Chris Moore was an aspiring rock musician with earrings and a shaved head when he walked into a Northern Virginia mosque a dozen years ago and began asking questions about Islam.
A month later, the Christian-raised son of a U.S. Navy man became a Muslim. His conversion initiated a spiritual odyssey that took him to several Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, where he adopted and then rejected the ultraconservative Wahhabi approach to Islam...
The arc of Moore's personal journey from a very conservative to a more moderate expression of his faith echoes the spiritual path of many Muslim American converts. For Moore, the story began in 1994, a year after graduating from Annandale High School.
An only child, he became close friends with Aaron Sellars, another young aspiring musician. The two also shared a yearning for spiritual fulfillment, which led them to Dar al Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church. They walked in one day and began asking one of the members about Islam. Sellars converted that day; Moore, raised Catholic, did so shortly afterward.
He took to his new faith with an intensity typical of converts. He adopted the Arabic name Khalil, which means intimate friend, and gave up his beloved music, because a Saudi spiritual adviser convinced him that it was a sinful waste of time...
When the Fairfax institute offered Moore a scholarship to study in Medina, Saudi Arabia, he grabbed it -- because to live in the town that Muhammad called home for several years is "the dream of every Muslim," Moore said.
He arrived in Medina in 1996. "When I first got there, I was pretty much in awe. I truly, honestly believed . . . that the only scholars on the face of the Earth that had anything to truly say about Islam were . . . Saudi-related in some way," he said. Theirs, he thought, was "the true Islam."
But in his third year of studies, he started having doubts about the Wahhabi version of Islam taught at Medina. He saw "inconsistencies" in some of his professors' teachings, he said, and was perplexed by the way they selectively chose scriptural stories to back up their ideas but left out others that contradicted them.
Determined to explore Islam on his own, Moore began reading respected ancient Muslim scholars whose views were contrary to the Wahhabi outlook. He also listened to a taped lecture by Hamza Yusuf, the founder of the Zaytuna Institute and a leading figure in the American Muslim community.
"Sparks started to go off, like maybe [his Saudi professors were] pulling the wool over my eyes," Moore recalled thinking. "Maybe there is another version of Islamic history and another version of Islam."
When he started pulling away from the Wahhabi approach, some of his fellow students, including American and British colleagues, called Moore an unbeliever and an "innovator" -- a sin in Wahhabi thought.
In 1999, he decided to study Islam elsewhere and traveled to Mauritania, Morocco, Yemen and Egypt. He worked at an Islamic educational center in Abu Dhabi for a while. During his travels, he returned in the summer to study English and religious studies at George Mason University, where obtained a bachelor's degree in 2001...
What I find really interesting about this story is that this young man is on a spiritual journey within Islam. He had the passion typical of a convert to any religion and that passion led him to explore and embrace a fundamentalist version of Islam. But he didn't stop there. He kept searching and questioning and saw how his fundamentalist teachers only used the scriptural texts that supported their own views. He came to realize that there was more than one way to understand and practice his faith.
This is a hopeful story about Islam because it demonstrates that there is room for diversity there. It is also the kind of story I have heard over and over from former Christian fundamentalists.
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