Book description
In December 2009 the US government launched an air strike against the
tiny Yemeni village of al-Majalah where al-Qaeda militants were
believed to be in hiding. A second attack a week later targeted the
prominent religious leader Anwar Awlaki. He escaped unharmed but many
villagers were killed. These two strikes were intended to set back
al-Qaeda's operations in Yemen but, within 24 hours, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab - a 23-year-old Nigerian man and one of Awlaki's
followers - boarded a plane to Detroit with explosives hidden in his
clothing.
His is not a unique story: at a time when true pluralism remains an
aspiration rather than a reality in the West, young men, disillusioned
and angry with the spiritually barren, consumerist societies in which
they live, travel to Yemen in search of fulfilment. There, in the
country's anarchic wilderness, they find what they could not at home:
a pure way of life, submissive wives and like-minded brethren. Some,
like Abdulmutallab, find something much more dangerous: the conviction
to carry out Jihad.
In Undercover Muslim, Theo Padnos brilliantly evokes a
landscape and journey that few Westerners have experienced. He
investigates the radicalisation of these disaffected young men as they
move, almost unnoticed, from London, Berlin or Paris to their new
spiritual home in Yemen.
Padnos's journey takes him from the newsroom of a Yemeni newspaper
to the prayer rows and lecture rooms of Yemen's madrassas, from covert
Jeep rides into the sacred mountains to a stint in an overcrowded
prison. It is through these events, and through the people he
encounters, that Padnos shows us how a terrifying gulf has opened
between Islam and the West.
Theo Padnos is the author of
My
Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun: Adolescents at the Apocalypse: A
Teacher's Notes
. He taught short stories and poems to teenaged prisoners in America
before travelling to Yemen to study Islam in 2005. He has written for a
number of publications including the
London Review of Books
.
