Journey to the Journey to the End of Islam

 

I just finished reading Michael Muhammad Knight’s Journey to the Centre of Islam. It is not often that a book brings me to tears, especially one without a fictional narrative. Knight’s memoir is a journey seeking the end of Islam through several ‘Muslim’ countries. Beginning in South Asia, home to the largest Muslim population in the world, Knight experiences a religion practiced with all the indigenous eccentricities one might expect, with many practices predating the arrival of Islam to the subcontinent. His journey goes through Syria and Ethiopia before culminating in Hajj. There are several Islams and Muslims on display in the book. Their beliefs and practices are at times mutually unrecognisable as stemming from the same theology. Knight himself seems to believe (and decry) several Islams and be several Muslims.

I have often wondered what it is like for a person whose entry to Islam was not through institutionalized instructions that begins before you acquire sentience. The gentle, personal nature of introduction and conversion borne of conviction are concepts somewhat difficult to comprehend. Like most babies born Muslim, the Adhan was recited in my ears soon after my birth. I did not acquire my religion by choice. Being born into it has had (and continues to have) social and political consequences I have often wished I did not have to contend with. Religiously, though, things are even less straightforward. I saw a Zakir Naik clip several years ago where he said until the age of 19 he was only Muslim because he was born one, and it was after that he chose, of his own free will, to dedicate himself to the religion. The first part of it is no less true for me. Knight – in only 15 years of being Muslim – asks a question I too have found myself asking over and over. Am I still Muslim? My name is Mohammad; I will never not be treated as one. However, not unlike Knight, I find myself confronting a fundamental contradiction about the way in which Islam asks us to organize society and what I find to be conscionable. For all the revolutionary potential (and historical praxis) that this call to action has given to people in the last 1500 years, questions about the treatment of women, non-believers, apostates, slaves and the like are things you have to find irreconcilable with a world where we ask not to be defined by our bodies or ascribed identities.

Even as Knight takes in the incredible human spectacle that is Hajj, he experiences a hostility from his fellow Hajjis that seems out of place with the occasion. The custodians of the two Holy Mosques – whose legitimacy to custody is justified by Knight’s roommate by reference to the fact of custody ( a statement that deserves its own book)  – have decided on an interpretation of Islam that leaves no room for pilgrims to bring so much of their dear faith with them to its holiest locations. He interacts with people that anyone who grew up Muslim has seen plenty of archetypes of around them. The young zealot who is quick to takfiri (branding someone a non-believer), the uncles who believe Muslims of other ethnicities have Islam all wrong, non-Arabs who sincerely believes themselves lesser than Arabs because Allah revealed the Quran in Arabic, and the many many men who see it fit to ‘correct’ you when they think you are being Muslim wrong. Even as Knight somewhat denounces the Islam of his peers, he looks inward, casting serious doubt about the validity of his own criticisms. The doubt is not objective – he questions his intentions in concluding that all brothers but him subscribe to a religion that tolerates bigotry as the cost of community. I found myself looking at a mirror here too. The Islam of resistance and the Islam of authority also plays its role in the Knight’s journey. As a call to action, the religion has served a purpose throughout history. Even from a secular and progressive point of view, it is undeniable that some of the bravest and most morally defensible wars of our time are being fought by people out of sincere Islamic convictions.

Meaningful as the journey seems to have been, I wonder if the author really did reach the end of Islam. As he prepares to conclude a Sunni marriage with his girlfriend (having just taken the Shahada as a Shia during his Hajj), I was left with the impression of a man crafting his own Islam from the pieces of his journey – one that he is not obliged to justify to his brothers and sisters. In a stray line somewhere in the middle of the book Knight declares it much easier to be Muslim in America than in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. That requires little explanation. When a fellow hajji castigates him for kissing his fingers during Hajj, he quotes the Quran back at him: “To you your religion, and to me mine.”  

Last Slice

 

What does it mean to say self-consciousness is an expression of desire? Does that mean to be acutely self-aware is incredibly narcissist? When there is one piece of cake left on the table, looking at it constitutes for me an expression of desire. I look around the room to see if such desire manifests amongst the rest. There is a point beyond which everyone’s collective reluctance to be the person who acts on that desire reaches critical mass and you just know it is going to sit there for the rest of the night. I do not know how everyone perceives this. I know I am weighing my desire to eat that cake against my desire to maintain an image of mine in the minds of those around me. I do not know the details of this image; I do not even think they would register me going for that slice, let alone draw conclusions from it. I would not. The only thing I know for sure is that a not dissimilar thought process goes through the minds of the rest of them. Of course, I am also weighing other more specific factors: is that someone’s favourite dessert, is there a child on the table, are we celebrating someone, and so on. But on a more abstract level, going for the last piece is a lot about your perception of desire and your desire to be seen a certain way. It is difficult to argue for living life unexamined, but there are only so many things that can go under a microscope. And it does appear incredibly narcissist if every slide comes from the same source.    

Somebody Once Told Me

 

Are stories narrated better in first or third person? In my brief time playing computer games, I could never stand first-person shooters. The only perspective that made sense to me was third-person. I had to be able to see the playable character as if he too were removed from my agency. I think in a story, first-person narration is more honest about the reliability of the person telling you the story. When you read something where the pronoun ‘I’ features a lot, you are conditioned to imagine the narrator might be wrong about a few things. A third-person narrators carries a veneer of objectivity that is not necessarily borne out in the way the story is read. The story is still told from the partisan view of the person deliberately choosing to share it. By externalizing their own person from it, they supply a level of ostensible disengagement that is supposed to make us trust them more. It is not unlike a news headline that clearly wants you to read it one way while not wanting to be responsible for your interpretation.

I find this device to be quite useful in daily life. When you narrate a story, embellishment has value in the qualities it reflects on you as storyteller. Independent of this, however, I think we have the agency to engineer a story towards a desired reaction. Sometimes when I come up with an idea, I share it as if it were passed down to me by a person whose advice carries value. I am convinced this lends it a credence that simply giving advice would not. I have, on more than one occasion, invented sayings that I attributed to a grandparent, teacher or someone of similar stature. The idea that someone external to the situation and universally recognised as a possessing a measure of moral authority was the originator of the thought I am sharing makes people take it more seriously. So I find myself sharing my own thoughts in third-person. There is a measure of dishonesty in it, but it makes for good conversation. Talking feels like the most dishonest way for us to speak to each other, except for all the other ways.

When Does it End Robbie?

 

I was reading an old journal entry recently. I describe myself as being a stranger to my own emotions. I think the idea is of an escapism inherent in observing your own life as if a you are not a participant. It manifests very clearly when I am uncomfortable. Every time I am talked about in the presence of people I do not want to reveal myself to, I default to an acquiescing smile. I might also interject with harmless quips that offer nothing. I can see myself from the outside; I am trying to appear palatable without leaving an impression. I am whatever they want to project on to me. Whatever values they feel most comfortable imputing.

This deep-seated desire to avoid being known (or even perceived) goes back almost as long as I can remember. I have always wished for a measure of anonymity before feeling comfortable with the idea of being myself. It explains, to an extent, my proclivity for running away from excessive familiarity. Not so long ago, I found myself wondering if it made me sad to feel loved. I treated the question as not worth investigation, but not before it reminded me of another question from a loved one: do you not feel joy anymore?

Ennui is a weird emotion. It is cancerous, oppressive, and unbearably light. It lays bare conflicts I have with my sense of self-worth; that I ask myself if I will ever contribute anything of value. That running away at some point has to turn into running towards. That for all the moves I make I keep ending up in the same pit. That my dissatisfaction and despair are borne out of having harboured ideas beyond my station. That I dreamed of a life and personality beyond the strength of my documents. Of having tried to militate – in my own way – against the constraints of a social order I do not identify with. Of having decried a faith I feel politically compelled to hold on to.

The important thing about running, however, is that sometimes you just get to the other side. Sometimes you power through a stitch and notice not one kilometre. Regardless of how I suffer this evening, it will take its course and make way for another. Even my ennui might take flight and land one someone else smiling for today’s hopes and dreams. Not that it will arrest me intellectualizing when I could experience.

There is something to be said for typing into the void.