Islam by Diplomat Grimland

Former U.S. diplomat, Dave Grimland interprets Islam

Newly settled in Montana, Dave Grimland tries to balance negative images of the Muslim world.
By Sam Howe Verhovek, Times Staff Writer
April 1, 2007


PLENTYWOOD, MONT. — Dave Grimland spent nearly 30 years as a foreign service officer — "telling the U.S. side of the story," he says — in Bangladesh, India, Cyprus, Turkey and other nations with large Muslim populations. He wrote ambassadors' speeches, arranged cultural gatherings, and more than once hunkered down as angry mobs gathered outside the embassy to protest American policy.

Now retired and living in rural Montana, Grimland is once again telling a side of the story — only this time, in quiet pockets of the Big Sky State, he's trying to tell the Muslim side to non-Muslim Americans.

"I'm going to ask you, at least for this evening, to try to put on a pair of Muslim glasses and see what the world looks like," Grimland said one recent night to about 40 ranchers, farmers and others in the basement of the county library near the spot where Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan meet.

Outside, it was snowing and 16 degrees. The nearest mosque was about 120 miles away, in Regina. Many in the audience said they had never met a Muslim other than Plentywood High School exchange student Alisher Taylonzoda, from Tajikistan.

For two hours and 40 minutes — including a brief break for cider and baked goods — the Montanans listened intently as Grimland covered a sweeping amount of history and made a case that the vast majority of Muslims are like the great majority of Christians, Jews or Buddhists.

"No worse; no better," he said. "They want peace. They want to live their lives."

A soft-spoken man of 63, Grimland has traveled to dozens of churches, schools, small-town gathering halls and Indian reservations.

He brings along a black roller suitcase crammed with books, magazine articles and photocopies of slightly blurry maps, timelines, and "further study" reading lists for those interested in the history of Islam.

Talking to a dozen people there, 40 here, as many as 75 elsewhere, Grimland hardly expects to change the world. But he does feel a calling.

"I'd been frustrated ever since 9/11 by listening to comments [about] the backwardness of Islam, about the religion's responsibility for the 9/11 tragedy, versus the actions of a small number of Islamic extremists."

And so, Grimland said, "I just thought maybe I could try to help people who haven't traveled, who haven't had the benefit of having to know this stuff because it was part of their job."

He didn't come to Montana to give lectures on Islam. He came here to retire.

After the peripatetic life of an embassy public affairs officer, he and his wife, Kathleen, a former UNICEF officer in India, moved in 1995 to Columbus, about 35 miles west of Billings. They have a 15-year-old son, Michael; Grimland also has a daughter, Debra, 36, in Atlanta.

Grimland and his wife built a house on land they bought in 1990, after friends visiting India from the States showed them photographs of the Montana property.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, as he watched television news and took in what he describes as irregular coverage of the Muslim world in local newspapers, Grimland felt that Montanans were being given little true sense of that world.

"Islam, for most of us, didn't really even register on our personal radar screens until Sept. 11, 2001," he said.

"And since then, we've been assaulted with generally negative, often very violent images of the religion."

Grimland does not remotely justify terrorism.

He does try to explain what motivates jihadists, and why some Muslims don't condemn the violence.

"Many Muslims do perceive the U.S. as decadent and degenerate," Grimland told the gathering here, referring to Janet Jackson's exposed breast in the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and TV's "Desperate Housewives."