the first handful of shopkeepers and their employees were outdoors shoveling mud and hauling wreckage from their businesses, signs of rebirth after this region’s worst catastrophe in memory.
Kunio Imakawa, a 75-year-old barber, was not among them.
Mr. Imakawa and his wife, Shizuko, lost his three-chair barber shop, their second-floor apartment and all their belongings in the tsunami. Rebuilding would mean starting from scratch. And he said that simple math, calculated in yen and in years, showed it was not worth the effort.
“Young people would think, ‘Maybe there’s another way,’ ” he said last week as he sprawled with 1,600 other refugees in a chilly local sports arena. “But I’m too old. My legs have problems.
“It’s too late to start over.”
And as this rural corner of northeastern Japan tries to start over, his spent resilience is a telling indicator of the difficulties ahead. Well before disaster struck, this region was an economic and social laggard, leaching people and money to Japan’s rich urban south, sustained — even as opportunity moved elsewhere — by government largess and an unspoken alliance with the nuclear-power industry.
Now a week of calamity threatens to upend those compacts, with unpredictable consequences.
“The young people left these rural communities long ago for jobs in Sendai, in Tokyo and in Osaka,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, a Purdue University professor who is an expert not only on the region’s economy, but also on the aftereffects of natural disasters like the tsunami.
“These are declining areas. With an exogenous shock like this, I think it’s possible that a lot of these communities will just fold up and disappear.”
Some have been hollowing out, albeit slowly, for a long time. Japan’s population as a whole is shrinking and graying, but the Japanese prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami — Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate — often outpace the national trends, and their workers’ average incomes are shrinking as well.
Kesennuma’s home prefecture, Miyagi, claims one comparatively prosperous hotspot: its capital, Sendai, a million-person city that boasts some technology firms and a far younger population. But even Sendai has prospered at the expense of the surrounding countryside, which is significantly poorer and older.
Less than 19 percent of Sendai residents are older than 64, below the 22 percent national average. In contrast, over-64 citizens officially make up nearly 27 percent of Kesennuma’s population, and city officials say the total is closer to 30 percent.
People — especially young people — are leaving for the same reason as migrants everywhere: they see fewer opportunities here than in Japan’s bigger, flashier cities. For centuries, inland residents farmed and coastal residents fished. Over the years, farming declined in importance, and village fishermen have increasingly been routed by huge and more efficient factory ships.
“It’s a declining industry. That was so before the tsunami,” said Satsuki Takahashi, a University of Tokyo cultural anthropologist who has long studied the coastal villages in the tsunami area.
Unable to compete, but saddled with debt from purchases of boats and equipment, many fishermen troll in small boats near the coast, catching just enough to pay their bills.
“It’s usually the case that the first son has to stay with the home,” Ms. Takahashi said. “Those who can leave town are the second and third sons or daughters. Many of them do.”
Like governments everywhere, Tokyo has tried to manage the region’s decline. For pensioners — retired fishermen, and folks like Mr. Imakawa who serve them — there is a generous tax break for people who operate even marginal businesses from their homes. Japan’s small towns are filled with first-floor shops below second-floor apartments.
For job-hungry workers, Mr. Aldrich says, the government took another tack: it promoted the construction of nuclear power plants along the coast. Two reactor complexes were built in Fukushima Prefecture; one in Miyagi, near Sendai.
“There’s really no economic engine in these communities,” said Mr. Aldrich, whose 2010 book “Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West” details the government’s strategy for locating reactors in struggling areas. “These facilities bring $20 million or more to depopulating, dying towns. Many people saw these power plants as economic lifelines at a time when their towns are dying.”
And they were, until an earthquake and tsunami changed the economic equation last week.
Now at least one of the Fukushima complexes appears destined never to reopen. Part of the prefecture could remain off limits for years because of radiation. The future of similar plants could be thrown into doubt, along with the jobs and supporting businesses that sprung up around the nuclear industry.
At the same time, the tsunami wiped out thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of homes, many of them owned by retirees who lack the spirit or money to rebuild. And Mr. Aldrich — also the author of a long-term study of the societal impact of major disasters like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans — says the dislocation caused by the tsunami threatens to permanently rend the social fabric that keeps many coastal villages afloat in hard times.
Whether disproportionately elderly coastal towns will be resilient enough to absorb such blows is an open question. Whether Japan’s central government, already facing unprecedented debt, can afford to take on a colossal reconstruction of marginally economic areas is another. And then there is a third question: whether, in political terms, it can afford not to.
“We faced exactly the same question after Katrina,” said John Campbell, an expert on aging at the University of Michigan and visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. “There was a big discussion about whether we should rebuild the Ninth Ward, since it was below sea level, and so on. In terms of economic rationality, it didn’t make any sense, really. But on the other hand, it’s where these people lived, and there were emotional reasons to do it.
“These villages may not have the same sentimental attachment. Nonetheless, there’s an emotional argument that’s going to be made, and I think it will be a potent one.”
Moshe Komata contributed research.
17/03 Why Yasir Qadhi Wants to Talk About Jihad
March 17, 2011
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Yasir Qadhi spoke before the Eid al-Fitr prayer service in September at the Memphis Cook Convention Center.
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
On a chilly night in the dead of a New England winter, Yasir Qadhi hurried down the stairs of Yale University’s religious-studies department, searching urgently for a place to make a private call. A Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies, Qadhi was a fixture on the New Haven campus. He wore a trim beard and preppy polo shirts, blending in with the other graduate students as he lugged an overstuffed backpack into Blue State Coffee for his daily cappuccino. A popular teaching assistant, he exuded a sprightly intensity in class, addressing the undergraduates as “dudes.”
But Qadhi had another life. Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam, drawing a tide of followers in the fundamentalist movement known as Salafiya. Raised between Texas and Saudi Arabia, he seemed uniquely deft at balancing the edicts of orthodox Islam with the mores of contemporary America. To many young Muslims wrestling with conflicts between faith and country, Qadhi was a rock star. To law-enforcement agents, he was also a figure of interest, given his prominence in a community considered vulnerable to radicalization. Some officials, noting his message of nonviolence, saw him as an ally. Others were wary, recalling a time when Qadhi spouted a much harder, less tolerant line. On this night, however, it was Qadhi’s closest followers who were questioning him.
Two weeks earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a young Nigerian tried to blow up a jet headed for Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear. The suspect had been a student of Qadhi’s at the AlMaghrib Institute, which teaches Salafi theology in 21 American cities. F.B.I. agents were demanding interviews with Qadhi’s students. He urged them to cooperate, but many pushed back, and Qadhi found himself caught between two seemingly irreconcilable forces: a deeply suspicious government and a young following he could lose.
In the basement of the religious-studies building, Qadhi settled into an empty room, flipped open his MacBook Pro (encased in Islamic apple green) and dialed in to an Internet conference call with more than 150 of his AlMaghrib students. “I want to be very frank here,” Qadhi said, his voice tight with exasperation. “Do you really, really think that blowing up a plane is Islamic? I mean, ask yourself this.”
None of the students defended the plot, but some sympathized with the suspect, said several students who participated in the call, one of whom provided a recording to The Times. Was it not possible, they asked, that he had been set up? And how could they trust the F.B.I. after all they experienced — the post-9/11 raids, the monitoring of mosques, the sting operations aimed at Muslims? A few went as far as to say that they could not turn against a fellow Muslim who was trying to fight the oppressive policies of the United States.
Qadhi paced the worn, gray carpet. “There were even Muslims on that plane!” he said. “I mean, what world are you living in? How angry and overzealous are you that you simply forget about everything and you think that this is the way forward?”
Over the next year, Qadhi was thrust into the center of a crucial struggle — for the minds of his young students, the trust of his government and his own future as America was waking to a new threat. Since 2008, more than two dozen Muslim-Americans have joined or sought training with militant groups abroad. They are among the roughly 50 American citizens charged with terrorism-related offenses during that time. These suspects are a mixed lot. Some converted to Islam; others were raised in the faith. They come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and have migrated to different fronts in their global war, from Somalia to Pakistan. Their motivations differ, but the vast majority share two key attributes: a deep disdain for American foreign policy and an ideology rooted in Salafiya.
In the spectrum of the global Salafi movement, Qadhi, who is 36, speaks for the nonmilitant majority. Yet even as he has denounced Islamist violence — too late, some say — a handful of AlMaghrib’s former students have heeded the call. In addition to the underwear-bomb suspect, the 36,000 current and former students of Qadhi’s institute include Daniel Maldonado, a New Hampshire convert who was convicted in 2007 of training with an Al Qaeda-linked militia in Somalia; Tarek Mehanna, a 28-year-old pharmacist arrested for conspiring to attack Americans; and two young Virginia men held in Pakistan in 2009 for seeking to train with militants.
Qadhi said that none of those former students had approached him for counsel. But in recent years, countless others have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad. “We’re finding ourselves on the front line,” Qadhi said. “We don’t want to be there.”
During the months I spent in the insular world of young American Salafis, it became clear how pressing those questions are for many conservative Muslims who have come of age after 9/11. They have watched as their own country wages war in Muslim lands, bearing witness — via satellite television and the Internet — to the carnage in Iraq, the drone attacks in Pakistan and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. While the dozens of AlMaghrib students I interviewed condemned the tactics of militant groups, many share their basic grievances. They are searching for the correct Islamic response, turning to the ancient texts that guide their American lives. Their salvation, they say, hangs in the balance.
This is what makes Qadhi such a pivotal figure in a subculture that is little understood, even by the law-enforcement officials who monitor it. He is the rare Western cleric fluent in the language of militants, having spent nearly a decade studying Islam in Saudi Arabia, steeped in the same tradition that spawned Osama bin Laden’s splinter movement. Arguably few American theologians are better positioned to offer an authoritative rebuttal of extremist ideology. But to do that, Qadhi says he would need to address the thorny question of what kinds of militant actions are permitted by Islamic law. It is a forbidden topic for most American clerics, who even refrain from criticizing their country’s foreign policy for fear of being branded unpatriotic.
For an ultraconservative cleric like Qadhi, the picture is more complicated. Engaging in a detailed discussion of militant jihad — a complex subject informed by centuries of scholarship — risks drawing the scrutiny of law enforcement and, Qadhi fears, possible prosecution. If he were to acknowledge that Islamic law endorses the legitimacy of armed resistance against Western forces in Muslim territory, he could give a green light to the very students he claims he is trying to keep off the militant path. Yet by remaining silent, Qadhi says he is losing the credibility he needs to persuade them of his ultimate message: those fights are not theirs, as Westerners, to fight. “My hands are tied, and my tongue is silent,” he said.
Militant clerics abroad have filled the void, none more than Anwar al-Awlaki, the American preacher who is now believed to be in hiding in Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki has been linked to numerous plots against the United States, including the botched underwear bombing. He has taken to the Internet with stirring battle cries directed at young American Muslims. “Many of your scholars,” Awlaki warned last year, are “standing between you and your duty of jihad.”
It was near midnight last October when Qadhi’s teenage acolytes surrounded him at Thomas Sweet, an ice cream parlor in New Brunswick, N.J. Puma sneakers peeked out from under long robes. Suddenly the lyrics “shake your booty” blasted over the speakers. The young men leaned in closer, unfazed. Between helpings of mango-flavored sorbet, Qadhi pontificated on medieval Islamic theology. “We have a reasonable religion,” he said. “We’re a very logical, rational group of people.”
Qadhi’s students hang on his every word. They huddle around him — between classes, during meals, even in bathrooms — pinging him with questions. Their reliance on Qadhi is a product of contemporary Islam, a decentralized religion with no clear authority. Clerics with the highest level of scholarship are considered invaluable guides, especially in the secular West.
Qadhi was in New Jersey that weekend to teach a seminar on the concept of faith-led action. During a break, a dozen young men flocked to him once again. A soft-spoken engineer lobbed the first question: Wasn’t it hypocritical for the same Western imams who supported the Afghan resistance against the Soviets to now condemn the jihad against American troops? After all, another student asked, don’t civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan “have an obligation to do something to defend themselves?”
“I am not commenting on what they should or should not do,” Qadhi replied. “I am commenting on what you should do as American Muslims.”
They had heard it before: vote, educate your neighbors, protest peacefully. But is that what Islam commands when your people are dying? The question haunts some of Qadhi’s brightest students. One of the deepest Islamic principles is that of the ummah — the global community that unites all Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad was said to have likened it to the human body. If one part hurts, the whole body aches.
One of Qadhi’s followers, a feisty 27-year-old New Yorker, compared his experience of watching bombs fall on Iraq to what other Americans might feel at seeing “California being ravaged day in and day out. How would you feel?” He said he understood why Qadhi could not speak expansively about the conflicts overseas. Even so, he asked, who has greater credibility: the cleric living comfortably in America or the militant “in the cave” who sacrificed everything for his beliefs? “One thing about Awlaki no one can deny,” he said, “this man is fearless.”
That Awlaki carries weight with conservative Muslims underscores both the rivalry and proximity between militant and nonmilitant Salafis. Qadhi and Awlaki have parallel pasts: they were both born in the United States, spent part of their youth in the Middle East and entered the American Salafi movement just as it was on the rise. Awlaki later spent time in a Yemeni prison and emerged in 2008 calling for Muslims to fight the West. Recordings of his sermons continued to be sold at AlMaghrib seminars even after the students were ordered to stop in November 2009, following the Fort Hood shootings that Awlaki praised. Many of the students had grown up listening to him preach on his CDs. They trusted him then, one told me, why not trust him now?
For the tiny fraction of AlMaghrib’s students who have turned to violence, many are what Qadhi refers to as “sympathizers” of militant anger. These young, politically attuned Muslims are taken with events that don’t even register with most Americans, like two recent terrorism cases in New York that drew overflow crowds, Qadhi’s students among them. “If any Muslim is oppressed anywhere, the prevailing wisdom is that we should be standing up to help them — if we’re true believers,” says Ify Okoye, an AlMaghrib volunteer from Beltsville, Md. Sometimes, she added, “you feel guilty for living here.”
Many of today’s young American Muslims are the children of educated, successful immigrants whose passage to the United States came smoothly, in contrast to Europe’s largely working-class Muslims. For years, this bolstered the theory that American Muslim youth had been spared the alienation that fostered militancy in Europe.
But alienation has many faces. America’s youngest Muslims have grown up in a newly hostile country, with mounting opposition to the construction of mosques, a national movement seeking to ban courts from consulting shariah, or Islamic law, and rising hate crimes against Muslims. While some young Muslims have sought distance, abandoning Islam and even changing their names, others have experienced a spiritual awakening. The most conservative have found a home in Salafiya.
Salafis take their name from the Arabic word “salaf,” meaning “ancestor.” Their movement seeks to reclaim Islam’s lost glory by purging the faith of modern influences. Salafis model their lives after the first Muslims, beginning with the Prophet Muhammad, the seventh-century Meccan merchant to whom the Koran, it is believed, was revealed. They encourage a direct relationship with God through a literal reading of Islam’s primary sources — the Koran and the Sunnah, the prophet’s sayings and deeds.
Within the faith, Salafis have a reputation for intolerance and divisiveness. Like other religious conservatives, they tend to be adamant in their strict interpretations, shunning those who disagree. They denounce the veneration of saints, common among some Sufi sects. Many Salafi men insist on a fist-length beard and wear their trousers above the ankle in a desire to emulate the prophet.
While versions of Salafiya have persisted through history, its current iteration derives largely from the puritanical, 18th-century school of Saudi Islam known as Wahhabism. Today’s Salafis share the same basic theology but differ on how to manifest it. Many are apolitical, while another subset engages in politics as a nonviolent means to an end — namely, an Islamic theocracy. A third fringe group is devoted to militant jihad as the only path to Islamic rule and, ultimately, heaven. All three strains have surfaced in the West, where the movement has flourished among the children of immigrants. “It’s about this deep desire for certainty,” Bernard Haykel, a leading Salafi expert at Princeton University, says. “They are responding to a kind of disenchantment with the modern world.”
One balmy afternoon last spring, Qadhi walked across Yale’s campus, stepping around a throng of teenagers he dismissed, irascibly, as “the prefreshie tour.” He stopped before the tomblike building that houses the elite Skull and Bones society. Qadhi stared up at the brownstone facade, as if imagining the secrets it held. “You’re set for life,” he said, squinting through his sunglasses. “You get to thinking that everyone in the White House was a part of this, and it’s easy to see why people think there is a conspiracy.” After a pause, he added, “I don’t believe those theories.”
Qadhi is hardly disenchanted by the trappings of Western life. He has more than 10,000 fans on Facebook, hundreds of sermons on YouTube and a growing Twitter following. He drives a black, leather-interior Honda CR-V, often pulling into a Popeye’s drive-through for popcorn shrimp and gravy-slathered biscuits. He is planning a trip to Disney World with his wife, Rumana, and their four children.
Some of Qadhi’s followers find his ease with American culture perplexing, even suspicious. Yet it is his unapologetic comfort with America — his assertion that Muslims belong here as much as anyone — that has also made him a point of pride for many young Salafis. “We need to make sure that our children can live freely, and we’re going to fight for that freedom,” he told me one afternoon. “And every time I use that word, I need to make a disclaimer — I don’t mean ‘fight’ in the Tea Party sense of overthrowing the government.”
A stout five-foot-five, Qadhi chuckles easily and speaks rapidly, his hands punctuating his words with slicing motions. He is confident to a fault, often trailing a sentence with “God protect me from arrogance.” In class, he can be staid and professorial, with flashes of frivolity. He once implored students to “make love, not jihad.” He blends religious piety with entrepreneurial savvy. More than 20,000 people have signed up for “Like a Garment,” Qadhi’s new online seminar about sex in Islamic marriage. “I give explicit detail on how a man should give his wife an orgasm in a permissible manner,” he explained.
Qadhi’s platform is the AlMaghrib Institute, where he serves as academic dean. Founded in 2002 by Muhammad Alshareef, a Canadian cleric then living in Alexandria, Va., AlMaghrib is now an international enterprise, offering seminars in the United States, Canada and Britain. It reported nearly $1.2 million in revenue in 2009 and aspires to become a full-time Islamic seminary, albeit with an air of corporate America. During a recent retreat in the mountains of Ontario, AlMaghrib’s clerics whizzed along snowy bluffs on sleds drawn by Siberian huskies. “As long as you don’t touch them, it’s all right,” Qadhi said, referring to his interpretation of Islam’s ruling on dogs.
Last June, Qadhi and his family left New Haven for the outskirts of Memphis, settling into a spacious new ranch house in a well-tended subdivision. Still at work on his doctoral thesis, Qadhi found a job teaching Islamic studies at Rhodes College, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.
It is something of a curiosity that Qadhi, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s birthplace, now lives in a landscape marked by church steeples and “What would Jesus do?” bumper stickers. But the American South seems to agree with Qadhi, who often preaches on the Islamic principle of polite conduct. He takes to the gentility of his students at Rhodes, who call him sir. There is no better place to be Muslim than in America, he says, because as a minority “you feel your faith.” At times, he seems oddly Pollyanna-ish about his future in Tennessee, where someone tried to torch the site of a planned mosque last year. Qadhi concedes that living someplace like Saudi Arabia might be easier, but “it’s not my land at the end of the day,” he said. “I am an American. What else can I say?”
In Qadhi’s current incarnation, it is hard to make out the preacher he refers to as “the old me.” That Qadhi lives on via YouTube. In a television show recorded in Egypt in 2001, Qadhi, then 26, explains that one form of kufr, or disbelief, is adhering to man-made laws over God’s law. “Can you believe it?” he says. “A group of people coming together and voting — and the majority vote will then be the law of the land. What gives you the right to prohibit something or allow something?”
His young students nod their heads. “Islam is a complete way of life, a complete submission to Allah and to the rulings of Allah,” Qadhi said on the show. “It is a complete package.”
Long before Salafiya came to the United States, Qadhi’s father arrived in Houston from Karachi, Pakistan. It was 1963, and the young bachelor, Mazhar Kazi, enrolled at the University of Houston with his sights on a medical degree. One of the first foreign-born Muslims to settle in the area, Kazi took a job as a busboy and tended to his studies. He eventually married a microbiologist from Karachi and founded the area’s first mosque.
Their son, Yasir, was born in 1975, the second of two boys. When Yasir was 5, the Kazis moved to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, intent on exposing their sons to Islam and Arabic. Kazi took a job teaching medicine at the King Abdulaziz University. The family spent summers in Houston, but the boys were mostly shaped by life in Jedda, a blend of British expat culture and strict Saudi norms. Qadhi (who later changed the spelling of his surname to reflect the correct pronunciation) was precociously bookish. On weekends, he searched the local library for Tolstoy and Hemingway. By 15, Qadhi had memorized the Koran and graduated from high school, two years early, as valedictorian. Following his father’s wishes, he enrolled at the University of Houston in 1991, majoring in chemical engineering.
Qadhi had never attended a class with women and was shocked by campus life. He took refuge in the Muslim Students Association, a close-knit group of mostly Arab and South Asian immigrants. He was soon leading study circles and delivering effusive Friday sermons.
His introduction to Salafiya came in his sophomore year, when a Muslim convert from Colorado visited campus. A tall, regal man with a wispy white beard, the preacher displayed a command of Islam that Qadhi had never seen. When asked a question, he closed his eyes and recited a litany of evidence from the Koran and the Sunnah. This approach, a cornerstone of Salafiya, appealed to Qadhi’s empiricism. “It’s so disciplined and academic,” he said. Then 17, Qadhi began driving through the night to attend Salafi camping retreats, where legendary clerics lectured from Jordan and Saudi Arabia via teleconference. He drilled into Salafiya with a discipline that defied his adolescence. At a retreat in Boulder, Colo., some of Qadhi’s friends skipped out to go fishing. When they returned, Qadhi refused to share his notes. “It was very clear that this guy was going to become something and we weren’t,” said one of the friends, Amad Shaikh.
At another retreat, Qadhi fell under the sway of Ali al-Timimi. A cancer researcher from Maryland, Timimi had studied Islam in Saudi Arabia and helped spread the American Salafi movement, which began in the early 1980s as a patchwork of nonprofit groups subsidized by the Saudi government. Through shipments of free Korans and other texts, Salafi doctrine developed a strong presence at American mosques, prisons and Islamic schools. By the 1990s, the Salafi community numbered in the low thousands.
American Salafiya mirrored the movement abroad. It was largely apolitical until the first gulf war, when the United States set up a base in Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops on Saudi soil, home to Islam’s holiest sites, was a defining moment for Salafis, giving rise to a political awakening and fueling bin Laden’s militancy. In America, some Salafi clerics began calling for political action against the Saudi regime, while others remained loyal. Qadhi was torn.
But on other matters, he steered his fellow students in Houston toward a strict code. They instituted sex segregation, policing each other for signs of deviation. When a Pakistani student organization sponsored a rock concert, Qadhi and his friends distributed fliers warning the crowds that Islam prohibited music. They did not see themselves as stakeholders in America, Shaikh recalled. Their goal was to spread Islam and then migrate to Muslim lands. “It was almost cultish,” Shaikh said.
For all his stridency, Qadhi broke one significant rule: he fell in love outside the bounds of arranged marriage. The young woman, Rumana, was a quiet, graceful college student of Indian descent. But Qadhi’s parents had their sights on other marriage candidates, and the courtship faded.
During college, jihad loomed in the backdrop of Qadhi’s life. Like many of his peers, he was taken by the legend of the American Muslims who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets. Back then, talk of jihad carried little taboo, given the United States’ role in financing the resistance. Qadhi knew several men who later fought in Bosnia. Noble as it seemed, he said, “I thought there were more productive ways for me to spend my life.”
He had long thought of becoming a Muslim scholar. Shortly before graduating, Qadhi applied to the Islamic University of Medina, a leading Salafi institution. After enrolling in the fall of 1996, he called Rumana. “I can’t live without you,” he told her. “Are you willing to live a difficult life?”
Qadhi and his new wife settled into a spare apartment, and he plunged into round-the-clock study. Life in Medina deepened his faith while narrowing his tolerance for the outside world. He came to identify with political Salafiya, denouncing secular democracies and declaring Sufis and Shia “heretics.” He took up the Palestinian cause — a pathway, he said, to the anti-Semitic rhetoric that ran rampant in his circles.
In the summer of 2001, Qadhi traveled to London to teach at an Islamic conference. At the end of a class, he went into a diatribe arguing that Israel did not rightfully belong to the Jewish people. “Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews,” Qadhi said, telling the audience to read a book about “the hoax” of the Holocaust. He went on to say that most Islamic-studies professors in the United States are Jews who “want to destroy us.”
Looking back, Qadhi said he fell down a slippery slope where criticism of Israel gave way to attacks on Jews. Beneath the vitriol, he said, was a sense of victimization — that non-Muslims were to blame for the afflictions of the Muslim world. “When you’re young and naïve, it’s easier to fall prey to such things,” said Qadhi, who publicly recanted years later. Last August, he joined a delegation of American imams and rabbis on a visit to the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, which he said left him “sick” and more embarrassed by his Hitler remarks.
“It was a pre-9/11 world,” he said. “The circumstances did not dictate that we think critically.”
Two months after the London episode, Qadhi was walking to his mosque in Medina when a friend came running. “Yasir, Yasir, did you hear what happened?” the young man called out. Qadhi rushed to a neighbor’s apartment in search of a television, just as the second tower collapsed.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the American Salafi movement fell apart. As federal agents raided Muslim mosques, charities and businesses, the most prominent Salafis vanished from clerical life or landed in prison. Some of the movement’s key figures were convicted on charges unrelated to terrorism, ranging from tax evasion to visa-immigration violations. “All of these people were jailed for different things, but if you look at them collectively, you see the Salafi movement,” Idris Palmer, a onetime Salafi activist, told me.
Law-enforcement officials say that there was no policy singling out Salafis. They were rushing to root out a new enemy, with little time to grasp the theological differences separating nonviolent fundamentalists from the creed of the hijackers. Many agents did not even know what a Salafi was “and still don’t,” says Christopher Heffelfinger, a security analyst who consults with the government. Northern Virginia — then a nexus of the American Salafi movement given its proximity to the Saudi Embassy — became a focal point. Anwar al-Awlaki was still preaching in Virginia when federal agents raided 15 local Islamic offices and homes. “It’s a war against Muslims and Islam,” Awlaki bellowed in an audio address. “It’s happening right here in America.”
The most high-profile Virginia case involved Qadhi’s onetime mentor, Ali al-Timimi, who regularly preached at a Falls Church mosque. At a dinner five days after 9/11, Timimi and some of the mosque’s young congregants discussed how to respond. Prosecutors later accused Timimi of spurring the men to wage jihad against American troops overseas, saying they practiced shooting at a paintball facility. At issue in the case against Timimi were his words: his lawyers argued that he recommended that the men move to Muslim countries, while prosecutors said he was inciting jihad. They highlighted comments by Timimi unrelated to the dinner, including politically charged speeches and a statement in which he celebrated the Columbia Shuttle disaster. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
From Medina, Qadhi followed the case closely. For American clerics, he said, the message was clear: those who engage in controversial rhetoric are treading on thin ice. While 9/11 had shaken Qadhi’s movement, it also unsettled him personally. “No matter how strange this sounds, after having lived in Saudi Arabia for so long and also in America for so long, I could fully understand the fear, the anger, the frustration, the paranoia on both sides,” Qadhi says. “I could understand ‘they’ and ‘us.’ ”
Qadhi began to wrestle with some of his own beliefs. It troubled him that Salafiya, even in its nonmilitant form, had helped shape the ideology of groups like Al Qaeda. “What type of Islam are we going to teach people?” he recalled thinking. “This isolationist Islam? This Islam of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ — is that healthy? Is that what my religion is?”
At the time, Qadhi was on track to become Medina’s first American doctoral candidate. He wondered if he had a more promising future in America, where the Salafi movement, bereft of leaders, was in crisis. From Houston, Qadhi’s father — who had retired and was volunteering as a prison chaplain — encouraged his son to leave Saudi Arabia, which he believed had left Qadhi “totally brainwashed.”
“I said, ‘Come back to America; this is your land,’ ” Kazi said in an interview at his home, sitting in what he called his “Archie Bunker chair.”
In 2004, Qadhi applied to Yale. Some of his contemporaries saw the move as strategic. “It was a stepping stone,” Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told me. “He knew that with that Yale ticket, people would take him more seriously.”
Qadhi’s Saudi professors were aghast that he would switch to a Western university to study Islam. Yale’s professors were also surprised. The religious-studies department had never taken on a graduate of the Saudi educational system. “You admit someone from Saudi Arabia, you don’t know how much intolerance you let into an American university,” says Frank Griffel, a professor of Islamic studies.
But Qadhi impressed Griffel as “profoundly intelligent” and willing to engage in critical thinking. At Medina, Qadhi’s studies revolved around the search for an absolute religious truth. At Yale, the line of inquiry was markedly different. In Qadhi’s first class with Griffel in the fall of 2005, the subject was a 12th-century Sufi jurist. “You, Yasir, probably know more about this guy,” Griffel said. “But we’re going to study how to study him.” Qadhi was struck by this analytical approach. “The question is more historical in nature — it’s about where did this idea come from, how did it affect later ideas,” Qadhi said.
For Qadhi, the Koran remained the unequivocal word of God. But he began to think more critically about the “man-made” canon that informed Islamic theology. So much of Qadhi’s intransigence — especially toward other Muslim sects — was based on the view that his tradition was divinely ordained. He came to see Salafiya as yet another “human development” that was handed down over generations and therefore subject to imperfection. “I realized that, in many issues, only God knows the ultimate truth,” he says.
Qadhi landed on the American preaching circuit with force, and his following skyrocketed among young Salafis. America’s leading clerics were converts who had risen to prominence because they could translate an intricate theology into an American vernacular. Qadhi did the same but as the proud son of Muslim immigrants. Plus he was a Salafi — or so it seemed.
In July 2006, at a conference in Copenhagen, Qadhi did the unthinkable: he shook a woman’s hand in a spontaneous challenge to her perception of fundamentalists, he said. The woman, Mona Eltahawy, a columnist on Arab and Muslim issues, wrote about the exchange, which became known in Salafi circles as the “when-Yasir-met-Mona moment.” The handshake drew a death threat from a man in London.
The following year, Qadhi further pushed the limits, making a pact of “mutual respect and cooperation” with American clerics of the Sufi order, Salafiya’s longtime enemy. Several of Qadhi’s former Saudi professors publicly assailed him, a signal he had become too prominent for them to ignore. Qadhi began to step away from the Salafi label, rebranding his movement “orthodox with a capital O.” While he remained devoted to Salafiya’s core tenets, his followers struggled to keep pace with his changes. Others remained skeptical. “Is he being instrumental and opportunistic, or has he really abandoned some of these Salafi beliefs?” said Haykel, the Princeton professor. “He’s engaged in an incredible performance of reinvention that I’m not sure he’ll be able to pull off.” The same question hovered over Qadhi’s institute, whose founder, Alshareef, once gave a sermon titled “Why the Jews Were Cursed.”
Meanwhile, as Qadhi honed a new message, he was roundly dismissed on jihadist forums as a “sellout.” One detractor was Samir Khan, a young blogger from North Carolina who eventually moved to Yemen and now runs the Al Qaeda magazine, Inspire, according to law-enforcement officials.
While Khan was still living in the United States in 2007, he wrote several blog posts about Qadhi. “He has done good, and we do not deny this,” read one. But Qadhi’s “wrongdoings,” he continued, “can destroy the Muslims.”
Suspicion surrounded Qadhi. In February 2006, he was crossing from Canada into the United States when American border agents pulled aside his van and ushered his family into a room. An agent told Qadhi he was “waiting for permission from Washington” to let Qadhi back into the country, he recalled. They were freed more than five hours later.
It was the first sign that Qadhi was on the terrorist watch list. From then on, he and his family traveled separately. “I’m not going to be humiliated in front of my kids,” he said. At airports, he became accustomed to long interviews with border agents, who downloaded his laptop hard drive and searched his cellphone. They photocopied notes he kept on his sermons and even asked for his definition of jihad. F.B.I. agents in New Haven questioned him about two American acquaintances who had been charged with terrorism-related offenses. Qadhi said he knew nothing of their activities, but the agents pressed him to report on anyone who expressed views that “might be of interest,” he recalled. He refused, saying, “This is America, not Soviet Russia or East Germany.”
Increasingly, Qadhi felt backed into a corner. In August 2006, at a meeting for Muslim leaders in Houston, he walked up to Daniel W. Sutherland, a Homeland Security official. “Hi, I’m a pacifist Salafi,” Qadhi said to him. Looking stunned, Sutherland sat and talked with Qadhi for more than an hour.
Then in May 2008, Qadhi received an invitation from Quintan Wiktorowicz, an analyst for a government agency that was hosting a conference on counterradicalization. (Wiktorowicz was recently named a senior director at the National Security Council.) In attendance were British and American intelligence officials, including the director of Homeland Security at the time, Michael Chertoff.
During a break, Qadhi spotted a Houston acquaintance who happened to work for Chertoff. “I said, ‘Don’t you think it’s ironic that on the one hand, you’re reaching out for my expertise and wanting my help, and on the other hand, you’re harassing and intimidating me as if I’m a potential terrorist?’ ”
In the West, jihad is often depicted as a self-contained, violent cause. But in Qadhi’s world, it exists within a panoply of complex and overlapping issues. The most immediate question is not whether to fight overseas but how to make peace living in the pluralistic West.
Debates pivot on arcane theological points from the ninth century, a time when religious empires reigned, not secular nations. Classical scholars reference a world divided between dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, and dar al-harb, the land of war. But which land is America?
“If we’re not at war, why is America killing Muslims throughout the world?” says Basil Gohar, 30, who has studied with Qadhi. “If we are at war, how can we live in America peacefully?”
Even absent the question of war, Western Salafis ponder their loyalties. Internet forums buzz with talk about the concept of al-walaa wal-baraa, which is rooted in Koranic verses dictating allegiance to Muslims over non-Muslims. Qadhi’s students are divided over whether to vote, pay taxes that support the military or even celebrate Thanksgiving. “These sorts of things, they are the fault lines,” says Okoye, the student from Maryland.
Qadhi sees in his students an earlier version of himself — the passionate Salafi who took comfort in a black-and-white world. He prods them to think “in colors” and find a balance between loyalty to Islam and to America. He urges them to pay taxes and vote, drawing the line at military service, given Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is no draft,” he said. “Thank God for that.”
For Qadhi and his students, nothing tested those loyalties more than the events after the underwear-bomb plot of December 2009. Whenever a terrorism suspect is identified, AlMaghrib runs the name through its database of alumni to see if there is a match. “Oh, my God,” Qadhi said when a colleague told him that the 23-year-old suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been his student.
Qadhi searched his memory. The son of a prominent banker, Abdulmutallab had been living and studying in London. He had taken two AlMaghrib classes before attending the institute’s 16-day Houston conference in 2008. There, Abdulmutallab kept mostly to himself. “He never got into political issues,” says Abdul-Malik Ryan, 36, a lawyer from Chicago who studied with him every morning.
As media outlets discovered the connection, AlMaghrib’s leaders rushed to contain a crisis. The institute’s vice president, Waleed Basyouni, reached out to the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. Agents wanted to interview all 156 students who attended the 2008 conference. “I said, ‘If you start going to our students and terrifying them, and they stop coming, we will close down,’ ” he recalled telling the agents. “ ‘You would be pushing the students to go to basements, small circles, on the Internet. So it’s in your benefit that this organization stay open.’ ”
In previous cases, F.B.I. agents dropped by the homes of some AlMaghrib students, unannounced. This time, they issued a subpoena but agreed to arrange interviews in advance and to send female agents to question the women. The clerics urged the students to cooperate, but many balked, prompting Qadhi’s 50-minute conference call from Yale.
Veering between high-pitched emotion and tedious scholarship, Qadhi argued that the case presented no conflict of loyalties because Abdulmutallab, by all appearances, committed a crime, violating both American and Islamic law.
But, one student asked, what about America’s transgressions? Why was Qadhi focused on the militants? He responded that he had bluntly criticized American policies to State Department and other officials, telling them “the root cause of this terrorism is terrorism perpetrated at the state level.”
Even so, Qadhi urged his students to “chill out” and use common sense. “You need to look at the repercussions of what you are going to do to yourself, to your family, to your society and to the Muslims that are around you,” he said.
The students cooperated, and in subsequent meetings with the F.B.I., an agent told Qadhi and Basyouni that the bureau did not consider AlMaghrib a terrorist threat, said the clerics. (An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment about Qadhi or the investigation.)
The Abdulmutallab episode drew a new line in the long-distance battle between Qadhi and Awlaki. The Yemeni-American cleric announced that Abdulmutallab’s operation was in retaliation for American “cruise missiles and cluster bombs.” By then, the United States had authorized the assassination of Awlaki, provoking outrage among many of Qadhi’s students.
Qadhi seemed to be riding a pendulum of self-preservation. If he lurched too far toward appeasing the government, he risked losing his base.
That March, Qadhi rose before a crowd of thousands in Elizabeth, N.J., to finally speak about Awlaki. “I am against this preacher when he tells our youth to become militant against this country while being citizens to this country,” Qadhi told the packed auditorium.
“But when my government comes and says, ‘We’re allowed to take him out; we’re allowed to kill him; we’re allowed to assassinate him,’ I also put my foot down, and I say to my own government, ‘Shame on you!’ ” The audience listened raptly. “Be angry every time a bomb is dropped on innocent civilians in the name of the war on terror,” Qadhi bellowed. “Be angry every time our tax dollars are spent to oppress yet another group of innocent Palestinians. Be angry every time more draconian measures are utilized against us in this greatest democracy on earth.”
Never before had Qadhi so forcefully condemned America’s policies in public. But “channel that anger,” he continued, “in a productive manner.” He urged a “jihad of the tongue, a jihad of the pen, a jihad that is not a military jihad.”
American Muslims, Qadhi told the audience, needed to abide by the laws of their country, understanding that had they been born in Palestine or Iraq, their “responsibilities would be different.” He did not elaborate.
It is this kind of ambiguity that gnaws at some of Qadhi’s students. “We just get wishy-washy nonanswers,” one female student told me, adding that Qadhi’s “jihad of the tongue” was unconvincing. Being martyred in the battlefield, she said, is “romantic,” while “lobbying your congressman is not.”
The call to prayer soars through the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Houston, its lobby adorned with a fresco of the Texan flag. Every summer, AlMaghrib’s most-devoted students convene here for a two-week Ilm Summit, transforming the ballroom floor — a corporate tableaux of overstuffed sofas and dim lighting — into a version of Islamic utopia.
“Ilm,” in Arabic, means “knowledge.” From dawn to night, the students immerse themselves in advanced Islamic theology and Koran recitation under the guidance of Qadhi and other clerics. The men favor long tunics, and some women wear niqabs, the full-face veil. Most are upper-middle-class college students of South Asian descent who pay $1,500 to attend. To the hotel’s Hispanic waiters, they seem otherworldly. The men and women eat, study and even ride the elevators separately.
Yet the so-called AlMaghribis upend easy stereotypes. The women are a forceful presence in class and can be spotted on breaks engaging in fierce arm-wrestling matches. The most dominant trait among the men is a quintessentially American geekiness. Qadhi, like many of his students, is a “Star Trek” fan. His lectures are laid out on PowerPoint as students crouch over laptops. Between classes, talk often turns to the latest AlMaghribi courtship.
The mood darkened last July after Qadhi announced that agents from the local F.B.I. office would be dropping by for a “roundtable discussion.” The ballroom fell to a hush as Qadhi and Basyouni led Brad Deardorff, supervisory special agent of the Houston division, to the stage. He smiled tentatively as Qadhi began a quick speech about the need to counteract extremism. Deardorff talked about the history of militant movements, saying there was “no standard profile for an Islamist terrorist.”
Then came the students’ questions, submitted in writing. “How do you expect us to help you” read one question, “when there are F.B.I. informants in our mosques?”
“Jeez, that’s a tough question,” Deardorff said. “We don’t target mosques. We do collect domestic intelligence. But mosques are buildings. Mosques don’t conspire. Mosques don’t blow things up.”
The students stared at him incredulously. It struck some as ironic that Qadhi would engage in a public discussion with the F.B.I. about “terrorism” — which they deemed a loaded word — when the underlying theological issues remained off limits. In a poll last year on Qadhi’s blog, Muslim Matters, participants ranked “jihad” as the No. 1 subject in which they wanted academic instruction.
There are several kinds of jihad, which is translated to mean “striving in the path of God.” While progressive Muslims emphasize the spiritual form, Qadhi and other conservatives say that the majority of the Koran’s references to jihad are to military struggle. Qadhi’s interpretation makes him neither a hardline militant nor a pure pacifist. While he unequivocally denounces violence against civilians, he believes Muslims have the right to defend themselves from attack. But he says “offensive jihad”— the spread of the Islamic state by force — is permissible only when ordered by a legitimate caliph, or global Muslim ruler, which is nonexistent in today’s world.
Such fine distinctions were less pronounced before 9/11, when Qadhi and others preached openly about the glory of Islam’s early military triumphs. In a decade-old sermon about one of Islam’s landmark battles, Qadhi said, “once a prophet has become ready for jihad, for fighting, then he will not take off his armor until he has actually met the enemy.”
By the time he returned to the United States in 2005, AlMaghrib had canceled a popular class on Islam’s military history, and its instructors largely avoided current events. Some students inferred from Qadhi’s silence a tacit support for militant groups. “Everyone was always like: ‘We know he believes it. He can’t say it publicly,’ ” recalled Lauren Morgan, who is 26 and a former student of Qadhi’s. She said she and other students had openly sympathized with militants. “I think if you’re going down the Salafi interstate, the jihadi exit is open for you,” Morgan said. “It’s there.”
Many students first heard Qadhi denounce jihadist movements almost a year after the London bombings. That same month, June 2006, AlMaghrib released a statement calling terrorism “a perversion of the true Islamic teachings.”
The central contest between Qadhi and militants like Awlaki hinges on a rather abstruse point: how to define America in Islamic terms. Qadhi likens his country to Abyssinia, the seventh-century African kingdom that gave refuge to the prophet’s followers. In exchange for upholding the laws of the land, they were allowed to worship freely — a contract Qadhi equates to an American passport or visa. Breaking the contract by joining militant groups at war with America constitutes treachery, Qadhi says, which is forbidden in Islam. Awlaki, by contrast, compares America with ancient Mecca, where the prophet’s followers were persecuted, forcing them to flee and later fight back.
Critics take issue with the technical nature of the debate. Qadhi’s students, they argue, could conclude that joining a militant group is permissible provided they renounce their citizenship. This is further complicated by his refusal to address whether the Islamist uprisings in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute legitimate jihads.
Saying yes would open the door to public recriminations, but denying the legitimacy of those insurgencies would fly in the face of Islamic law, says Andrew F. March, a professor at Yale who specializes in Islamic law. “The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are unambiguous examples of jihad or war against an outside invader,” March says. “There is no mainstream juridical opinion that says that Muslims cannot resist that.”
Under mounting pressure from students, Qadhi and another AlMaghrib scholar, Abu Eesa Niamatullah, considered teaching a course on the fiqh, or jurisprudence, of jihad. “What stopped us?” Niamatullah says. “Picture two bearded guys talking about the fiqh of jihad. We would be dead. We would be absolutely finished.”
On Oct. 18, Qadhi posted a 5,000-word essay on his blog, trying to jump-start a discussion on jihad. He argued that extremists cherry-pick verses from the Koran to justify actions antithetical to the faith, while United States policy also plays a central role in radicalizing Muslim youth. What Abdulmutallab did not hear at AlMaghrib, Qadhi lamented, “was a discourse regarding the current political and social ills that he felt so passionately about, and a frank dialogue about the Islamic method for correcting such ills.”
“It is an awkward position to be in,” he wrote of his situation. “How can one simultaneously fight against a powerful government, a pervasive and sensationalist-prone media and a group of overzealous, rash youth who are already predisposed to reject your message, because they view you as being a part of the establishment (while, ironically, the ‘establishment’ never ceases to view you as part of the radicals)?”
One week later, Qadhi was flying through Dallas. He had traveled free of hassle for nine months and seemed to be off the watch list. But now, border agents were stopping him. They wanted to ask a few questions. “Here we go again,” he said.
Qadhi’s ambiguous relationship with the government reflects a quandary facing the Obama administration: whether to engage with Muslims across the ideological spectrum. While many American Muslim leaders have been hit by accusations of extremism, Qadhi is a natural target. Self-described terrorism watchdogs refer to AlMaghrib as “Jihad U.,” and last year, a Fox News reporter called Qadhi a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
While Qadhi hardly seems the caricature of his critics’ rendering — the stealth Islamist plotting a shariah takeover of the White House — his views reflect a vision that many Americans would find objectionable. He hopes that the world will someday fully adhere to his faith, he said, conceding that it would most likely be “not in my lifetime.” Egypt’s recent uprising, he wrote on his blog, illustrates that change cannot come from militancy but “begins in the heart and in the home, and it shall eventually reach the streets and shake the foundations of government.”
As the administration confronts domestic radicalization, some government analysts say they have much to learn from clerics like Qadhi. “We’re trying to get our arms around how to engage with Yasir and people like him,” a senior counterterrorism official told me. “It’s a new issue.” One concern, officials told me, is their uncertainty about how world events might harden the thinking of clerics like Qadhi.
In the search for answers, the Obama administration has studied counterradicalization approaches overseas. In Europe, some policy makers argue that nonmilitant fundamentalists are the problem, not the solution, because their rigid interpretation of Islam fuels the very radicalization they profess to fight. The British government was rebuked for providing funds to nonmilitant Salafi organizations.
The U.S. Constitution would prevent such financing. But the question remains to what extent the administration will consult with nonviolent fundamentalists or help them by creating what Qadhi and others call “a safe space” in which Muslims are free to discuss controversial issues without the fear of repercussions.
“There is a way to stop extremism,” he claimed, “but it’s not palatable for Americans.”
Qadhi recently went live with a Web site devoted to issues of jihad. He is calling it The J Word.
Other American clerics have also begun to speak out, most notably Imam Zaid Shakir, who posted a widely read letter online aimed at dissuading the “would-be mujahid,” or warrior.
Gone are the days when Qadhi would dismiss teaming up with clerics of different schools. There were too few Salafis left in America. “I need help,” Qadhi told me one afternoon last month.
He was sitting in the library of his new home, where more than 10,000 books line the cherry-stained shelves. Memphis is a long way from the centers of Islamic thought — places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It would be folly, Qadhi said, to think that a young American cleric could solve the theological puzzles that have invited centuries of debate.
But he was certain of one thing: only America’s clerics could lead the way forward for their young flocks.
“American Muslims are at the forefront in battling Islamic extremism because they have everything to lose if anything else happens,” Qadhi said. “They’ll lose their American identity, and they’ll lose their prestige, whatever prestige remains of our religion that we would like to have in this land.”
Andrea Elliott (a.elliott-reporter@nytimes.com) is a reporter for The Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.
Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com)
Todd Heisler/The New York TimesYasir Qadhi spoke before the Eid al-Fitr prayer service in September at the Memphis Cook Convention Center.
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
On a chilly night in the dead of a New England winter, Yasir Qadhi hurried down the stairs of Yale University’s religious-studies department, searching urgently for a place to make a private call. A Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies, Qadhi was a fixture on the New Haven campus. He wore a trim beard and preppy polo shirts, blending in with the other graduate students as he lugged an overstuffed backpack into Blue State Coffee for his daily cappuccino. A popular teaching assistant, he exuded a sprightly intensity in class, addressing the undergraduates as “dudes.”
But Qadhi had another life. Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam, drawing a tide of followers in the fundamentalist movement known as Salafiya. Raised between Texas and Saudi Arabia, he seemed uniquely deft at balancing the edicts of orthodox Islam with the mores of contemporary America. To many young Muslims wrestling with conflicts between faith and country, Qadhi was a rock star. To law-enforcement agents, he was also a figure of interest, given his prominence in a community considered vulnerable to radicalization. Some officials, noting his message of nonviolence, saw him as an ally. Others were wary, recalling a time when Qadhi spouted a much harder, less tolerant line. On this night, however, it was Qadhi’s closest followers who were questioning him.
Two weeks earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a young Nigerian tried to blow up a jet headed for Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear. The suspect had been a student of Qadhi’s at the AlMaghrib Institute, which teaches Salafi theology in 21 American cities. F.B.I. agents were demanding interviews with Qadhi’s students. He urged them to cooperate, but many pushed back, and Qadhi found himself caught between two seemingly irreconcilable forces: a deeply suspicious government and a young following he could lose.
In the basement of the religious-studies building, Qadhi settled into an empty room, flipped open his MacBook Pro (encased in Islamic apple green) and dialed in to an Internet conference call with more than 150 of his AlMaghrib students. “I want to be very frank here,” Qadhi said, his voice tight with exasperation. “Do you really, really think that blowing up a plane is Islamic? I mean, ask yourself this.”
None of the students defended the plot, but some sympathized with the suspect, said several students who participated in the call, one of whom provided a recording to The Times. Was it not possible, they asked, that he had been set up? And how could they trust the F.B.I. after all they experienced — the post-9/11 raids, the monitoring of mosques, the sting operations aimed at Muslims? A few went as far as to say that they could not turn against a fellow Muslim who was trying to fight the oppressive policies of the United States.
Qadhi paced the worn, gray carpet. “There were even Muslims on that plane!” he said. “I mean, what world are you living in? How angry and overzealous are you that you simply forget about everything and you think that this is the way forward?”
Over the next year, Qadhi was thrust into the center of a crucial struggle — for the minds of his young students, the trust of his government and his own future as America was waking to a new threat. Since 2008, more than two dozen Muslim-Americans have joined or sought training with militant groups abroad. They are among the roughly 50 American citizens charged with terrorism-related offenses during that time. These suspects are a mixed lot. Some converted to Islam; others were raised in the faith. They come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and have migrated to different fronts in their global war, from Somalia to Pakistan. Their motivations differ, but the vast majority share two key attributes: a deep disdain for American foreign policy and an ideology rooted in Salafiya.
In the spectrum of the global Salafi movement, Qadhi, who is 36, speaks for the nonmilitant majority. Yet even as he has denounced Islamist violence — too late, some say — a handful of AlMaghrib’s former students have heeded the call. In addition to the underwear-bomb suspect, the 36,000 current and former students of Qadhi’s institute include Daniel Maldonado, a New Hampshire convert who was convicted in 2007 of training with an Al Qaeda-linked militia in Somalia; Tarek Mehanna, a 28-year-old pharmacist arrested for conspiring to attack Americans; and two young Virginia men held in Pakistan in 2009 for seeking to train with militants.
Qadhi said that none of those former students had approached him for counsel. But in recent years, countless others have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad. “We’re finding ourselves on the front line,” Qadhi said. “We don’t want to be there.”
During the months I spent in the insular world of young American Salafis, it became clear how pressing those questions are for many conservative Muslims who have come of age after 9/11. They have watched as their own country wages war in Muslim lands, bearing witness — via satellite television and the Internet — to the carnage in Iraq, the drone attacks in Pakistan and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. While the dozens of AlMaghrib students I interviewed condemned the tactics of militant groups, many share their basic grievances. They are searching for the correct Islamic response, turning to the ancient texts that guide their American lives. Their salvation, they say, hangs in the balance.
This is what makes Qadhi such a pivotal figure in a subculture that is little understood, even by the law-enforcement officials who monitor it. He is the rare Western cleric fluent in the language of militants, having spent nearly a decade studying Islam in Saudi Arabia, steeped in the same tradition that spawned Osama bin Laden’s splinter movement. Arguably few American theologians are better positioned to offer an authoritative rebuttal of extremist ideology. But to do that, Qadhi says he would need to address the thorny question of what kinds of militant actions are permitted by Islamic law. It is a forbidden topic for most American clerics, who even refrain from criticizing their country’s foreign policy for fear of being branded unpatriotic.
For an ultraconservative cleric like Qadhi, the picture is more complicated. Engaging in a detailed discussion of militant jihad — a complex subject informed by centuries of scholarship — risks drawing the scrutiny of law enforcement and, Qadhi fears, possible prosecution. If he were to acknowledge that Islamic law endorses the legitimacy of armed resistance against Western forces in Muslim territory, he could give a green light to the very students he claims he is trying to keep off the militant path. Yet by remaining silent, Qadhi says he is losing the credibility he needs to persuade them of his ultimate message: those fights are not theirs, as Westerners, to fight. “My hands are tied, and my tongue is silent,” he said.
Militant clerics abroad have filled the void, none more than Anwar al-Awlaki, the American preacher who is now believed to be in hiding in Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki has been linked to numerous plots against the United States, including the botched underwear bombing. He has taken to the Internet with stirring battle cries directed at young American Muslims. “Many of your scholars,” Awlaki warned last year, are “standing between you and your duty of jihad.”
It was near midnight last October when Qadhi’s teenage acolytes surrounded him at Thomas Sweet, an ice cream parlor in New Brunswick, N.J. Puma sneakers peeked out from under long robes. Suddenly the lyrics “shake your booty” blasted over the speakers. The young men leaned in closer, unfazed. Between helpings of mango-flavored sorbet, Qadhi pontificated on medieval Islamic theology. “We have a reasonable religion,” he said. “We’re a very logical, rational group of people.”
Qadhi’s students hang on his every word. They huddle around him — between classes, during meals, even in bathrooms — pinging him with questions. Their reliance on Qadhi is a product of contemporary Islam, a decentralized religion with no clear authority. Clerics with the highest level of scholarship are considered invaluable guides, especially in the secular West.
Qadhi was in New Jersey that weekend to teach a seminar on the concept of faith-led action. During a break, a dozen young men flocked to him once again. A soft-spoken engineer lobbed the first question: Wasn’t it hypocritical for the same Western imams who supported the Afghan resistance against the Soviets to now condemn the jihad against American troops? After all, another student asked, don’t civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan “have an obligation to do something to defend themselves?”
“I am not commenting on what they should or should not do,” Qadhi replied. “I am commenting on what you should do as American Muslims.”
They had heard it before: vote, educate your neighbors, protest peacefully. But is that what Islam commands when your people are dying? The question haunts some of Qadhi’s brightest students. One of the deepest Islamic principles is that of the ummah — the global community that unites all Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad was said to have likened it to the human body. If one part hurts, the whole body aches.
One of Qadhi’s followers, a feisty 27-year-old New Yorker, compared his experience of watching bombs fall on Iraq to what other Americans might feel at seeing “California being ravaged day in and day out. How would you feel?” He said he understood why Qadhi could not speak expansively about the conflicts overseas. Even so, he asked, who has greater credibility: the cleric living comfortably in America or the militant “in the cave” who sacrificed everything for his beliefs? “One thing about Awlaki no one can deny,” he said, “this man is fearless.”
That Awlaki carries weight with conservative Muslims underscores both the rivalry and proximity between militant and nonmilitant Salafis. Qadhi and Awlaki have parallel pasts: they were both born in the United States, spent part of their youth in the Middle East and entered the American Salafi movement just as it was on the rise. Awlaki later spent time in a Yemeni prison and emerged in 2008 calling for Muslims to fight the West. Recordings of his sermons continued to be sold at AlMaghrib seminars even after the students were ordered to stop in November 2009, following the Fort Hood shootings that Awlaki praised. Many of the students had grown up listening to him preach on his CDs. They trusted him then, one told me, why not trust him now?
For the tiny fraction of AlMaghrib’s students who have turned to violence, many are what Qadhi refers to as “sympathizers” of militant anger. These young, politically attuned Muslims are taken with events that don’t even register with most Americans, like two recent terrorism cases in New York that drew overflow crowds, Qadhi’s students among them. “If any Muslim is oppressed anywhere, the prevailing wisdom is that we should be standing up to help them — if we’re true believers,” says Ify Okoye, an AlMaghrib volunteer from Beltsville, Md. Sometimes, she added, “you feel guilty for living here.”
Many of today’s young American Muslims are the children of educated, successful immigrants whose passage to the United States came smoothly, in contrast to Europe’s largely working-class Muslims. For years, this bolstered the theory that American Muslim youth had been spared the alienation that fostered militancy in Europe.
But alienation has many faces. America’s youngest Muslims have grown up in a newly hostile country, with mounting opposition to the construction of mosques, a national movement seeking to ban courts from consulting shariah, or Islamic law, and rising hate crimes against Muslims. While some young Muslims have sought distance, abandoning Islam and even changing their names, others have experienced a spiritual awakening. The most conservative have found a home in Salafiya.
Salafis take their name from the Arabic word “salaf,” meaning “ancestor.” Their movement seeks to reclaim Islam’s lost glory by purging the faith of modern influences. Salafis model their lives after the first Muslims, beginning with the Prophet Muhammad, the seventh-century Meccan merchant to whom the Koran, it is believed, was revealed. They encourage a direct relationship with God through a literal reading of Islam’s primary sources — the Koran and the Sunnah, the prophet’s sayings and deeds.
Within the faith, Salafis have a reputation for intolerance and divisiveness. Like other religious conservatives, they tend to be adamant in their strict interpretations, shunning those who disagree. They denounce the veneration of saints, common among some Sufi sects. Many Salafi men insist on a fist-length beard and wear their trousers above the ankle in a desire to emulate the prophet.
While versions of Salafiya have persisted through history, its current iteration derives largely from the puritanical, 18th-century school of Saudi Islam known as Wahhabism. Today’s Salafis share the same basic theology but differ on how to manifest it. Many are apolitical, while another subset engages in politics as a nonviolent means to an end — namely, an Islamic theocracy. A third fringe group is devoted to militant jihad as the only path to Islamic rule and, ultimately, heaven. All three strains have surfaced in the West, where the movement has flourished among the children of immigrants. “It’s about this deep desire for certainty,” Bernard Haykel, a leading Salafi expert at Princeton University, says. “They are responding to a kind of disenchantment with the modern world.”
One balmy afternoon last spring, Qadhi walked across Yale’s campus, stepping around a throng of teenagers he dismissed, irascibly, as “the prefreshie tour.” He stopped before the tomblike building that houses the elite Skull and Bones society. Qadhi stared up at the brownstone facade, as if imagining the secrets it held. “You’re set for life,” he said, squinting through his sunglasses. “You get to thinking that everyone in the White House was a part of this, and it’s easy to see why people think there is a conspiracy.” After a pause, he added, “I don’t believe those theories.”
Qadhi is hardly disenchanted by the trappings of Western life. He has more than 10,000 fans on Facebook, hundreds of sermons on YouTube and a growing Twitter following. He drives a black, leather-interior Honda CR-V, often pulling into a Popeye’s drive-through for popcorn shrimp and gravy-slathered biscuits. He is planning a trip to Disney World with his wife, Rumana, and their four children.
Some of Qadhi’s followers find his ease with American culture perplexing, even suspicious. Yet it is his unapologetic comfort with America — his assertion that Muslims belong here as much as anyone — that has also made him a point of pride for many young Salafis. “We need to make sure that our children can live freely, and we’re going to fight for that freedom,” he told me one afternoon. “And every time I use that word, I need to make a disclaimer — I don’t mean ‘fight’ in the Tea Party sense of overthrowing the government.”
A stout five-foot-five, Qadhi chuckles easily and speaks rapidly, his hands punctuating his words with slicing motions. He is confident to a fault, often trailing a sentence with “God protect me from arrogance.” In class, he can be staid and professorial, with flashes of frivolity. He once implored students to “make love, not jihad.” He blends religious piety with entrepreneurial savvy. More than 20,000 people have signed up for “Like a Garment,” Qadhi’s new online seminar about sex in Islamic marriage. “I give explicit detail on how a man should give his wife an orgasm in a permissible manner,” he explained.
Qadhi’s platform is the AlMaghrib Institute, where he serves as academic dean. Founded in 2002 by Muhammad Alshareef, a Canadian cleric then living in Alexandria, Va., AlMaghrib is now an international enterprise, offering seminars in the United States, Canada and Britain. It reported nearly $1.2 million in revenue in 2009 and aspires to become a full-time Islamic seminary, albeit with an air of corporate America. During a recent retreat in the mountains of Ontario, AlMaghrib’s clerics whizzed along snowy bluffs on sleds drawn by Siberian huskies. “As long as you don’t touch them, it’s all right,” Qadhi said, referring to his interpretation of Islam’s ruling on dogs.
Last June, Qadhi and his family left New Haven for the outskirts of Memphis, settling into a spacious new ranch house in a well-tended subdivision. Still at work on his doctoral thesis, Qadhi found a job teaching Islamic studies at Rhodes College, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.
It is something of a curiosity that Qadhi, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s birthplace, now lives in a landscape marked by church steeples and “What would Jesus do?” bumper stickers. But the American South seems to agree with Qadhi, who often preaches on the Islamic principle of polite conduct. He takes to the gentility of his students at Rhodes, who call him sir. There is no better place to be Muslim than in America, he says, because as a minority “you feel your faith.” At times, he seems oddly Pollyanna-ish about his future in Tennessee, where someone tried to torch the site of a planned mosque last year. Qadhi concedes that living someplace like Saudi Arabia might be easier, but “it’s not my land at the end of the day,” he said. “I am an American. What else can I say?”
In Qadhi’s current incarnation, it is hard to make out the preacher he refers to as “the old me.” That Qadhi lives on via YouTube. In a television show recorded in Egypt in 2001, Qadhi, then 26, explains that one form of kufr, or disbelief, is adhering to man-made laws over God’s law. “Can you believe it?” he says. “A group of people coming together and voting — and the majority vote will then be the law of the land. What gives you the right to prohibit something or allow something?”
His young students nod their heads. “Islam is a complete way of life, a complete submission to Allah and to the rulings of Allah,” Qadhi said on the show. “It is a complete package.”
Long before Salafiya came to the United States, Qadhi’s father arrived in Houston from Karachi, Pakistan. It was 1963, and the young bachelor, Mazhar Kazi, enrolled at the University of Houston with his sights on a medical degree. One of the first foreign-born Muslims to settle in the area, Kazi took a job as a busboy and tended to his studies. He eventually married a microbiologist from Karachi and founded the area’s first mosque.
Their son, Yasir, was born in 1975, the second of two boys. When Yasir was 5, the Kazis moved to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, intent on exposing their sons to Islam and Arabic. Kazi took a job teaching medicine at the King Abdulaziz University. The family spent summers in Houston, but the boys were mostly shaped by life in Jedda, a blend of British expat culture and strict Saudi norms. Qadhi (who later changed the spelling of his surname to reflect the correct pronunciation) was precociously bookish. On weekends, he searched the local library for Tolstoy and Hemingway. By 15, Qadhi had memorized the Koran and graduated from high school, two years early, as valedictorian. Following his father’s wishes, he enrolled at the University of Houston in 1991, majoring in chemical engineering.
Qadhi had never attended a class with women and was shocked by campus life. He took refuge in the Muslim Students Association, a close-knit group of mostly Arab and South Asian immigrants. He was soon leading study circles and delivering effusive Friday sermons.
His introduction to Salafiya came in his sophomore year, when a Muslim convert from Colorado visited campus. A tall, regal man with a wispy white beard, the preacher displayed a command of Islam that Qadhi had never seen. When asked a question, he closed his eyes and recited a litany of evidence from the Koran and the Sunnah. This approach, a cornerstone of Salafiya, appealed to Qadhi’s empiricism. “It’s so disciplined and academic,” he said. Then 17, Qadhi began driving through the night to attend Salafi camping retreats, where legendary clerics lectured from Jordan and Saudi Arabia via teleconference. He drilled into Salafiya with a discipline that defied his adolescence. At a retreat in Boulder, Colo., some of Qadhi’s friends skipped out to go fishing. When they returned, Qadhi refused to share his notes. “It was very clear that this guy was going to become something and we weren’t,” said one of the friends, Amad Shaikh.
At another retreat, Qadhi fell under the sway of Ali al-Timimi. A cancer researcher from Maryland, Timimi had studied Islam in Saudi Arabia and helped spread the American Salafi movement, which began in the early 1980s as a patchwork of nonprofit groups subsidized by the Saudi government. Through shipments of free Korans and other texts, Salafi doctrine developed a strong presence at American mosques, prisons and Islamic schools. By the 1990s, the Salafi community numbered in the low thousands.
American Salafiya mirrored the movement abroad. It was largely apolitical until the first gulf war, when the United States set up a base in Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops on Saudi soil, home to Islam’s holiest sites, was a defining moment for Salafis, giving rise to a political awakening and fueling bin Laden’s militancy. In America, some Salafi clerics began calling for political action against the Saudi regime, while others remained loyal. Qadhi was torn.
But on other matters, he steered his fellow students in Houston toward a strict code. They instituted sex segregation, policing each other for signs of deviation. When a Pakistani student organization sponsored a rock concert, Qadhi and his friends distributed fliers warning the crowds that Islam prohibited music. They did not see themselves as stakeholders in America, Shaikh recalled. Their goal was to spread Islam and then migrate to Muslim lands. “It was almost cultish,” Shaikh said.
For all his stridency, Qadhi broke one significant rule: he fell in love outside the bounds of arranged marriage. The young woman, Rumana, was a quiet, graceful college student of Indian descent. But Qadhi’s parents had their sights on other marriage candidates, and the courtship faded.
During college, jihad loomed in the backdrop of Qadhi’s life. Like many of his peers, he was taken by the legend of the American Muslims who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets. Back then, talk of jihad carried little taboo, given the United States’ role in financing the resistance. Qadhi knew several men who later fought in Bosnia. Noble as it seemed, he said, “I thought there were more productive ways for me to spend my life.”
He had long thought of becoming a Muslim scholar. Shortly before graduating, Qadhi applied to the Islamic University of Medina, a leading Salafi institution. After enrolling in the fall of 1996, he called Rumana. “I can’t live without you,” he told her. “Are you willing to live a difficult life?”
Qadhi and his new wife settled into a spare apartment, and he plunged into round-the-clock study. Life in Medina deepened his faith while narrowing his tolerance for the outside world. He came to identify with political Salafiya, denouncing secular democracies and declaring Sufis and Shia “heretics.” He took up the Palestinian cause — a pathway, he said, to the anti-Semitic rhetoric that ran rampant in his circles.
In the summer of 2001, Qadhi traveled to London to teach at an Islamic conference. At the end of a class, he went into a diatribe arguing that Israel did not rightfully belong to the Jewish people. “Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews,” Qadhi said, telling the audience to read a book about “the hoax” of the Holocaust. He went on to say that most Islamic-studies professors in the United States are Jews who “want to destroy us.”
Looking back, Qadhi said he fell down a slippery slope where criticism of Israel gave way to attacks on Jews. Beneath the vitriol, he said, was a sense of victimization — that non-Muslims were to blame for the afflictions of the Muslim world. “When you’re young and naïve, it’s easier to fall prey to such things,” said Qadhi, who publicly recanted years later. Last August, he joined a delegation of American imams and rabbis on a visit to the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, which he said left him “sick” and more embarrassed by his Hitler remarks.
“It was a pre-9/11 world,” he said. “The circumstances did not dictate that we think critically.”
Two months after the London episode, Qadhi was walking to his mosque in Medina when a friend came running. “Yasir, Yasir, did you hear what happened?” the young man called out. Qadhi rushed to a neighbor’s apartment in search of a television, just as the second tower collapsed.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the American Salafi movement fell apart. As federal agents raided Muslim mosques, charities and businesses, the most prominent Salafis vanished from clerical life or landed in prison. Some of the movement’s key figures were convicted on charges unrelated to terrorism, ranging from tax evasion to visa-immigration violations. “All of these people were jailed for different things, but if you look at them collectively, you see the Salafi movement,” Idris Palmer, a onetime Salafi activist, told me.
Law-enforcement officials say that there was no policy singling out Salafis. They were rushing to root out a new enemy, with little time to grasp the theological differences separating nonviolent fundamentalists from the creed of the hijackers. Many agents did not even know what a Salafi was “and still don’t,” says Christopher Heffelfinger, a security analyst who consults with the government. Northern Virginia — then a nexus of the American Salafi movement given its proximity to the Saudi Embassy — became a focal point. Anwar al-Awlaki was still preaching in Virginia when federal agents raided 15 local Islamic offices and homes. “It’s a war against Muslims and Islam,” Awlaki bellowed in an audio address. “It’s happening right here in America.”
The most high-profile Virginia case involved Qadhi’s onetime mentor, Ali al-Timimi, who regularly preached at a Falls Church mosque. At a dinner five days after 9/11, Timimi and some of the mosque’s young congregants discussed how to respond. Prosecutors later accused Timimi of spurring the men to wage jihad against American troops overseas, saying they practiced shooting at a paintball facility. At issue in the case against Timimi were his words: his lawyers argued that he recommended that the men move to Muslim countries, while prosecutors said he was inciting jihad. They highlighted comments by Timimi unrelated to the dinner, including politically charged speeches and a statement in which he celebrated the Columbia Shuttle disaster. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
From Medina, Qadhi followed the case closely. For American clerics, he said, the message was clear: those who engage in controversial rhetoric are treading on thin ice. While 9/11 had shaken Qadhi’s movement, it also unsettled him personally. “No matter how strange this sounds, after having lived in Saudi Arabia for so long and also in America for so long, I could fully understand the fear, the anger, the frustration, the paranoia on both sides,” Qadhi says. “I could understand ‘they’ and ‘us.’ ”
Qadhi began to wrestle with some of his own beliefs. It troubled him that Salafiya, even in its nonmilitant form, had helped shape the ideology of groups like Al Qaeda. “What type of Islam are we going to teach people?” he recalled thinking. “This isolationist Islam? This Islam of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ — is that healthy? Is that what my religion is?”
At the time, Qadhi was on track to become Medina’s first American doctoral candidate. He wondered if he had a more promising future in America, where the Salafi movement, bereft of leaders, was in crisis. From Houston, Qadhi’s father — who had retired and was volunteering as a prison chaplain — encouraged his son to leave Saudi Arabia, which he believed had left Qadhi “totally brainwashed.”
“I said, ‘Come back to America; this is your land,’ ” Kazi said in an interview at his home, sitting in what he called his “Archie Bunker chair.”
In 2004, Qadhi applied to Yale. Some of his contemporaries saw the move as strategic. “It was a stepping stone,” Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told me. “He knew that with that Yale ticket, people would take him more seriously.”
Qadhi’s Saudi professors were aghast that he would switch to a Western university to study Islam. Yale’s professors were also surprised. The religious-studies department had never taken on a graduate of the Saudi educational system. “You admit someone from Saudi Arabia, you don’t know how much intolerance you let into an American university,” says Frank Griffel, a professor of Islamic studies.
But Qadhi impressed Griffel as “profoundly intelligent” and willing to engage in critical thinking. At Medina, Qadhi’s studies revolved around the search for an absolute religious truth. At Yale, the line of inquiry was markedly different. In Qadhi’s first class with Griffel in the fall of 2005, the subject was a 12th-century Sufi jurist. “You, Yasir, probably know more about this guy,” Griffel said. “But we’re going to study how to study him.” Qadhi was struck by this analytical approach. “The question is more historical in nature — it’s about where did this idea come from, how did it affect later ideas,” Qadhi said.
For Qadhi, the Koran remained the unequivocal word of God. But he began to think more critically about the “man-made” canon that informed Islamic theology. So much of Qadhi’s intransigence — especially toward other Muslim sects — was based on the view that his tradition was divinely ordained. He came to see Salafiya as yet another “human development” that was handed down over generations and therefore subject to imperfection. “I realized that, in many issues, only God knows the ultimate truth,” he says.
Qadhi landed on the American preaching circuit with force, and his following skyrocketed among young Salafis. America’s leading clerics were converts who had risen to prominence because they could translate an intricate theology into an American vernacular. Qadhi did the same but as the proud son of Muslim immigrants. Plus he was a Salafi — or so it seemed.
In July 2006, at a conference in Copenhagen, Qadhi did the unthinkable: he shook a woman’s hand in a spontaneous challenge to her perception of fundamentalists, he said. The woman, Mona Eltahawy, a columnist on Arab and Muslim issues, wrote about the exchange, which became known in Salafi circles as the “when-Yasir-met-Mona moment.” The handshake drew a death threat from a man in London.
The following year, Qadhi further pushed the limits, making a pact of “mutual respect and cooperation” with American clerics of the Sufi order, Salafiya’s longtime enemy. Several of Qadhi’s former Saudi professors publicly assailed him, a signal he had become too prominent for them to ignore. Qadhi began to step away from the Salafi label, rebranding his movement “orthodox with a capital O.” While he remained devoted to Salafiya’s core tenets, his followers struggled to keep pace with his changes. Others remained skeptical. “Is he being instrumental and opportunistic, or has he really abandoned some of these Salafi beliefs?” said Haykel, the Princeton professor. “He’s engaged in an incredible performance of reinvention that I’m not sure he’ll be able to pull off.” The same question hovered over Qadhi’s institute, whose founder, Alshareef, once gave a sermon titled “Why the Jews Were Cursed.”
Meanwhile, as Qadhi honed a new message, he was roundly dismissed on jihadist forums as a “sellout.” One detractor was Samir Khan, a young blogger from North Carolina who eventually moved to Yemen and now runs the Al Qaeda magazine, Inspire, according to law-enforcement officials.
While Khan was still living in the United States in 2007, he wrote several blog posts about Qadhi. “He has done good, and we do not deny this,” read one. But Qadhi’s “wrongdoings,” he continued, “can destroy the Muslims.”
Suspicion surrounded Qadhi. In February 2006, he was crossing from Canada into the United States when American border agents pulled aside his van and ushered his family into a room. An agent told Qadhi he was “waiting for permission from Washington” to let Qadhi back into the country, he recalled. They were freed more than five hours later.
It was the first sign that Qadhi was on the terrorist watch list. From then on, he and his family traveled separately. “I’m not going to be humiliated in front of my kids,” he said. At airports, he became accustomed to long interviews with border agents, who downloaded his laptop hard drive and searched his cellphone. They photocopied notes he kept on his sermons and even asked for his definition of jihad. F.B.I. agents in New Haven questioned him about two American acquaintances who had been charged with terrorism-related offenses. Qadhi said he knew nothing of their activities, but the agents pressed him to report on anyone who expressed views that “might be of interest,” he recalled. He refused, saying, “This is America, not Soviet Russia or East Germany.”
Increasingly, Qadhi felt backed into a corner. In August 2006, at a meeting for Muslim leaders in Houston, he walked up to Daniel W. Sutherland, a Homeland Security official. “Hi, I’m a pacifist Salafi,” Qadhi said to him. Looking stunned, Sutherland sat and talked with Qadhi for more than an hour.
Then in May 2008, Qadhi received an invitation from Quintan Wiktorowicz, an analyst for a government agency that was hosting a conference on counterradicalization. (Wiktorowicz was recently named a senior director at the National Security Council.) In attendance were British and American intelligence officials, including the director of Homeland Security at the time, Michael Chertoff.
During a break, Qadhi spotted a Houston acquaintance who happened to work for Chertoff. “I said, ‘Don’t you think it’s ironic that on the one hand, you’re reaching out for my expertise and wanting my help, and on the other hand, you’re harassing and intimidating me as if I’m a potential terrorist?’ ”
In the West, jihad is often depicted as a self-contained, violent cause. But in Qadhi’s world, it exists within a panoply of complex and overlapping issues. The most immediate question is not whether to fight overseas but how to make peace living in the pluralistic West.
Debates pivot on arcane theological points from the ninth century, a time when religious empires reigned, not secular nations. Classical scholars reference a world divided between dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, and dar al-harb, the land of war. But which land is America?
“If we’re not at war, why is America killing Muslims throughout the world?” says Basil Gohar, 30, who has studied with Qadhi. “If we are at war, how can we live in America peacefully?”
Even absent the question of war, Western Salafis ponder their loyalties. Internet forums buzz with talk about the concept of al-walaa wal-baraa, which is rooted in Koranic verses dictating allegiance to Muslims over non-Muslims. Qadhi’s students are divided over whether to vote, pay taxes that support the military or even celebrate Thanksgiving. “These sorts of things, they are the fault lines,” says Okoye, the student from Maryland.
Qadhi sees in his students an earlier version of himself — the passionate Salafi who took comfort in a black-and-white world. He prods them to think “in colors” and find a balance between loyalty to Islam and to America. He urges them to pay taxes and vote, drawing the line at military service, given Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is no draft,” he said. “Thank God for that.”
For Qadhi and his students, nothing tested those loyalties more than the events after the underwear-bomb plot of December 2009. Whenever a terrorism suspect is identified, AlMaghrib runs the name through its database of alumni to see if there is a match. “Oh, my God,” Qadhi said when a colleague told him that the 23-year-old suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been his student.
Qadhi searched his memory. The son of a prominent banker, Abdulmutallab had been living and studying in London. He had taken two AlMaghrib classes before attending the institute’s 16-day Houston conference in 2008. There, Abdulmutallab kept mostly to himself. “He never got into political issues,” says Abdul-Malik Ryan, 36, a lawyer from Chicago who studied with him every morning.
As media outlets discovered the connection, AlMaghrib’s leaders rushed to contain a crisis. The institute’s vice president, Waleed Basyouni, reached out to the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. Agents wanted to interview all 156 students who attended the 2008 conference. “I said, ‘If you start going to our students and terrifying them, and they stop coming, we will close down,’ ” he recalled telling the agents. “ ‘You would be pushing the students to go to basements, small circles, on the Internet. So it’s in your benefit that this organization stay open.’ ”
In previous cases, F.B.I. agents dropped by the homes of some AlMaghrib students, unannounced. This time, they issued a subpoena but agreed to arrange interviews in advance and to send female agents to question the women. The clerics urged the students to cooperate, but many balked, prompting Qadhi’s 50-minute conference call from Yale.
Veering between high-pitched emotion and tedious scholarship, Qadhi argued that the case presented no conflict of loyalties because Abdulmutallab, by all appearances, committed a crime, violating both American and Islamic law.
But, one student asked, what about America’s transgressions? Why was Qadhi focused on the militants? He responded that he had bluntly criticized American policies to State Department and other officials, telling them “the root cause of this terrorism is terrorism perpetrated at the state level.”
Even so, Qadhi urged his students to “chill out” and use common sense. “You need to look at the repercussions of what you are going to do to yourself, to your family, to your society and to the Muslims that are around you,” he said.
The students cooperated, and in subsequent meetings with the F.B.I., an agent told Qadhi and Basyouni that the bureau did not consider AlMaghrib a terrorist threat, said the clerics. (An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment about Qadhi or the investigation.)
The Abdulmutallab episode drew a new line in the long-distance battle between Qadhi and Awlaki. The Yemeni-American cleric announced that Abdulmutallab’s operation was in retaliation for American “cruise missiles and cluster bombs.” By then, the United States had authorized the assassination of Awlaki, provoking outrage among many of Qadhi’s students.
Qadhi seemed to be riding a pendulum of self-preservation. If he lurched too far toward appeasing the government, he risked losing his base.
That March, Qadhi rose before a crowd of thousands in Elizabeth, N.J., to finally speak about Awlaki. “I am against this preacher when he tells our youth to become militant against this country while being citizens to this country,” Qadhi told the packed auditorium.
“But when my government comes and says, ‘We’re allowed to take him out; we’re allowed to kill him; we’re allowed to assassinate him,’ I also put my foot down, and I say to my own government, ‘Shame on you!’ ” The audience listened raptly. “Be angry every time a bomb is dropped on innocent civilians in the name of the war on terror,” Qadhi bellowed. “Be angry every time our tax dollars are spent to oppress yet another group of innocent Palestinians. Be angry every time more draconian measures are utilized against us in this greatest democracy on earth.”
Never before had Qadhi so forcefully condemned America’s policies in public. But “channel that anger,” he continued, “in a productive manner.” He urged a “jihad of the tongue, a jihad of the pen, a jihad that is not a military jihad.”
American Muslims, Qadhi told the audience, needed to abide by the laws of their country, understanding that had they been born in Palestine or Iraq, their “responsibilities would be different.” He did not elaborate.
It is this kind of ambiguity that gnaws at some of Qadhi’s students. “We just get wishy-washy nonanswers,” one female student told me, adding that Qadhi’s “jihad of the tongue” was unconvincing. Being martyred in the battlefield, she said, is “romantic,” while “lobbying your congressman is not.”
The call to prayer soars through the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Houston, its lobby adorned with a fresco of the Texan flag. Every summer, AlMaghrib’s most-devoted students convene here for a two-week Ilm Summit, transforming the ballroom floor — a corporate tableaux of overstuffed sofas and dim lighting — into a version of Islamic utopia.
“Ilm,” in Arabic, means “knowledge.” From dawn to night, the students immerse themselves in advanced Islamic theology and Koran recitation under the guidance of Qadhi and other clerics. The men favor long tunics, and some women wear niqabs, the full-face veil. Most are upper-middle-class college students of South Asian descent who pay $1,500 to attend. To the hotel’s Hispanic waiters, they seem otherworldly. The men and women eat, study and even ride the elevators separately.
Yet the so-called AlMaghribis upend easy stereotypes. The women are a forceful presence in class and can be spotted on breaks engaging in fierce arm-wrestling matches. The most dominant trait among the men is a quintessentially American geekiness. Qadhi, like many of his students, is a “Star Trek” fan. His lectures are laid out on PowerPoint as students crouch over laptops. Between classes, talk often turns to the latest AlMaghribi courtship.
The mood darkened last July after Qadhi announced that agents from the local F.B.I. office would be dropping by for a “roundtable discussion.” The ballroom fell to a hush as Qadhi and Basyouni led Brad Deardorff, supervisory special agent of the Houston division, to the stage. He smiled tentatively as Qadhi began a quick speech about the need to counteract extremism. Deardorff talked about the history of militant movements, saying there was “no standard profile for an Islamist terrorist.”
Then came the students’ questions, submitted in writing. “How do you expect us to help you” read one question, “when there are F.B.I. informants in our mosques?”
“Jeez, that’s a tough question,” Deardorff said. “We don’t target mosques. We do collect domestic intelligence. But mosques are buildings. Mosques don’t conspire. Mosques don’t blow things up.”
The students stared at him incredulously. It struck some as ironic that Qadhi would engage in a public discussion with the F.B.I. about “terrorism” — which they deemed a loaded word — when the underlying theological issues remained off limits. In a poll last year on Qadhi’s blog, Muslim Matters, participants ranked “jihad” as the No. 1 subject in which they wanted academic instruction.
There are several kinds of jihad, which is translated to mean “striving in the path of God.” While progressive Muslims emphasize the spiritual form, Qadhi and other conservatives say that the majority of the Koran’s references to jihad are to military struggle. Qadhi’s interpretation makes him neither a hardline militant nor a pure pacifist. While he unequivocally denounces violence against civilians, he believes Muslims have the right to defend themselves from attack. But he says “offensive jihad”— the spread of the Islamic state by force — is permissible only when ordered by a legitimate caliph, or global Muslim ruler, which is nonexistent in today’s world.
Such fine distinctions were less pronounced before 9/11, when Qadhi and others preached openly about the glory of Islam’s early military triumphs. In a decade-old sermon about one of Islam’s landmark battles, Qadhi said, “once a prophet has become ready for jihad, for fighting, then he will not take off his armor until he has actually met the enemy.”
By the time he returned to the United States in 2005, AlMaghrib had canceled a popular class on Islam’s military history, and its instructors largely avoided current events. Some students inferred from Qadhi’s silence a tacit support for militant groups. “Everyone was always like: ‘We know he believes it. He can’t say it publicly,’ ” recalled Lauren Morgan, who is 26 and a former student of Qadhi’s. She said she and other students had openly sympathized with militants. “I think if you’re going down the Salafi interstate, the jihadi exit is open for you,” Morgan said. “It’s there.”
Many students first heard Qadhi denounce jihadist movements almost a year after the London bombings. That same month, June 2006, AlMaghrib released a statement calling terrorism “a perversion of the true Islamic teachings.”
The central contest between Qadhi and militants like Awlaki hinges on a rather abstruse point: how to define America in Islamic terms. Qadhi likens his country to Abyssinia, the seventh-century African kingdom that gave refuge to the prophet’s followers. In exchange for upholding the laws of the land, they were allowed to worship freely — a contract Qadhi equates to an American passport or visa. Breaking the contract by joining militant groups at war with America constitutes treachery, Qadhi says, which is forbidden in Islam. Awlaki, by contrast, compares America with ancient Mecca, where the prophet’s followers were persecuted, forcing them to flee and later fight back.
Critics take issue with the technical nature of the debate. Qadhi’s students, they argue, could conclude that joining a militant group is permissible provided they renounce their citizenship. This is further complicated by his refusal to address whether the Islamist uprisings in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute legitimate jihads.
Saying yes would open the door to public recriminations, but denying the legitimacy of those insurgencies would fly in the face of Islamic law, says Andrew F. March, a professor at Yale who specializes in Islamic law. “The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are unambiguous examples of jihad or war against an outside invader,” March says. “There is no mainstream juridical opinion that says that Muslims cannot resist that.”
Under mounting pressure from students, Qadhi and another AlMaghrib scholar, Abu Eesa Niamatullah, considered teaching a course on the fiqh, or jurisprudence, of jihad. “What stopped us?” Niamatullah says. “Picture two bearded guys talking about the fiqh of jihad. We would be dead. We would be absolutely finished.”
On Oct. 18, Qadhi posted a 5,000-word essay on his blog, trying to jump-start a discussion on jihad. He argued that extremists cherry-pick verses from the Koran to justify actions antithetical to the faith, while United States policy also plays a central role in radicalizing Muslim youth. What Abdulmutallab did not hear at AlMaghrib, Qadhi lamented, “was a discourse regarding the current political and social ills that he felt so passionately about, and a frank dialogue about the Islamic method for correcting such ills.”
“It is an awkward position to be in,” he wrote of his situation. “How can one simultaneously fight against a powerful government, a pervasive and sensationalist-prone media and a group of overzealous, rash youth who are already predisposed to reject your message, because they view you as being a part of the establishment (while, ironically, the ‘establishment’ never ceases to view you as part of the radicals)?”
One week later, Qadhi was flying through Dallas. He had traveled free of hassle for nine months and seemed to be off the watch list. But now, border agents were stopping him. They wanted to ask a few questions. “Here we go again,” he said.
Qadhi’s ambiguous relationship with the government reflects a quandary facing the Obama administration: whether to engage with Muslims across the ideological spectrum. While many American Muslim leaders have been hit by accusations of extremism, Qadhi is a natural target. Self-described terrorism watchdogs refer to AlMaghrib as “Jihad U.,” and last year, a Fox News reporter called Qadhi a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
While Qadhi hardly seems the caricature of his critics’ rendering — the stealth Islamist plotting a shariah takeover of the White House — his views reflect a vision that many Americans would find objectionable. He hopes that the world will someday fully adhere to his faith, he said, conceding that it would most likely be “not in my lifetime.” Egypt’s recent uprising, he wrote on his blog, illustrates that change cannot come from militancy but “begins in the heart and in the home, and it shall eventually reach the streets and shake the foundations of government.”
As the administration confronts domestic radicalization, some government analysts say they have much to learn from clerics like Qadhi. “We’re trying to get our arms around how to engage with Yasir and people like him,” a senior counterterrorism official told me. “It’s a new issue.” One concern, officials told me, is their uncertainty about how world events might harden the thinking of clerics like Qadhi.
In the search for answers, the Obama administration has studied counterradicalization approaches overseas. In Europe, some policy makers argue that nonmilitant fundamentalists are the problem, not the solution, because their rigid interpretation of Islam fuels the very radicalization they profess to fight. The British government was rebuked for providing funds to nonmilitant Salafi organizations.
The U.S. Constitution would prevent such financing. But the question remains to what extent the administration will consult with nonviolent fundamentalists or help them by creating what Qadhi and others call “a safe space” in which Muslims are free to discuss controversial issues without the fear of repercussions.
“There is a way to stop extremism,” he claimed, “but it’s not palatable for Americans.”
Qadhi recently went live with a Web site devoted to issues of jihad. He is calling it The J Word.
Other American clerics have also begun to speak out, most notably Imam Zaid Shakir, who posted a widely read letter online aimed at dissuading the “would-be mujahid,” or warrior.
Gone are the days when Qadhi would dismiss teaming up with clerics of different schools. There were too few Salafis left in America. “I need help,” Qadhi told me one afternoon last month.
He was sitting in the library of his new home, where more than 10,000 books line the cherry-stained shelves. Memphis is a long way from the centers of Islamic thought — places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It would be folly, Qadhi said, to think that a young American cleric could solve the theological puzzles that have invited centuries of debate.
But he was certain of one thing: only America’s clerics could lead the way forward for their young flocks.
“American Muslims are at the forefront in battling Islamic extremism because they have everything to lose if anything else happens,” Qadhi said. “They’ll lose their American identity, and they’ll lose their prestige, whatever prestige remains of our religion that we would like to have in this land.”
Andrea Elliott (a.elliott-reporter@nytimes.com) is a reporter for The Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.
Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com)
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