A journey of faith

Rejecting radical Islam -- one man's journey

Excerpt:

The path to faith often takes unexpected twists. In the case of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the road went through three of the world's major religions -- Judaism, Islam and Christianity -- and ultimately brought him to the FBI.
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In 1999 he left his job at Al-Haramain for law school at New York University. Away from his co-workers, he was free to question the radical doctrines he'd learned in Oregon and meet with others about spirituality, including Christians. A year later, he converted to Christianity and was eventually baptized in the Baptist church.


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1. Image from FrontPageMagazine.com
   
2. My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir is available from Amazon
   
   

Excerpt from Front Page interview:

FP: Share with us your climb out of radicalism and conversion to Christianity.

Gartenstein-Ross: If there's one thing that working for a Wahhabi charity can do for you, it is make you step back and rethink your religious views. In the summer of 2000, after my first year of law school, I found that I missed the tolerant, idealized version of Islam that I once practiced. But by this time my views on faith had shifted: I no longer saw the purpose of religion as forging a relationship with God that felt comfortable, but instead believed that I needed to truly understand the relationship that God wanted with me. I began that summer studying the Qur'an, the ahadith (Muhammad's recorded sayings and doings), and trying to revisit whether the moderate version of the faith that I once knew was indeed viable. Midway through the summer, during a stroll through Washington Square Park, I was struck by the realization that perhaps I hadn't found the truth in Islam. When the faith seemed to answer my spiritual questions, it was because those were the answers I had been looking for. It was then that I began to examine the arguments for Christianity with a far more open mind. I became a Christian before the end of the year.