The Voice of God is Hamza Yusuf: The 2004 ISNA Convention

By Michael Muhammad Knight

At the 2003 ISNA convention I stink-palmed Cat Stevens and Siraj Wahhaj, handed out Kinko’s-made copies of my novel and aspired to chokeslam Muzammil Siddiqi through the roof of McCormick Place.

This year I’d speak on a panel—the ISNA people even gave me complimentary registration and an invitation letter from Secretary General Sayyid M. Syeed. Hot damn, right? And my books now had smooth covers, perfect binding, bar codes and an ISBN number. So yeah, punk is dead.

And you don’t know the half of it.

I showed up Friday morning with twenty of The Taqwacores shoved into a Budweiser box. It had a convenient handle and the books fit perfectly. Walking around the bazaar got me some double-takes; a few vendors offered to find me a new container so I wouldn’t have to look like I was carrying an 18-pack but I had gotten used to it. I was even having fun in a different way than I had expected; it wasn’t a Fuck You kind of thing. It almost hurt, and I liked that it almost hurt. I haven’t tasted beer since I was five years old, so their dirty looks and judgments came undeserved, but still I brought them on deliberately—like I could cart away all their pettiness in a red-and-white cardboard box. That’s my inner Catholic again, always trying to suffer.

Then I saw some stretched-out deer-skins with Ya Sin branded into them. The smaller one went for $200 and the big one was $400. The vendor saw me inspecting them, looked at my special speaker name-tag and asked about the beer.

“It’s not beer,” I said and showed him. “It’s books.”

“But it doesn’t look right!”

“Doesn’t look right? WHO’S GOT THE QURAN ON A CARCASS?”

I finally got to meet HijabMan, who spotted me as I passed his booth. He has a real name but I look at him and see HijabMan. He was running a good hustle with his t-shirts. From my vantage point, the guy’s a born salesman because he genuinely enjoys people—even when he couldn’t sell a shirt, he at least made someone smile. I bought his shirt reading “THIS IS WHAT A RADICAL MUSLIM FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE.” A girl asked what qualified me as a radical Muslim feminist.

“I’ve prayed behind a female imam,” I told her. “That do anything for you?” It took her a second to process.

“Who allowed that?”

“She did.”

I went by Alhambra and looked over about seven thousand lectures available from Hamza Yusuf, the surfer-turned-shaykh who took off his turban and started wearing suits after 9/11.

Caught up with Helena (Ms. ISNA 2003) and ventured over to the Hyatt with plans that night to crash the Matrimonial Networking and make out in the middle of it (after which I’d announce, “IT’S OKAY—SHE’S PROGRESSIVE!”) but the thing turned out to be full of people that she knew so we bailed for the hotel pool. Sitting in pool chairs under giant golden umbrellas, Helena remarked that it felt like The Great Gatsby. Every so often some wannabe-thug ISNA boys would show up hollering and acting like they were going to push each other in. I took off my shoes and swam in my pants, but when I came out I got the beer box wet. We went back to the convention to find another box and then rode a series of trains and buses for what must have been two hours to get to her place.

In the morning we walked through RoseHill Cemetery, the future site of Wesley’s memorial; the plan is a marble bust of Wes for fans to headbutt. Back at the convention we’d bust out my program to look over the day’s lecture offerings. Helena observed that ISNA people lived in clouds.

To stay mindful of my true place in the pecking-order of American Muslim writers, I accepted Asma Gull Hasan’s invitation to work at her booth for a few hours. The kicker was that she shared it with her brother Muhammad Ali Hasan of Muslims for Bush. The combined booth was a huge endeavor with six tables, leather furniture and a back display featuring Seeme and Ali with Bush on one side, Asma’s blown-up book cover on the other. I stayed on Asma’s side and watched everyone take their respective dumps on her. Someone drew a moustache on her poster, people signed her mailing list as John Kerry or “BUSH IN HELL,” and a middle-aged South Asian man pointed at her with the announcement, “that’s the crap of the world, sitting right there.”

“For all the airs they put on about protecting Muslim women,” she told me, “they’ve been pretty abusive.” It seemed to be wearing her down at times, but she still had books to sign and kept smiling for people. One man came by, bought a book, ran off and then returned with all his daughters so they could meet her. I spent most of my stint at Asma’s booth eating complimentary Reese’s cups and talking with two of her friends that she had employed for the weekend.

“Are you pro-Bush?” one asked in a slight whisper. When I said no, she relaxed her posture.

My Radical Muslim Feminist shirt got a lot of comments. I noted that most of the positive reactions came from young hijabis. One guy with a henna beard came up and asked if my shirt meant that I supported gays.

“Sure,” I said.

“You can’t be gay and Muslim.”

“You ever hear of Rumi?” With that he stormed off.

HijabMan gave me a fake registration ID that said “Imran Khan” so I strolled around being that guy for a while. When Asma saw it she said that the real Imran Khan, the cricket player, was calling her all the time. I helped bring books up to her “Meet the Author” session and sat for some of it. Listened to Tahir Ali explain his book The Muslim Vote: Counts and Recounts, the cover of which featured a photo from ISNA ’00 when the block vote for Bush was announced. These were crazy times. ISNA ’04 saw an endless parade of Kerry stickers—lanky Arab dudes wore them on cotton white thobes, girls used Kerry-Edwards to accessorize their hejabs, little kids had them, old men had them. They even covered the Hasans’ tables, the photo of Bush, and the TV screen showing Asma’s appearances on O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, From the Heartland with John Kasich, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, C-SPAN BookTV and KTLA Morning News.

I found the right lecture hall too late for Asra’s presentation of the Muslim Women’s Bill of Rights, but the place was still packed and I knew she was in there somewhere because a boom mic hung over the crowd. I went up and spotted her in the center of everything with a cameraman’s bright light in her face. In the after-party atmosphere I met Sabreen and her Progressive Meetup group. Once I got a chance, I hugged Asra and we all went downstairs for the Bombay Express food court. Between Asra’s piece in Time hitting newstands Monday and the AP wire on Muslims for Bush, I don’t think an ISNA convention was ever so tied to mainstream America.

Asra wanted to hit the main hall and hear Hamza Yusuf speak, his topic being “Only for the Love of Allah: Devotion through Giving.” The chairs in the main hall were all graced with envelopes and complimentary ISNA pens. I took a bunch of pens but they were designed to fall apart about twelve seconds after you wrote your check. I left before the Hamza Show but stopped by later, watched for a minute and decided that he’s an excited little worm. I also decided that he takes sharp little shits that hurt him, even though they’re not big. They’re just sharp. If you look at him it makes sense.

After the convention I’d learn that Internet phantoms were calling me a sell-out for speaking on an ISNA panel. They should also know that I signed up for that free CAIR t-shirt with the Nike swoosh on it. As I walked away from the booth, in came the husky Caucasian loudmouth that had once threatened to sue me. I did a lap around the bazaar, put the shirt on and came back. When Hooper finished his chit-chat with two hijabis I held up my name-tag so he could see it and said “as-salamu alaikum.” He returned with a stiff “wa-alaikum” and I disappeared into the crowd.

So on top of having my name in the official ISNA program, I joined CAIR and gave salams to a man that I had offered to fight on pay-per-view. What could be worse—going to a hookah bar with the Muslims for Bush guy?

Guess what, kids…

Saturday night I rode away from the Donald E. Stephens Center in a chauffeured van with the Hasans, their cousin Omer, a hired bodyguard, and Asma’s two friends. The traffic slowed to a crawl, and I looked out at a sidewalk flooded with Muslims of every background and category, knowing that if ISNA 2004 was a wrestling federation (which was naturally how I viewed it) I had found myself sitting with Triple H—the main-event villain, the guy that a sold-out arena cheers to see torn apart. Ali treated us to dinner, and we considered what else to do with the night. It was said that some Naseeb members were having a prom-themed party at the Hyatt, but he wanted to undo his stress at the hookah place.

Watching from a crowded corner while Ali danced under the blue lights with his tie off and shirt half-unbuttoned, I stumbled into a discussion of gay Muslims with a random Shi’a girl. I don’t remember how it started, but I blame the HijabMan shirt. She asked if I had ever heard of an organization called al-Fatiha, with a tone suggesting that this group’s existence would prove some point for her. I replied that I was friends with al-Fatiha’s president and her face collapsed. Then she said that Islam was the wrong religion for homosexuals. My only answer was that we all had our static.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Well, I mean…I have sex with girls.”

“You do?”

“On extremely rare occasions.”

“What, you do mut’ah?”

Then I lost it. If you’re going to be that stupid about the rules, you make the whole thing look stupid with you. So I flipped out and started pounding the table, yelling that I could give a rip about any of it anymore and that I was going to go mack on ISNA girls and take them to buffets for plates of pure bacon piled up high, and once I had some momentum going and the people around us thought I was nuts or drunk, I screamed things like GOD DAMN IT, I’M A REGISTERED SPEAKER! Then a girl at the next table asked why I still had my name-tag on. Ali gave me a high-five. The guy couldn’t be happier if he was rolling on ecstasy.

Out in the parking lot Ali’s cousin asked if I had a copy of The Taqwacores that he could buy. I had finally learned the writer’s hustle: to sell a book, put on a show. I signed his copy with a cartoon of a pig saying Allahu Akbar. Omer seemed like a good kid; I even saw myself in him, the twenty-year old quiet college guy who abstained from alcohol while all his kafr friends were like, “dude—one of these days we’re going to get you WASTED!”

The Hyatt lobby was still hopping after 4:00 a.m. but I didn’t know anyone so I just went and slept under the MSA table. When I crawled back out, most of the kids were gone, but one dude was sitting by himself so we got to talking. I ended up confiding my whole life story to the kid and all my mistakes, and he just said simple things that you could tell a Muslim fourth-grader but it still hit me where it needed to. Back when I used to go to the Islamic Center of Rochester only at night when nobody else would be around, if I'd run into someone it always turned out to be a guy that could say what Allah wanted you to hear at those weird hours. Maybe the same holds for hotel lobbies at ISNA conventions. At one point I looked up at the skylight and saw that it was time for breakfast, so I gave him my salams and went back to the Donald E. Stephens. When the bazaar opened up again I swung by Asma’s table and swiped some Reese’s cups. A hijabi girl saw me and laughed. “I’d take one too but I’d feel like a traitor,” she said.

During my many laps of the bazaar I’d stop at the Hasans’ and just watch people go by, shaking their heads or staring in disbelief. Some laughed at the big Bush face and others looked ready to cry. Once Ali had a whole mountain of huddled young men waiting for their shots at him. Meanwhile, Asma talked to security about all the Kerry stickers vandalizing their booth.

I found the Muslims for Kerry table, which started out in a back corner but somehow moved up. I hung out at the AMC table and the guy told me that I could be AMC’s Ibrahim Hooper. I don’t know about that; I’m already the Ibrahim Hooper of my own life.

A Bektashi named Huseyin came up to ask if I was who I was and joked, “I’m not sure if I should shake your hand or not.” I bumped into him again later when he was with his friend Muhammad, who said he had something for me and pulled out a copy of Walid al-Taha’s The Hundred Seeds of Beirut. I couldn’t believe it—Walid was the saxophone-playing junky saint that brought Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey into the Moorish Orthodox crowd and started him on a life that’d involve wanderings across Asia and ten years in Iran, turning him into…well, Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey. I never expected to see anything related to those guys at a scene like this. Muhammad signed the copy, “to my dearest Akh, Michael Muhammad Knight—keep the gharib and the sirr,” opposite a photo of Noble Drew Ali sitting at a desk. The bibliography in the back cited Hakim Bey’s “Sijil of the Fatimid Order.” Muhammad didn’t have a registration ID so I gave him the Imran Khan.

I was too tired to keep walking around so I went up to room 34, knowing that if I fell asleep in there someone would wake me up for the panel. At 4:30 I sat at the end of a long table that I’d share with legendary poet Abd al-Hayy Moore, slam-poet Dasham Brookings, novelist Umm Zakiyya and Asra Nomani. Pamela Taylor, the panel's organizer, gave each of us a chance to explain what we were doing there. The slam-poet guy recited his verses and had a power-point presentation. I didn’t know what the hell I’d say but I was sitting next to Asra and she wrote me an outline: “1) who I am, 2) why I write, 3) telling the truth.” So there it was. When my turn came up, I stood and told them how I had converted, how I went to Pakistan and almost joined the fight for Chechnya, how a brother told me that I could do more good as a writer though he’d probably wish I had died in a Russian basement if he knew the stuff I did now. I stood in front of the hijab-squad and wajib-beards and told them all that at one time I completely abandoned any concept of Islam—and even if I could return to the shahadah, I still wouldn’t sit for any nonsense about little French lap-dogs keeping the angels out of my mom’s house. Then I explained the deal behind The Taqwacores and how it came about, how I stuffed it with all my anger and squeezed in a shred of hope. I wrapped up my turn by saluting two writers that weren’t there. First was Walid al-Taha, martyred by opium and police in 1965. I read some lines from The Hundred Seeds of Beirut.

Then I’d mention Mohja Kahf and said that ISNA should be ashamed of itself for refusing the most important and relevant artist in the community from reading in the main hall. Dasham Brookings gave an ass-mouthed response about ISNA’s laws being ISNA’s laws and that’s all there could be to the matter. It takes a special kind of coward to be that poet who supports the exclusion of poets. Umm Zakiyya was kind enough to remind us all that we could write whatever “risque” stuff that we wanted, but first and foremost our work had to please Allah.

The rest of the session went pretty fast. My personal highlight came when someone asked if the men supported themselves by writing—why she didn’t include the women in that, take a guess, but Abd al-Hayy Moore said that if you want a career, be a computer programmer. Takbir to that. Asra put herself in the question and said that in fact, she did support herself by writing. Takbir again. After the session concluded it was more or less socializing. Former Horizons guy Fawad gave me salams and we agreed to someday get a Muslim comic book going. I answered a few questions from people and an Afghan-Uzbek girl named Inur gave me her math. I went downstairs with Asra to find that half the lights in the building had gone out. The food court was closed up and Bombay Express moved their operations to the front lobby, completely in the dark save some set-up emergency lights. I bought a pile of dollar samosas and sat with Asra and her friends on the floor.

Swung by HijabMan’s booth and found him standing on the table waving candy bars at people. With every last t-shirt sold, he had taken to peddling other vendors’ wares for them. I sat behind his table with my new friend Alejandro, who had some struggles going on over a beautiful Muslimah and her family; I made a du’a for him because I know how that is. Asra came through, my friend Sadef stopped by with her brother, and then the two Bektashis, Huseyin and Muhammad, showed up. I flipped through a copy of Horizons that was all about Chicago (featuring the Sears Tower on the cover juxtaposed with a minaret) and found a photo inside of Huseyin and Muhammad standing with that long-bearded Kabbani guy. Muhammad had a big envelope on him and dipped into it to reveal all kinds of crazy Moorish stuff, like the first picture I’d ever see of Walid al-Taha. Muhammad wanted to get Walid’s work out there and hoped to someday write about all the American Muslim jazz musicians—he already knew of over two hundred. What a moment we had there with all these characters, and I was so sleep-deprived that it felt even weirder. I turned around and saw Alejandro in sujdah with his forehead resting on an ISNA tote-bag. When it came time for everyone to part ways, I called Inur and left to meet her in the Hyatt lobby. We’d walk around until finding our own lecture hall. Every now and then someone would open the door, apologize and then close it, scandalized that we were sitting alone with just the shaytan as that hadith says. A hijabi girl showed up and asked if we had a room.

Inur had an interesting experience for her first ISNA convention—she had told me about two girls getting into a fight over a boy while all the guys rooted them on. Earlier in the day she met Hamza Yusuf and said that he seemed really cool and soft-spoken but then went to his speech where he screamed like it was a pep rally. And ISNA wouldn’t even let him go until they had collected a certain amount of money, she said. The convention was only a racket, and Hamza brought in the marks.

If ISNA 2004 was a wrestling federation, of course he’d be the Rock. Perhaps the time is ripe for Hamza to make his own foray into feature films.

Eventually Inur’s aunt called and asked where she was. We walked back through the lobby past some guys complaining that Yusuf had just repeated his earlier performance verbatim.

Before she left I asked Inur what brought her to Chicago for all this what-have-you.

“I really like Cat Stevens,” she replied. “My sister said he’d be here.”

I swear to Allah that I don’t make this stuff up.

Michael Muhammad Knight completed his first book, Where Mullahs Fear to Tread, at the age of 19. He began circulating The Taqwacores by handing them out from the trunk of his car in mosque parking lots. Autonomedia has just re-released his book.