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.”