Islam’s Taubah is a Kali Moment. A Moment of Horror-Filled Realization of Trespass
What can a radical imam teach us about this moment in history?
Editor’s Note: In light of the cultural and political wormhole we’re being collectively pulled into — especially with escalating tension around the Israel-Palestine war and the 2024 presidential race heating up over the next month — I felt this was an appropriate time to share the highlights of my four-hour conversation with alleged terrorist Abu Taubah.
In 2016, through a series of personal networks, I had the opportunity to interview an anti-terrorism task force veteran who converted to Islam and was later accused by the U.S. government of being a terrorist. His name is Abu Taubah, and while the allegations against him were formally dropped, the stain of accusation remained.
In the worldwide Muslim community, Abu Taubah has been seen as a progressive voice teaching Islamic education since 1995. He earned awards from Islamic groups in Toronto, Sri Lanka, and Edinburgh. In addition to teaching, he hosted an online school called Timbuktu Seminary. Later, Fox News took an interest in Taubah because Omar Mateen was said to have attended the seminary. You may remember a radicalized Mateen as the Orlando nightclub shooter.
In a subsequent Fox News interview, Taubah rejected the attack on the gay nightclub but refused to condemn Mateen himself. He said, “[In Islam] we don’t denounce people; we denounce actions. And I denounce this action. I hate this action. But I don’t hate Omar Mateen, and I don’t denounce him.”
There are two Taubahs. There is the Taubah you see on YouTube channels which is filled with extreme emotions ranging from frustrated passion to intolerant reductivism. And then there is the Taubah I spoke with, the Taubah who makes a calm and compelling case for his views. So who is Taubah and why is this conversation still significant years later?
For starters, after the disproportionate Israeli response to the horrific October 7th Hamas attack, we’ve shed the bedtime story that the world is neatly divided into “good guys” and “bad guys.” Blurring that dividing line segregating two realities is at the heart of what I do. I’ve always felt that this conversation with Taubah stood out for marking a new territory. It’s a conversation that invites us to listen instead of react — and I feel we desperately need to do more of that. We need to be able to listen to each other. My role in this exchange — as in any — is to bring you a wider lens through which to view our very fragile human condition. My role isn’t to pass value judgments, to neither praise nor condemn, but to be devoted to kindling the fire of human belonging.
Marcus Dwayne Robertson accepted Islam when he was twelve years old, though his mother insisted he continue to attend church. The son of educators, Robertson grew up in a home that encouraged the pursuit of learning–something he continues today on his path to a deeper understanding of Islam.
Eventually, Robertson would take the name Abu Taubah from Surah Taubah in the Quran, the last of the Medina chapters forged during the warring years in Islam’s origin story. The verses emphasize a declaration of disassociation with polytheists and how to navigate the fulfillment and breaking of earlier treaties. Also within that surah is the acceptance of any pagan who has repented their ways and come to embrace Islam.
Taubah translates to repentance, but the word carries far more weight than that. Taubah is a moment of horror-filled realization. This concept is captured powerfully in the Hindu story about the goddess Kali, the mother of destruction. Because everything Kali set foot on was destroyed, the desperate attempt to stop her blood-lust led her to step on her consort, Lord Shiva, killing him. When she was faced with what she’d done, that realization pulled out of her state of mad destructiveness. Kali subsequently biting her tongue is one of the most iconic moments of taubah.
Christianity’s expression of taubah is found in the story of Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. Until recent times, Judas was tainted as the archetypical betrayer, with little to no understanding of his motivations. Arguably one of Jesus’ most devout disciples, Judas’ betrayal was fueled by his love for both Jesus and the movement he led. It wasn’t until he had committed his disloyalty did Judas’ horror-filled realization—a moment of taubah—fell on him.
To understand Abu Taubah the man, it is important to understand what motivates him. With Kali and Judas, their transgressions and moments of repentance came from acts of love and purpose. The same is true for Abu Taubah; he felt that his experience serving the United States in combat created a deep need for repentance that a deeper reach for Islam would fill.
The man who is raised is never as powerful as the man who has raised himself. Abu Taubah wasn’t indoctrinated by social media or a local imam. He isn’t another Muslim born into Islam, brought up in a remote part of the world with zero exposure to the West. He is soft-spoken and charming, albeit with undertones of aggression. He is neither a simple man nor a run-of-the-mill hate preacher. Taubah is from the West and he has shed its sentiments — at least, he shed everything he believes is corrupt about America and its influence.
As an American-born black man who was passionate about serving his country, Abu Taubah made a decisive move to join the United States Marine Corps as his first act of independence upon reaching adulthood. He served with the 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company, an anti-terrorism force. His voice brims with pride as a patriot who served his country in a capacity that other Muslims would likely see as a conflict of interest. In recalling his military career, Taubah's voice is laced with frustration with what he defines as political interference in intelligence work.
“The era that I’m talking about is before Edward Snowden and 9/11. I joined in 80’s till the 90’s, so it was a totally different era; a totally different way of dealing with terrorism than we have now. Number one, it wasn’t on TV. Number two, since it wasn’t on the TV, it didn’t have so many people having their hand in it. There wasn’t the status quo, so we were allowed to do our job. Nowadays, it’s a political statement.”
When his tour was over, Taubah didn’t come home to beer and barbeques, like other Marines. Instead, he dove deeper into Islam.
“I wanted to learn my deen [Islamic faith] better. I was holding out. I’d already been in the Marine Corps and traveled the world a number of times. And I had been sitting down and teaching children, and I realized that as a teacher I didn’t know enough. So I was teaching at an Islamic school, so I decided I need to go learn more. And I understood that the best place to learn was in Mauritania. And it’s an open desert and anyone being there would not to be there unless they were studying.”
While the most severe interpretations of Islam are found in remote places of study, an escape from influence is found among spiritualists throughout history from Buddha to Jesus. But for Abu Taubah, the puritanism here is important. His post-military retreat into a harsh desert climate is indicative of someone who wants to be free of influence. The harsh asceticism of the open desert has been home to devotees since at least Christianity.
With considerable counter-terrorism work under his belt and renewed Islamic training, Taubah took the first concrete step that positioned him as a radical Imam. Becoming an intelligence asset, he used his unique skill sets to advance a post-9/11 counter-terrorism agenda, where he quickly became either exposed to or disillusioned by the end goal.
“When I was in Egypt, the State Department contacted me and they wanted me to do a covert operation for them. I did. And it was a good way to make money. It was overseas, I needed the money. I’m a Marine and I know how to do work like this. I know Arabic. And we all wanted the same thing: to fight and capture what they call Osama bin Laden, and to stop terrorism. And I was already trained. So I did that type of thing for a period of time and then I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore. I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore because I thought the people weren’t actually fighting terrorism. We were fighting people who we didn’t like.”
Conspiracy theories about America are rife in the Muslim world, including among American Muslims. Many believe in what is called the “myth” of Osama bin Laden—a puppet figure, a phantom target created to justify American assertiveness in the Muslim world. While some Muslims across the spectrum of Islamic extremism see bin Laden as a saint, abandoning all worldly comforts for a higher cause, others will point to the conspiracy.
In Taubah’s world, conspiracies are blurred with racial grievances and critical social commentary. For a mind that cannot see the difference between theory, conspiracy and critique, Taubah is dangerously influential.
His growing animosity toward America was underscored by terrorism charges that were brought against him while working as a CIA asset. Taubah challenged the FBI charge of conspiracy to commit a false tax form, a charge that included tax fraud for the purposes of terrorism in West Africa. Though the charges were dropped in 2015, Taubah spent four years in jail.
“For three of those years, they held me in isolation, where I was under total illumination. They had bright car lights on my face, 24/7, for three years. The lights never went out. The bright lights were on an angle facing my face.”
Having interviewed intelligence assets off the record, it’s clear that Taubah’s story doesn’t make sense. The CIA doesn’t wantonly throw hard-won assets in jail with grave terrorism charges—especially not highly-skilled individuals such as Abu Taubah. This is where the cracks in his story start appearing, and the conspiracies compound that show us the underbelly of religious and racial tension in the United States.
Why was a highly-trained former Marine turned intelligence asset arrested under terrorism charges and thrown in prison? Taubah’s answer is clear: racism and Islamophobia. “A lot of it has to do with racism, and some of it has to do with religious racism,” he told me. “You know, religious bias and discrimination.”
Despite being an American, Taubah’s foremost identity is Muslim. He is not a foreign-born and bred imported imam who sees America as the “Great Satan” in the same way as terror groups and foreign Islamists do. He evinces none of the traditional opposition to America and the West that is typical of Islamist figures in other parts of the world. This makes him a striking figure in a larger fight against radical Islam that otherwise simplifies the landscape into a dichotomy of good and evil.
If we define “radical” as a viewpoint that sees all other views as inadequate and inferior then, by definition, being a Muslim who sees Islam as the only option is “radical.” A devout follower of Islam cannot entertain the idea that his view is radical and extremely intolerant toward outside influences. In other words, if you want to call Taubah “radical” then it’s not because he harbors animosity against the actions of the United States; what makes him radical is that he sees no pious alternative to fully embracing Islam. Though Taubah was raised in the United States, he has pushed beyond a state of integration with the larger American community. Despite his upbringing and military service in a free, multicultural America, he cannot see any other way than an Islamic one.
These are the lesser-discussed undertones of what it means to be Muslim and American; what it means to be integrated. Anthropologists would favor a state of acculturation, of merging multiple identities as favored over assimilating to a culture. Taubah rejects this, not only for Americans but also for other Muslims who he says have tainted the faith with the culture they bring with it. For him, culture is second to religion.
For his part, Taubah sees the use of the word “radical” as a fabricated concept used by the West to criminalize Muslims. Taubah is not shy about his views and, in a liberal political climate eager to embrace multiculturalism, he doesn’t need to be.
On the subject of Sharia [Islamic] law, Taubah says,
“Sharia law is good, it’s the best law. People don’t even know what parts of sharia law are already in the Constitution. This all goes toward the confusion on sharia and Islam. We need more knowledge about these things. There’s nothing wrong with using the political system to make sure we [Muslims] get treated fairly. The Jews and homos already do it.”
What Taubah envisions, under Islamic law, is an empire that annihilates all competing ideas. This is what makes Taubah a striking radical figure. Having been raised in the West only to later convert to Islam means that he’s lived life as a non-Muslim. He’s fought our common enemies. He’s done intelligence work for our government. Having seen more sides to this picture than the average American, he still reduces to a single point: Islam
As we paint a picture of what it means to be radical, we’re beginning to see a complicated mosaic of grievances.
Despite a military career in counter-terrorism work, Taubah holds a diplomatic view toward radical organizations and their acts of violence.
Taubah sees both the United States and the Middle East as nations run by despots antagonistic toward Islam. He describes suicide bombers as something the media plays up to promote their own agenda. When asked about his time at the side of the Blind Sheikh (a.k.a Omar Abdel-Rahman)—the notorious jailed leader of a militant Islamist movement responsible for multiple acts of violence, including the first World Trade Center attack in 1993—Taubah maintains that Rahman suffered at the hands of a media and government conspiracy eager to manipulate and defame Muslims. This perceived conspiracy looms over terror groups including Boko Haram and ISIS, which according to Taubah, “are set up by the West to do clichéd things.” Taubah also can’t manage to denounce ISIS and hints that ISIS is part of a promised prophecy.
In 2016, this would have been a shocking claim. In 2024, it’s being shared among college students at anti-war protests across college campuses. Wormhole.
“I haven’t read up on ISIS. ISIS never said they’re a bad group. The ones who say this are the same ones who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I don’t know if they’re good or bad. All is see is all these groups attacking them, and they’re just fighting to survive. The Kurds are closing in on ISIS. In five years, ISIS will be destroyed. In the Last Days [according to Islamic prophecy] it’s established that Syria will still be fighting and the Mahadi will come down in Syria and help whatever group is still left there.”
In 2016, this sounded like bogus ravings. In 2024, ISIS is a blip on our radar and Syria is joining a new coalition of powers against Western Imperialism alongside Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc — in what feels like the dawn of the end times.
Taubah then quickly stepped away and discredited ISIS’ growing recruitment in the West as a fad that plays into a government conspiracy. If you’ve been paying attention to the currents after October 7th, you’ll have seen a conversation boom exposing the hidden hand of Western governments in rattling the pre-existing hornets next in the Middle East. It’s a common claim now that the U.S. and Israel were behind ISIS — a claim that I have no opinion or comment on. I am simply sharing where we are now and that what may have been a fringe view then is mainstream now.
“Why does ISIS have a website running in the US? They could stop that. Why are we allowing it in the US—allowing them to broadcast their message? Why? Because it is something that justifies the justice program. Most of these people [pledging allegiance to ISIS] have mental problems. [The government is] getting those people and making it look good for them [and their agenda]. Why are we they allowing their Twitter account? The US has agreements with companies to [fight] terrorism. There isn’t a freedom to let criminals do their thing.”
The Orlando attack shone a spotlight on the challenge of the largely unassimiliating, Islamic community leadership that has worked to insulate itself against criticism and examination by invoking Islamophobia. At the time of this interview, there was active ground covered to get Muslim Americans politically engaged through new groups like M Power Change and USCMO.
The next natural progression, especially in light of the deepening rift that feeds off social justice issues, is Islamic militancy. Taubah forecasted the same. That was 2016.
In 2024 some of the college protestors are chanting for death to Zionists — not Zionism, but Zionists. Not the ideology, but the people. It’s a violent and extreme position to take that’s getting cover under the sympathy for victims of genocide — but there’s nothing Islamic about it. As Taubah shared in the Fox interview, Islam calls for us to condemn behavior, not people.
“I think it should be an obligation for every man in the United States to join the military. Muslims in the United States are going to be eaten alive. We have not learned from history. We say ‘never again’ and that just means the Jewish people. But right now we’re going through the history of Herzegovina. We’re building up another Herzegovina right now.”
Despite how extremely uncomfortable it is to hear Taubah refer to people as homos, there’s another part of me that sees the prophetic nature of his views. “Never again” is on all our lips now, including urging the memory that never again meant never again for anyone including Muslims as elected leadership and systems of government freely dehumanize Arabs and anti-genocide supporters.
In 2016, Taubah predicted genocide, and his response to that is increased militancy on the part of America’s Muslims. This includes developing Muslim-run media, arguing that the government doesn’t allow Islamic media. When asked about Al Jazeera and its recent nationwide failure despite being allowed to run, Taubah pointed to a larger struggle that reflects the hearts of millions of Muslims worldwide.
“It’s America versus Islam,” he tells me. “An empire versus a small band.”
It feels like we’re there, right? It feels like this is a David vs Goliath moment in our history. Rebels against the Empire. Whether someone calls America the “Great Satan” or “an Empire,” the sentiment is the same. For many people now, America is an overbearing empire that needs to be cut down. Remembering the Islamic lesson — it’s not America that’s the problem; it’s the behavior of American systems and leaders.
Throughout my talk with Taubah, he invoked a host of secular grievances that would be familiar to any anti-capitalist activist. The same themes of injustices are ripe in other areas: class warfare, lack of access to education, poverty, racial tension, police corruption, and distrust of the American political system and its politicians. He also has a deep distrust of American society at large, saying that a form of modern-day intellectual, economic and moral slavery is perpetuated through film and traditional education systems.
On whether Western culture is harmful to Muslims, Taubah confesses:
“Prophet Muhammad wasn’t for the believer to see non-Islamic culture. If we see something from a non-believing culture, the heart would blacken because it was seeing things that hasn’t been seen or heard. Take movies for example. By the end of the movie, you’re rooting for the bad guy – people who are criminals or performing zina [fornication]. Those people are positioned in the movie as the best person.
Look at holidays. Children get overwhelmed by Christmas. These holidays have no basis in Islam. And if you don’t go along with it, then that society says you’re an extremist. Western society has become its own religion. Each religion has its own criteria: what’s haram [forbidden], what’s obligatory, what’s encouraged, discouraged, and what’s permissible.”
In addition to solving hunger and poverty, Taubah argues that Islam can also salvage the institution of marriage through Islamic polygamy.
“All the men in the world can’t be dirty bastards. It is how Allah has created them. Polygamy is better than cheating as long as a woman’s rights are taken care of and guaranteed, which Islam offers. For example, it is better to have a wife than a ‘baby momma.’ Right now there’s the ‘Friday night’ girlfriend and the ‘Sunday morning;’ wife. These things exist. Through Islam, a child from an out-of-wedlock relationship is given rights. It’s not a bastard.”
Taubah has two wives and 15 children, all of whom live in the home with him. There is no conversation on what a woman wants in this scenario.
He also addressed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy at the time for President of the United States. His view was contrary to the flocks of Muslims of all backgrounds who cherished the idea of a Clinton presidency. Taubah stepped back to take a much more critical view of the candidate, adding that “Hillary Clinton is one of the worst. Her husband’s administration was the worst against black people in U.S. history. They destroy Negro communities.”
Yet, most jarring was Taubah’s unashamed misogynistic admission that “Islam doesn’t allow for a woman president. Any woman as a leader is bound to fail.” He continued: “[Women are] more emotional, they have menses, or menopause; these things affect their mental state. Women in politics also have a chip on their shoulder.”
So why stay here, most would ask. Why not leave America, as political right always suggests when America is criticized by brown foreigners? (And remember, Taubah is American-born and bred.)
“We’re in the West because our countries are taken over by despots largely placed there by leaders in the West. Islam doesn’t say we have to leave. We have to gain respect of the populous by becoming leaders: mayor, governor, president. Muslims can have a lot to say over how we’re seen in the West. Islam is growing. Just look at birth rates and conversion rates.”
The words “Islamic radical” conjure images of “Death to America”-chanting, uneducated Arabs, products of madrassas with no experience of the world around them outside of Islam. That image exists, but it’s far too simplistic to capture the full portrait.
Despite his open, monolith Islamic views that wouldn’t allow for a female president and support for polygamy, he is in some ways more open about the clash of Western values and Islamic ones than the average Muslim American. While Muslim Americans stripped Omar Mateen’s faith and denounced him as a Muslim —a move that is easier than admitting there is a crisis in Islam— Taubah can see the difference between a man and his actions. That in itself is radically deviant from the Muslim majority opinion. In its own way, it is more humane.
Taubah is a powerful and terrifying figure because of the dualities he embodies, born in part out of the experiences he’s had that are unlike most other imams in North America. Labeled a “radical Imam,” the question isn’t so much, “Is Abu Taubah radical?” but, rather, “What does radical mean?”