Ten years after his conversion to Islam, Jeremiah McAuliffe found himself in a lonely corner of the American landscape -- outside the tidy mosque on a Monroeville hillside, a place where he once so thoroughly belonged that he still has keys to the building.
On this day, women in robes and head scarves were tending to children. Afternoon prayer had ended.
"As' salaam alikum, salaam," he said to one.
"Walikum as' salaam," she said. Each was wishing the other peace.
"Surprised to see you," the woman said.
Surprised to be here, McAuliffe admitted.
McAuliffe had not been to the mosque to pray since September. By the time he stopped going, he already was feeling a distance between himself and other Muslims. He found his co-religionists insular, disinclined to criticize within the community, unapproachable, sometimes intolerant of other views.
He might have sensed the coming estrangement when, a year after he gave himself over to the religion of Mohammed Ibn Abdullah in a small prayer room in Pittsburgh, McAuliffe issued a reflective essay called "My First Year as a Muslim." The piece was critical of the local Muslim community for its lack of devotion, the tendency of many to criticize others, the attitudes toward women. He urged fellow Muslims to look inward, to examine their relations with non-Muslims. It was a cry reflective of his Catholic boyhood -- "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" -- a taking of moral inventory.
The reaction was no reaction at all. Like many other religions, Islam is complex and legalistic and the stuff of debate, but it is also a culture and its adherents still have secular lives to keep them occupied. McAuliffe was feeling lost in the shuffle. In coming years, the essay circulated through the Internet, turned up on mailing lists, in discussion groups.
"Obviously it resonates with ... people," but "they're kind of few and scattered," he said. And the Internet is not a place of worship.
A grandson and great-grandson of Chicago firemen, McAuliffe, 44, of Swissvale, grew up an Irish Catholic, studied religion at Duquesne, searched for something in which to believe and fell in love with the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed. In keeping with Muslim law, he gave up dating, and leery of the idea of an arranged marriage, remained single.
"I did come in kind of thinking 'Oh, I found a family,' " McAuliffe said. But his conversion -- the conversion of a religious studies major -- was driven by intellect.
"It's a religion entirely based on a text," he said.
He was amazed that Mohammed, the product of a tribal people in a constant state of war, wrote about justice and compassion.
"But he was in his culture," McAuliffe said. "You can never divorce yourself out of your culture."
When the moon of Islam burst against the sides of the World Trade Center, McAuliffe saw reactions on both sides -- the angry shock of Americans, the plaintive insistence of innocence on the part of fellow Muslims -- an impossible chasm to straddle.
"What I would have liked to see from the local Muslim community would have been an increased level of self-reflection and self-criticism," he said. "Each group, the Americans and the Muslims, want to believe they are innocent, that each is the injured party who has done no harm to anybody. Nobody is innocent."
Already an outsider, McAuliffe found himself a believer in Islam without a sense of oneness with his fellow Muslims.
"A lot of Americans say they reject organized religion. I've always thought that was a bit of an excuse. I guess how I've changed since 9/11 is I no longer believe in organized religion," McAuliffe said. "And it's a beautiful religion. It just breaks my heart."
Now he is left to wonder if religion without kinship can nurture him.
"In my philosophical studies, truth was always found in community," he said. And today, that building on the hillside seems as far away as the crescent moon atop its spires.
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