Ex-foreign service officer offers Muslim perspective

PLENTYWOOD, Mont. -- Dave Grimland spent nearly 30 years as a foreign service officer -- "telling the US 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 US 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 recently to about 40 ranchers, farmers, and others in the county library.

The nearest mosque was about 120 miles away, in Regina. Many in the audience said they never had met a Muslim other than a 16-year-old exchange student at Plentywood High School, Alisher Taylonzoda, who comes from Tajikistan.

For two hours and 40 minutes, the Montanans listened as Grimland covered a sweeping amount of history and made a case that the 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, Grimland has traveled to dozens of churches, schools, small-town gathering halls, and Indian reservations. He brings along books, magazine articles and maps, timelines, and reading lists for those interested in the history of Islam.

"I don't do a PowerPoint presentation or anything like that," says Grimland, 63, who was born in New Mexico and raised in west Texas. "I try to be the power."

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."

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

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.

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

When he filled in as a substitute history teacher at the Columbus high school, he said, he was shocked at how sexually suggestive student attire was. Many in the audience Plentywood nodded.

When it came time for questions, many expressed polite skepticism about the Muslim world's desire for peace.

"These moderates you're talking about -- is there ever going to be an outcry from them, or do they secretly agree with this?" asked Betty Overland, a local banker. The "this" was the jihadists' acts of violence against Americans.

Grimland said there were moderate Muslim voices, but they rarely got media coverage.

Bennie Lund, 78, a retired Plentywood elementary schoolteacher and wheat farmer and his wife, Ann, said they had come to Grimland's lecture because they were curious to hear the perspective of an American who had visited so many foreign countries -- something they had never been able to do.

Neither of them had a passport.

"We've always worked; we've always been busy," said Ann Lund, 74. "We never did have time to go to Europe or any of those places."