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“Most of the questions are, ‘How should we react?’ Our answers are, especially for our sisters who are more visible because of [wearing a head scarf]: Stay home until things calm down.”3 Yet Awlaki was unable to produce any victims of hate crimes, such as the woman he claimed was beaten with a baseball bat.4

Behind the scenes, Awlaki was having other conversations—with the FBI, which had quickly identified him as a point of contact for the hijackers.5 Awlaki’s story shifted, depending on the day and the person to whom he was speaking. The FBI called him in for at least four interviews in the weeks following September 11.6

On September 17 Awlaki admitted to the FBI that he had known Nawaf Al Hazmi in San Diego—well enough to describe his appearance and personality in some detail.7 Scant days later, he told an Associated Press reporter tracking the investigation that he didn’t know any of the hijackers. Instead he sought to turn scrutiny back on the FBI. “Our people won’t listen to us when they see this is how the FBI is treating them,” he said. “It strengthens our belief that we are a community under siege, whose civil rights are being violated.”8

The imam was under pressure because of his relationship to the hijackers, and his worldview turned ever darker. Under the watchful eyes of FBI surveillance, he turned back to an old vice, visiting prostitutes in the D.C. area, at least one of whom was underage.9

His sermons also darkened, taking an increasingly combative tone. Awlaki had always been an advocate of the view that Muslims were victims of discrimination and violent persecution around the world, parroting the Saudi-influenced scholars who had come before him. Now, by his account, that persecution had come squarely to America.

Rather than focus on the perpetrators of 9/11—whom he had, wittingly or unwittingly, assisted in their suicide mission—Awlaki pointed, with increasing stridency, at the U.S. government. As the days stretched into weeks, Awlaki’s condemnations of terrorism became ever more equivocal and convoluted. In an October khutba, Awlaki delivered a speech that blamed terrorists for their violent acts while blaming the United States exponentially.

The fact that the US has administered the homicide of one million Iraqi civilians, and supported the murder of thousands of Palestinians does not justify the killing of one civilian in NY or Washington DC. And the killing of six thousand American civilians does not justify the killing of one innocent Afghani. Two wrongs don’t make a right.10

Awlaki’s peers didn’t see anything particularly radical about the imam from San Diego. “We could have all been duped,’’ said Johari Abdul-Malik after Awlaki had come out of the jihadist closet in 2009, echoing the view of others in the community. “But I think something happened to him, and he changed his views.’’11

Shaker El Sayed, another imam who served at Dar Al Hijrah, echoed this view, dismissing the idea that Awlaki’s contact with the September 11 hijackers should have been scrutinized.

Well, he was an imam when he left and he was an imam at the Islamic center in San Diego. And being an imam myself, I get in touch with lots of people, but does this necessarily mean that I agree with what they are doing behind my back? Of course not.

So the government, in the case of Muslims, they did not look for the serious scrutiny; they spread a broad dragnet of suspicion around Muslims, in general, and the Islamic centers in particular.12

Awlaki’s sermons continued to spiral into radicalism. At times, he blamed the Jews for the plight of American Muslims, saying that they controlled the media and the government and citing recordings of Richard Nixon in the White House as evidence.13 Awlaki also fixated on Muslim prisoners in the United States, a topic to which he would return again and again. He seemed to be projecting his own personal worries into these lectures, but his khutbas also reflected concerns being expressed across a broad spectrum of the Muslim community. The difference was the tone: