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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 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. 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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