Here in Mecca, I was feeling a deep sense of loss, though mine was more of the kind brought about by the incessant and doubtful churning of the spirit. Daesh represented the worst kind of Islam. In Saudi Arabia’s barren Wahhabi wastelands, a weed-like form of intolerance had been allowed to grow unhindered. And now its roots were too deep to chop. The eighteenth-century handshake between Wahhab and ibn Saud was now unshakable “truth.” Wahhab preferred that his disciples be called Salafis, adherents who claimed to be superior to all Muslims. To this day, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis disdain the term when it’s used to describe them, which is exactly why I always try to use it in public. In the extremist Wahhabi mindset, the word itself would constitute idol worship, because it derives from the name of a real man. In their mind, they best emulated the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers, and subsequently the first three generations of Muslims known as al-salaf al-salih, the “pious ancestors.” For these Salafis, this was also Islam’s “ideal” period, during which Islam’s canon, which a large percentage (but not all) of Muslims follow worldwide, would be crafted to perfection. For Sunni Muslims, one example was Sahih Bukhari, one of six Kutub al-Sittah (books of hadith and tradition) of the Islamic canon. The authenticity of these hadiths remains a subject of debate and disagreement. I knew Bukhari well, because I had been taught that this, after the Quran, was the most important book for Muslims. The word sahih in Urdu and Arabic means “correct.”
Post-Hajj, for just a New York minute, I decided to try a different mosque than my usual one at 96th Street in the hopes that it would perhaps be a better fit. This much-smaller Bangladeshi East Village enterprise on 2nd Avenue and 11th Street, which used to be called Madina Masjid, now sported a new sign proclaiming “The Islamic Council of America.” The prayer area had not changed much, but the imam had, at least on the few Fridays I went. It seemed he had been imported, supposedly from Bangladesh, the Islamic nation formerly known as East Pakistan—a country where I had filmed illegally for A Jihad for Love. Security agencies found out and we had to rush out of the country. I never went back. But I was fluent enough in the Bengali language, which made this mosque familiar. Bangladeshis worried how their country was increasingly “Taliban-ized.” This imam was proof that it was. He used Wahhabi-style hadith in his sermon to buttress his arguments. This Friday, in late 2011, he decided to invoke Sahih Bukhari in his tirade against the kafirs (“disbelievers”) and murtads (“apostates”). The former practiced kufr (“unbelief”) and the latter were guilty of riddah (“apostasy”). “They should be killed,” he almost yelled.
I wanted to challenge him. He was wrong, not just theologically but also Quranically. There were fifty to seventy-five congregants. I had addressed much-larger numbers at the talks I used to give in my speaking career. But I couldn’t muster the courage. I had always been the good and obedient student, never daring to question my teachers with questions that I hadn’t thought out completely. During school debates I would often lose to my fellow debaters, never quite finding the rhetorical flourishes they seemed to conjure easily. Our childhood selves never leave us.
If I had had the courage in the moment, I would have first invoked one of my favorite Surahs of the Quran. It was Chapter 109, Surah Kafirun (“The Unbelievers” or “The Disbelievers”):
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Say: Oh you who turn away
I do not worship what you worship,
nor do you worship what I worship.
And I will not worship what you worship,
Nor will you worship what I worship.
Your way is yours, and my way is mine.
The Quran, I would tell this ignorant man, was in part a call to religious tolerance. Allah, God, was saying, “Your way (faith) is yours and my way (faith) is mine.” This was an unprejudiced, broad-minded Allah, who was respectful of religious diversity. I would not stop at that—I would take him up on jihad. I had, after all, put the words Jihad and Love in the same sentence for my previous film.
If able to gather even further courage in that moment, I would have taught him how I was a mujahid (a person engaged in jihad) and so were all other “good” Muslims. To dare to make this argument I would use semantics. In Arabic, jihad was often a noun and it was akin to “persevering, to struggling, to applying the self.”
The imam then spoke at length about the disbelievers who surrounded us in Manhattan, never invoking Surah 109 and throwing in enough code about how we needed to stay away or convert them. His audience was typical NYC Bangladeshi cab drivers, a large minority in New York’s yellow cab world, which is majority South Asian. How on earth would they convert a drunken passenger at 4 a.m. in, let’s say, bar-heavy Hell’s Kitchen? Did this idiot perched on his bully pulpit know his deranged rhetoric was one reason for Islamophobia? His arguments for an intolerant Islam would even manifest in the political candidacy of the vituperative (soon-to-be President) Donald Trump, who first called for a Muslim ban and then upon his second debate, confronted by a living Muslim woman, created the viral #MuslimsReportStuff. One tweet went: “Hello I would like to report a dangerous, racist, misogynist, demagogue on my TV . . . yes I’ll hold.” Anti-Muslim slurs emanating from mercurial, provocateur, reality show–style mouths like his are directly proportional to Daesh recruitment. In the recent past, when US soldiers kicked, stepped on, and urinated on Qurans, or when American evangelical pastors allegedly burned or flushed Qurans down the toilet, they generated a few thousand more recruits. But the East Village imam is also part of the problem.
Muhammad had favored al-jihad fi sabil Allah, or “striving in the face of God.” It was this strife that was of paramount importance, because the struggle (jihad) was with oneself in order to reach a better rapport with Allah, God. Scholars through centuries tried to reason with the principle as ordained by the Prophet and the “Book” (Quran). Even I was a mujahid. But Jihad 2.0 favored by Daesh is of annihilation and barbarism. Their sword-waving, horsebacked, murderous Ikhwans behave exactly like their predecessors in the time of Wahhab and ibn Saud.
Daesh is never short of an endless supply of gullible and misguided youths, who have not even bothered to learn their mandated prayers. The For Dummies series of books has produced hundreds of guides to every aspect of life; naturally, the installment Islam For Dummies became a widely-read post-9/11 primer. Did would-be jihadis read it as much as bored housewives cruising Amazon or Walmart? Apparently yes, since it’s been found amongst the tattered bodies of Daesh simpletons schooled by the likes of Daesh recruiter Salah Abdelslam. It seems that some suicide bombers do their crash courses in Islam this way. Many don’t even know how to pray, having never been in the basement-style mosques favored in countries like France. They probably have been told that martyrdom would bring them their heavenly houri, or seventy-two virgins, and “wine-bearing” post-pubescent boys. Some scholars have tried to make the wider claim that all male believers will be rewarded with libidinous houris in paradise. If granted a one-way ticket to heaven, I’d choose the boys over the virgins any day.
But truthfully, a lone, suicidal, psychopathic, depressed, and deeply misanthropic individual with a laptop to trawl the dark web is all it takes. Islam is the only difference between an Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook massacre and Khalid El Bakraoui in the 2016 Brussels attacks. Out of 1.7 billion Muslims, the latter types are infinitesimal, but enough for savagery.
For Daesh, just like their Wahhabi Ikhwan ancestors, takfir (excommunication) is critical, thus the labeling of the Shia and Muslims like me as infidels. The one thing the Wahhabi and Daesh mind differs on is the idea of an Islamic monarchy. For Daesh, the House of Saud is un-Islamic; in fact, all monarchy falls outside of the much-sought Dar al Islam (House of Islam). For the codependent Wahhabis, it’s a question of survival: They have long felt that without the Sauds they are nothing. In addition, there is Dar al Harb (House of War), which constitutes all lands that are not ruled by Islam. Daesh dares to say what Wahhabis won’t
say directly—even though many in their ranks believe it to be true—that there must be never-ending (till Judgment day) war with most of the planet, in addition to sectarian and infidel bloodbaths.
In Wahhabi and Daesh territory, anything outside of this kind of worldview, including mine, would be a serious deviation to be punished as bida, a religious innovation. As a filmmaker putting Islam and homosexuality together—something that had never been done before on film—I knew my inner state of struggle (the Jihad al-Nafs, “the struggle of the self”) had become so challenging that it had brought me to the doors of Mecca, this ancient city, only for Muslims, and perhaps the keeper of all secrets of the Muslim world. Over the years, at Q&A sessions, I would always defend Muhammad and even emphasize how similar I tried to make my life to his. Sure, Muhammad was in part a warrior—but that was a regular condition in those times, often a legitimate outcome of monotheistic proselytizing, which for many Muslims included the Christian Crusades as just one example. The Holy Roman Empire was responsible for more than its fair share of violent warfare. One needed look only to the Torah for evidence of Jewish violence. The holy books of Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all tainted with blood. Muhammad was a reluctant warrior. Like Jesus, he was once a refugee. The similarities do not end there. Daesh religious history, however, is full of perversions. They, for example, exclude the fact that Jesus is mentioned ten times as often as Muhammad in the Quran. The book awards him, like Abraham and Moses, the status of a Prophet. The Quran rests firmly and respectfully on its predecessor monotheisms of Judaism and Christianity.
Tawhid, or the principle of the Oneness of God, is the fulcrum on which much of Islam rotates: Allah al Ahad, al Wahhab (“The God, the One and the Single”). In every single prayer a Muslim performs there is a period called Tashahhud, when the supplicant says, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet.” I was taught to raise the index finger of the right hand at the point where this central precept of one God comes up. Adham coincidentally texted one day, moments after my prayer, which included Tashahhud:
“Thanks be to Allah, Parvez! What if Muhammad had asked for the middle finger rather than the index one!”
I couldn’t help but laugh at Adham’s impiousness. And yet there was so much to be somber about. Muhammad’s idea of a shared Tawhid for the entire Ummah lay in tatters. Not one of the early Muslims would recognize today’s religion.
Parting from Muhammad Jaffar on that last day at the foot of Jabal al-Nour, after our failed expedition to Hira, I asked him, “There are millions of us here. So many kinds of Muslims. What kind are you?”
He laughed and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand from his heart to the sky above, “There is only one way to be Muslim. And that is mine.”
Very simply he was describing many centuries of theological rigor that had debated this. At its crux, in Islam there were no intermediaries. It was just God and the believer. That is what the Quran and its Prophet intended. It is hard to prove whether Muhammad foresaw the fitna that through sectarianism and war Islam would create in future centuries. Notwithstanding sheikhs and ulema doing incredible damage to twenty-first century Islam, Muhammad had clearly and presciently revealed that there were no intermediaries between God and the believer. He in fact negated the idea of a clergy. Each Muslim, if he or she chose, would have a direct hotline to Allah, a kind of ongoing Whatsapp in today’s terms. Despite his illiteracy, Muhammad became a vessel for the poetic and highly literary revelations of God because of his foresight.
Prophets become prophets because they can see things the rest of us cannot.
CHAPTER 11
MY PASSAGE TO INDIA
If you take Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh as a single South Asian entity, you come up with the world’s largest number of Muslims (Indonesia is second in this configuration)—more than in the entire Middle East. This South Asian Trio used to be one single nation till the departing British colonizers split them into India and East and West Pakistan. They have shared languages, cultures, and histories. But the split (partition) led to history’s bloodiest and biggest mass migration. Like their new names, East and West Pakistan sat on their assigned sides. The problem was that the world’s second-largest population of Muslims contained at the time in Hindu India sat inconveniently in the middle. In 1971, India supported East Pakistan’s war for independence, and it became its own nation of Bangladesh, as a result of a war that was as much about geography as it was about language and culture.
It was natural for me as an Indian Muslim to go back where I came from. One of Islam’s truest legacies lives in South Asia, which was undivided not so long ago. Colonizers have always redrawn national boundaries with the blood of innocents. The US is new to colonial style behavior and the sorry results of its foolish attempts at it are fought on the streets of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to name just a few. More significantly I realize that America is not only bad at colonialism; it as a nation despises it.
Each time I go home, I get new insight into the “Islam problem,” as one Pakistani TV pundit put it. For a while, Deobandi Islam enjoyed greater supremacy in South Asia than it does now, because of its strong influences on the Taliban. The primary reason for the lost influence is Wahhabi penetration. That dogma has meant the death of a carefully built syncretism that had been crafted over centuries between Muslim (Mughal) rulers, idol-worshipping (Hindu) subjects, and the meaningful numbers drawn to the Sufi way of life. The desecration of countless mausoleums of Sufi mystics is proof of the cobra-like ability of Wahhabi Islam to swallow all that comes in its path. The Deobandis, in fact, have always known the historical context for Daesh.
I first went back in 2006, when I was filming A Jihad for Love.
“Well, I can take you to the entrance, but promise that nothing will be seen and you are not filming me,” insisted Zainab Alam. I had requested to meet her in the city of Lucknow, home to India’s highest Shia population. Though a senior scholar at the University of Lucknow, she was not granted much prestige by her school, but Zainab had spent decades quietly studying the role of women in Islam, throughout history and today. On this day she was taking me and my Shia cameraperson to the Nadhwa madrassa (school) or to use the more officious name, Institute of Islamic Sciences. This school is directly linked to the Sunni Deobandi School of Islam that was born where I was and provided the ideological foundation for the Taliban. Several schools Deoband spawned either didn’t allow women in at all, or if they were lucky enough to gain entry they had to be fully covered—Zainab’s hair flew free.
In the West, “radicalization” toward global jihad happens by the flickering light of laptops belonging to hermetical psychopaths tuned in to the social-web-savvy Daesh. They hide behind undetectable browsing apps that promise to conceal or change IP addresses. But surely the NSA is able to overwrite those and join them on these midnight prowls of the dark web where Daesh partially lives?
Often these killing machines will never meet in person. There will never be contact with their Emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (rumored killed in 2016), or with his shura (counselors), or even a visit to their self-declared capital of Raqqa in Syria. But a few thousand have made the schlep to the “front lines.”
But 2006 was a time when Osama was still alive, running his jihad chocolate factory. This jihad came packaged in different flavors. Entering Nadhwa, I wondered if “radicalization” happened in open sight here? I found the word problematic because I, too, was a radical Muslim, but of a completely different kind. So much Islam stood between al-Qaeda and me. Here, hundreds of Nadhwa schoolboys with white skullcaps bobbed their heads up and down in rote style recitation, its repetition intended to instill focus. They would never know the Quran’s poetry or depth of meaning, or the context of its history.
“What are you learning about today?” I asked one.
“Takfir,” he said, one Muslim accusing another of being an infidel.
“Do you know what happens to a kafir (infidel)?” I
asked. He giggled and shook his head. I wondered if he’d already been taught the un-Quranic principle that “all infidels should be killed.”
“What else are you learning?” I asked, wondering further if he knew there was severe sharia punishment for using takfir lightly.
“Taqlid,” he said. This word means literally “to blindly follow.” It is encouraged to follow a mujtahid, a scholar of sharia law, as per the majority Hanafi madhhab (school) opinion in India. Islam has four schools of thought. Hanafi, because of the Mughal and Sufi influences, has become more pluralistic than the Hanbali of the Wahhabi, the most puritanical. Just a year before I got to Nadhwa, the so-called “Amman” message had been delivered calling for unity and tolerance in the Muslim world. It had been endorsed by 200 ulema worldwide. It was a tedious document dealing with issues of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence), but it formally stated that Sunni Islam comprised Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki, and Hanbali as the four schools of theology. The Shia got two schools—the Jafari and the Zaidi—and in addition there were two others that fit neither sect, Ibadi and Zafari. The unanimity they craved was not to be. I am pretty sure that neither Osama nor Baghdadi nor anyone here ever read the Amman message. I spoke to a bespectacled student after he had asked me Wahhabi-style to switch off my camera because it was “haram.”
A Sinner in Mecca Page 24