by Eboo Patel
“He’s not dead, right?” I’d ask my dad.
“No, he’s alive,” my dad would say, a bit of frustration creeping into his voice.
“So why doesn’t he tour anymore?”
“He became a Muslim—a rigid Muslim, who thinks music is against the religion,” my dad would answer, unable to mask his anger.
I was confused. We were Muslims, too, and we liked music. Even more, I thought that the most spiritual music I had ever heard—“Peace Train,” “Moonshadow,” “Wild World,” “Father and Son”—had come from this guy with the funny name. It was only much later that I learned the whole story.
When Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, converted to Islam in the late 1970s, he happened to fall in with a group of Muslims who told him that music was against his new faith. This was an entirely legitimate interpretation of Islam, but very much on the severe end, and a damn shame considering the gift that God had given him. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Yusuf came under a different influence and rethought his position on music.
It was the time of the Balkans war, and Yusuf, like most Muslims and many other citizens of good faith around the world, watched as the Bosnians were murdered en masse by the Serbs while the United States, Britain, France, and others barely lifted a finger. He found himself growing angrier and angrier and feeling more and more helpless. One day, he got a phone call from a Bosnian aid agency. “Do something for the children being killed here,” the person on the other end of the line said. “Organize an international concert—use your talent.”
Yusuf was torn. He had been told by an earlier influence that music was un-Islamic, but here was a group of Muslims asking for his help in the form of his gift—music. A few weeks later, Yusuf was visited by the Bosnian foreign minister, Irfan Ljubijankic, a Muslim and a doctor who had heroically saved the lives of many Bosnians in the basement of his home using the crudest medical instruments.
As a young man, Dr. Ljubijankic had been deeply inspired by Cat Stevens’s music, so much so that he had started playing music himself. When they met, Dr. Ljubijankic put in a cassette with a song he had written, “I Have No Cannons That Roar.” Yusuf was deeply moved by the song. Dr. Ljubijankic placed the cassette in his hand and said, “Please use it if you can for helping the cause.”
Some time later, the doctor’s helicopter was shot down over Bihac, and he died. Yusuf played the cassette the doctor had given him over and over. He also started listening to other music coming out of Bosnia—hymns and songs called nashids, which were providing the Bosnians with an enormous amount of inspiration during the war. Listening to these songs, Yusuf had a sudden realization: “Here was a magnificently potent tool; we simply had to use it.”
Yusuf, wishing to remain true to his faith and also provide his gift of music to the Bosnians, started studying with other teachers and returned to the traditions of Islam to explore further the permissibility of music. He found that the Prophet allowed and even encouraged music when it served a positive end. He was surprised that the Muslims who had told him that music was against Islam had not pointed out this crucial distinction. One line in his essay “Islam Sings” articulates a central truism in the formation of every individual’s religious identity: “It’s interesting to note now how my formative years as a Muslim were shaped by those I came into contact with.”
Yusuf Islam started to make music again.
Azim Nanji’s understanding of Islam can be summed up in the famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “God is beautiful and loves beauty.” I would stop in to see Azim about once a month. He had usually just returned from, or was about to leave for, a trip abroad—lecturing at Aga Khan University in Pakistan, visiting early childhood educational programs in East Africa, attending the ceremony for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in Syria, meeting with the Imam in Paris. Even so, our time together always felt relaxed. “How did Islam, a faith with such a highly focused monotheism, find a place in Hindu India, with its millions of Gods?” I asked. And Azim told me a story. Once, there was a Sufi sheikh who came with his followers to the state of Gujarat in India. He sent word to the local Hindu prince that he had arrived and wanted to stay. The Hindu prince sent a servant with a full glass of milk to the sheikh, as if to say, “We are already complete here.” The sheikh mixed in a spoonful of sugar and sent the sweetened milk back to the prince, as if to say, “My people and I will only contribute positively to this community.”
“I love spiritual poetry,” I once told Azim. “Blake and Tagore and Whitman. I feel like every nation and religion has a few shining souls who give utterance to the values of their tradition in a way that makes them seem both unique and universal.”
“Ah, yes,” Azim responded. “I love those poets, too. But my favorite spiritual poet is Rumi, a Muslim born in Afghanistan in the thirteenth century.” I almost fell off my chair. Of course I had heard of Rumi. I had seen dozens of his volumes on bookstore shelves. But he was a Muslim? I had no idea. “Some people call Rumi’s great opus, The Mathnawi, ‘the Qur’an in the Persian tongue,’” Azim continued. He told me Rumi’s story, how he had been a scholar of Islamic law, making legal rulings and giving stern lectures, until a man in rags approached him one day. “What’s this?” the man asked Rumi, pointing to his law books.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Rumi responded disdainfully.
The man fixed Rumi in a steely gaze, waved his arm, and set the books on fire. Then he waved his arm again, and the books appeared unharmed.
“What was that?” Rumi asked, shocked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said, and disappeared. The man was Shams of Tabriz, and in that moment Rumi made the decision to give up his law books and follow the mystical path of love and spirituality that Shams embodied—the Sufi path.
I almost couldn’t restrain myself. I wanted to be reading Rumi right there, right then. Azim smiled and started reciting some of his favorite Rumi lines:
I am not from east or west
not up from the ground
or out of the ocean
my place is placeless
a trace of the traceless
I belong to the beloved
I told Azim about my grandmother in Bombay and how she sheltered women and children in her home. “Oh, yes, Ashraf Ma-ji,” Azim said.
“You’ve heard of her?” I asked, incredulous.
“Of course. She is one of the living saints of the Ismaili tradition. Your family,” Azim said, leaning in a little closer, “has lived the service ethic of Islam as well as any that I have known. Your grandmother’s father started the Ismaili Volunteer Corps. Your grandfather Major Ebrahim Patel was one of the key pillars of the Ismaili community in India and very close to the Imam. Your aunt in Bombay was the first female president of a major Ismaili national council. Your uncle in Nairobi was the Imam’s ambassador to the Kenyan government for many years. Yes, it seems that Islam’s service ethic is being passed down the generations in your family. I wonder what you will do with it?”
“Where does this service ethic come from?” I asked.
“From God, at the moment of creation,” Azim said. I looked at him a little blankly.
“It is best articulated in Sura 2 of the Holy Qur’an,” he told me.
I went home, opened my English translation of the Qur’an, and read. God created Adam, the first human and therefore the representative of all humankind, by blowing His breath into a lump of clay. God made Adam His abd (servant) and khalifa (representative on earth). It was Adam’s responsibility to be a good steward of God’s beautiful creation, taking care of the oceans and rivers, the forests and animals. After God deputized Adam, He called the angels forth and told them to offer respect to His vicegerent on earth. But the angels refused and responded, “Will You put there a being who will work mischief on the earth and shed blood, while we sing Your glories and exalt Your utter holiness?” God did not refute the angels directly, instead choosing to say, “I know what you do not know.” God then se
t up a contest between Adam and the angels, asking each to name the different parts of creation. The Angels could not do it, protesting that the only knowledge they possessed was for glorifying God’s name. God turned to Adam, who proceeded to accomplish the task.
I finished the story, closed the Qur’an, touched it to my forehead, and kissed it. Outside, the grass in Oxford, greener than anything I had seen before, seemed as if it was shining and pointing to heaven. Two blue-winged birds flew out of one of Oxford’s towering trees into the hedges below, cawing loudly. I saw a boy and his mother walking, finished with their afternoon play, going home for dinner. She playfully grabbed the ball from him and began to run away with it. He laughed and followed her. This was creation. God had made it holy, had entrusted humanity to be His representative here. From the time of our ancestor Adam, each human had been given God’s breath, a great goodness that not even the angels could perceive but that God knew and spoke of. And what were we able to do that the angels could not, that gave us the ability to serve as stewards of creation? We could name things. We had creativity. We could learn and apply our learning to improve creation. And suddenly I understood my grandmother in India much better. And Dorothy Day and King and Heschel and Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. I felt as if I had a glimpse into their goodness, as if I knew something more of their Source.
The sun was almost finished setting. I remember my mother referring to this as Maghrib time, the holy moment when it is both night and day on earth. Prayer time. I went to my knees, touched my forehead and nose to the floor in sijda, and came back up—the same motion that the angels made when they saw the Prophet Muhammad ascending through the heavens to meet with God. I cupped my hands, closed my eyes, and started reciting Sura al-Fatiha, the first chapter of the Holy Qur’an: “Bismillah Ar Rahman Ar Rahim. Alhamdolillah Ar Rabbil Al Amin.” It had been years since I had said it. But somehow, it came back to me, came pouring from my heart onto my lips and out into the world, as if carried on the breath of God.
Under the guidance of Azim Nanji, I learned that Islam is best understood not as a set of rigid rules and a list of required rituals but as a story that began with Adam and continues through us; as a tradition of prophets and poets who raised great civilizations by seeking to give expression to the fundamental ethos of the faith.
I found the clearest articulation of that fundamental ethos in the writing of Fazlur Rahman, a professor at the University of Chicago until his death in 1988. One of the most influential Muslim minds of the twentieth century, Rahman emphasized that the core message of Islam is the establishment of an ethical, egalitarian order on earth. He insisted that all the passages of the Qur’an be read in that general light. The central aspect of this moral order is merciful justice, embodied first and foremost in Allah—the Arabic term for “the God,” signaling that there are no others—and then in the prophets that He sends to earth with guidance. God also gives each human an inner light, which the Qur’an refers to as taqwa, the writing of God on our souls. Rahman called taqwa the single most important concept in the Qur’an. It is the piece of us that innately knows the mercy of God. And God, as it says in the Qur’an, sent Muhammad and his followers to be nothing but a special mercy upon all the worlds.
I read biographies of Muhammad. He came of age during a time that Muslims now refer to as jahilliya (a period of darkness), when the lesson of monotheism and mercy that had begun with Adam and had continued through his successors—Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus—had been replaced by a rampant materialism and a worship of false idols. Muhammad became a well-respected merchant in Mecca, often asked by his fellow Arabs to mediate disputes. Every year, he made a retreat to Mount Hira, where he would pray, fast, and give alms to the poor. During his retreat in the year 610, Muhammad felt a powerful force envelop him and heard this command: “Iqra” (Recite). Though illiterate, Muhammad found the first revelation of the Holy Qur’an pouring from his mouth: “Recite in the name of your Lord who created.” Some traditions say that Muhammad was frightened and confused by this incident, thinking that perhaps a demon had possessed him. He ran back to his wife, a well-regarded businesswoman named Khadija, and she assured him that God would not let a demon enter a man as pious and righteous as he. She took Muhammad to see her cousin, Waraqa, a Christian. Waraqa listened carefully to the story, looked deep into Muhammad’s eyes and forehead (where the light of God is said to reveal itself), and declared to Khadija that the prophecy had come true: God’s messenger to the Arabs had arrived. Waraqa and Khadija, a Christian and a woman, were the first people to recognize Muhammad’s prophetic call. For the next twenty-three years, Muhammad guided a growing community of converts in the religion that became called Islam (the term means “submission to the will of God,” and its followers became known as Muslims), a faith that Muhammad repeatedly stated was not new but simply a return to God’s original message of monotheism and mercy.
I studied the great medieval caliphates of Islam. The Abbassids in Baghdad, who discovered Aristotle and translated his work from Greek to Arabic. The Umayyads in Córdoba, considered the most learned city in Europe at its peak, referred to even by European Christians as “the ornament of the world.” The Fatimids in Cairo, an Ismaili empire that built the great Muslim seat of learning, Al Azhar, along with hundreds of libraries and other centers of scholarship. I marveled at the pluralism that Muslim empires had nurtured and protected. The Mughal emperor Akbar was hosting interfaith dialogues in sixteenth-century India while religious wars raged in Europe.
I learned about the role that Muslims had played in modern freedom movements. That Abdul Ghaffar Khan (also known as Badshah Khan), a Pashtun Muslim (coming from the same tribe as Afghanistan’s Taliban), played a key part alongside Gandhi in liberating India from British rule, guided by his interpretation of Islam as a nonviolent tradition of liberation. I read Farid Esack’s Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism on the central role of Muslims in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
I saw the ethos of Islam brightly expressed in the work of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), the development institutions established by the Aga Khan, the Ismaili Imam. In forgotten parts of the world such as Central Asia and West Africa, the AKDN is providing microloans to villagers to start small businesses and establishing integrated systems of education and health care. The AKDN is building the first university in Central Asia and is expanding Aga Khan University in Karachi, one of the best institution of higher education in the Muslim world, to include a campus in East Africa. It is investing in projects that protect Islam’s vibrant cultural heritage of architecture, calligraphy, and music. The AKDN includes one of the most respected disaster relief organizations in the world, Focus. When a horrible earthquake struck Kashmir in 2005, the Pakistani government relied on AKDN helicopters to get help to the region. Over and over, the Imam has emphasized that the AKDN is a modern expression of the Islamic ethos of dignity, service, and beauty. In other words, the Aga Khan is much more than a philanthropist; he is a Muslim.
I watched myself effortlessly making each leap of faith—that there is one God; that He chose humanity as His vicegerent on earth with the purpose of creating a moral social order; that He sent messengers with guidance for this world; that the final Prophet was a merchant named Muhammad, who received the message we call the Holy Qur’an through the angel Gabriel; that Islam was such a rich tradition that it had given rise to many tariqas (spiritual paths) and madhabs (schools of thought), one of them being the Ismaili tariqa, which stated that God would provide humanity with a leader who would give guidance in how to interpret the Qur’anic message to meet the challenges of each new era. I learned the Ismaili Du’a again in full. I went to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and had someone teach me the salat prayer that most Muslims do five times a day. I started to fast during Ramadan.
As I had come to terms with my brown skin, with my Indian heritage, with my American citizenship, I realized that I was now facing and understanding the part of myself
that was both first and final: I was a Muslim.
Faith, wrote the great scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith, is the way a believer connects with a religious tradition. A tradition, wrote the poet T. S. Eliot, is not simply inherited; it is something acquired only by great labor. It was the ethic of service and pluralism in Islam that I felt most enlivened by and most responsible to. Starting the Interfaith Youth Corps gave me the chance to put that ethic into action, to feel worthy of the designation “Muslim.”
With the help of several established interfaith organizations, I gathered a group of sixteen young people from four continents and six different religions to discuss the basic principles of the Interfaith Youth Corps in the Bay Area in June 1999. The conference facilitator was Anastasia White, a PhD student in organizational design and a veteran of the reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa. She pushed us to view the Interfaith Youth Corps as more a movement than a project. I thought about the movements I had admired during my college years—the Catholic Worker, service learning, multiculturalism. Each one had a core idea that ignited passion across a broad range of people. Dorothy Day didn’t start every Catholic Worker House of Hospitality. She developed the idea, built one or two models, and then watched as thousands of others gave new expression to the core concept. I thought about the dozens of service organizations I admired, the hundreds of multicultural initiatives that had helped young people find their identities—more examples of core ideas spreading like wildfire, capturing people’s imaginations, relying on the creativity of entrepreneurial individuals to take new shape. I started to think in terms of a movement. The best way to represent that intention was a slight change in name, from Interfaith Youth Corps to Interfaith Youth Core.
Anastasia agreed with that change and added another point: “If the Interfaith Youth Core is going to be a movement, the structure has to be flexible. A movement is a growing group of people making an idea happen in their own way. The trick for the people starting the movement is to articulate the core idea clearly, develop a spread strategy, and then identify and network the best people doing the work.”