From the Apr 24 – Apr 30, 2003 issue

News

The Outsider

How an Islamic fundamentalist from Saudi Arabia became a liberal critic of U.S. foreign policy--and Seattle Central Community College's most popular professor.

by Sandeep Kaushik

Mohammad al-Madani does not know exactly how old he is. He could be 43, he says, or perhaps 45. They didn't keep birth records in the Saudi Arabia of the late '50s, and such were the quirks of his upbringing--at his father's whim, he was separated from his mother at birth and raised in the home of his aged maternal grandmother--that he will never know the actual year of his birth.

Al-Madani could have grown up to be Osama bin Laden. The similarities are striking: Roughly the same age, both were Saudi sons of wealth and privilege. Both had foreign-born mothers and self-made fathers who parlayed close ties to Saudi Arabia's ruling family into immense wealth and status. As teenagers, both were driven, by the vapidity and corruption of the society in which they were raised, into embracing utopian dreams of Islamic fundamentalism. Both, because of their outspoken attacks on the Saudi monarchy, raised the ire of the authorities, went into exile, and were ultimately disowned by their families and their country.

But bin Laden went to Afghanistan to join the jihad against the Soviets, founded al Qaeda--and you know the rest. Al-Madani came instead to the United States, where he abandoned his religious faith as he evolved into a fierce proponent of the secular humanist and indelibly Western values of the American left. He eventually became one of the most popular--and radical--professors at Seattle Central Community College, itself a hotbed of leftist thought in a city about as far to the left as American cities get.

A neat, trim man, Mohammad al-Madani is hazel-eyed, with a pale, slightly ruddy complexion, wavy brown hair, and a beard fading to gray. His English is accented, though not heavily, his voice soft yet slightly raspy. As he talks, he pauses often to sip from endless cups of black coffee or to take long pulls off the American Spirit cigarettes he chain-smokes. He speaks in abstractions, about ideas and philosophies. He looks and sounds, in short, exactly like what he now is--a Western intellectual well out of step with mainstream post-9/11 American political and cultural life, but at home in the hermetic, quaintly impractical, left-leaning world of the American professoriate.

Over a series of regular Friday afternoon meetings in the comfortably divey surroundings of Bill's Off Broadway, the Capitol Hill watering hole where he holds weekly independent study seminars for his advanced students, I get al-Madani to tell me the story of his upbringing. He's more interested in assessing the post-9/11 threat to civil liberties posed by John Ashcroft's relentless pursuit of the terrorist boogeymen within, he says, but politely honors my requests.

"No question, the legendary Ibn Saud, who through conquest and consolidation created the state of Saudi Arabia in 1932. The al-Saud family, now numbering over 2,000 descendants, still rules unchecked the desert kingdom. Saudi Arabia has long been a close ally of the American government, in spite of its repressive monarchy and its continuing

efforts to fund and promote the spread of radical Islam through the rest of the Muslim world. It's a deal of mutual interests; the U.S. gets access to Saudi oil, and in return the Saudi regime enjoys the protection of American troops.

For his loyalty, and for helping to build one of the king's palaces, al-Madani's father was granted a vast tract of empty land on the outskirts of what was then the small port city of Jidda. According to family lore, his royal patrons allowed Ishmael to claim everything from where he stood at the city's edge to where he could no longer see a man walking away from him across the desert. Whether the story is literally true or not, as the city expanded over ensuing decades into a bustling commercial center, Ishmael became fabulously wealthy.

The elder al-Madani conducted himself as befitted a Saudi patriarch, ruling his household with absolute authority, marrying and divorcing at whim. Though Ishmael never had more than two wives at any given time, Mohammad says his father married at least eight women (Mohammad's mother was the seventh) and perhaps more. Mohammad knows of 17 full and half-siblings, but has heard his father had more wives, and children, in Yemen and Sudan. He tells me a story: As a teenager he once stopped in the local market to give a crazy beggar-woman a few coins. A nearby shopkeeper, witnessing his charity, called out to ask if he was trying to make amends for his father's sins. "Didn't you know?" the merchant asked the clearly confused young man. "She was your father's first wife." She went insane, the shopkeeper said, when Ishmael refused to allow her to raise her first son, and so Ishmael divorced her.

Mohammad was not raised by his mother. For reasons his father never chose to explain, he was raised instead by his maternal grandmother in Medina, one of the holy cities of Islam. His grandmother, an Algerian refugee, was poor, but loving and generous. He did not return to his father's house until his early teens. By then it was the early 1970s, the heyday of OPEC. A seemingly endless stream of petrodollars flooded the country, rapidly transforming a poor, nomadic tribal society into a wealthy, urbanized welfare state. At first, al-Madani says, his father's wealth and power were intoxicating. He remembers seeing his father bet, and lose, a six-story building in a card game.

But the excitement soon wore off. For teenagers, Saudi Arabia offered few diversions. Almost all of the television programming was religious; movie theaters and dance clubs were illegal; alcohol was banned. "There was really nothing for teenagers to do to occupy themselves, and in that kind of vacuum, you turn to religion big-time," al-Madani says.

He and about a dozen friends began meeting with the local imam daily after prayers, studying and memorizing the Koran, and imbibing the virulent tenets of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, the puritanical and aggressively chauvinistic interpretation of the faith that dominates Saudi Arabia and, backed by wealthy Saudi patrons and the Saudi government, is rapidly spreading through the rest of the Islamic world. Wahhabis see not only other religions, but also more moderate Islamic sects, as heretical. The teachings of the prophet, as seen through the extreme Wahhabi prism, seemed to contradict what al-Madani was seeing around him in Saudi Arabia. "In the Koran it says God created everybody equal, and I remember thinking God doesn't seem to know about this place," he says.

Soon the apparent disjunctures between the lessons of the holy book and reality began to take on political overtones. Several times when discussing this period of his life, al-Madani invokes a specific passage of the Koran that he says shaped his early political views. It is from the 27th sura, and though it has been 20 years since he has read the Koran, al-Madani remembers it clearly. It reads: "Kings when they enter a city spoil it, and abase the mightiest of its people: and in like manner will these also do."

Al-Madani accepted his imam's interpretation of the passage. The Koran says kings are bad. Saudi Arabia is a kingdom. Therefore, the Saudi monarchy was inherently un-Islamic, and needed to be replaced.

"I learned not to think," al-Madani says of this period in his life. "I learned to wait until the imam interpreted things for me." Saudi Arabia's rulers weren't religious enough, al-Madani was taught, and they weren't authoritarian in the right way. "Our solution was to advocate for a total return, 1,500 years backwards, to a pure Islam."

Al-Madani was still young, though, and his worldview was forming but it had not yet hardened. His dangerous political opinions remained private, limited to his small circle of friends. And while he found an outlet in his faith, he increasingly chafed under his father's authority, and sought a means of escape. In the mid-'70s, unbeknownst to his parents, he applied for, and received, government funding to study abroad. He was accepted at Temple University in Philadelphia, and went in 1976. His father did not object; 17 of his other children remained behind to do his bidding.

Al-Madani says he knew nothing about the U.S. before going; the only American television show he'd ever seen was Bonanza. When he arrived, it was "a total culture shock. It was awesome," he says, "a new world." Within months, though, as the first rush of cultural freedom wore off, al-Madani felt overwhelmed. "I couldn't comprehend the culture, and then the guilt set in big-time." His core beliefs in flux, he became deeply depressed, and nearly gave up and returned home. Instead, though, he eventually transferred to tiny Muskingum College in the small town of New Concord, Ohio, where the cultural distractions were considerably less and he was one of a handful of Middle Eastern students. At first he tried to cling to his faith, but it was a losing battle. In his early days at Muskingum, al-Madani remembers seeing the Christian chapel on campus and throwing a fit. He demanded school authorities provide space for a mosque so he and his friends could pray on campus. They did, turning over a room in one of the dorms for the Islamic students to pray. Al-Madani says they set it up as a makeshift mosque, but then none of them ever actually prayed there. They were too busy, he recalls fondly, drinking, talking politics, and trying to score with female students.

By the time he graduated in 1981 with a math degree, al-Madani had been transformed into a secular, westernized liberal. The rapidity with which al-Madani jettisoned the repressive tenets of his faith reveals something important about the United States' current conflict with Islamic radicals. For all of bin Laden's geopolitical justifications for attacking "Crusaders"--because America has troops in Saudi Arabia or because we support the Israelis in their conflict with the Palestinians--what Islamic radicals really fear (as well they should) is the global spread and transformative power of American culture, with its emphasis on pluralistic tolerance, radical individualistic free expression, and, not incidentally, the pleasures of the flesh. That Internet cafes in Karachi and other Muslim cities are filled with young Muslim men viewing American porn is not lost on bin Laden and his ilk. They fear that Western culture could change the whole Islamic world, just as it changed al-Madani.

Despite his changed worldview, al-Madani returned to Saudi Arabia, where he secured a university teaching position. But now, having tasted Western freedoms, he saw his homeland from a completely different perspective. The contrasts with the U.S. were stark. "Civil liberties do not exist in Saudi Arabia, period. No freedom of the press, period. Women are in a subservient position across the board. People live in a culture of fear, and can't speak freely even in their own homes," al-Madani says.

Al-Madani began to quietly express his reformist views and sought out other liberals. Soon, however, he began to be regularly picked up for questioning by Saudi officials, who would hold him for a few days of interrogation and then release him to his father's custody with a warning. He says it happened many times, too many to count. "My father's connections kept me alive," al-Madani believes. But his relations with his father became so strained, he says, that at one point, in the midst of a shouting match, his father, by now an old man, struck at him with his cane, breaking al-Madani's arm. After two semesters al-Madani came back to the U.S., where he earned a second BA in anthropology from Oregon State University in 1987.

Again he tried returning to Saudi Arabia, and began teaching archaeology in Riyadh, the capital. Again his liberal Western beliefs got him in trouble. After a few months, the university dean called him and told al-Madani he wanted to fire him, but couldn't because of his father's influence. The dean added, though, that it might be best for all concerned if al-Madani returned to the U.S. for graduate study, and essentially offered him a scholarship to resign. Al-Madani took the offer, enrolling in the Ph.D. program at the University of Florida. At his family's insistence, he had married a Saudi woman in 1985; she remained in Saudi Arabia, and during term breaks he would return to visit her and his family.

In 1990 his son was born. But two years later, in the wake of the Gulf War, as Saudi liberals pressed for political reforms, the government responded with a major crackdown. Friends of al-Madani were being arrested and jailed. Many of them, he says, eventually ended up dead. He decided he had to get out and never return. Leaving for the final time was traumatic, he says. Upon learning of his decision, his father disowned him. His wife refused to emigrate, and they divorced. Al-Madani took custody of his son, and brought him to the U.S. Neither has been back to Saudi Arabia, and, except for a sister who came to the U.S. for a time before their father forced her to return, al-Madani has not seen his family since.

It was a psychologically wrenching decision to leave Saudi Arabia for good, but al-Madani says he had no choice: "Under the current system, I could have received life in jail or possibly death." Later, he adds, the Saudi Arabian government demanded he return to Saudi Arabia--they told him they would send him a one-way ticket back--but he refused, and in retaliation they revoked his citizenship. By then he had a green card, and became an American citizen in March 2001.

On a Thursday morning in March, I drop by SCCC to attend al-Madani's "Culture of Terrorism" class. He's been in Seattle since 1992--he had friends here and came as he finished writing his dissertation--and chose a job at SCCC over one at Oregon State because he likes the idea of teaching kids from poor and immigrant backgrounds. I already have the syllabus, and the course description gives me pause: "We will focus on the evolutionary trajectory of the United States, its relationship with the natives, and its role as a superpower. We will critically examine capitalism and its principles, globalization, invisible privileges, necessary illusions, institutional discrimination and the manufacture of consent, as some of the devices that contribute to, and maintain, the U.S. cultural hegemony and dominance in both the domestic and global spheres." The reading list includes William Blum's Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

Uh-oh, I think. These may be worthy issues and books, but they don't immediately spring to mind when I think of terrorism. I'm not exactly sure what terrorism is--an ideology? misguided revolutionary tactic? self-defeating violence?--but I feel like I know it when I see it. I enter the room with a sinking suspicion that I'm about to experience a session in political indoctrination from out of deep left field.

I am wrong. There are about 35 students in the fourth-floor classroom overlooking Broadway. They are a mixed lot: some older, some younger, some politically to the left, others clearly on the right. What they lack in polish they more than make up for in sheer enthusiasm and intellectual engagement. Al-Madani challenges them in a kind of informal Socratic dialogue. They obviously like him--everyone calls him by his first name--even those who don't share his politics.

The students take turns presenting their personal definitions of terrorism. As each does so, al-Madani writes it on the board, and asks the other students to help him critique it. A boisterous give-and-take ensues, full of good-natured catcalls and jeering, as the class points out potential flaws in each. The proposed definitions are all over the ideological map. Some try to define terrorism on the basis of the victims' subjective perceptions--if you feel terrorized by an act of violence, you have suffered from terrorism--but this falls apart because of the difficulty of distinguishing acts of terror from mundane violence or ordinary criminality. Others, in their desire to encompass violence perpetrated by states--the U.S. in Afghanistan, Israel in the occupied territories--propose definitions that seem to describe all war as terroristic violence. By the end of the session, none of the proposed definitions has withstood the scrutiny of the class, and yet, I notice, al-Madani has not provided his own.

The next day at Bill's, as a group of his advanced students looks on, I ask al-Madani about this. He explains that he wanted to use the class to provoke his students into considering what the term "terrorism" actually encompasses. "It is extremely difficult to have a blanket definition of terrorism," al-Madani contends. "I believe the state's definition is incomplete because it excludes the state." The attacks of 9/11 were indisputably terroristic acts--"I don't see how anyone in their right mind could condone what happened," he says--but he adds that the bombing and killing of civilians in Afghanistan as the U.S. overthrew the Taliban was also terrorism of a sort. He is not a pacifist, but believes that war is only justifiable as an act of immediate self-defense. American foreign policy is driven by domestic politics and corporate interests, al-Madani argues, and until it is fundamentally reoriented toward human rights as opposed to economic advantage, U.S. actions in the world will invariably cause more harm than good. As long as repression and inequality remain as roots of the geopolitical order, terrorism will continue to grow.

I press him on this point, because it goes to the heart of a crucial current debate on how the U.S. should use its hegemonic power as the sole superpower in a post-Cold War, unipolar world. We are less than a week into the Iraq war when we speak, and al-Madani is describing the invasion as a "great aggression." But, I counter, won't the Iraqi people be better off after Saddam is deposed? Can't they benefit from the Western democratic values that al-Madani has taken to heart? Wouldn't even American occupation be an improvement over the brutal, dictatorial systems endemic in the Islamic world?

One of his students responds by trotting out the ubiquitous, if facile, relativist argument: Who are we to decide what's better for others? But al-Madani is too smart, and too aware of the repressive realities of a country like Iraq, to fall into that trap. He admits that the Iraqi people will initially benefit from the overthrow of the Baathist regime. In the long run, though, he remains convinced that they will go from being enslaved by a brutally violent dictatorship to being economically exploited and marginalized by a cruelly indifferent capitalist order determined to preserve the status quo of Western power. He does not, he says, believe that we will witness the flowering of a newly democratic Iraq anytime soon.

So how, then, should the United States engage with the corrupt and repressive Saudi monarchy? Given that corporations and capitalism are here to stay, what can the U.S. do to help, say, the Saudi liberals al-Madani left behind when he fled the country of his birth 11 years ago?

"I don't know," he says. "It's a difficult question."

Roughly six months after becoming a U.S. citizen, on the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Madani was at his home in the Central District getting ready to go to work when his son yelled for him to come over and see what was happening on television. He says he went through the same initial reactions everyone else did watching the planes crash into the buildings over and over: First there was denial--"It really felt like a video game; it was surreal," he says--and then the horror of it began to sink in. But while he was overwhelmed by the violence and the scale of the destruction, within hours he says he was beset by another fear: that no matter who was responsible, Arabs were going to be blamed for the attacks, and Arabs living in the U.S. were going to suffer because of it. And, he says, that did happen, just as it did after the Oklahoma City attack.

Of course, unlike Oklahoma City, Arabs were responsible for 9/11, and within a few weeks it became clear that not only were the perpetrators Arabs, but 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. "That didn't surprise me at all," al-Madani says. "The Saudi system is oppressive, and uses Islamic extremists to get rid of leftists and liberals." With the sanction of the Saudi regime, he adds, Islamic extremism was allowed to develop institutional organization and "a structure of operation," which then became armed and dangerous--with American connivance--in Afghanistan. The United States' real concern, he says, should not be bin Laden, who is only one man, but the Saudi system that created him and his al Qaeda followers.

I ask al-Madani if he ever thinks about what his life would have been like if he'd never visited the U.S. Would he have perhaps been caught up, like bin Laden and so many other young well-to-do Saudis were, in the Afghan mujahideen's war against the Soviets? And everything that came after? He pauses for a few seconds, and then admits he thinks about it often. He doesn't believe he would have joined the Afghan jihad, he says, because ever since he was young he abhorred the idea of violence. Rather, he would probably have ended up like his brothers, cogs in the family business or holding some high-ranking position in government or at a university, a pillar of the community, rich enough to vacation in Europe every summer, corrupt and closed-minded.

So al-Madani didn't end up a jihadi, or even a Muslim. Instead he became an American college professor teaching what many would call a radical leftist critique of American imperialism to college students. There is a lesson in that, one that highlights the differences between Western freedoms and Saudi repression. In Saudi Arabia, as first a right-wing and then a left-wing critic of the regime, he faced intolerance, repression, and event the threat of violence for espousing his views. In the United States, he is also considered a radical intellectual, though here we are able to marginalize and co-opt our intellectual radicals by shunting them off to teaching gigs in our smaller colleges and universities, where they are free to say and do what they want, but remain safely distant from the forces that shape American politics and society. Depending on your perspective, it is either the genius or the curse of the open American system.

Mohammad al-Madani has come a long way--geographically, materially, and intellectually. His days of immersing himself in Islamic fundamentalism are well behind him--he no longer even owns a copy of the Koran. He's pretty satisfied, he says, with the life he's carved out for himself in the United States. He'll never be rich again, as he was in his father's house in Jidda, but he's comfortable; he owns his own home, and has enough to be able to lend a helping hand to some of his talented students who are financially strapped.

He's particularly proud of how his son, now 13 and in the seventh grade, is turning out. Nabil al-Madani is a typical American teenager, his father says, into playing basketball with his friends, watching television, things like that. It's been tough on the boy not to have a female figure in his life, al-Madani admits, and like most parents, he worries about the dangers--drugs, unprotected sex--his son will soon face. And though Nabil, like his father, grew up without a mother, almost nothing else about their upbringings is similar. While the al-Madani household in Saudi Arabia was, and still is, ruled by an absolute authoritarianism, the al-Madani household in Seattle is ruled by a freethinking rationalism. Instead of ordering his son to do this or that, al-Madani reasons with his Nabil, explaining the consequences of his actions, and then lets him decide.

"I don't force him to do anything," al-Madani says, "and that includes going to school."