Welcome to Islam, - * I had not gone shopping for a new religion

After twenty-five years 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 coloured 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 favourite 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 practise good manners; and to meet honourable
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 Hadj.
Scholars relate the wto the concept of kasd, "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
hadj 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 hadj 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 hadj 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.