After twenty-five years as a writer in
America, I wanted something to soften my cynicism. I was searching for
new terms by which to see. The way one is raised establishes certain needs
in this department. From a pluralist background, I naturally placed great
stress on the matters of racism and freedom. Then, in my early twenties,
I had gone to live in Africa for three years. During this time, which was
formative for me, I rubbed shoulders with blacks of many different tribes, with
Arabs, Berbers, and even Europeans, who were Muslims. By and large these
people did not share the Western obsession with race as a social
category. In our encounters, being oddly colored, rarely mattered.
I was welcomed first and judged on merit later. By contrast, Europeans
and Americans, including many who are free of racist notions, automatically
class people racially. Muslims classified people by their faith and their
actions. I found this transcendent and refreshing. Malcolm X saw
his nation’s salvation in it. “America needs to understand Islam,” he
wrote, “because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race
problem.”
I was looking for an escape
route, too, from the isolating terms of a materialistic culture. I wanted
access to a spiritual dimension, but the conventional paths I had known as a
boy were closed. My father had been a Jew; my mother Christian.
Because of my mongrel background, I had a foot in two religious camps.
Both faiths were undoubtedly profound. Yet the one that emphasizes a
chosen people I found insupportable; while the other, based in a mystery,
repelled me. A century before, my maternal great-great-grandmother’s name
had been set in stained glass at the high street Church of Christ in Hamilton,
Ohio. By the time I was twenty, this meant nothing to me.
These were the terms my early
life provided. The more I thought about it now, the more I returned to my
experiences in Muslim Africa. After two return trips to Morocco, in 1981
and 1985, I came to feel that Africa, the continent, had little to do with the
balanced life I found there. It was not, that is, a continent I was
after, nor an institution, either. I was looking for a framework I could
live with, a vocabulary of spiritual concepts applicable to the life I was
living now. I did not want to “trade in” my culture. I wanted
access to new meanings.
After a mid-Atlantic dinner I
went to wash up in the bathroom. During my absence a quorum of Hasidim
lined up to pray outside the door. By the time I had finished, they were
too immersed to notice me. Emerging from the bathroom, I could barely
work the handle. Stepping into the aisle was out of the question.
I could only stand with my head
thrust into the hallway, staring at the congregation’s backs. Holding
palm-size prayer books, they cut an impressive figure, tapping the texts on
their breastbones as they divined. Little by little the movements grew
erratic, like a mild, bobbing form of rock and roll. I watched from the
bathroom door until they were finished, then slipped back down the aisle to my
seat.
We landed together later that
night in Brussels. Reboarding, I found a discarded Yiddish newspaper on a
food tray. When the plane took off for Morocco, they were gone.
I do not mean to imply here
that my life during this period conformed to any grand design. In the
beginning, around 1981, I was driven by curiosity and an appetite for travel.
My favorite place to go, when I had the money, was Morocco. When I
could not travel, there were books. This fascination brought me into
contact with a handful of writers driven to the exotic, authors capable of
sentences like this, by Freya Stark:
“The
perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as
a human being; the people’s directness, deadly to the sentimental or the
pedantic, like the less complicated virtues; and the pleasantness of being
liked for oneself might, I think, be added to the five reasons for travel given
me by Sayyid Abdulla, the watchmaker; “to leave one’s troubles behind one; to
earn a living; to acquire learning; to practice good manners; and to meet
honorable men”.
I could not have drawn up a
list of demands, but I had a fair idea of what I was after. The religion
I wanted should be to metaphysics as metaphysics is to science. It would
not be confined by a narrow rationalism or traffic in mystery to please its
priests. There would be no priests, no separation between nature and
things sacred. There would be no war with the flesh, if I could help it.
Sex would be natural, not the seat of a curse upon the species.
Finally, I did want a ritual component, daily routine to sharpen the
senses and discipline my mind. Above all, I wanted clarity and freedom.
I did not want to trade away reason simply to be saddled with a dogma.
The more I learned about Islam,
the more it appeared to conform to what I was after.
Most of the educated Westerners
I knew around this time regarded any strong religious climate with suspicion.
They classified religion as political manipulation, or they dismissed it
as a medieval concept, projecting upon it notions from their European past.
It was not hard to find a
source for their opinions. A thousand years of Western history had left
us plenty of fine reasons to regret a path that led through so much ignorance
and slaughter. From the Children’s Crusade and the Inquisition to the
transmogrified faiths of nazism and communism during our century, whole
countries have been exhausted by belief. Nietzsche’s fear, that the
modern nation-state would become a substitute religion, has proved tragically
accurate. Our century, it seemed to me, was ending in an age beyond
belief, which believers inhabited as much as agnostics.
Regardless of church
affiliation, secular humanism is the air westerners breathe, the lens we gaze
through. Like any world view, this outlook is pervasive and transparent.
It forms the basis of our broad identification with democracy and with
the pursuit of freedom in all its countless and beguiling forms. Immersed
in our shared preoccupations, one may easily forget that other ways of life
exist on the same planet.
At the time of my trip, for
instance, 650 million Muslims with a majority representation in forty-four
countries adhered to the formal teachings of Islam. In addition, about
400 million more were living as minorities in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Assisted by postcolonial economics, Islam has become in a matter of
thirty years a major faith in Western Europe. Of the world’s great
religions, Islam alone was adding to its fold.
My politicized friends were
dismayed by my new interest. They all but universally confused Islam with
the machinations of half a dozen middle eastern tyrants. The books they
read, the new broadcasts they viewed depicted the faith as a set of political
functions. Almost nothing was said of its spiritual practice. I
liked to quote Mae West to them: “Anytime you take religion for a joke, the
laugh’s on you.”
Historically, a Muslim sees
Islam as the final, matured expression of an original religion reaching back to
Adam. It is as resolutely monotheistic as Judaism, whose major Prophets
Islam reveres as links in a progressive chain, culminating in Jesus and
Muhammad, peace be upon them. Essentially a message of renewal, Islam has
done its part on the world stage to return the forgotten taste of life’s lost
sweetness to millions of people. Its book, the Quran, caused Goethe to
remark, “You see, this teaching never fails; with all our systems, we cannot
go, and generally speaking no man can go, further.
Traditional Islam is expressed
through the practice of five pillars. Declaring one’s faith, prayer,
charity, and fasting are activities pursued repeatedly throughout one’s life.
Conditions permitting, each Muslim is additionally charged with
undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime. The Arabic term for
this fifth rite is Hajj. Scholars relate the word to the concept of
‘qasd’, “aspiration,” and to the notion of men and women as travelers on earth.
In Western religions, pilgrimage is a vestigial tradition, a quaint,
folkloric concept commonly reduced to metaphor. Among Muslims, on the
other hand, the Hajj embodies a vital experience for millions of new pilgrims
every year. In spite of the modern content of their lives, it remains an
act of obedience, a profession of belief, and the visible expression of a
spiritual community. For a majority of Muslims the Hajj is an ultimate
goal, the trip of a lifetime.
As a convert, I felt obliged to
go to Makkah. As an addict to travel I could not imagine a more
compelling goal.
The annual, month-long fast of
Ramadan precedes the Hajj by about one hundred days. These two rites form
a period of intensified awareness in Muslim society. I wanted to put this
period to use. I had read about Islam; I [attended] a Mosque near my home
in California; I had started a practice. Now I hoped to deepen what I was
learning by submerging myself in a religion where Islam infuses every aspect of
existence.
I planned to begin in Morocco,
because I knew that country well and because it followed traditional Islam and
was fairly stable. The last place I wanted to start was in a backwater
full of uproarious sectarians. I wanted to paddle the mainstream, the
broad, calm water.
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