Knight - Journey to the End of Islam

Michael Muhammad Knight

Soft Skull Press
New York

Copyright 2009 by Michael Muhammad Knight. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Peace to Sonia Pabley, Phyllis Wender, and Lynn Hyde at the Gersh Agency.

Peace to Denise Oswald, Anne Horowitz, Carrie Deringer, Adam Krefman, and everyone at Soft Skull Press.

Peace to Richard Nash.

This manuscript was completed during a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts; peace to Holly Blake.

Peace and love to Azreal.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-59376-552-1

Cover design by Brett Yasko

Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates

Soft Skull Press

An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC

2117 Fourth Street

Suite D

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to

Master Fard Muhammad

and

Sadaf Khatri

Contents

We must pray that when your heads finished turning, your face is to the front again.

ROBERT BOLT, A Man for All Seasons

Real pilgrimage, I thought on the plane, might be like Fantastic Voyage (the Isaac Asimov novel, not the Coolio song). The storys premise is more famous than the actual book or 1966 movie, having been spoofed and redone in a thousand cartoonsThe Simpsons, Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021, Dexters Laboratory, Futurama, Ren & Stimpy, SpongeBob SquarePants, Rugrats, Muppet Babies, Transformers: a team of scientists have to shrink down to subatomic size and pilot a nanosubmarine through some guys carotid artery to destroy a blood clot in his brain. Pilgrimage would be like that, but youre not only the microscopic explorers; youre also the body being explored. After making your way through the circulatory system and reaching the end of your mission, turns out it was just a journey to the center of you.

When they dimmed the lights for us to sleep, I imagined that outside this green and white Pakistan International Airlines airbus was a blood vessel instead of a starry nightwe were flying up the carotid canal into my head, a subatomic cruise to knowledge of self. Thats what Pakistan meant to me.

THE FIRST TIME I went to Pakistan, I was seventeen years old, a senior at my Catholic high school, a born-again convert to Islam, and insane. I spent two months at Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, doing the madrassa thing and considering jihad in Chechnya. That trip was a decade and a half ago, and I hadnt been back since. This time, I was flying to Lahore to take part in a documentary and hang out with Pakistans first punk rock band.

The Indian-American Muslim girl I left behind worried about what her family would think of my awful books, but they were always nice to me. The week of our engagement party, Sadafs mom had given me a miniature Quran in a little box, each page only the size of my thumbnail but every verse was there. Who has the eyes to read it? she asked me, but the baby Quran wasnt meant to be read, functioning more as a talisman like dashboard Virgin Marys. I wouldnt have known what it said anyway, all in Gods language. That Quran was in my hand when the plane took off. I kissed it and let it be magic.

Before heading to Toronto to fly out with the film crew, I was in Brooklyn, walking down Bushwick Avenue while on the phone with another producer from Hollywood.

You know whats great about your novel?

No, I said.

Its such an American story! We can always argue about religion, you knowIm Christian, youre Muslim, we can fight over whos saved and whos going to hellbut were all free to practice whatever religion we want to, and no one will ever say, Youre not an American.

Actually, Ron...

I helped him through some history: Mother Ann, leader of the Shakers, jailed for opposing war during the American Revolution; Elijah Muhammad and his son locked up on the same charge nearly two centuries later; the Sun Dance, central act of Lakota religious life, banned by the federal government for fifty years; Reed Smoots election to the Senate in 1902 challenged on the grounds that he was a Mormon; Five Percenters in South Carolina prisons thrown into solitary confinement until they renounced their beliefs; the Department of Veterans Affairs refusing to allow Wiccan symbols in military graveyards; Sikh police officers dismissed for wearing turbans while on duty; the ATF turning Waco into a new Karbala. There has never been a shortage of religions that failed to qualify, at one time or another, as sufficiently American.

Sometimes, Allah just throws the answer at you. Two days later, I found the street littered with pages from a book whose binding had given out. Deciding to get religious about itsince Im a traveler and real travelers have to believe that things come to them for a reasonI picked up a page.

There was no trace of the cover or any page with the title or authors name, so I cant properly cite the text besides that its pages 137 and 138 of something; apologies to someone:

Regarded as a foreign body that ought to be expelled from the national organism, and as the agent of a foreign power, the Church had to fight to establish its Americanism. Catholic laymen who took pride in their religious identity responded to the American milieu with militant self-assertion whenever they could, and Church spokesmen seemed to feel that it was not scholarship but vigorous polemicism which was needed. The Church thus took on a militant stance that ill accorded with reflection; and in our time, when the initial prejudice against it has been largely surmounted, its members persist in what Monsignor Ellis calls a self-imposed ghetto mentality... [remainder of sentence obscured by dried mud].

Catholicism was, moreover, the religion of the immigrant. To American Catholics, the true Church seemed to be in Europe...

Catholics had come a long way from whenever that book was writtenprobably before America had a Catholic president. The random page had me thinking that the producer might have been right, at least partly: under a constitution that defined religion as a personal choice, theoretically uninvolved with the state, every religion had the chance to become Americanif it was willing to negotiate. As early as the 1820s, American Jews were petitioning their rabbis for sermons in English, shorter services, and new prayers that spoke to their own lives. These changes led to the rise of Reform Judaism, todays largest denomination of Jews in the United States, a direct offspring of the Jewish American experience.

The Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) was an indigenous American religion, but still had to become American in terms of the larger society. The process began with abandoning polygamy, which opened the door for their Utah theocracy to fully enter the Union as a state, and continued with a revelation to shave off their long beards. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir purged its hymns of LDS-specific heresies like golden plates and Joseph Smith to focus on normative Judeo-Christianity, Moses and Noah and such, eventually becoming Christian enough and American enough to perform at Ronald Reagans inauguration.