Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi just recently said in his Facebook post:

Was greatly honored to meet our dear brother Terry Holdbrooks, who was a US Army serviceman stationed at Guantanamo. While he wasn’t particularly religious when he was initially stationed at the prison, seeing the prisoners had a profound impact on him.

Firstly, he was absolutely revolted at the inhumane manner in which they were treated. Before arriving, Terry was put through a program of ‘brainwashing’, where he was repeatedly told that these very people had brought down the Twin Towers. In fact, on the way to Guantanamo, his entire platoon was first flown to the 9/11 memorial, and then told to ‘Never forget’. The prisoners were regularly referred to as ‘scum’ and ‘hajji’ and ‘sand n***rs’ and ‘rag-heads’. They were tortured, mentally and physically (and Terry described some of what he witnessed). Their Qurans were flushed down toilets and stomped on. All of this made him extremely disgusted at how his own nation was treating these human beings, many of whom he could see were completely innocent and had nothing to do with terrorism.

Secondly, he told me that he could not understand how these prisoners remained so cheerful and high-spirited, always praying, always optimistic, always serene. One phrase that he said really struck a chord with me, “Even though I was technically free, I felt like a prisoner without any purpose in life, and even though they were the prisoners, I felt they were the ones who were free.” When Terry said this, I almost broke down in tears.

This led him to break away from the the routine of the other guards, and actually befriend the prisoners and talk to them. He taught himself some basic Arabic, and also conversed with the English-speaking prisoners (such as Shaker Aamer and Omar Khadr and Moazzam Baig). One of the prisoners gifted him his only copy of the Quran, which really touched him (he would tell me that the prisoners would show him kindness and gift him their food, even though they had limited supplies of food, because that was the only thing they could gift!) All of this led him down the very difficult path of realizing that not only was the entire narrative of the ‘War on Terror’ false, but that on a personal level, he could not reject the obvious truth of Islam.

Eventually, he converted to Islam and began praying at Guantanamo, and doing what little he could to help the prisoners out, by giving them more time to shower, or not unnecessarily placing extra handcuffs on them. When his conversion became public knowledge, and it was obvious that he was polite with the prisoners, he was humiliated and roughed up by his squad, and eventually was released from the army.

Since the army wanted to get rid of him quickly, they claimed that he had some type of mental disorder! His conversion to Islam was interpreted as being a sign of mental disorder.

Truly, the symbolism here is so profound. Even at one of the worst hell-holes on Earth, where the darkest and most brutish side of humanity is still manifesting itself, the light of Islam was so powerful that a person who was meant to extinguish it ended up embracing it. They wish to extinguish the light of Islam with their tongues, but Allah refuses except that His Light be perfected, even if the rejectors reject it.

Categories: Islam