From FBI Career to Muslim Imam! - "I Gave up The FBI For Islam’’
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Shots fired. Shots fired. My aspiration to be an FBI agent brought me into Islam. We had a family friend who had done work with the FBI. So I asked him at one point, "Okay, so I want to be an FBI agent. What should I study?" He said, "Study Arabic and Persian." First year of college I find myself as an Arabic major, applying for several positions with the FBI, getting two internships positions, and had a job offer as an intelligence analyst. During my time at the FBI, there were a few things was marked Top Secret. A few years I found myself coming full circle. Once doing work for the FBI, and then now found myself speaking in front of a grand jury. I started listening to the Quran.
It was clearly not from this world. Who is Adnan Adrian Woodsmith? Can you tell us briefly about your life? Before I was known as Adnan, I was known primarily as Adrian. I was born in 1988, to an American mother and a British father. It was in my freshman year, so my first year of college that I came to Islam. During that time, spent a cumulative year and a half in the Arab world and the Middle East, studying Arabic. Then wound up in California for a few years, where I married my now wife of 12 years. And then we've been in Providence, Rhode Island, for the last 10 years where I've served as an imam and Muslim Chaplain at Brown University.
And now currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University. So how was your life in regards to faith before Islam? What were you believing in? I don't remember all the details, but the way my mother tells it is that when I was seven, that it was me who demanded that we find a church, we become members of the church so that I can be baptized finally. Because for me, faith and religion, Christianity, that was the most important thing. Now, growing up, I was involved in my church, heavily involved in my church. To such an extent that say, for example, my senior year of high school, I was giving the sermon on Youth Sunday and involved in many ways at the church.
But in my years there, there were things that I saw at the church and elements of Christianity that really bothered me and that I didn't understand. But I knew enough that I knew I needed a relationship with God, and I needed a religion. And I thought, well, this church and Christianity in general is, it's good enough. Maybe I can't have anything better than that because I'm a limited human being with limited intellect. And so therefore, this is the best that I can have in this world, and this is what I can do with. What parts of this belief bothered you? Which parts didn't make sense to you? One of the elements was not necessarily the belief, but the practice.
First of all, the sense that there were all these different denominations doing very different things in terms of their worship and their belief. One of the key things, too, was growing up in the church, and specifically in high school, seeing that the worship service had a particular form. And then, when we got a new head pastor, an interim head pastor who was just going to be there for a year, things started changing. The way we worship started changing. The whole order of service, he would change things.
And that got me asking, how is it that the way that we're worshiping God is so easily affected by one man making a few decisions that other people disagree with, and almost on a power trip in a way? So that bothered me. How did your journey towards Islam begin? It was in eighth grade when we took a kind of career aspiration test. So, what I scored highest in was law enforcement. And so I thought, well, if I went into law enforcement, I could become a police officer. But if I wanted to excel, the ultimate, the top law enforcement is the FBI. I knew from that point on, I wanted to go into the FBI. We had a family friend who worked as a detective, had done work with the FBI.
So I had a series of conversations with him and asked him at one point, "Okay, so I want to be an FBI agent. What should I study? Should I study criminology, psychology, something like that? And he said "No." He said, "Study Arabic and Persian." He said, "They need Arabic and Persian speakers right now. If you know either of those languages, or ideally both, you'll be a shoo in into the organization." First year of college at Dartmouth College, I find myself as an Arabic major. Part of the requirements of being an Arabic major is we had to take Arab 10: Introduction to Arab Culture. And so, it's winter of my freshman year. I'm taking this course.
And I remember one day in that class we watched a particular documentary called "Islam: Empire of Faith." And it was in that video that I heard the adhan, the call to prayer for the first time in my life. And I heard it in that classroom several times through the course of this documentary. And I remember walking through the snowy landscape of New Hampshire and feeling for days, perhaps weeks after that, that everything around me was almost echoing the adhan. I felt it echo inside of myself, and I felt like I was being called to something. And so from that point forward, I started looking into Islam.
And so at first it began a process of, well, let me understand this bit, and oh, this bit makes sense, or this practice is something the like of which I've been looking for my whole life. So let me do this to become a better Christian. So when I first went to the Muslim Student Association room on campus at Dartmouth College, and picked up a little booklet on Salah, which gave the whole details of how to make Salah, all the conditions for it, all the things you say in it. I read through that and I realized this is what I've been looking for my whole life. As Towards Eternity, we need your support.
We are a charity organization that aims to spread the message of Islam to the entire world in ten languages. With your support, you can help people convert to Islam, give up harams, start praying, and so on... And get your share from all these good deeds, Inshallah. Donate to Towards Eternity and don't miss this golden opportunity. So I thought, okay, let me learn. Because I knew I'd grown up with pastors, Christian pastors who'd taken this Buddhist practice or taken this thing from Hinduism, this part of yoga or something like that, and been better Christians because of it. So I thought, okay, let me take this Muslim practice, this Salah thing, and be a better Christian.
On spring break, on a what we call a missions trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And we're trying to help out people devastated by the hurricane there. And in the in-between times, I go up to the leaders of the program and I say, "Do you know where East is?" I would want to find the Qibla, and I'd make Salah. And I could tell they were giving me sideways glances of, what's this guy doing? As a Christian, yeah. It was about two months before I came to Islam, at that point. Before I officially took my Shahada. How did it feel when you were praying as a Christian?
It felt like that little boy, Adrian, who was desperate for answers and plagued by certain questions in life, like he finally had his peace and he finally had his answers. So after two months of this, of taking in parts of Islam that, oh, this practice here and that belief there, let that inform my belief and practice my life as a Christian. After about two months of that, I found myself in the Muslim Student Association room for Juma prayer for the second time. And I sat through that service, which was a completely different experience from going to church growing up. It just felt like everything I needed in a worship service. The address spoke directly to me, was completely relevant.
I felt it connected me to my Creator, and then that form of all of us lining up and bowing down and prostrating. It was unlike anything I'd experienced before. And so, I'm sitting after that service in the small prayer room on campus, and I thought, okay, so I've been taking on all these elements of Islam. This is my investment in Christianity right here, and this is what I've grown up with and what I valued in Christianity. And over the last few months I've taken on this part of Islam and this part of Islam and this part of Islam. And I was sitting there looking and thinking, hmm, I can see I have more invested in Islam than I do in Christianity. So, I guess that makes me a Muslim.
So I'm sitting there and I think, I guess I'm a Muslim. It's then that I go up to the imam and I say, "I want to become Muslim. I want to take my Shahada." So I want to ask, why did you leave Christianity? Did you see some inconsistencies? Yeah, I never felt that I left Christianity. I never made the choice to leave Christianity. It was a choice to be a better Christian through these different practices and beliefs. And then I found that really, the true Christian, the true Christ follower, is a Muslim, you know? Realizing that Jesus Christ (pbuh), he was a Muslim and he called to Islam.
So, I only left Christianity in terms of the tribalism of identifying with one particular person and one particular group. Basically every other religion out there is... It takes its name from a people or from a person or from a culture, right? Christianity from Christ. Buddhism from the Buddha. Judaism from the Jews, the people of Judah. And so, all these names are taken from particular peoples. But then you have Islam, which just... It's a concept and it belongs to everyone. And it belonged to Jesus Christ (pbuh). And now I found myself now, trying to be a better Christian that, that was a better name for me than Christian, it was Muslim.
Then, what was the reaction of the people around you to your conversion to Islam? My mother, it took her a few months to come around. And I take responsibility for that myself. Because I told her the day I took my Shahada. I called her up at the end of the day and said, "Mom, I want to speak to you about something." She said, "Adrian, I'm just heading out the door. Can it wait? I'm heading to a Bach Society concert. Can we talk about this later?" And I said, "Mom, I've become Muslim." And so she said, "Uh, I have to go. We'll speak later. Bye." And so, she was concerned, and she knew from her perspective, I was going through a rough week. She took a while to come around.
So, then what happened? Did you enter FBI as a Muslim? Right, so... My aspiration to be an FBI agent brought me into Islam, ultimately. It was because of wanting to be an FBI agent that I learned Arabic. It's because of learning Arabic that I was exposed to Islam. And then being exposed to Islam, I became Muslim. And so I found myself now in my junior year and then senior year of college, applying for several positions with the FBI, getting two internships positions. So, I worked in the summer in Washington, D.C., and so I had a top secret clearance. It means I had gone through a background investigation. So, the FBI had looked into my whole life, every place I'd spent time.
They'd talked to all kinds of people I'd ever associated with in life. And I had to go through a polygraph, go through a lie detector test. They asked me about my whole life, went through a series of examinations. And after a period of something like 6 to 8 months, was qualified by the government to view secret government material if the need ever arose. And so, during my time at the FBI, there were a few things marked classified and secret. And there was one sentence I saw in my time there that was marked Top Secret. You got accepted into FBI now? I had the top secret clearance. I had two internships with them and had a job offer as an intelligence analyst.
So, I could see my trajectory in the organization. I had my contacts with the linguists. I was going to be a linguist. Once I reached the age of 26, would be old enough to apply for the special agent position, and then my career would go on from there. So now, you were a Muslim in the FBI. What type of experience was it, and what happened next? I met lots of really sincere, committed people. But I was slowly awakening and it took me a while. But I was slowly awakening to whiteness in a way, in terms of growing up white American.
You grow up complacent with the way things are and think that, okay, let me just lead a good life and find a good house and find a good job, and just try not to hurt anybody, and I'll be a good person, without knowing that the house that you pick and the job that you go into and the education that you get, it is all contributing to a system of oppression and subjugation in the US and abroad. Because you grow up as a Westerner thinking that, okay, the police are here to protect us, but if you grow up as a minority community, you might understand, Well, sure, that's part of it, but they also inflict a lot of violence and harm on communities as well. And so similarly, the FBI...
Yes, the FBI brings people who've done horrible things to justice. It restores the rights of people whose rights have been taken away. But it's also a function of a political organization. It's political at its core, is in the best interests of the politicians to see as the threat of today, is the threat that the FBI is contributing resources to. It took me a while to realize, and it was only a year out of my internship. And then starting to think about marriage to this particular sister that I was interested in, and a conversation that I'd had with her father that really made me realize that I could not hold these two things in tension anymore.
These were always in tension and I couldn't balance it anymore. I could not both serve the spiritual and religious community that meant so much to me, and serve the organization that was doing so much harm to it as well. So then, why did you leave the FBI? It was a career you have dreamed of for a long time. Wasn't it hard to leave for your religion? So, it's interesting. It was hard and it wasn't hard at the same time. It wasn't hard in that moment when I made the decision. Because I remember I was sitting in the living room of my future father in law's house. So I'm sitting with this Afghan man, amazing, lovable man. He has so much love and warmth and everything.
And he welcomed me into his home. He was excited that I was... Seemed to be this upstanding guy. And I was interested in marrying his daughter. So we're having a conversation about that and about my aspirations in life, and where I see myself going, and how his daughter would fit into that. And so here he is, this amazing, welcoming, encouraging man. And then suddenly his face gets serious and he says, "So, I think we need Muslims like you in the FBI. But I don't think that Muslim could be married to my daughter." And I'm sitting there feeling small, suddenly intimidated by this man. And I realize he's right. He's absolutely right. And so, that was already not sitting well with me.
And then in that moment when my father in law brought it to a head, I realized me having this beautifully inspiring woman as a life partner for the rest of my life and raising children with... For me to either have her or have a certain career trajectory that I'm already feeling slightly uncomfortable about. I'd rather choose her and see what happens. Being in the FBI was what gave me focus. It's what gave me direction. It gave me a sense of mission and purpose in life. And when that was taken away from me, I was left with a sense of, okay, well, I want to serve the Muslim community. I want to increase in knowledge, which, Alhamdulillah, I'm blessed.
Praise God I was able to get certain ijazahs, certain traditional authorizations, in terms of being able to teach Qur'an, Qur'an memorization, basics of jurisprudence, of creed, theology and Islamic spirituality, among other qualifications. And so, I had this general mission and purpose of serving the Muslims and learning about Islam. At the end of the day, I had a sense of ultimate purpose. And that's what Islam gave me in terms of worship of my Creator. But I also have to do something in this world while I'm here. And then a few years, I found myself coming full circle in terms of once working and doing work for the FBI. And then now, fast forward.
I'm in the Muslim Chaplain position at Brown, an imam in the community in Rhode Island. And it's the years in which I**S is seen as this great existential threat to America that everyone's terrified of. And so, the local counter-terrorism agent in Providence at the time, he reaches out to me to establish a relationship. I know enough of what he's doing and that I can't completely reject him. But I have to hold him at arm's length because of what he wants to look into in the community and the harm that can be caused systemically. This FBI agent is trying to develop a relationship with me.
Meanwhile, I'm getting to know various people in the community, and I get to know one brother who is in the prison system in Rhode Island and tells me about a story that happened to him, he said when he was in prison. After a while, an Assistant U.S. Attorney shows up in my office at Brown with a subpoena, which is a legal document which says, if you don't give us certain information, we will put you in jail. And so, at that point, I had to reach out to my contacts, get a lawyer to make sure, to protect myself in the whole procedure. And found myself speaking in front of a grand jury. And so, I'm in a room with a grand jury.
The way a grand jury works, which is not like a trial jury in court in America. The way a grand jury works is that once the attorney is done, then the jury members get to ask whatever questions they want. And so, there were 20, just regular, average Rhode Islanders in that room. They started asking me questions about Islam. And I could tell... I looked over at the US attorney and I could see he was getting very uncomfortable. And one of the... She was such a sweet woman.
One of the people there, she asked me, she said, "You mentioned how this brother, you were kind of a mentor to this brother, a spiritual mentor, and now this situation of you having to give his personal information to us and to the attorney and the FBI agent and this whole thing, has it affected your relationship with him?" And I said, "Bless your heart. Of course it has. Thank you for asking. It's a really unfortunate situation." But of course, I could see the US attorney was not happy that people on this grand jury were just seeing the humanity of this whole situation and how really absurd it was, ultimately.
After becoming a Muslim, did anyone around you get inspired by you and become a Muslim? Almost ten years after I came to Islam, my grandmother, I went to her house one day and she was starting... She died with a certain level of dementia. And so, she was starting to become a little less there, but more childlike and have this childlike innocence about her. And there was one day I went to her house. I visited her, like we always used to visit her with my father's family and my brothers over there.
And she was looking at me so intently, and she said to me something like, "That thing you do where you go upstairs, I want to do that with you." And I thought, "That thing I do where I go upstairs, what's she talking about?" And I realized it's when we would spend hours there, and then a prayer time would come in. I'd excuse myself to go pray Dhuhr or pray Asr upstairs. And she would note that, and she would see the quality of how I looked going there and coming back. And so she said, that's what she was referring to. And I said, "Oh, do you mean pray?" And she said, "Yeah, yeah, that." So I said, "Okay, you could pray with me." And so I led her in prayer.
And then came back another day and she said, "Can we do that thing where you go upstairs..." And I said, "Okay," and then... So I told her, I said, "Look, can I tell you about Islam and about the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)? And she said, "Oh, yes, yes, please." And so, she was such a lovely, blessed woman. Bless her heart. I've never met such a sweet woman as she was. And so I told her all about it and told her about "La Ilaha illallah", about the statement of faith, that there is no God but Allah and what that means, and who Muhammad (pbuh) is. And she was just so ready to accept. So, she took her Shahada there. She said the testimony of faith there.
What impressed you the most about Prophet Muhammad (saw)? Reading about his life, it was clear to me that he was someone who was completely without blame, completely doing exactly the right thing in life. I think that was a key thing. I've always been a perfectionist, always wanting to do the right thing, always deeply upset when I feel like I've done the wrong thing. And so, being able to know the intimate, moment-by-moment details of the life of this inspirational man, that was a real sense of healing for me. Having a sense of what it means to be the best person I could be.
And so, just seeing him in all these situations, as I read these narrations and hear stories about him, and get to know him, his whole life is a healing for me. So you talked about some Ayat in the Qur'an that you're convinced that this must be divine. Can you give just 1 or 2 examples that you have in your mind? I grew up as a classical pianist. I was quite accomplished in that regard. Playing piano growing up, and doing hour long solo recitals, won a few competitions. So music and sound was very important to me. I think that's one of the reasons why the adhan hit me so hard. Just hearing the beauty and the simplicity of that.
And then also as soon as I started listening to the Qur'an, I knew it was clearly not from this world, for me. Having grown up in a musical tradition and then just the simplicity and the specificity of the recitation. I fell in love with the art of Qur'anic recitation immediately. And so, one of the first things that drew me to the Qur'an was not necessarily the wisdom I found in it, which was profound, but just the raw sound of it. Just, it didn't seem human to me. Brother Adnan, thank you so much for your sincere answers. We learned a lot from you. May Allah reward you for all the things you do for this Ummah. Jazakallah khairan for being with us. May Allah reward you as well.
This has been a great pleasure and honor to be here. Thank you very much.
It was clearly not from this world. Who is Adnan Adrian Woodsmith? Can you tell us briefly about your life? Before I was known as Adnan, I was known primarily as Adrian. I was born in 1988, to an American mother and a British father. It was in my freshman year, so my first year of college that I came to Islam. During that time, spent a cumulative year and a half in the Arab world and the Middle East, studying Arabic. Then wound up in California for a few years, where I married my now wife of 12 years. And then we've been in Providence, Rhode Island, for the last 10 years where I've served as an imam and Muslim Chaplain at Brown University.
And now currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University. So how was your life in regards to faith before Islam? What were you believing in? I don't remember all the details, but the way my mother tells it is that when I was seven, that it was me who demanded that we find a church, we become members of the church so that I can be baptized finally. Because for me, faith and religion, Christianity, that was the most important thing. Now, growing up, I was involved in my church, heavily involved in my church. To such an extent that say, for example, my senior year of high school, I was giving the sermon on Youth Sunday and involved in many ways at the church.
But in my years there, there were things that I saw at the church and elements of Christianity that really bothered me and that I didn't understand. But I knew enough that I knew I needed a relationship with God, and I needed a religion. And I thought, well, this church and Christianity in general is, it's good enough. Maybe I can't have anything better than that because I'm a limited human being with limited intellect. And so therefore, this is the best that I can have in this world, and this is what I can do with. What parts of this belief bothered you? Which parts didn't make sense to you? One of the elements was not necessarily the belief, but the practice.
First of all, the sense that there were all these different denominations doing very different things in terms of their worship and their belief. One of the key things, too, was growing up in the church, and specifically in high school, seeing that the worship service had a particular form. And then, when we got a new head pastor, an interim head pastor who was just going to be there for a year, things started changing. The way we worship started changing. The whole order of service, he would change things.
And that got me asking, how is it that the way that we're worshiping God is so easily affected by one man making a few decisions that other people disagree with, and almost on a power trip in a way? So that bothered me. How did your journey towards Islam begin? It was in eighth grade when we took a kind of career aspiration test. So, what I scored highest in was law enforcement. And so I thought, well, if I went into law enforcement, I could become a police officer. But if I wanted to excel, the ultimate, the top law enforcement is the FBI. I knew from that point on, I wanted to go into the FBI. We had a family friend who worked as a detective, had done work with the FBI.
So I had a series of conversations with him and asked him at one point, "Okay, so I want to be an FBI agent. What should I study? Should I study criminology, psychology, something like that? And he said "No." He said, "Study Arabic and Persian." He said, "They need Arabic and Persian speakers right now. If you know either of those languages, or ideally both, you'll be a shoo in into the organization." First year of college at Dartmouth College, I find myself as an Arabic major. Part of the requirements of being an Arabic major is we had to take Arab 10: Introduction to Arab Culture. And so, it's winter of my freshman year. I'm taking this course.
And I remember one day in that class we watched a particular documentary called "Islam: Empire of Faith." And it was in that video that I heard the adhan, the call to prayer for the first time in my life. And I heard it in that classroom several times through the course of this documentary. And I remember walking through the snowy landscape of New Hampshire and feeling for days, perhaps weeks after that, that everything around me was almost echoing the adhan. I felt it echo inside of myself, and I felt like I was being called to something. And so from that point forward, I started looking into Islam.
And so at first it began a process of, well, let me understand this bit, and oh, this bit makes sense, or this practice is something the like of which I've been looking for my whole life. So let me do this to become a better Christian. So when I first went to the Muslim Student Association room on campus at Dartmouth College, and picked up a little booklet on Salah, which gave the whole details of how to make Salah, all the conditions for it, all the things you say in it. I read through that and I realized this is what I've been looking for my whole life. As Towards Eternity, we need your support.
We are a charity organization that aims to spread the message of Islam to the entire world in ten languages. With your support, you can help people convert to Islam, give up harams, start praying, and so on... And get your share from all these good deeds, Inshallah. Donate to Towards Eternity and don't miss this golden opportunity. So I thought, okay, let me learn. Because I knew I'd grown up with pastors, Christian pastors who'd taken this Buddhist practice or taken this thing from Hinduism, this part of yoga or something like that, and been better Christians because of it. So I thought, okay, let me take this Muslim practice, this Salah thing, and be a better Christian.
On spring break, on a what we call a missions trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And we're trying to help out people devastated by the hurricane there. And in the in-between times, I go up to the leaders of the program and I say, "Do you know where East is?" I would want to find the Qibla, and I'd make Salah. And I could tell they were giving me sideways glances of, what's this guy doing? As a Christian, yeah. It was about two months before I came to Islam, at that point. Before I officially took my Shahada. How did it feel when you were praying as a Christian?
It felt like that little boy, Adrian, who was desperate for answers and plagued by certain questions in life, like he finally had his peace and he finally had his answers. So after two months of this, of taking in parts of Islam that, oh, this practice here and that belief there, let that inform my belief and practice my life as a Christian. After about two months of that, I found myself in the Muslim Student Association room for Juma prayer for the second time. And I sat through that service, which was a completely different experience from going to church growing up. It just felt like everything I needed in a worship service. The address spoke directly to me, was completely relevant.
I felt it connected me to my Creator, and then that form of all of us lining up and bowing down and prostrating. It was unlike anything I'd experienced before. And so, I'm sitting after that service in the small prayer room on campus, and I thought, okay, so I've been taking on all these elements of Islam. This is my investment in Christianity right here, and this is what I've grown up with and what I valued in Christianity. And over the last few months I've taken on this part of Islam and this part of Islam and this part of Islam. And I was sitting there looking and thinking, hmm, I can see I have more invested in Islam than I do in Christianity. So, I guess that makes me a Muslim.
So I'm sitting there and I think, I guess I'm a Muslim. It's then that I go up to the imam and I say, "I want to become Muslim. I want to take my Shahada." So I want to ask, why did you leave Christianity? Did you see some inconsistencies? Yeah, I never felt that I left Christianity. I never made the choice to leave Christianity. It was a choice to be a better Christian through these different practices and beliefs. And then I found that really, the true Christian, the true Christ follower, is a Muslim, you know? Realizing that Jesus Christ (pbuh), he was a Muslim and he called to Islam.
So, I only left Christianity in terms of the tribalism of identifying with one particular person and one particular group. Basically every other religion out there is... It takes its name from a people or from a person or from a culture, right? Christianity from Christ. Buddhism from the Buddha. Judaism from the Jews, the people of Judah. And so, all these names are taken from particular peoples. But then you have Islam, which just... It's a concept and it belongs to everyone. And it belonged to Jesus Christ (pbuh). And now I found myself now, trying to be a better Christian that, that was a better name for me than Christian, it was Muslim.
Then, what was the reaction of the people around you to your conversion to Islam? My mother, it took her a few months to come around. And I take responsibility for that myself. Because I told her the day I took my Shahada. I called her up at the end of the day and said, "Mom, I want to speak to you about something." She said, "Adrian, I'm just heading out the door. Can it wait? I'm heading to a Bach Society concert. Can we talk about this later?" And I said, "Mom, I've become Muslim." And so she said, "Uh, I have to go. We'll speak later. Bye." And so, she was concerned, and she knew from her perspective, I was going through a rough week. She took a while to come around.
So, then what happened? Did you enter FBI as a Muslim? Right, so... My aspiration to be an FBI agent brought me into Islam, ultimately. It was because of wanting to be an FBI agent that I learned Arabic. It's because of learning Arabic that I was exposed to Islam. And then being exposed to Islam, I became Muslim. And so I found myself now in my junior year and then senior year of college, applying for several positions with the FBI, getting two internships positions. So, I worked in the summer in Washington, D.C., and so I had a top secret clearance. It means I had gone through a background investigation. So, the FBI had looked into my whole life, every place I'd spent time.
They'd talked to all kinds of people I'd ever associated with in life. And I had to go through a polygraph, go through a lie detector test. They asked me about my whole life, went through a series of examinations. And after a period of something like 6 to 8 months, was qualified by the government to view secret government material if the need ever arose. And so, during my time at the FBI, there were a few things marked classified and secret. And there was one sentence I saw in my time there that was marked Top Secret. You got accepted into FBI now? I had the top secret clearance. I had two internships with them and had a job offer as an intelligence analyst.
So, I could see my trajectory in the organization. I had my contacts with the linguists. I was going to be a linguist. Once I reached the age of 26, would be old enough to apply for the special agent position, and then my career would go on from there. So now, you were a Muslim in the FBI. What type of experience was it, and what happened next? I met lots of really sincere, committed people. But I was slowly awakening and it took me a while. But I was slowly awakening to whiteness in a way, in terms of growing up white American.
You grow up complacent with the way things are and think that, okay, let me just lead a good life and find a good house and find a good job, and just try not to hurt anybody, and I'll be a good person, without knowing that the house that you pick and the job that you go into and the education that you get, it is all contributing to a system of oppression and subjugation in the US and abroad. Because you grow up as a Westerner thinking that, okay, the police are here to protect us, but if you grow up as a minority community, you might understand, Well, sure, that's part of it, but they also inflict a lot of violence and harm on communities as well. And so similarly, the FBI...
Yes, the FBI brings people who've done horrible things to justice. It restores the rights of people whose rights have been taken away. But it's also a function of a political organization. It's political at its core, is in the best interests of the politicians to see as the threat of today, is the threat that the FBI is contributing resources to. It took me a while to realize, and it was only a year out of my internship. And then starting to think about marriage to this particular sister that I was interested in, and a conversation that I'd had with her father that really made me realize that I could not hold these two things in tension anymore.
These were always in tension and I couldn't balance it anymore. I could not both serve the spiritual and religious community that meant so much to me, and serve the organization that was doing so much harm to it as well. So then, why did you leave the FBI? It was a career you have dreamed of for a long time. Wasn't it hard to leave for your religion? So, it's interesting. It was hard and it wasn't hard at the same time. It wasn't hard in that moment when I made the decision. Because I remember I was sitting in the living room of my future father in law's house. So I'm sitting with this Afghan man, amazing, lovable man. He has so much love and warmth and everything.
And he welcomed me into his home. He was excited that I was... Seemed to be this upstanding guy. And I was interested in marrying his daughter. So we're having a conversation about that and about my aspirations in life, and where I see myself going, and how his daughter would fit into that. And so here he is, this amazing, welcoming, encouraging man. And then suddenly his face gets serious and he says, "So, I think we need Muslims like you in the FBI. But I don't think that Muslim could be married to my daughter." And I'm sitting there feeling small, suddenly intimidated by this man. And I realize he's right. He's absolutely right. And so, that was already not sitting well with me.
And then in that moment when my father in law brought it to a head, I realized me having this beautifully inspiring woman as a life partner for the rest of my life and raising children with... For me to either have her or have a certain career trajectory that I'm already feeling slightly uncomfortable about. I'd rather choose her and see what happens. Being in the FBI was what gave me focus. It's what gave me direction. It gave me a sense of mission and purpose in life. And when that was taken away from me, I was left with a sense of, okay, well, I want to serve the Muslim community. I want to increase in knowledge, which, Alhamdulillah, I'm blessed.
Praise God I was able to get certain ijazahs, certain traditional authorizations, in terms of being able to teach Qur'an, Qur'an memorization, basics of jurisprudence, of creed, theology and Islamic spirituality, among other qualifications. And so, I had this general mission and purpose of serving the Muslims and learning about Islam. At the end of the day, I had a sense of ultimate purpose. And that's what Islam gave me in terms of worship of my Creator. But I also have to do something in this world while I'm here. And then a few years, I found myself coming full circle in terms of once working and doing work for the FBI. And then now, fast forward.
I'm in the Muslim Chaplain position at Brown, an imam in the community in Rhode Island. And it's the years in which I**S is seen as this great existential threat to America that everyone's terrified of. And so, the local counter-terrorism agent in Providence at the time, he reaches out to me to establish a relationship. I know enough of what he's doing and that I can't completely reject him. But I have to hold him at arm's length because of what he wants to look into in the community and the harm that can be caused systemically. This FBI agent is trying to develop a relationship with me.
Meanwhile, I'm getting to know various people in the community, and I get to know one brother who is in the prison system in Rhode Island and tells me about a story that happened to him, he said when he was in prison. After a while, an Assistant U.S. Attorney shows up in my office at Brown with a subpoena, which is a legal document which says, if you don't give us certain information, we will put you in jail. And so, at that point, I had to reach out to my contacts, get a lawyer to make sure, to protect myself in the whole procedure. And found myself speaking in front of a grand jury. And so, I'm in a room with a grand jury.
The way a grand jury works, which is not like a trial jury in court in America. The way a grand jury works is that once the attorney is done, then the jury members get to ask whatever questions they want. And so, there were 20, just regular, average Rhode Islanders in that room. They started asking me questions about Islam. And I could tell... I looked over at the US attorney and I could see he was getting very uncomfortable. And one of the... She was such a sweet woman.
One of the people there, she asked me, she said, "You mentioned how this brother, you were kind of a mentor to this brother, a spiritual mentor, and now this situation of you having to give his personal information to us and to the attorney and the FBI agent and this whole thing, has it affected your relationship with him?" And I said, "Bless your heart. Of course it has. Thank you for asking. It's a really unfortunate situation." But of course, I could see the US attorney was not happy that people on this grand jury were just seeing the humanity of this whole situation and how really absurd it was, ultimately.
After becoming a Muslim, did anyone around you get inspired by you and become a Muslim? Almost ten years after I came to Islam, my grandmother, I went to her house one day and she was starting... She died with a certain level of dementia. And so, she was starting to become a little less there, but more childlike and have this childlike innocence about her. And there was one day I went to her house. I visited her, like we always used to visit her with my father's family and my brothers over there.
And she was looking at me so intently, and she said to me something like, "That thing you do where you go upstairs, I want to do that with you." And I thought, "That thing I do where I go upstairs, what's she talking about?" And I realized it's when we would spend hours there, and then a prayer time would come in. I'd excuse myself to go pray Dhuhr or pray Asr upstairs. And she would note that, and she would see the quality of how I looked going there and coming back. And so she said, that's what she was referring to. And I said, "Oh, do you mean pray?" And she said, "Yeah, yeah, that." So I said, "Okay, you could pray with me." And so I led her in prayer.
And then came back another day and she said, "Can we do that thing where you go upstairs..." And I said, "Okay," and then... So I told her, I said, "Look, can I tell you about Islam and about the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)? And she said, "Oh, yes, yes, please." And so, she was such a lovely, blessed woman. Bless her heart. I've never met such a sweet woman as she was. And so I told her all about it and told her about "La Ilaha illallah", about the statement of faith, that there is no God but Allah and what that means, and who Muhammad (pbuh) is. And she was just so ready to accept. So, she took her Shahada there. She said the testimony of faith there.
What impressed you the most about Prophet Muhammad (saw)? Reading about his life, it was clear to me that he was someone who was completely without blame, completely doing exactly the right thing in life. I think that was a key thing. I've always been a perfectionist, always wanting to do the right thing, always deeply upset when I feel like I've done the wrong thing. And so, being able to know the intimate, moment-by-moment details of the life of this inspirational man, that was a real sense of healing for me. Having a sense of what it means to be the best person I could be.
And so, just seeing him in all these situations, as I read these narrations and hear stories about him, and get to know him, his whole life is a healing for me. So you talked about some Ayat in the Qur'an that you're convinced that this must be divine. Can you give just 1 or 2 examples that you have in your mind? I grew up as a classical pianist. I was quite accomplished in that regard. Playing piano growing up, and doing hour long solo recitals, won a few competitions. So music and sound was very important to me. I think that's one of the reasons why the adhan hit me so hard. Just hearing the beauty and the simplicity of that.
And then also as soon as I started listening to the Qur'an, I knew it was clearly not from this world, for me. Having grown up in a musical tradition and then just the simplicity and the specificity of the recitation. I fell in love with the art of Qur'anic recitation immediately. And so, one of the first things that drew me to the Qur'an was not necessarily the wisdom I found in it, which was profound, but just the raw sound of it. Just, it didn't seem human to me. Brother Adnan, thank you so much for your sincere answers. We learned a lot from you. May Allah reward you for all the things you do for this Ummah. Jazakallah khairan for being with us. May Allah reward you as well.
This has been a great pleasure and honor to be here. Thank you very much.