Muslim leaders look inward after arrests of N.Va. men

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By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 25, 2009; 11:34 AM

The adults thought they'd done all they could. They had condemned extremist ideology, provided ski trips and scout meetings, and encouraged young people to speak openly about how to integrate their religion, Islam, with the secular world.

But since five college-age Virginia men were arrested in Pakistan earlier this month after allegedly being recruited over the Internet to join al-Qaeda, many Washington area Muslims are questioning whether mere condemnation is enough.

Mustafa Abu Maryam, a Muslim youth leader who has known the five arrested men since 2006, said he was alarmed by their decision to go to Pakistan after exchanging coded e-mails with a recruiter for the Pakistani Taliban. "I always thought that they had a firm grasp on life and that they rejected extremism or terrorism," Maryam said of the young men from Alexandria.

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Mosques and Islamic organizations across the U.S. regularly issue statements rejecting violence and fringe ideologies. But since the arrests, Muslim leaders are scrambling to fill what they describe as a gap in their own connection with young people, searching for new ways to counter the influence of the extremists young people may encounter, especially online.

"I'm really concerned about what the Internet is doing to my young people," said Mohamed Magid, imam at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling. "I used to not be worried about the radicalism of our youth. But now, after this, I'm worried more."

Relatives of the five men have declined to speak to reporters.

"I have to be a virtual Imam," Magid said, explaining that his mosque and other Muslim organizations and institutions need a larger and more effective online presence. Referring to extremists, he added, "Twenty-four hours, they're available; I want to be able to respond to that."

Until now, many Muslim leaders have focused on what they saw as external threats to young people, such as Islamophobia or the temptations of modern secular life. Now they say it is time to look inward, to provide a counterweight to those who misinterpret Koranic verses to promote violence -- and to learn what rhetoric and methods appeal to young people.

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Radicals "seem to understand our youth better than we do," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. "They use hip-hop elements for some who relate to that."

Bray said "seductive videos" gradually lure in young people, building outrage against atrocities committed against Muslims. Extremist videos "play to what we call in the Muslim youth community 'jihad cool' -- a kind of machismo, that this is the hip thing to do."

For some, a new approach cannot come too soon. Zaki Barzinji, 20, a Sterling native and former president of Muslim Youths of North America, said mosques are "sort of in the Stone Age when it comes to outreach. Their youth programs are not attractive, not engaging . . . . They're shooting in the dark because it's always adults who are planning this outreach."

Nor is the threat limited to the Internet, Barzinji said, adding that groups of "traveling Muslim proselytizers" sometimes appear at Virginia Tech, where he is a senior, often attracting foreign students, who tend to be more socially isolated.

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"They go to the dorms, look for Muslim-sounding names, knock on the door and say, 'Hey, we'd like to talk to you about hellfire and how you're heading that way,'" Barzinji said. "All they're offering is social connection and acceptance."

Barzinji said Muslim groups should create online forums where young Muslims can find answers from authoritative sources. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman at CAIR's Washington headquarters, said he spent a recent day at work with a copy of "The Social Media Bible," trying to figure out how to do just that.

One idea: a Web portal offering video explanations of Koranic verses that are sometimes misinterpreted by radicals, as well as suggestions of "positive things you can do to rectify injustice," Hooper said. Many Muslim parents said they don't worry about the influence of radical strangers on their own children. "I just don't see it as a very widespread phenomenon," said Bob Marro, a Great Falls father of two college students who were active in their high school's Muslim Student Association. "I know for my sons and their friends, if they got a message like that, they would find it just laughingly funny. . . . . If you've been open with your kids and talked to them as they were growing up, they'll have enough of a sense of their own value and their place in the world."

His son, Nicolas Marro, 19, a sophomore at the University of Virginia, said the five young men's decision to go to Pakistan "seems like such an anomaly, especially in this area, where people take their studies so seriously."

Whenever he has seen radical rhetoric on a public forum, he said, it is usually shouted down. "There will be a plethora of responses -- 'Are you crazy?' 'Is something wrong with you?'" he said. But if even a few young people slip through the cracks, the results can be devastating for the community. "They ruin it for the rest of us," said Azraf Ullah, 15, of Herndon, who was attending a scout meeting at the All-Dulles Area center last week. "We have to work harder to show that we're not that."

"The impression is like, 'Every Muslim youth is involved with this thing,'" said Syed Akhtar Alam, a father of three who lives in Ashburn. At an interfaith youth group Alam is involved with, parents of other faiths approached him after the arrests in Pakistan. "They just wanted to know, 'How could this happen?'" he said, adding, "It just happened randomly. Bad people are everywhere. . . . It is parents' responsibility to tell their kids, 'This is your country and you need to protect it.'"

Magid, the imam at the Sterling mosque, said Muslim leaders should be more active on social networking sites and should create an online network of imams to talk to young people, "even addressing questions about jihad," he said. It is no longer enough, he added, to rely only on mosque-based scout troops, basketball teams and religious classes.

Hooper said some leaders are discussing an Islamic Peace Corps through which youth could help Muslims in underdeveloped countries. But someadvocate a more adventuresome approach, borrowing from the extremists' own methods. "A 20-year-old, he's not satisfied with a canned food drive to solve the world's problems," said a religious leader whose mosque would not permit him to be quoted by name. "You've got to give them something more, even a little macho. "These boys who got busted, . . . .they want to be baaaad," the leader said. "You've got to be as bad as the jihadis. You've got to show them jumping out of helicopters. This ain't no Peace Corps. "

Staff writer Brigid Schulte contributed to this report.

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