Imam for a Day: My Trip to ISNA Headquarters

By Michael Muhammad Knight

At the ISNA convention I had met Fawad Siddiqi, Assistant Editor at Islamic Horizons. We talked about my doing an article for them. I thought it’d say something about both ISNA and myself if a jerk like me could get in their magazine. The only problem came in finding something ISNA-friendly to write.

Then a friend told me about Al-Maun, a Muslim-run safehouse and food pantry in Columbus, Ohio. Sounded good. I looked up the address, threw on my eleven-spiked Princeton hat, grabbed my photographer Mike Pedri and hit the road.

I also had on a Shriner jacket that I had found at the Elmwood Avenue thrift store. It looked like a Marine uniform until you saw the patches. On my right arm it said “ISMAILIA LEGION OF HONOR—BUFFALO, NY” with yellow star-and-crescent under a curvy sword.

On the I-271, the dividing wall between lanes had a desert sunbaked look to it against the whitish-blue sky. Maybe it was just the right time of day. I asked Ped what color he’d use to describe it. Buff or beige, he said. Golden arches and gas-station logos sat atop needle-thin towers rising out of the hills. I noticed one had a ladder reaching all the way up and imagined Bilal bin Rabah climbing it to give adhan for all the truckers.

I-271 took us to the 71, which took us to Columbus. During the drive I made repeated attempts to call Al-Maun, getting only the voicemail.

The North Garfield address was just a couple of turns after the exit. It looked like any other rundown house in the neighborhood, save the big AL-MAUN above the front door. We walked up and knocked three times (according to sunna). No answer. Then I saw the side door and figured I’d give it a shot.

“Who’s there?” screamed a female voice.

“As-salaamu alaikum,” I replied. “My name is Mike Knight, I’d like to speak with Ramadan Islam.” She opened the door in a grandma-nightgown and slippers with frizzed hair and tired eyes. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Mike Knight, I’m with a magazine—“

“I’m not interested.” She moved to close the door but I stopped it with my foot.

“Is this the shelter?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Is Ramadan Islam here?”

“No, he left. He comes back in the day sometimes.” She spoke fast.

“Do you know what time?” I asked.

“No, I don’t know what time.” I thanked her and the door closed. Al-Maun was done with us for the night. Ped said he’d have no problem sleeping in the car if it were in a better neighborhood. We drove barely a minute before finding the campus of Columbus State Community College and moved our operations to its parking lot. We leaned on the outside of my car dipping into a blue bag of salt and vinegar chips on the hood. That was dinner. As I changed my socks we discussed various college campuses we had been to and how some were easier to sneak into than others. I wondered what road-tripping slobs did when they got too old to blend in on campuses.

“Someday,” I mused aloud, “I might have to actually pay for a motel room.” We both laughed.

Ped and I slept in an OSCC study lounge until a cop came in and told us the place had closed at eleven. We went back to the car and drove around a little, looking at the clubs. Clubs all have the same names, no matter where you go: Slammers, Bammers, Boomers, Shooters, Players, Rimmers, Buzzers, Rammers. We had no reason to stay in Columbus and hit the I-75 westbound for Indianopolis, stopping along the way to sleep outside a gas station.

The next morning we passed what looked like a chunk of spaceship riding a slow flatbed trailer with police escort. The next three overpasses were crowded with people staring down our road with binoculars. I pulled over, rode the loud tire-ruts for a hundred yards, left my car on the 75 and ran uphill to ask somebody what they were all looking at.

“It’s a big ol’ bomber comin’ this way,” said a farmer-looking guy. He looked at the star and crescent on my Shriner jacket. “What’s that mean?” he asked.

“I’m in the FOI.”

“What’s that?”

“Fruit of Islam,” I replied. “Louis Farrakhan’s bodyguards.”

Just west of Indianopolis was Plainfield, home to the Islamic Society of North America.

In my first encounter with ISNA I smeared feces on respected leaders and prepared to wrestle Muzammil Uncle on the roof of McCormick Place. How could I top that? Challenge Ingrid Mattson to kegstands? Lock Muhammad Nur Abdullah in the smelly trunk of my car?

Set back from the road at the end of a long drive, flanked by dry cornfields on all sides, the massive red brick ISNA complex looked like a fort. An empty fort. The parking lots were wide open and quiet. We had the place to ourselves. Ped got some shots of me standing in the corn with the building in the background—I thought it’d make a good picture with the corn symbolizing some idealized spirit of America and then right in the middle of it you had a big mosque.

“Shouldn’t this corn have been harvested by now?” I asked him. Not if it’s cow corn, he said.

I called Fawad. He said he was out of town for the night, but behind the building we could probably find brothers and sisters using the prayer room. Ped and I walked around and found a whole new parking lot occupied with three or four SUVs. We went in the back door and found a young man setting up tables. I realized that in my spiked Princeton hat and Alternative Tentacles shirt I might have looked like a weirdo. Introduced myself, quick to mention Fawad and use some Arabic lingo in one big breath. The guy directed Ped and I to an older gentleman who brought us upstairs to the wudu facilities and prayer room.

After making wudu I walked into the masjid and made two rakats while Ped waited in the main lobby. Somebody told me once that it was a good habit to always offer two rakats out of respect for the mosque. The older brother gave adhan, then came to me and made small talk. Turned out he worked for Rolls-Royce. Another man entered the masjid with his small son. We all stood there for a second, not knowing what to do, and the older man invited me to lead. Me, the guy who stink-palmed Siraj Wahaj; me, the shabby Sufi diagnosed with mild to moderate apostasy. He gave the iqamah. During prayer the kid jumped out of line, danced and sang to himself in Urdu but always rejoined us for sujdah. After prayer I made du’a for these men not to be penalized for standing behind a wretch—they didn’t know. And I hoped with all my hope that the boy would never lose whatever it was that made him dance during Zuhr.

I talked with them afterwards, the boy’s father inviting Ped and I to his brother’s wedding reception later that evening. I wished that Muslims would stop being so damned nice. It’s easy to sit alone in my room with a stack of Bukhari and want to tear it all apart, but sometimes Islam looks better in real life than on paper. Of course, sometimes it’s the opposite.

Back outside I called Al-Maun again. A woman told me that Ramadan was out “doing the driveway” and jotted down my number. Ped and I wandered around in the corn until Ramadan called back. He sounded enthusiastic for the interview. Said we had the wrong Al-Maun, though. We had gone to the Al-Maun pantry; the Al-Maun safehouse was on South Ohio Street. He said to call when we got to the place.

So we drove three and a half hours back to Columbus. Ped looked at my dirty Princeton hat with its eleven spikes and hole where I used to have the twelfth.

“The missing one is special,” I told him. “It’ll find its way back and then fill this hat with justice, as now it’s filled with inequity.”

We found no South Ohio Street, but came across an Ohio Avenue and went to the house number that Ramadan had given. The lights were off. Nobody answered our knocks. I called Ramadan’s cel number but he didn’t answer. We knocked again. I tried finding a listing for Al-Maun in a soggy phonebook on the porch. Nothing. I called Ramadan again. I called the pantry number. I gave the cel another try and left a message. Called the pantry again. Called the cel, left another message. Called again. Called again. Drove back to the pantry but this time when we knocked the lady turned off her lights and refused to answer. We walked to my car, then walked back and her lights were on again. Knocked on the door and her lights went off. I gave Ramadan’s cel one last try. I left a subtly hostile message and gave up.

Driving down Broad Street wondering what to do, maybe a mile from the pantry, Ped spotted a house with sign in front reading “ISLAMIC CENTER.” I turned around, found a place to park and we went to check it out. Everybody there looked vaguely East African—Ethiopian or Somalian, I guessed. The brother I spoke to had the softest, most delicate and yet grounded voice I had ever heard from a man. I asked if he had ever heard of Ramadan Islam and Al-Maun. He said Ramadan had stopped by their mosque once, a long time ago, but they never heard anything from him after that. The brother directed me to their wudhu room in the basement. I washed and went back upstairs to make Maghrib. While standing to recite Fatiha, I looked down at the bat on my Alternative Tentacles t-shirt and for a split dumb second thought that I was praying to it.

Ped asked if I had ever been to Detroit. I hadn’t, so we went.

At 2:08 a.m. on the I-75 North, somewhere around exit 195 I saw a lit-up sign saying ISLAMIC CENTER OF GREATER TOLEDO in front of a bulbous dome and skinny pointed minarets. At the first chance I made an illegal U-turn, waking up Ped, made another U-turn and ended up almost where I was and I first saw the sign. Put on the hazard lights, left Ped as he drifted back to sleep and ventured into the night. Climbed a harmless chicken-wire fence and crossed a dark sea of crunchy grass. Seemed like forever before I came to the sign, which itself was fifty yards before the actual mosque. I stood there awhile with open mouth and empty head in front of hard words on stone washed in a blast of flourescent lights. I felt that weird kind of bug-out happening when your spine tingles and you realize that Somebody must be running this show for things to work out so well at dumb hours of the night on dumb roads in Ohio. Maybe it only seemed to work out because I was nuts. Then I shook it off and walked to the white brick mosque. The dome and minarets gave it that spaceship look like it could just shoot off into heaven. The doors were locked so I just walked a lap around the perimeter and returned to the dark field and the chicken-wire fence and Ped sleeping in my car with its hazards on. I got in, waited for two big trucks to go by and rejoined the road.

A few minutes into Michigan I pulled over at a rest-stop to crash. Woke up at around five and resumed the drive. Ped was old cold. I thought about Detroit, how for some people it was the holy of holies because Allah Himself had walked those streets as a seller of silks named W.D. Fard.

Then came another one.

By the southbound side of 75, just past exit 34B, sat a white mosque with green trim. I did yet another U-turn and took the exit. Turned right at a gas station and drove maybe a mile. This one turned out to be closed too, but I stopped the car and lay on my back in the parking lot looking up at its old-copper green and the Arabic shahadah under its name, Masjid Umar bin Khattab. Then all I could do was get back in the car.

We drove around Detroit for a while until stumbling across Cobo Hall, home of a once-thriving wrestling scene. Wrestling went down like everything else—you had little mom-and-pop stores in every city until one day a Wal-Mart—in this case, Vince McMahon—drove them out of business. Before Vince conquered Detroit, Cobo Hall hosted wrestling’s greatest villain: the fireball hurling, foreign-object wielding Sheik (not to be confused with the Iron Sheik). As a kid I only knew of him from old magazines, but had seen enough bloody pictures to be legitimately afraid of the man.

Just across the street from Cobo stood the Renaissance Center, where the Sheik once made an open challenge to fight anyone on the roof. Seeing that, I had seen enough. We got on the bridge to Canada, where we’d take the 401 to the 403 to the QEW to Buffalo.

Around London somewhere I spotted two more minarets and a buff/beige mosque from the road. We took the next exit and found the Islamic Centre of Ontario. Ped waited in the car while I went in and apparently stumbled on a community function. I introduced myself to a young man and asked where I could make wudhu. He showed me the way. I washed up and made a prayer in the masjid. It was the first time in the whole trip, that I really felt like I was saying something to the Creator of the Universe. Maybe those other prayers were practice to get me back in the right place.

A few hours later I was back in Buffalo not knowing what to make of it all. I had been to five mosques in a weekend, four of them discovered accidentally. I had lead prayer at the heart and soul of ISNA. I suppose Somebody was trying to take me somewhere—maybe a place I had been to before, or a new place I’d like better. Or maybe the point was that I’m in a good place now.

Michael Muhammad Knight is author of The Taqwacores, a novel available through the legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.