The Ending to a Failed Novel

By Michael Muhammad Knight

Since finishing The Taqwacores I had been at work on another novel about a guy named Bombay Unger who did stupid punk things and sloshed around living funny and sad bum stories. It was supposed to be about Islam and community and such but ended up being about sex and how miserable it made me both before and after waking up from my old Sunni anti-sex days. I later changed Bombay’s name to Ben Majnun, after the guy from Layla and Majnun, and named the manuscript Dogsperm; according to old San Antonio punk band The Fearless Iranians from Hell, “dogsperm” was actually a Farsi word for “jerk.” Then I changed the title to just Ben Majnun. Then I ditched the whole thing.

It’s not easy to look at a big slab of white paper, a hundred thousand words and ten months or whatever and realize that you’re not doing anything with it, that it was meant for your shelf and your shelf alone, but maybe some of Ben Majnun could be salvaged. If nothing else, perhaps the ending.

Ben Majnun went through some little struggles that I guess were mine. He harped on his pink-poodle complex over being a White Muslim, he thought he had gotten over his Sunni repression but still beat himself up every time he got with a girl, he self-published a punk novel that prompted a variety of reactions: some positive, some negative and some confused or missing the point. The big struggle, however, was whether he could call himself Muslim at all. And that was mine too. Questions ate me up inside and nobody had the answers—not the traditional scholars with their “back in that time and place, thus-and-so” brush-offs or the liberal scholars desperately stretching for new ways to read the old stories. Both sides seemed afraid of admitting that maybe it all didn't wrap up so nicely, that there was some shit that would just have to stay shit.

When it came to challenges on the Prophet’s life and conduct, Ben Majnun answered his question by realizing what Islam was supposed to say all along—that prophets were only people and could hurt in all the ways that people hurt.

So here goes, the last six or seven hundred words:

Cool, said Ben.

I ordered it online, it was very interesting.

Thank you.

So do you consider yourself Muslim?

I don’t know, Ben told him. It’s complicated.

How so?

I don’t know, Ben told him again, really just sick of answering the same goddamn questions all the time.

What is your issue with Islam?

I don’t know, Ben replied. I guess Prophet Muhammad did some things that I have a problem with.

Like what?

Like marrying a six-year old and killing eight hundred Jews at Qurayza. Like marrying a girl the day he killed her father and husband.

But you have to understand, the man kindly explained, that Muhammad (pbuh) was a man of that time and place, and it’s so easy for us to judge him from our modern perspectives but back then…

The instant-message window said that he was still typing, but Ben signed off and went to bed.

With an arm around Noorjahan, Ben proposed his new take:

“I’ve been lugging around my Marmaduke Pickthall,” he said, “and before every sura he mentions whether it was revealed at Mecca or Medina. It had me thinking—and I need to check it out further, but here’s an idea—what if something changed after the Hijra?”

“What do you mean?”

“When Muhammad first began his mission, they shit on the Muslims left and right and the whole time Allah said don’t react violently, bear it with patience, leave it up to the Lord of all the Worlds, you know? That’s when Islam was beautiful.”

“Then what?” she asked, propping up her head to look at him.

“Then the Muslims emigrated to Medina and it was a different world. The Muslims were no longer persecuted. Muhammad wasn’t getting intestines smeared on his head in the street. He had become a statesman and was building his power. If I think about all the rotten or at least questionable things he did that make it hard for me to be Muslim… Jesus, they’re all post-Hijra. The Muslims emigrated in 622, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“Aisha wore pigtails when Muhammad tapped her in 623. The Muslims fought at Badr in 624. Uhud, Banu Nadir and the second Badr in 625. The Qurayza massacre in 627. And in 628 he began sending egomaniacal letters to kings and world leaders. I wonder if the Quran’s Mecca parts are any different from its Medina ones—what if getting all famous and powerful corrupted him and he lost the mantle?”

“There was a guy who already came up with this,” she told him.

“You’re kidding!”

“No. He was Somalian. He flat-out said, ‘Muhammad in Mecca is my prophet, not in Medina.’ So they fatwa’d his ass.”

“It makes sense. Maybe the Prophet just sold out—like a little garage band with all the sincerity in the world until that big record deal comes through and cheeses everything up.”

“You know what else happened in Muhammad’s life around that time?”

“No, what?”

“620, two years before Hijra? Khadija died.”

Ben thought about that as he held a warm naked girl in his arms who had love for him that wasn’t only lusting or crushing or puppy-something and it wasn’t the kind of love that’d make her bound to his bed forever. What she really had for Ben could best be called a ridiculous extreme of compassion.

Somebody had that for the Prophet, even when he’d run down mountaintops and tell her what crazy voices were saying to him. I’m going nuts, he’d cry, I’m really losing it this time and Khadjia would just bury his head in her bosom and hold him tight. What would it be like to not have that after so long?

If Rasullullah’s downfall was being mean over a girl, Ben Majnun could see a little Sunni in himself.

THE END

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