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As a child, I was raised as a Catholic, although much of Christianity never really resonated with me. By the time I was in middle school, I had resolved that I was an atheist. Nevertheless, I continued to attend Catholic doctrine classes on weekends at the behest of my father, and eventually enrolled in our local Catholic high school. I was a non-believer, and I was not afraid to show it. It wasn’t until I was in grad school, living in Manhattan, and had become increasingly “evangelical” in my atheism, that I revisited the subject of faith and spirituality, when I encountered Islam.

Probably about two years after I converted —to Shi`ism, specifically — I had my first experience with “convertophobia”; my first moment when the presence and power of the Muslim community’s fear of converts began to crystallize for me. It was during the holy month of Ramadan, at a center in New York City; at the time one that was, ironically, dominated by converts from all walks of life. One of the shaykhs at the center knew that I was a hobby photographer, and asked me to shoot photos for a few of the most important nights of the month, in order to document and advertise for the community. So, with my bulky 5D in tow, I proceeded to do just that. It didn’t take long, however, for another convert with a known anger problem to begin harassing me and, in front of all present, accuse me of being a spy. The guy had a modest clique of sycophants built up at the time, but for the most part people recognized the notion as laughable. Sure, I’d only been attending that congregation for about a year at the time, but if my goal was covert surveillance, a Canon 5D is not exactly how anyone would go about doing it. Eventually, one of the shaykhs interceded, but even his explanation wasn’t quite good enough for this guy.

It wasn’t my last run-in with him, either. In one of his larger blow-ups, I had brought a Christian friend along with me who was curious to check out the center and learn a little more about Islam first-hand. When it was time for the dusk prayer, the call to prayer came and the congregation hastily began to form into ranks. I asked my friend to just relax in a chair in the back of the hall, saying I’d be back once this was all over. But just before the prayer started, I heard a commotion coming from behind. For a moment, everything stopped. I turned, and saw the same guy now badgering my friend, insisting that he needed to be able to open and search his backpack, because there could be a bomb in it. I have experienced a lot of humiliating moments in life, but until then, nothing like that.

The offender in question was someone who had converted a long time ago — possibly while he was in prison, although for what I suspect are obvious reasons, I never bothered to ask — and gone the usual Sunni-to-Shi`a route. In fact, he had gone the Wahhabi-to-Shi`a route, which is not all that uncommon once people burn out on all the crazy. Well, he had brought the crazy with him, with more than enough to share with everyone. Still, I figured it was probably an anomaly, and more related to his pretty open problem with white guys, particularly those of the bookish, academic sort. A practicing clinical therapist at the time, I just chalked it up to some pretty clear mental health problems and did my best to move on with life. Within another year at the most, he had more or less alienated himself from all but two people in the center, and eventually just stopped showing up.

I was lucky at that center because I was insulated. Looking back as a convert, I now know how precious that insulation was. If not for that, I’m not sure I would have lasted. More than anything, the shaykhs made the big difference. We had three, which is a ridiculously high number for any center, let alone one of that size. From early on, they helped guide me through an increasingly complex learning process, eventually tutoring me in seminary-level texts. Over time, though, I could feel myself hitting a wall. Even a couple hours a day or more of guided, independent studies was not cutting it for me. I needed something more.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I was doing my best to settle into seminary life in Karbala, Iraq. I had given up my Brooklyn apartment, my decently-paid job as a clinical therapist, and, in large measure, the approval of my parents and loved ones. After a month of sleeping on office floors, I finally got assigned to a student dormitory. At first, everyone seemed exceedingly nice. People appeared to go out of their way to assist me, and I couldn’t quite figure out if it was in spite of my lack of functional spoken Arabic, or because of it (pity). People would insist that I join them for meals in their rooms, would take me out shopping — hell, for the first month or two I was not allowed to pay for anything. I was a “guest,” and that just wouldn’t be culturally acceptable level of hospitality. Then, the honeymoon started to wear off. It began to dawn on me that many times, when I thought people were laughing with me, they were actually laughing at me: the stupid westerner, the dumb white guy, and yes, the convert.

There is an assumption on the part of many Iraqis — although I’m sure the same is true with other Shi`i cultural groups — that converts couldn’t possibly know their own adopted religion, let alone that they might know it better than someone born into it, for whom it is just as much a cultural artifact as it is a faith. From the get-go, I had people who would observe with great care my ritual ablutions, waiting to point out any visible procedural error. Of course, they found mistakes; except that the mistakes were on their part. It became rapidly clear that many of my colleagues did themselves did not understand a number of very basic aspects of religious law. In another similar experience, one of the teachers and administrators in my school commented about me to a friend of mine, “He needs to learn how to pray in Arabic.” Of course, I’ve always prayed in Arabic. This particular shaykh just made the natural assumption that, as a foreigner and convert, I could not.

When I got things right, or demonstrated that I could do certain things others could not (like wrap a turban), I was met with accolades. It later dawned on me that they were not the sort that are intended to be affirmative; rather, they were of the kind an audience might produce when cheering for a performing animal doing “human” things. Even today, if I lead a congregational prayer at an Islamic center, it is normal for at least one person to approach me after and complement my Quranic recitation. Often they are quite sincere, yet it’s hard to read it any other way than when a white person complements a black person for being “articulate.” Why wouldn’t they be? Is that supposed to be atypical?

To be fair, not everyone in my dorm knew straight out of the gate of my convert status. My seminary handler and I had actually come up with a weirdly elaborate back-story to hide the fact that I am an American citizen by birth, in order to avoid potential troubles or even kidnapping by overzealous Sadri students or their friends and relatives outside of the seminary system. Throughout my first year, I only ever had one experience that gave me a reason to take that threat very seriously, and it’s probably a story for another time. However, a number of workers in the Ayatollah’s office knew — and approved of — the fact that I was a convert, and nothing stays secret in Iraq for long. As soon as people started asking me more than once if I was really a Bosnian, born to Muslim parents, who immigrated to the US as refugees, who then converted to Shi`ism, and moved to Iraq to join the Islamic seminary, I more or less figured the jig was up.

At that point, I didn’t realize the extent to which me being a convert truly made a difference in how I was perceived. It wasn’t until another convert, this one from the UK, showed up the same seminary a few months later, and was placed in the same dormitory, that I really started to see the full depth of the “convert” label’s implications. He remains one of my best friends to this day, which is why I’m not going to use his real name (I’ll just call him Ali).

The strangest part was, not all that much had changed with Ali’s arrival; it was more that my perception about everything that had gone on up until that point changed, and for one critical reason: Ali spoke Arabic fluently, and could even understand Iraqi with what seemed like relative ease. It was then that I finally realized how people saw me — indeed, both of us — because Ali would tell me. After that, my perception of reality went through a painful and slow adjustment period. Approximately half or more of the daily interactions I had with people, which I had thought were just warm and humorous, were them making fun of me in ways I was sure not to understand; either because it would have required me to understand a lot of nuances about Iraqi culture (I was still a fish out of water), or because they consisted of what Ali would, in UK form, refer to as “sly digs.”

That knowledge hurt a great deal. People I had heretofore seen as my new friends actually just kept me around to laugh at my expense, and, even better, without me realizing it. But what hurt even more came next: we were both, on numerous occasions, accused of being spies. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but it happened all the time. In fact, when we left for the summer that year, both of our rooms were broken into, ransacked, and then pillaged, and all by our fellow seminary students, some of them in relatively high levels of study. (When we came back the following year, we were basically told by the religious authorities in Karbala who ran the seminary dorms that there was nothing they could do about it.) My point is, I’m not talking about some reckless and impulsive kids here, I’m talking about adults who are supposed to be legit, turban-wearing, bona fide religious scholars.

The following year, Ali actually ran into someone who used to live in the dorm with us. When asked how he was holding up, Ali said that it was rough, and people constantly accused him and myself of being spies. The student laughed, and said, “Trust me, I would know if you guys were spies. Because I was a spy. That’s why I got kicked out of the dorm. I was there to spy on the Sadris for Maliki, and I got found out.” At that point he produced his government ID card, as if to drive home the irony.

And that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? If a foreign government actually wanted to spy on the Iraqi seminary system dormitories — God knows why — then, realistically, who would they have sent? A white guy who couldn’t speak a lick of the local language, or one of the many Iraqi-Americans available, who know the language, the culture, the geography, who have roots there? It was just as laughable as being accused of spying with that giant Canon 5D as my “spy equipment.”

As time went on, I came to learn that this is just par for the course when it comes to converts. In Iraq, it has its own special forms, to be sure. At least two of the biggest scholars in Najaf do not give the normal monthly stipend to US or British passport holders. Because, you know: we might be spies, and that goes double for converts. Or I would hear stories of other converts studying in neighboring Najaf, who were also accused regularly of being spies, or rumors were spread about them being spies (as also happened to me and Ali). Just this last winter, after a class was letting out, the instructor, who has lived a lot in the US, asked the two of us, “So, how many times have you been accused of being spies?”

To avoid the dorms, we used to spend a few nights a week sleeping in the offices above the seminary, where we would have access to a kitchen, a western-style toilet, and most importantly, the internet. It was the only opportunity Ali and I had to keep in touch with our loved ones. At first, office workers started changing the wifi password to discourage us from spending too much time there. Eventually, complaints started coming in to the management from office workers: why were we being allowed to sleep around the offices at night, when it was obvious to all that we were spies? So, that ended.

A typical scene: this photograph was taken on my usual walking route home, from the Karbala city center to the neighborhood where my dormitory was situated.

What made the constant spying accusations so particularly galling was for myself and Ali, was that we had, at great personal expense, left behind our comfortable lives in the west to pursue what we considered to be a noble calling. It’s not like life in Iraq is especially comfortable, even under the best of circumstances. During my first year, we had only sporadic electricity. It would be on for a couple of hours, and the off for a few. In total, we would get 8–10 hours of electricity per day if we were lucky. And that was during the colder months. When summer started, and the temperature started creeping up to 110 degrees in the day, and 90–95 degrees at night, the availability of electricity got a whole lot worse, as did the consequences of life in its absence.

Iraqi food can be pretty great, but it’s generally not known for its variety, or its ease on the digestive system. As a student, you eat whatever food the central shrine authority in Karbala provides, which is usually some fairly unpalatable chicken, or rice with a given vegetable stewed in a tomato base. Ali and I earned very little money — even less than the average Iraqi student because of our lack of residency papers.

The neighborhood we inhabited was a dump. I don’t mean that in an insulting way; I mean it quite literally. The aqueduct that ran through our town was a dump site for garbage, dead animals, you name it. I won’t bother trying to describe the smell, mostly because nobody would believe me. I dubbed it “garbage river.” To cross from one side of the street to another, you had to cross over a network of jimmy-rigged, handmade “bridges” — usually cobbled together out of scrap metal or the torn off ceilings from buses — that threatened to collapse at any moment. On a grocery run one night, I once commented to Ali that, if I ever fell off into the river, rather than trying to pull me out, he should just shoot me and think of it as a mercy killing.

“Garbage River”

We readily accepted the exigencies of living in poverty, even by local standards, in Iraq. It was just part of the price tag of our education; an education we were fighting for tooth and nail so that we could return to the west and serve its growing community of converts. The real indignity was not our living conditions, it was that we were mocked, chided, and accused of being spies in spite of everything we had given up. Iraqi students don’t give up anything to attend seminary. They have homes to return to on the weekends, relatives to support them financially, and access to much larger stipends from surrounding schools and religious institutions. They don’t have to risk imprisonment or deportation at every security checkpoint, of which there are many, simply because the only way for them to complete their studies is to overstay a 30-day tourism visa. The constant efforts of others to humiliate us for being converts simply added heap after heap of insult to injury.

The teeth of a comb