AN UNLIKELY IMAM
White ex-gang member is a beloved spiritual guide for young Muslims
A quarter-century ago, before he converted to Islam and long before he was a Muslim cleric, Imam Suhaib Webb was a street gangster.
He was a swaggering 6-foot-5, 18-year-old blond, blue-eyed member of the Bloods, a Los Angeles contingent whose tentacles reached east to Webb’s home in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. He smoked weed. He skipped school. His English teachers, he says now, were rappers — Tupac Shakur, NWA, Biggie Smalls and Public Enemy — and Webb spun his own tunes, serving as the DJ in a hip-hop ensemble called AK Assault.
On the cover of the band’s second album, “Mafia Style” (1992), Webb stares sullenly off into the distance, arms crossed. The hint of a scowl on his smooth baby face conveys a message embraced by teen rebels everywhere: The whole world is totally lame and in need of serious reform.
On a cool, rainy afternoon in October, as Webb stands before a congregation of Muslims gathered for Friday prayers at the Church of the Epiphany in downtown Washington, he’s 40 or so pounds heavier than he was in his AK years, but his hard gaze has not softened.
He’s sporting a bushy, mustache-less beard and a gray suit. He is 43 years old. But somehow he still carries the same badness and verve that enlivened the album cover. Maybe it’s the sleek, snappy cut of his suit or the gleaming white kerchief tucked in the lapel pocket. His size 12 shoes are pointy-toed — fancy and well-suited for dancing — and as he stands on the altar, politely waiting out the emcee’s introduction, there’s a bristling energy in the way he shifts on his feet.
Legions of Islamic teenagers in America know who he is. Webb has 100,000 followers on Twitter and 230,000 on Facebook. On Snapchat, the disappearing-message platform that is de rigueur among millennials, he gets roughly 20,000 daily views. His snaps are 10-second prose poems that bespeak his wisdom on both
Islamic law and 2016 street style. In one, he’s wearing a flat-billed Kangol hat as he waxes dubiously on arranged marriage. No other Sunni imam could joke, as Webb did in a video last year, that his Snapchat handle is pimpin4paradise786.
A newcomer to Washington and a deeply educated Koranic scholar, he is the founder and guiding spirit of a faithbased community group aimed at gathering the city’s young Muslims.
Center DC does not yet have an office or a single donor. There are only three volunteer staffers, all part time, but in leading his small group — which offers prayer sessions at iconic sites like the Lincoln Memorial and fortnightly classes on Muslim theology — Webb aims to make classical Islam relevant to modern Americans and to help a hate-addled world see that, if the prophet Muhammad were alive today, he’d be politically in sync with Bernie Sanders. He’d be tolerant of gays and abortion, and he would, like Webb’s long-ago rap idols, be sickened by the systematic racism pervading America.
Naturally, jihadist hard-liners hate Webb for his liberal views. In its online magazine, Dabiq, the Islamic State last year labeled him an apostate and “all-American imam.” The story ran with a photo of a machete pressed to a man’s neck and, beneath it, a caption reading, “The punishment for apostasy.” The story said of Webb, “Adopting a Southern inner-city accent sprinkled with thug life vocabulary, he is quick to switch to an ordinary voice when speaking to CNN and other media outlets.”
At the Church of the Epiphany in October, Webb’s subject is Donald Trump. “We’ve got a presidential candidate who has no respect for women, for Latinos, for Muslims, for blacks,” he says. “This is a guy who doesn’t know how to wear a suit properly and has a bad spray tan.”
For Webb, Trump is a reason to read Islamic history more closely and to find inspiration in two Muslim heroes of the first millennium, Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, and his descendant, Zaid. Both men died in battle, “sacrificing themselves,” Webb argues, “for the freedom of the Muslims. Zaid was killed and his body hung on a fence for four years.
“You have a responsibility to honor his legacy,” Webb intones to the hundred or so faithful kneeling on prayer mats arrayed on the altar. “You need to stand up against persecution, for what is right and just. Think of Rick in ‘The Walking Dead,’ of the way he wakes up in the hospital. We can wake up like that and speak out against white male privilege in this country. We have the collective power to propel causes like Black Lives Matter. We can make a huge difference.”
When he stalks off, Webb is swarmed by admirers. Some fans pound him on the back as others take selfies with him, leaning in close as he looms above, grinning. It is an ebullient moment — and a moment that now, in retrospect, seems like it happened seconds before an earthquake or in the instant before the sun fell from the sky.
On Nov. 8, American voters elected as president a candidate who has said that he would “absolutely” require Muslims to register in a database. And while that hasn’t happened, the president has barred residents from primarily Muslim countries to be banned from entering the United States.
How can a Muslim leader stand in the heat of such vitriol and remain poised and effective? At this unique juncture in American history, a great pressure rests on the shoulders of such leaders as Suhaib Webb.
Webb arrived in Washington late in 2013 from Boston, where for three years he was the top imam at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center — and a target.
When terrorists with Islamic ties bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, killing three and injuring more than 260, Webb fended off baseless Internet rumors that the bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were trained in Boston mosques.
In a New York Times op-ed, he wrote, “Radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the American Muslim mainstream. ... What Islam requires, above all else, is mercy.” Meanwhile, he was under attack from a local activist, Charles Jacobs, co-founder of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, who alleged that Webb was anti-Semitic, homophobic and in cahoots with the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, even as Boston’s leading rabbis disagreed and one U.S. attorney, Carmen Ortiz, told the New York Times that Jacobs’s claims were “incredibly racist and unfair.”
Webb moved to the District, oddly enough, to duck the political limelight — and to reinvent what it means to be a Muslim cleric. He is now, almost uniquely, a freelance imam, unaffiliated with any mosque, foundation or university. He makes his living traveling the globe, giving talks on Islam as he addresses crowds of up to 2,500.
His biggest fans are brainy millennials who were raised Muslim, only to come of age in the fractured techno blur of the 21st century. During a recent three-week period Webb traveled to New York, England, Morocco, Oklahoma and Texas, and also to Boston, where one fan, a 22-year-old Somali emigre named Ahmed Hassan, noted that Webb is a passable basketball player. “He’s old-school,” Hassan says, critiquing his former imam’s on-court habits. “He posts up and shoots sky hooks like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He fouls a lot. He plays to win.”
In Washington, Webb teaches two classes for the region’s biggest Islamic group, the Virginia-based All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS). But his main focus locally is his nonprofit, Center DC, which boasts about 25 frequent participants, most of them young Muslim professionals who are reminiscent of the Islamic believers who followed Muhammad into the hinterlands of the Arabian desert in A.D. 622.
They’re idealistic wanderers of the city, revolutionaries whose faith is not moored to a building, but rather to “pop-up duas,” which are spontaneous prayer sessions on random street corners. As Webb sees it, they constitute a vanguard. “Eventually,” he said, “one of them might become a federal judge or a congressman or a senator and they’ll remember their experience with Center DC. It could shape how we treat Muslims in this country.”
Center DC meets every other Tuesday night at George Washington University for a class, “Getting It Right,” a primer on Muslim theology. When I visit, Webb skates in exactly on time. He’s taller than everyone else in the room and more famous, but as he folds his legs under a small table, he stresses that tonight it’s all about community.
“And that means knowing that Yasmin is pregnant,” he says. “It means knowing that Tara and Anders are newlyweds.”
Webb’s ostensible mission tonight is to explicate 28 qualities of God, but the splendor of his talk lies in his wild and erudite digressions. When he notes that God is “the first and the last,” he dwells for a moment on a 1996 book on Christian theology, “The Domestication of Transcendence,” before musing briefly on ’90s-era heavy-metal music and its facile use of divine phraseology — “guitar gods,” for instance. “I believe in freedom of speech,” Webb says, “but I think it’s important to see what’s going on.
“God is immanent,” he continues. “He’s part of your life. He’s alive. He’s living.”
Soon, he’s stressing that Muslims must practice acts of charity and is dwelling on the “screaming liberal” bent of historical Islam by, for instance, quoting a 13th-century Syrian scholar. According to Webb, al-Nawawi said, “If a person is gay because of their nature, we have to treat them with mercy.”
The students listen attentively, taking notes. When the class ends Anders Rosen, one of the newlyweds, downplays Webb’s leadership role. “He makes us think,” says Rosen, a recent convert to Islam. “He gives us a place where we can unpack our ideas in an honest environment, but really it’s the group that matters. It’s an interesting time to be a convert, but among this group I feel like I’m supported. I feel like I’m on the TV show ‘Friends.’ ”
When I meet Webb at Peet’s Coffee & Tea downtown the next day he needs no caffeine. He is instantly antic as he tells me about one of his earliest Sunday school teachers, a Mrs. West who warned of an insidious rival faith.
“One of these days,” she told her class, according to Webb, “these men are going to knock on your door. They’re called Muslims, and they’re going to tell you to denounce your lord and savior, Jesus Christ!”
“I was like, ‘Holy hell!’ Webb says, looking back to a time when his first name was William. “‘How are these guys gonna come to suburban Oklahoma?’”
At the time, in Webb’s eyes Islam had little more to offer than “camels and tents.” Besides, it was nothing compared with his true devotion, basketball.
He was a talented shooting guard; by the time he was 14 he could dunk. In ninth grade, he transferred out of the mostly white schools of his home town, Edmond, and into a predominantly black John Marshall High School, in Oklahoma City, to play ball. But during his junior year Webb wrenched his knee, and he had more time to consider the hardships of his schoolmates: Many were on food stamps; some sold crack and broke into jewelry stores to survive.
Suddenly hip-hop wasn’t just music to Webb. It was truth. When Public Enemy sang of how blacks were bereft of political power (“Neither party is mine not the/ Jackass or the elephant”), Webb knew that the group was bearing witness. And he heard the poetry in rap as well. He is still rapturous as he recites lyrics from his favorite hip-hop album, “Paid in Full,” released in 1987 by Eric B. & Rakim: “I start to think and then I sink/Into the paper like I was ink.”
“Who the hell talks like that?” Webb marvels. “Rakim brings in a control of the language that is almost like Chaucer.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Webb’s first spiritual mentor was an Oklahoma City rapper. Chilly D. was four or five years older than Webb, who was 18 at the time. He spoke in cosmic terms, telling young Webb, “Islam is where black people come from.”
Webb was intrigued. He bought a copy of the Koran and began reading, clandestinely. Fearful of angering his parents, he read the holy book in a cramped bathroom off his family’s kitchen, perched on the toilet, the door locked as he absorbed the Koran’s wisdom.
There was warfare and bloodshed in the holy book’s 114 surahs, or chapters, yes, but as Webb read he also found a rhetorical zing that put him in the mind of the myriad rap rhymes he had memorized over the preceding years. He kept reading, and when he neared the end of the 18th surah, he encountered these words: “If trees were pens and the oceans were ink, you could never exhaust the words of God.”
Within months, he stopped drinking. He stopped smoking pot, stopped eating pork. His parents were “concerned,” he says. They were relatively liberal Christians; they didn’t like Mrs. West. Still, they worried about their son.
As a gang member, he had been shot at twice — luckily by bad marksmen. Once he watched a rival gang member bleed to death outside a restaurant. His parents asked, “How can you turn your back on Christ?” They worried that he was allying with a cult.
But Webb only deepened his faith. In time, he changed his first name — Suhaib was a disciple of Muhammad. He moved to Cairo and spent seven years studying Islam at Al-Azhar University, the Harvard of the Muslim world. In Cairo he learned to speak Arabic fluently. He became a hafiz, meaning that he joined the tens of thousands of Muslims worldwide who have fully memorized the Koran, all 77,500 words.
On the day before he left Egypt, an aging, gray-bearded farmer approached him in the mosque, dressed in a simple homemade robe. Mumbling in a country dialect of Arabic Webb could scarcely make out, the man asked the American imam to explain the pronunciation behind a single Arabic word in the Koran: “shrri,” meaning evil. “Tell it to me simply,” he said, “in everyday language. Every time I ask you guys a question you give complex answers nobody can understand. Simple, please.”
Webb gave him an answer and the old man went home, satisfied. And in an instant, Webb apprehended his mission in life: He would teach Islam in simple language. He would reach out to young Muslims by speaking the casual street patois of his youth, and it would work.