Michael Muhammad Knight - Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America

To my lawyers, Christopher Beall and Adam Platt at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, LLP, and David Greene at the First Amendment Project

In 1923 William Carlos Williams wrote, The pure products of America go crazy.

Heres a story for him:

A fifteen-year-old white kid with Dad a diagnosed schizophrenic, rapist and racial separatist and Mom fresh off her second divorce, I listened to a lot of Public Enemy and read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and by sixteen had a huge portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini on my bedroom wall. At seventeen I was running around Pakistan with Afghan and Somalian refugees, breaking my Ramadan fasts with Tablighs, playing cricket in Peshawar and studying Islam at the largest mosque in the world: Faisal Masjid in Islamabad, which happens to look like a spaceship.

Then I lived in Pittsburgh with a punk whod cover himself in spikes, studs, pins and Docs while I still sported an ayatollah-sized black turban and flowing white jalab. What a scene we must have been, walking through malls together.

Years later Id date a Pakistani-Bengali (isnt that a poem itself, child of two cultures that hate each other) whose parents called me Johnny Walker The government of Pakistan paid for his trip? Hes Johnny Walker! as in John Walker Lindh, the infamous American Taliban.

Normal Muslim boys dont want to live in mosques overseas, they told herjust crazy American converts. And there you go.

You claim to be a Muslim but you Irish white

D12, Quitter

You cant talk about Islam in this country without bringing race into it. There have been plenty of studies of what Islam does for the American Black Man, and African-Americans constitute nearly half of the U.S. Muslim population. The black Muslims are too established and entrenched to have any mystery, but the white Muslim (1%) remains such a culture-mutant that the sighting of one still demands an explanation. How in the wonder of Allahs creation did you happen? Had you suffered a freak laboratory accident like Dr. Octopus? Did you travel to outer space and encounter mutagenic rays like Ben Grimm? And how did your white parents feel about your new superpowers?

Back in Pittsburgh, a black kid saw me with the Quran and it threw his whole world into upheaval; son of a member of the Nation of Islam, he had grown up seriously believing that one of Islams Five Pillars was the hatred of Caucasians. For him a white person reading the Quran was like a Jew reading Mein Kampf . When I assured him that I was in fact as Muslim as anyone else on the planet, he shook his head and gave me a double take.

We have to talk, he said. A week or two later he took shahadah as a Sunni.

The only black kid in his detention home, Malcolm X described himself in those years as a mascot or a pink poodle. I was in fact extremely popular, he writes in his Autobiography , I suppose partly because I was kind of a novelty. As a white Muslim I was a pink elephant.

When Id walk into a mosque, nobody assumed that I was Muslim; Id greet my brothers with as-salamu alaikum and sometimes get a polite hello in reply, like aww, isnt that cute that he tried to say salams? Thered often be someone offering to take my coat, pour some tea or explain to me what Islam was all about. It was tempting to hide my conversion, play dumb and ask questions like Why do Muslims wash before prayer? or What does Islam say about Jesus? just because my kufr appearance made people so extra-friendly and pleasantbut when I revealed that I actually knew my shit and had taken shahadah years ago their faces would beam like I had just told them they won the lottery. In the much-hyped war of civilizations, nothing proves the truth of Islam more than a guy thatd rather switch sides than fight. Theres a White Muslim Mystique thatll get you far in the community. Communication Director at CAIR (Council of American-Islamic Relations), Ibrahim Hooper knows it. Surfer-turned-shaykh Mark Hanson/Hamza Yusuf knows it. Cat Stevens knows it, with the added value of being a mainstream celebrity. And Ingrid Mattson from ISNA (the Islamic Society of North America) knows it best, because shes the real jewela white woman .

One Pakistani brother confessed that he took delight in seeing white converts, since black Muslims are a dime a dozen.

Often Id try to boost my Muslim cred by wearing the right kind of hat but only ended up looking like a crazy convert with something to prove. Which I was, of course. I had taken a decent religion and made it real crazy, crazier than any of the good normal kids at my Islamic summer camp back in Rochester. All those desi teenagers would go out between lunch and Zuhr to play basketball or soccer or man-hunt and Id sit in the office pouring through Bukhari with the imams telling me that it was okay to go outside and play, that even Prophet Muhammad enjoyed sports. I had soon read enough to teach kids my own age who had been raised with Islam around them all their lives. I remember one summer-camp afternoon when all the kids sat in a circle in the mosque and the imams asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said that I wanted to be an imam or an alim and assumed that everyone else would say the same thing, but one after another it was all doctor, engineer, computer programmer. It blew me away; I thought we all wanted to live in mosques and read the Quran all day.

As a convert, everything I knew about Islam and Islamic culture came from books written by conservative Muslim scholars. I was led to assume that all Muslims prayed five times daily, all Muslim women wore hijab and Islam was the centerpiece of every believers daily life. It never dawned on me that there could be half-assed Muslims like my moms family had been half-assed Catholics, or that Islamic communities could obsess over the same concerns of materialism and social status as non-Muslims. I thought Islam did away with that and made us all brothers. I thought that if a Muslim man practiced his religion with the utmost devotion and sincerity, and just so happened to work at a gas station, any Muslim parents in the world would be proud to give him their daughters hand. It was pretty stupid of me, I know now as I write it.

And my only socialization with Muslims came through the mosque, where everyone put on their best Super-Mumin masks and fronted like they really did wear hijab at the mall and keep to their prayers. My standard of what it meant to be Muslim became so unreachable that when I fell short, I gave upwith no idea that these good kids were boozing up, hooking up, missing prayers, even entertaining secret doubts and asking themselves horrible questions.

Funny thing about that afternoon at Islamic summer camp: when one of the older brothers in the masjid heard all the Pakistani kids saying that they wanted to be doctors, he walked over to our circle and bitched them out. You should aspire to become scholars of Islam, he said.