*
MY FIRST MEETING with Abu Maleeq was in a mosque outside the center of Berlin. The cabdriver pulled up in front of an old gray building that had once been a factory. Like most mosques in Europe, it didn’t look impressive from the outside. In these places, Muslims would get together and establish an association, called a Verein in German. The building they rented or bought was officially the group’s headquarters, and they would then convert part of it into prayer rooms. These buildings were called Hinterhofmoscheen in German, which can be translated to “backyard mosques.” They were usually not in the best neighborhoods, as had been the case in Hamburg, where the al-Quds mosque was in the red-light district. Some Muslims, especially younger ones, had told me they felt that the only place for mosques in Europe was in neighborhoods where no one else wanted to be. This did not bode well for long-term relationships between Muslim communities and the rest of European society.
The system of allowing anyone to establish an association to rent or buy property that could then be turned into a mosque was also potentially risky. I had met “imams” in some of these establishments who talked more about politics than religion. In fact, when I asked where they had received their Islamic training, some would stumble around and explain that they’d taken a course in Saudi Arabia or somewhere else, or that they were the oldest in their community, or that they were the only ones who spoke classical Arabic. Some of these imams had been brought in from other countries and were supervised from afar. In Germany’s Turkish community, many mosques belong to an organization called the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs. The Turkish ruling political party, the AKP, works through the union to influence what is taught in these mosques, from religion to political preferences.
It was different with the imam I knew in Berlin, who was young but had studied Islamic teachings in Europe and the Middle East. He had grown up in Germany, and he knew what he was talking about.
“He is in the office,” the imam told me when I arrived. “He might not tell you immediately what he has on his mind, but maybe when he trusts you he will.”
The man in the office stood up when I came in. “As’salam alaikum,” he said.
My eyes went immediately to his hands, which were covered with tattoos. He noticed me looking and explained that they were from the days when he’d lived the life of an unbeliever.
“You mean when you were a rapper?”
He nodded.
The tattoo on his right hand said “STR8,” and the one on his left, “Thug.” He smiled and his white teeth showed. “You could say I was what people called a ‘bad boy,’” he said. He looked at the tattoos and added, “Allah will erase them from me.”
I asked how he had become Muslim.
“I was Muslim from the beginning,” he replied. “But I had lost the right path until Allah brought me back.”
Though he now went by Abu Maleeq, his birth name was Denis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert. He told me that he’d been born in Berlin. His mother, a German, had raised him there with his stepfather, a former U.S. Army soldier. “My real father was from Ghana,” he explained. “He dumped us when I was a baby. I had no idea that the American was in fact my stepfather until much later, when my grandmother told me.”
His stepfather was strict with Denis and his brother. “We were constantly fighting, he and I, and I also began to do a lot of shit,” he told me.
“What kind of shit?”
He smiled, again showing his teeth. “Well, the kind of shit you do when you end up in gangs in Berlin, street fights, drugs here and there, and some other stuff.”
His mother and stepfather finally decided to send him to a facility for children with behavioral problems who had been part of gangs or had had trouble with the law. “That was kind of funny. I was already bad, and then they send me to a place where I met kids who were worse than me.” He laughed. “So I learned some other things.”
I wondered where all his anger came from as a child.
“Do you know how it felt to grow up as the only dark-skinned child in my neighborhood and school? I grew up with racism.”
I didn’t respond.
He paused and asked if I wanted a tea or coffee. I wondered if he was trying to change the subject. I pressed him.
“What was it like for you to grow up here?”
“It was very difficult,” he said. Some teachers called him “Negro,” and treated him and his Muslim friends badly.
It reminded me of my own experiences in kindergarten, with the teacher who always pointed out that the bad characters in the fairy tales “were all dark-haired, like you,” and of the other children in Klettenbergstrasse who weren’t allowed to play with us because we were children of guest workers and not really up to their “standards,” or because my oldest sister was handicapped.
I could feel the pain in his voice when he talked, the sense of how difficult it was to be the outsider. Cuspert told me that he became increasingly interested in politics and what was happening in the world, an impulse to which I could also relate. “Maybe because of my own experience growing up here, I always felt I should support those who are weak, the underdogs,” he said. I’ve often heard this argument from members of terrorist organizations. The problem is that if it’s taken too far, “supporting underdogs” can easily turn into oppressing others.
That was why he took to the streets against what he called “unfair” American foreign policy around the time of the First Gulf War in the early 1990s. He grew up in a largely Muslim immigrant neighborhood in Berlin, where support for the Palestinian struggle mixed with general left-wing sentiments. Many of his neighbors saw America as the great evil. As a teenager, he told me, he’d even burned an American flag.