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| Why Yasir Qadhi Wants to Talk About Jihad | |
| 2011-03-22 | |
| He's the Salafi imam who is the intersection point between a number On a chilly night in the dead of a New England winter, Yasir Qadhi hurried down the stairs of Yale UniversityÂ’s religious-studies department, searching urgently for a place to make a private call. A Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies, Qadhi was a fixture on the New Haven campus. But Qadhi had another life. Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam, drawing a tide of followers in the fundamentalist movement known as Salafiya. Raised between Texas and Saudi Arabia, he seemed uniquely deft at balancing the edicts of orthodox Islam with the mores of contemporary America. To law-enforcement agents, he was also a figure of interest, given his prominence in a community considered vulnerable to radicalization. Some officials, noting his message of nonviolence, saw him as an ally. Others were wary, recalling a time when Qadhi spouted a much harder, less tolerant line. On this night, however, it was QadhiÂ’s closest followers who were questioning him.
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