I Led the Mob That Attacked a Church and Jesus Stopped Me Cold
My father, Mahmoud Al Amin, came to America from Lebanon in 1979.
He arrived with almost nothing except two suitcases and the address of a cousin who lived in a small apartment on the East Side of Dearborn.
He worked in a factory for 12 years.
He saved every dollar he could.
He bought a small convenience store and then a second one.
By the time I was born in 1983, my father was a respected man in the community.
He was not rich by American standards, but he was comfortable and he had built something from nothing and everyone around us knew it.
My father was a proud man.
He was proud of his Lebanese heritage.
He was proud of being Muslim.
He was proud of the community he had helped build in Dearborn, but there was a darkness underneath that pride that I did not fully understand until I was much older.
My father had left Lebanon during the years of civil war and Israeli military operations in the south.
He had watched his village burn.
He had buried neighbors with his own hands.
He had carried wounds inside his chest that never fully healed, no matter how many years passed or how successful his stores became.
He never spoke about those years in direct terMs. He never sat me down and told me the full story of what he had seen and survived, but the anger leaked out of him in a hundred small ways every single day.
It came out when the news showed images from the Middle East.
It came out when he drove past the Catholic church on our street and muttered under his breath.
It came out in the sermons at our mosque, where the Imam talked about the enemies of Islam and everyone in the room nodded along like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I absorbed all of it the way a child absorbs everything around him without question, without filter, without ever stopping to ask whether what I was being taught was true or whether it was just pain dressed up as religion.
The mosque we attended was led by a man named Sheikh Bassam.
He was a tall man with a thick gray beard and a deep voice that filled the entire prayer hall when he spoke.
He was educated.
He was articulate.
He could quote a scripture for hours without stopping and he believed with his whole heart that the Christian West was the fundamental enemy of Islam, not just politically, spiritually, theologically.
He taught us that Christianity had corrupted the original message of Jesus, who he said was just a prophet and nothing more.
He taught us that the church was a house of idolatry.
He taught us that the Eucharist, which Catholics call the body and blood of Christ, was the ultimate blasphemy because it elevated a human being to the level of God.
I heard these teachings every Friday for 20 years.
I heard them so many times that they stopped sounding like opinions and started sounding like facts, like gravity, like air, like something so obviously true that only a fool or a traitor would question them.
By the time I was in my mid-20s, I had become one of Sheikh Bassam’s most dedicated followers.
I was not just a mosque attendee.
I was an organizer.
I helped it coordinate events.
I recruited young men from the community.
I connected our local group with networks of like-minded Muslims across the country who believed that active resistance against Western Christian influence was a religious obligation.
I want to be honest with you about what I mean when I say active resistance.
I am not talking about protests or pamphlets or peaceful demonstrations.
I am talking about organized intimidation.
I am talking about targeting churches and Christian community events with the intention of disrupting and frightening and sending a message.
We told ourselves it was jihad.
We told ourselves that every act of disruption we carried out was earning us reward in paradise.
We are not planting bombs.
We had not crossed that line, but we were walking toward it one step at a time and I was leading the march.
The men I recruited were young and angry and desperate for purpose.
Most of them were second or a third generation Muslims born in America who felt caught between two worlds and fully accepted by neither.
They had grown up watching their fathers and uncles struggle against discrimination.
They had seen the way Muslim communities in the Middle East were portrayed in American media.
They had felt the sting of casual racism and religious prejudice in schools and workplaces and neighborhoods.
They were carrying real pain and I gave that pain a direction.
I gave it a target.
I gave it a theology that told them their anger was not just justified, but holy.
That is one of the most dangerous things a human being can do.
Taking the genuine pain of vulnerable people and turning it into a weapon.
I did not understand that then.
I thought I was empowering them.
I thought I was waking them up.
I thought I was being the leader that our community needed.
What I was actually doing was destroying them from the inside while telling them they were being made stronger.
In the spring of 2016, Sheikh Bassam approached me after Friday prayers with something specific in mind.
He had received information that a local Catholic church was planning a special high mass to celebrate a significant feast day.
This was not just an ordinary Sunday service.