Haroon Moghul - How to Be a Muslim: An American Story

IN JUST OVER A DECADE , Id gone from an inelegant twenty-one-year-old, compelled by an act of terror to enter a public spotlight he was terrified by, to a man sure-footedly navigating a privileged world of pundits, politicos, policymakers. That some of my new colleagues went in and out of the White House from time to time was considered unremarkable. I was thirty-one, and I had my dream job.

Hafsa and I chose a tidy one-bedroom in a vibrant neighborhood of Arlington. We had add-ons most New Yorkers could only dream of: a dishwasher, a washer and dryer, wall-to-wall carpeting, central air-conditioning, a balcony overlooking an interior courtyard. Our building had swimming pools, a garage, a doorman. Even a deli you could enter without having to step outdoors. Not much by my fathers standards, but I felt Id made it.

Id knocked out my masters thesis (at an Ivy League); passed my oral examinations by unanimous consensus, scoring an MPhil; and successfully defended my prospectus. Through the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, Id seek to better understand non-Western modernity; framed by thinkers like Koselleck, Foucault, and Chakrabarty, Id explore how spatiality and temporality functioned in an Indo-Islamic contemporaneity.

It felt fair to ask: Where would I be in ten years?

I can tell you where I was just six months later.

Just a few months after moving to Virginia, I was seeing a therapist twice or thrice a week, walking from work whenever the weather was nice enoughit was a pleasant hike from the New America Foundations office to hers. Right before her block, Id cross a very long, very exposed bridge. The asphalt had long since been bleached by the Southern sun. The guardrails, made of sooty stucco, failed to rise much higher than my waist. Below was a forest, and in the middle of that, a pathetic rivulet, which never shimmered no matter how bright the day. It was there I decided, one autumn afternoon, that Id take my life back into my hands. By concluding it with the power of my own legs.

Because, as Sir Edmund Hillary might put it, it was there. A voice in my head, at least one of them, told me I should tell my therapist. I was paying her a lot of money, and Id gone out of my way to find her. Tired of explaining the pressures of a Muslim life to the uninitiated, I went and found myself not just a Muslim therapist but a Punjabi like me. Here I was confessing to a woman Id rather have been dating that I was a total fraud. Id made my name talking about Islam; I wouldve told you in any public venue that suicide was indubitably a sin, and now I was considering it? When Id first started researching suicide just weeks before, I told myself it was better to look it up than act it out. Theoretical exercises. Passive ideation. Until I found carbon monoxide. You go to sleep, some kind anonymous soul wrote on a crowded message board, and you wake up dead.

There was a painless way to go. Which meant there was a way to go. Which meant I could go. But its not just that a mechanism presented itself and the conceptual became the potential. Its that I began to perceive my decision as Islamic. Darkly and cruelly so, the last revenge of a religious logic that had bedeviled me my entire life. By cutting short a reprobate existence, which if continued would only see me accumulate more misdeeds, Id be more, not less, likely to go to heaven. After all, one big sinsuicideis better than a lot of big sins. Although I was well into seeing my therapist when this train of thought left the station, I didnt tell her right away. I waited until that day, on that bridge, and then I decided I should tell someone. An old friend, Ali; I caught him outside the bookstore near where his train from Philadelphia had just come inhe was impossible to miss.

He was wide, stocky in the manner of a shorter man, but tall too. The kind of person you wouldnt want to come across in a dark alleyunless he was on your side. When we finally sat down to dinner, he asked me why Id needed to meet this very night.

Because Im planning to kill myself, I announced.

Ali was quieter than I expected. He kept his distance, like the slightest move toward me might set me off. Well. There went dessert. Can you promise me youll wait until tomorrow before making any irreversible decisions?

If hed told me suicide was haram, I might well have stabbed myself to death with my cutlery. I never wanted to hear of Islam again. So this approach was novel, and therefore appreciated. But: How do you know Ill keep my word?

If you kill yourself tonight, Ali responded, Ill be the last person you ever saw. Can you imagine how guilty Id feel if I couldnt stop you from killing yourself?

Since Ali had a wife, two adorable daughters, two very kind-hearted parents, and was himself a model human being, these words had their intended impacthe was an inestimable bastard for thinking of them on the fly. Dinner wasnt done until I promised not to make any immediate, irrevocable decisionsand then, just like that, I was home. Though we were technically still married, Hafsa was in New York and I was alone in Arlington. I usually spent my evenings by myself, in the dark, watching television, or leaving it on in the background so at least it sounded like there was someone in my life.

But Id lied. Not intentionally, but Id fibbed all the same. Ali knew enough about the problems that had piled up on me, but he wasnt there when they broke me. So just a few nights after swearing to Ali I would not, I sat at my desk, writing. I wrote for hours, inspired by the thought that I did not have to leave a suicide note, but could explain my decision through a suicide short story, a genre I hoped I had just invented. I wanted to leave something as heartrendingly unforgettable as the last paragraph of Tony Judts The Memory Chalet. At least one thing I wrote would last longer than me. Then I slept well, for the first time in months: there was nothing to stay up and worry over. And I was awake by 7 a.m., starting the day like every Muslim does, by checking his phone and firing off an e-mail: I wasnt coming into work today. Breakfast passed uneventfully. A bagel, toasted and margarined.

Then it was down to the business center.

The expensiveness of my apartment building was belied by the quality of its downstairs decorshocking-pink walls that belonged in a bed and breakfast somewhere several hundred miles south and west, and framed prints straight from a TJ Maxx remainders aisle. I printed out two copies of my story and went back up to my apartment, its eggshell-white walls and noncommittal gray carpets a jarring contrast to the exuberant lobby. I showered and shavedremarkably motivated, all things consideredplaced one copy of my story on my bedside table, put on a light jacket, and headed out the door.

From Starbucks, I ordered Awake tea and a coffee cake, warmed up and served in a crinkly pastry bag. I took my last ride on the Metro, but got off at the penultimate stop, deciding to walk the remainder of the way. Once I passed the Hilton, it was only a short distance to the bridge, a miracle of midcentury American engineering, suspending me in the air between this life and the next. Halfway across, I stopped, turned my back to traffic, sucked in a deep breath, and stared down below. Way down. Would it hurt? In theory, itd be painless. Would it hurt anyone else? The only people who might care would be my father and my brother. But I hurt too much to stay for them. Would it offend Him?