ISLAM continues to attract large numbers of people everyday and is the fastest growing religion in the world. But who could have imagined that a guard at the world's most notorious prison, which is known for arresting and torturing people without trial or conviction, will accept Islam influenced by one of his very detainees. The Newsweek (March 30 issue) carried a story of Army specialist Terry Holdbrooks, a guard at Guant?namo, whose conversations with detainee 590, a Moroccan also known as “the General,” proved to be life-altering. For the first six months of his time at the prison, the report says, Holdbrooks spent most of his day shifts just doing his duty. He'd escort prisoners to interrogations or walk up and down the cellblock making sure they weren't passing notes. But when the midnight shifts came, they were slow. “The only thing you really had to do was mop the center floor,” he told Newsweek. So Holdbrooks began spending part of the night sitting cross-legged on the ground, talking to detainees through the metal mesh of their cell doors. He developed a strong relationship with the General, whose real name is Ahmed Errachidi. Their late-night conversations led Holdbrooks to be more skeptical about the prison, he says, and made him think harder about his own life. Soon, Holdbrooks was ordering books on Arabic and Islam. During an evening talk with Errachidi in early 2004, the conversation turned to the Shahada, the one-line statement of faith that marks the single requirement for converting to Islam (“There is no god worthy of worship except Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet”). Holdbrooks pushed a pen and an index card through the mesh, and asked Errachidi to write out the Shahada in English and transliterated Arabic. He then uttered the words aloud and, there on the floor of Guant?namo's Camp Delta, became a Muslim. As the fog of secrecy slowly lifts from Guant?namo, other scenes are starting to emerge as well, including surprising interactions between guards and detainees on subjects like politics, religion and even music. The exchanges reveal curiosity on both sides — sometimes even empathy. “The detainees used to have conversations with the guards who showed some common respect toward them,” says Errachidi, who spent five years in Guant?namo and was released in 2007 after being found innocent. “We talked about everything, normal things, and things (we had) in common,” he wrote to Newsweek in an e-mail from his home in Morocco. Though it was only Holdbrooks who volunteered to embrace Islam, other guards too, as Errachidi says, had expressed interest. As early as in 2002, Holdbrooks and other guards were increasingly skeptical about the prison and the misgivings that they were told about it – including doubts that the detainees were the “worst of the worst.” Specialist Brandon Neely, who was at Guant?namo when the first detainees arrived that year, says his enthusiasm for the mission soured quickly. “There were a couple of us guards who asked ourselves why these guys are being treated so badly and if they're actually terrorists at all,” he told Newsweek. Holdbrooks grew up hard in Phoenix — his parents were junkies and he himself was a heavy drinker before joining the military in 2002. He has holes the size of quarters in both earlobes, stretched-out piercings, and wrist-to-shoulder tattoos. He joined the military to avoid winding up like his parents. He was an impulsive young man searching for stability. With little prior exposure to religion, Holdbrooks was struck at Gitmo by the devotion detainees showed to their faith. “A lot of Americans have abandoned God, but even in this place, (the detainees) were determined to pray,” he says. Consider here the impact of what practicing Islam has on other people, coupled with inviting them using reason and truth revealed by Allah in the Qur'an. Allah knows best, had the detainees only talked about Islam without practicing, the impact would have softened. And the opposite is also true: had the detainees only practiced and never spoke out about Islam, it may not have made this difference. In the end it is Allah who guides whomever He wishes to the straight path. Holdbrooks only told his two roommates about the conversion, and no one else. But other guards noticed changes in him. They heard detainees calling him Mustapha, and saw that Holdbrooks was studying Arabic openly. One night his squad leader took him to a yard behind his living quarters, where five guards were waiting to stage a kind of intervention. “They started yelling at me,” he recalls, “asking if I was a traitor, if I was switching sides.” At one point a squad leader pulled back his fist and the two men traded blows, Holdbrooks says. Holdbrooks spent the rest of his time at Guant?namo mainly keeping to himself, and nobody bothered him further. Another Muslim who served there around the same time had a different experience. Capt. James Yee, who had become Muslim years earlier, was a Gitmo chaplain for much of 2003. He was arrested in September of that year on suspicion of aiding the enemy and other crimes — charges that were eventually dropped. Yee says the Muslims on staff at Gitmo — mainly translators — often felt beleaguered. “There was an overall atmosphere by the command to vilify Islam.” Back in Phoenix, Holdbrooks returned to drinking, in part to suppress what he describes as the anger that consumed him. Holdbrooks divorced his wife and spiraled further. Eventually his addictions landed him in the hospital. He suffered a series of seizures, as well as a fall that resulted in a bad skull fracture and the insertion of a titanium plate in his head. Holdbrooks, now 25, says he quit drinking three months ago and began attending regular prayers at the Tempe Islamic Center, a mosque near the University of Phoenix, where he works as an enrollment counselor. The long scar on his head is now mostly hidden under the lace of his Muslim kufi cap. When the imam at Tempe introduced Holdbrooks to the congregation and explained he'd converted at Guant?namo, a few dozen worshipers rushed over to shake his hand. “I would have thought they had the most savage soldiers serving there,” says the imam, Amr Elsamny, an Egyptian. “I never thought it would be someone like TJ.” __
