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In
the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful
I submitted to Allah on 6 Rabiah al-Awal 1424 (
May 7, 2003
) at the office of the Grand Imam, Sheikh of the Noble
al-Azhar
University, in Cairo. I stated in Arabic, “I bear witness that there is no god
but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His Servant and
Messenger.” I acknowledged that Moses, Jesus, and all other
prophets (upon them be peace and blessings) are servants and
messengers of Allah, I renounced all religions other than
Islam, and I said that henceforth I adhere to Islam as my
faith and sacred law. I was personally received and formally
welcomed into Islam by the sheikh of al-Azhar, Muhammad
Tantawy.
I was 62, had lived, researched, and taught in the Muslim Arab
world for 35 years, and was very familiar with Islam in both
theory and practice. Yet, a long-time Egyptian brother who
accompanied me that fateful day said that he had cried as he saw me listening to and answering the questions of
the sheikh who interviewed me and authenticated my submission.
What had been my journey to Islam and why had it taken so
long? What has been unfolding since my submission?
My first direct contact with Islam was in Berkeley,
California
in the days of the Free Speech and anti-Vietnam War movements.
I had been raised in Texas as a Presbyterian and had gone
through multiple, albeit not atypical, identity changes in the
1960s at the University of Texas in Austin and in a wide range
of student travels, including my studies in Mexico, Chile,
Spain, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Argentina. I broke ties with
the Presbyterian Church, saw Roman Catholicism as a gross
exploiter of the poor and a supporter of the reactionary elite
in
Latin America, and seriously questioned United States
foreign policy and business interests outside its borders.
Within WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America, I came to feel like a foreigner.
When I was a junior in college, I wanted to leave home and all
things American in order to dedicate myself to the
“revolution” in Latin America, which, led by Salvador
Allende, was gaining momentum among socialist students and
activists in Chile. My mother and a kind anthropology
professor at UT-Austin talked me out of that bold move, and so
I eventually moved into anthropology, a discipline on the
fringe where cultural relativity and the pursuit of knowledge
primarily among third-world peoples prevailed.
As a graduate student at the University
of
California in Berkeley, I plunged into social anthropology and was encouraged by my
graduate advisor, Laura Nader, to focus on the Arab Middle
East. I struggled with Arabic, studied Islamic institutions
with a well-known professor who was Jewish and also, it was
said, a Zionist. I met and interacted with Arab graduate
students, both Christian and Muslim. I found Sufism attractive
and I fasted for a few days one Ramadan just to feel the
experience. Non-Christian religious experience had become
fashionable at Berkeley and it was fashionable to sample as many such experiences as
possible along with other exotica.
Today, I see that period as a step on the return to paganism
in much of the West; but it also reflected a search for a more
meaningful spiritual life by some of America’s best. The predominant materialism and the pursuit of
capitalist values had become spiritually vacuous and even
destructive.
I was not a flower child during that period, but I was close
to them and I learned from them and from other counter-culture
students to take religion in itself seriously. To do so went
against the grain of much of anthropology, where religion was
taken simply for the role it plays in society and culture and
not for the power inherent within it. That I accepted the
power of religion as religion did not, however, make me a
believer. Yet, I was never an atheist. I remained neutral and
content to observe what others did and said in the name of
their religious beliefs.
Thanks to student deferments I escaped going to the Vietnam
War and instead spent from 1968 to 1970 in Saudi Arabia
doing field research for my PhD dissertation. Allah Almighty,
I believe now, blessed me back then. I was able to know the
old
Riyadh
and I can never forget the calls to prayer from
Riyadh’s 1000 minarets. They were powerful, and I wanted to
respond; but I walked alone and without religion through dusty
streets while mosques were filled with the faithful.
I later lived for 18 months with Bedouin nomads in the Empty Quarter
and Eastern
Province. During my first night in the desert with them, when the
sunset prayer was called, I found that I could not just sit
alone and not pray with them. I could not deny their religion
by saying that I was a Christian as others in similar
situations before me had done. I knew in my heart that their
Allah was the same God that I had known as a child. And so I
prayed with them that prayer, and then every other prayer,
five times a day throughout the year and a half that I lived,
herded, and migrated with them. Their leader, Talib, taught me
the Fatiha (opening chapter of the Qur'an). I
proclaimed the shahada (declaration of faith) many
times, and in public. I fasted the two Ramadans that I spent
with them.
Islam was seamlessly integrated into everything we did. It
punctuated and regulated our whole life from the most mundane
to the most sublime, and it embraced everybody in the
community. No one was left out. This was not particularly
religious in a spiritual or intellectual way; the Islam we
lived was “normal,” how everyday life was constituted. I
wrote long ago that the happiest days of my life were those I
lived among these Muslim Arab Bedouin. That is still true
today, 35 years later; but I feel a new happiness now as I
return once again to Islam.
A Bedouin brother and friend asked me if I would continue to
pray and fast after I left them. I asserted that of course I
would continue and said that Islam did not end at the borders
of Saudi Arabia. But back in Berkeley
life was different. My notes show that in the first course
that I ever taught, I talked about Islam being a “beautiful
religion.” I expressed strong positive vibes for Islam but I
no longer prayed and none of the nominal Muslims whom I knew
in
Berkeley
prayed either.
Soon afterwards I was employed at The American University in
Cairo
where a secular agenda dominated. Back then, in the 1970s,
Arabic was hardly heard on campus. Islam at AUC was then
mainly history, art and architecture, and field trips to the
museum and some exquisite old mosques. Later in the 1980s,
“political” Islam began to be heard, veiling and a few
beards began to appear on campus, and more students were
fasting. Then the Muslim students at AUC asked for the unheard
of: a mosque or prayer area on campus.
Many considered these changes a horrible slide backwards from
modernity and progress. I, however, respected what these
Muslim students were doing. I tried in my courses to present
Islam and the changes underway in a positive light while also
walking the tightrope of scientific “neutrality” or
“value-free” social science. In my heart, and given my salafi
(or Wahhabi) “upbringing” in
Saudi Arabia
, I liked what I saw happening and took offense at snide
comments against these young Muslims made by
colleagues—Muslim and Christian, Egyptian and American. Yet,
I simply observed.
More recently have been a series of events that affected me
personally, in addition to the wider world in which we all
exist. There were the deaths of my elderly parents and thus
freedom from the ties that bound me to them as a dutiful son
and thereby to the ancient Presbyterian and Methodist lineages
that they embraced. There was the bombing of our Muslim
brothers in Afghanistan
by young men white, black, and brown who could be blood or
milk relatives of mine from Texas
and the South. There are the horrible scenes of barefaced
torture of Muslim brothers, held without trial, in Guantanamo
— a part of Cuba
that the US
took during a war in which my grandfather nearly had to fight.
In 2002, there was the September 11th anniversary of the 1973
CIA-instigated coup against the popularly-elected government
of Salvador Allende in Chile. I learned on that day that a friend, a brother, had
miraculously survived the bloody coup and after years of
torture and exile was alive and well in Santiago. Another friend, a sister, was found again in Paris
after decades of incommunicado.
Around the same time, Bedouin whom I had not seen for more
than twenty years suddenly appeared at one of the gates of AUC,
and I was soon in Saudi Arabia
for a short visit. I was in the desert again. The magnificent
desert Arabian night sky, miraculously without columns or any
support, was overpowering. The camels were present chewing
their cuds, just like before. The people were the same, my
brothers of long ago and now also their sons and grandsons. An
old friend asked if I would call the prayer. I deferred, but
of course I prayed with them. More than 30 years had passed
since I had prayed together with others, but I had not
forgotten. That night I knew that it was time for me to wake
up. I could no longer remain an observer and an occasional
participant.
Back
in Cairo
I asked an American Muslim who was taking a course with me how
he had converted and he told me that he had simply said the shahada
before a sheikh. I asked a couple of Egyptians, and they told
me to go to al-Azhar
University. I asked if circumcision was required. The unofficial verdict
was no, not at my age. Then I was in Paris, the
City of Light, with an Egyptian brother and his daughter as the
Anglo-American war against Arab-Muslim Iraq raged.
Early morning, upon waking, I knew without doubt that I wanted
to submit formally and officially. I told my brother. We met
the next day after our return to Cairo
at the office of the Grand Imam of al-Azhar. I submitted to
Allah. A few close friends who heard the news were very happy
and congratulated me enthusiastically. A retired Egyptian
police General, a close friend of a close friend,
congratulated me but said that I must now pray regularly and
in the mosque. I knew on my own that the purification (tahar)
of circumcision was necessary, and so I had myself
circumcised; it was not the big deal I had always imagined and
feared.
I prayed at home for a few days. Then I ventured into the
mosque, a large and important one across the street from where
I live. The news spread like wildfire through my downtown
neighborhood; many expressed their happiness at my becoming a
Muslim. At AUC, I now pray in our overly-crowded prayer area.
The students, my younger brothers, have become my teachers and
rightly correct me when I make mistakes. In the downtown
mosque I have moved from the back rows to the front row and am
now a regular. Workers, businessmen, officials, young, and
old, we pray together in the unity of Islam that recognizes no
classes, no ethnic groups, no races, no borders.
Towards the end of the summer of 2003, I went for a month’s
vacation in eastern Saudi Arabia. My Bedouin brothers said that I should perform the `Umrah
(the lesser pilgrimage). In a matter of hours, I was on an
airplane from Dammam to Jeddah. When the pilot announced that
in ten minutes we would cross the miqat, the line at
which one must don the ceremonial robes, tears flowed and I
cried like I have never cried before. Mecca, the Great Mosque, the Ka’aba, the tawaf
(circumambulation), the sa’iy (running between the
hills of Safa and Marwa), the cutting of my hair were all
truly beyond words. Never have I experienced or even imagined
anything like the `Umrah, and then the praying and the sitting
and the thinking in the Great Mosque. Islam does not belong to
me. Islam does not belong to the reader. Islam belongs to
Allah, Exalted is He!
Perhaps my real journey is just now beginning - in sha'
Allah (God willing). I feel the pain of the Muslim nation
and I also sense hope and the seeds of victory. My ears are
open, for the first time in a long time — perhaps the first
time ever. I hear the call of da‘wa (invitation to
Allah). I am not anti-American, as one might think from some
of the things I said above. I am an American though my home is
in Egypt.
My ancestors were among the first European settlers in Virginia
and the first Anglo settlers in Texas. They had escaped religious bigotry and political oppression
and strove to create a new society with respect and freedom
for all human beings, according to the Scriptures available to
them. I follow in their tradition. They migrated across oceans
and continents and so have I. They followed the Holy Bible.
They did not know the Holy Qur’an. But thanks to Allah, I am
privileged to know it, and it is thus my duty to help spread
the Message communicated therein.
My mother was a daughter of the American Revolution, and years
ago when I told her about Allah she was sure that He and her
God are one and the same. There is hope that America
will be saved, not from, but by Muslims - in sha' Allah.
There is a lot of work for us Muslims to do and long roads to
travel — and not only in (or even mainly in)
America, but throughout the world. Allah Akbar!
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