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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 did
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—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, have 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. 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
Qur'an, 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 wudu'
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 had joined 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.
* This
story first appeared on www.jews-for-allah.org. It is
republished with kind permission.
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