3:AM Magazine

By Michael Muhammad Knight.

Responding to Andy Blade’s article, ‘Islam Calling’ puts me in a strange position, since I’m not generally perceived as a defender of Islam.  Muslims boycotted the website Progressive Islam after I wrote that if the Prophet Muhammad would not have approved of woman imams, then “the Prophet is wrong, shit on him.”  My articles have been threatened with legal action by the leadership of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and my novel on Islamic punk rockers has been confiscated in Malaysia and censored in the UK for fear of offending Muslims.  I have even stink-palmed Cat Stevens, who Blade treats fairly sympathetically in his piece.

But I do consider myself a Muslim, even if Andy Blade would dismiss me as not a “real-deal” Muslim.  Like the fundamentalists, he holds a simplistic view of Islam in which there’s no room for movement.  While respecting Andy as a musician, I’m thankful to say that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

Blade suggests that we compare Islamic khutbahs to church sermons, claiming that in the church we’re more likely to find laughter and love.  I wonder if he’s ever been on this side of the pond… maybe to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where my grandfather, a Pentecostal minister, had children believing that his coal furnace fueled the fires of Hell.  Or Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in Harlem, where the imam cracks jokes and the women shout praises of “preach it brother imam!” during the sermon.  Blade employs his own first-hand encounters to make sweeping generalizations about the natures of various world religions, as though there’s uniformly one Islamic experience that we can measure against uniform Christianity or Buddhism.  Since there was no place for religious music in Blade’s particular Islamic background, he declares that “there are no such things as hymns in Muslim ceremonies,” but if there were, they would have the emotion of the “heaviest death metal anthems.”  Andy, have you ever heard of qawwalis, the devotional music of Chisti Sufism?  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, maybe?  When Nusrat sings “Allah Hu,” does it sound like Morbid Angel?

I was at Masjid Malcolm Shabazz this past Friday.  It’s my favorite mosque, mainly for its rich history: this was where Malcolm X led New York’s chapter of the Nation of Islam.  After his assassination, the building was destroyed by arson and years later converted to a Sunni mosque by Warith Deen Mohammed, son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.  It was Warith Deen who renamed the mosque in Malcolm’s honor.

The Friday sermon contained not a word of what Blade calls “harsh, guttural” Arabic.  Preaching to a largely non-Arabic speaking congregation, the imam made it plain.  “What’s the best thing you can wear?” he asked, then providing the answer: “a smile.”  He also told us to love Christians.  “You can’t force your religion on anyone,” he said, “not even your own children.”  It was an important statement for this congregation, which was made up of primarily African-American converts or the sons and daughters of converts, many with Christian families.  By the way, Andy, in a mosque like this one, the call to prayer doesn’t sound like an order or threat at all, but more like an old gospel song.

Andy Blade expresses his bewilderment that outsiders could be drawn to Islam’s “claustrophobic embrace.”  To convert of your own free will is “madness,” he says.  For some it is; when I first converted, I went pretty crazy with it, but after going through the extremes of both fundamentalism and apostasy, I think I’ve balanced out.  Now I’m just a Muslim the way I want to be.  I’m not going to apologise for the ugly side of an old religion, and I’m certainly not going to argue about what “true Islam” stands for.  There’s no such thing as True Islam.  Religion is symbols and forms, and the symbols mean essentially whatever people want them to.  Any religion can be read to support violence; during World War II, Zen Buddhist masters in Japan endorsed the killing of those who disturbed the public order.  Centuries before that, it was Buddhist mujahideen who drove the Mongols out of China.

Blade claims to tell us what the Qur’an “plainly says” without any consideration for the numerous ways in which Muslims relate to the text; in his view, only those who interpret the Qur’an literally are “real-deal Muslims.”  Though fundamentalists and apostates alike imagine Islam to be small and very clearly defined, Islam as I’ve experienced it is big and complicated, and much more intellectually diverse than Blade allows.  I have seen orthodox and conservative Muslim women who wrestle with verse 4:34 (regarding the beating of wives).  These are earnest Muslims who do believe in the Qur’an, but they are also serious feminists who will never accept or excuse domestic violence.  Dealing with the problematic 4:34, some look for historic context or scrutinize the language, some apply exegetical techniques similar to those used in reformist Judaism (which must address these same concerns in its own tradition), and others even challenge the authenticity of that verse.  There are many ways that someone can be a Muslim and have a relationship to the Qur’an; I’m still looking for mine, but I don’t think the knee-jerk literal reading is necessarily the most valid. 

Your experience is what it is, and the issues you mention are legitimate.  But it’s not enough for you to take the word Muslim away from me or my friends: Sunnis, Shi’as, anarchist Muslims, Muslim feminists who wear hijab, Muslim feminists who wear fishnets, progressive Muslims who get drunk, agnostics and atheists who claim Islam as their culture, traditional Sufis, crazy weed-addled Sufis, indigenous American heretics and lesbian Muslim drag-king punk singers.  Andy, you don’t know.  What’s worse, you don’t even know enough to know that you don’t know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Muhammad Knight is the author of The Taqwacores, recently reviewed on 3:AM. His American Muslim road odyssey, Blue Eyed Devil, has been praised as “today’s On the Road”.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, July 11th, 2007.