Zaytuna's Smelly Kebabs

By Nassim Mobasher

The non-profit Zaytuna Institute, headquartered in Hayward, California, was co-founded by Hamza Yusuf in 1996 in order to "revive the tradition of sound Islamic teaching institutions." Since then, Zaytuna has become known as a center for promoting Islamic learning based on traditional Sunni sources of jurisprudence; it is often seen as a more moderate, traditional counterweight to narrow Salafi/Wahhabi approaches to Islam in the West. An American who converted to Islam at 17, Yusuf spent ten years in the Middle East, studying Islam with shaykhs in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and North Africa. He rose to public prominence soon after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush sought his advice on the US response. The BBC has called him "the rock star of the new Muslim generation."—Ed.

Zaytuna and I crossed paths for a brief period in what now seems a lifetime ago. My adventure began where all noteworthy adventures begin: the MSA mailing list.

An email announced a weeklong spiritual retreat or “Deen Intensive Program( D.I.P)” during the winter holidays. Hamza Yusuf was the only name I recognized among the names of shuyukh. The city hosting it was Calgary, in western Canada, in the province of Alberta. I flagged the message to look at it later. Papers and midterms and organizing a few antiwar rallies, not to mention overdoses of Columbian coffee (two creams, three brown sugars), and suddenly the deadline for the application date had arrived.

I filled out the essay questions on the application while sitting through a South Asian Politics lecture. As the instructor was describing Indira Gandhi’s (mis)handling of the crisis in the Golden Temple, I was writing about my struggles with the fundamentalists running various Muslim Institutions. Class ended by the time I was halfway through the application.

“Next class we will look at sectarian violence,” announced the professor. The next question on the application read, "What is your madhhab?" There were boxes placed in front of the legitimate four that could be checked off. The fifth box said "Other." That’s the one I checked off. And after having "othered" me, they wanted me to "Explain" on the stretch of a line what sort of Other I was. A Jafari/Shia/Ithna Ashari/Alavi/Rafidhi-- depending on how you look at it. I had a break and my next class was philosophy: Aristotle’s categorization of beings into neat little boxes.

I emailed the application to them that night, almost sure it would be denied. But Approval from Calgary came a few weeks later--they liked me, they really liked me! Well, so long as I paid them $400 in tuition.

One of the many boxes I had checked off was the one that said "need financial assistance." But in all likelihood, everyone had requested such assistance and it had run out for the procrastinators.

Not to worry, student-loan money paid for my plane ticket and tuition. I arrived in Calgary the night before the event but could not afford a hotel room, so I and other members of "The Coalition of the Muslim Broke" spent a memorable night occupying the sovereign Calgary airport. We had parked on the chairs in front of the Starbucks coffee shop but successfully resisted temptation to Evil, in the face of sleep deprivation. Morning came and vans arrived to pick us up.

The day was spent socializing in the Calgary mosque, until we were taken to the Silver Creek Ranch, located in the remote foothills 75km northwest of Calgary. For those of you unfamiliar with the climate in this particular part of the world, the cold enters your skin like sharp, stinging spikes, but it is warmed up when the Chinook winds come around.

On the bus, I looked through the reading package and the several articles that we had been required to read before coming to this program. The overall understanding I got from the readings was that the problem with Islam (Wahhabi Islam--although never explicitly stated as such) is that it has abandoned the madhhab system. A prerequisite to approaching the Quran and the hadiths is Islamic scholarship. The Salafis had adopted a method in which any individual felt qualified in passing their own fatwa (verdict) based on a hadith they had come across in Bukhari, and this method lacked the holistic approach that came with scholarship.

We finally arrived on the crunchy snow covering the hills and the trees. The campsite consisted of some cabins, a cozy diner lodge, and a recreation building called the Music Hall with hardwood floors. The Music Hall was where most of the learning would take place, and it was divided by a green curtain that separated the sexes. The division of space was done while mindful of gender equity concerns. The speaker sat in the front and made eye contact with both the men and women.

The first night was about covering the formalities. Hamza Yusuf made some introductory remarks, and made it clear that "this was not the place to find a spouse, there are other available venues for those of you looking but this is simply not the place for it."

Dinner was served in the diner lodge, also divided by another green curtain. The food was too bland for my taste buds but I was too busy trying to get to know the people who surrounded me. There was a noticeable number of Caucasian converts, African Americans, Arabs from surrounding Canadian provinces and even someone who had come from as far as Australia. It felt like everyone in the room was a pre-med. “You mean you are not going to study medicine?” I was asked more than a few times, with a look that said "then what sorry excuse do you have for continuing to exist?" It was no comfort knowing I once had that worldview, and gave people that look.

That night, we stood outside where a white blanket covered the ground and a black blanket covered the sky above, and Hamza Yusuf shared with us his love of astronomy. I think the reason these retreats were usually held somewhere far away from cell-phone service coverage (i.e. civilization) was to teach us a lesson in humility. We were vulnerable to the cold and to the wild animals lurking in the distance; we were overwhelmed by Nature. We were blips of nothingness when those stars looked at us; we were overwhelmed by the vastness of the incomprehensible Universe. We were quite simply overwhelmed. And ready to submit.

We slept on bunk beds, worried about mice. We’d been told earlier that any food crumbs would attract them but we had craved chocolate by midnight and had nervously broken off a few pieces, careful not to leave behind any crumbs. "We" consisted of me and other members of "Muslims for Lindor/Cadbury," advocates of sweet milk chocolate and world peace (but certainly not regime change).

That night, we had been given a booklet on proper adab or etiquette of learning and lectured on how we were to behave in the presence of shuyukh. The word adab was Arabic but shared in Persian and meant "manners." Growing up in Southern Iran, my parents had me on a steady diet that included a daily cup-full of adab with my vegetables. When I was seven years old, my reputable image as a child of proper adab was one day shattered.

Grandpa had had another one of his dinner parties in which he made meat kebabs that the adults had always said were the best-tasting kebabs in the world. I hated his kebabs for as long as I could remember, usually because I made friends with the lamb in the basement before I saw Grandpa play butcher and cut him up. I could never eat the lamb on my plate, pretending to be a kebab. So that fateful day, when Grandpa came next to me, holding his big pot of hot kebabs to put one on my plate, I was taken up by a whirlwind of courage and said, "No thank you, I don't want any." A few of the adults gasped, the room fell silent, and Grandpa gave me a cold stare before moving on with his pot of patriarchy to fill cousin Sara's plate. My aunt declared that I was a disgustingly rude child, lacking in any adab. "But I said it politely," came my insecure response. "There's nothing polite about refusing your Grandfather. You should be ashamed!" came another aunt's sharp reply.

Adab, in my current context meant that we were not to question or challenge a shaykh openly, for traditional learning required that a student abide by the didactic method, and acknowledge the superior education of a shaykh. Politely written questions were okay, but we were in no place to be disagreeing with the shayookh. We were not allowed to refuse what was being fed to us. I'm not sure how a Southern Iranian family's understanding of 'adab' managed to coincide with that of the North American convert community. All I knew was that I was not going to eat the kebabs I did not want.

The next morning, the learning officially began. After prayer and breakfast, we began our first session, which was led by a Shaykh Jamal. Shaykh Jamal’s program was going to be a reading of Bukhari’s chapter of hadiths on marriage. This was a bit ironic since we had been instructed not to think about the ‘M’ word here at this venue. Nonetheless, each hadith was read, and commentary from Shaykh Jamal would follow. This started out a bit tedious but exciting learning was soon to follow.

There was a hadith about treating your wives equally, and in the commentary, the Shaykh angrily instructed the women to allow their husbands to take on more than one wife. Men have needs, he told us, needs that our periods and our eventual menopause could never fulfill. The male sexual appetite sometimes requires more than one woman's work to be fed. He told us to get these silly western notions of monogamy out of our silly little heads. If we really loved our husbands, we would let him marry others.

I listened, thinking of my grandmother, who had been living that life for more than forty years now. I thought of the forty years, in a house with two floors that were divided with more than just bricks. A house where two women shared one man. I thought of the male sex-drive with sheer awe for such an insatiable force.

On another occasion, Shaykh Jamal instructed us that western courts were no place to be getting a divorce and if it was possible, we should try very hard to go to a Muslim country where a divorce could be done according to Sharia guidelines. Muslim countries, those beacons of Islamic justice, thought I. This was comical, I had to stop myself from acting on the urge to burst into loud laughter, the adab-police was all over the place.

People wrote their question on paper and passed them on person to person to the front. The moderators at the front chose which questions they would read out ( I know because I wrote questions aplenty that were never read out) and then Shaykh Jamal gave his opinion.

"Shaykh, this girl and I really want to do it, but we are not married yet. What should we do?" The Shaykh answered, going off on some tangents about the troubles of our times: these days, the girl's parents are too picky and require too many household appliances from the poor groom. There seemed to be an endless way of rephrasing this same question and the Shaykh never grew tired of answering it. My friend, sitting next to me, (both a member of the 'Coalition of the Muslim Broke' and 'Muslims for Lindor/Cadbury') nudged me and whispered, "I feel like my brain's shrinking."

In the fiqh session, we were divided into three different madhhab-groups and each taught in different spaces. I had chosen the Shafi'i madhhab, which was taught by Imam Zaid Shakir in the diner lodge, where we learned in the presence of the camp’s staff. We opened Imam Shafi'i’s Reliance of the Traveler, and began with the section on water and the rules of purity. Those who staffed the camp were non-Muslims who had seen us during meals and noticed how segregated we were but they were in for a surprise during these sessions. One of the members of the staff was setting the lunch tables as Imam Zaid explicitly detailed out ejaculations and secretions in the context of purity. He then proceeded to answer further explicit questions in this regard, and I watched the shock on the staffer's face as she placed breadbaskets on the tables.

Imam Zaid was quite mellow and had us laughing often. He also taught the Science of Hadith on a white-board in the evenings in the Music Hall. He explained the rigorous process that hadiths underwent and how they were classified. The sahih (authentic) hadiths were the equivalent of Qur'anic verses, since Islam could not be understood in a vacuum and needed to be understood with the practice of the Prophet.

After my persistent writing and re-writing of a question and sending it to the front, it was finally passed through to Imam Zaid, and he read it out: "If our premise is that we believe that the Qur'an is the unchanged word of God, and our second premise is that the hadiths were sayings that were related to the Prophet after his death, then by considering a sahih hadith equal to a Qur'anic verse means, aren't we holding the words of fallible humans in equal regard to the Word of God?"

Imam Zaid explained that the Qur'an was also passed on orally, and written and collected after the death of the Prophet, by fallible human beings, just like the hadiths. If we were going to discredit the validity of hadiths based on such reasoning, then this same reasoning would also discredit the accuracy of the Quran. I wanted the chance for rebuttal, to say that the difference lay in the fact that according to the Quran, Islam was to be a religion for all people of all times. If we were to limit our understanding of it to the way in which it was practiced in seventh century Arabia, we would strip Islam of its universality. I wanted to argue that many of the hadiths followed a dated logic that was no longer applicable; the language of the hadiths was in the style of factual reporting, not containing interpretative value like the Qur'an, and the two could simply not be equated. I wanted to say a lot of things but I could not, and my written questions were no longer read out.

I had tried several times to stay after the session was over and speak to the Shaykh, but a pushy, possessive crowd that usually sat on the front row during sessions also hogged the Shaykh's time after the session was over. They usually talked to him, just to talk and sometimes asked the most elementary questions. I would wait for them to finish, but they never seemed to until the Shaykh was finally ready to go. At this point, I was dying to talk to my friend who was on the other side of the green curtains. He had more access to the shuyukh since they ate and socialized with the men. Maybe the green curtains weren't so mindful of gender equity after all.

The next evening, while we waited for Hamza Yusuf to arrive, I heard a young woman standing behind me tell her friend, "Even if Hamza Yusuf had three wives, I would kill to be his fourth wife!" What followed was the distinct sound of my brain shrinking. Mind you, Hamza Yusuf was a beautiful man, an eloquent speaker with wit and soul. There was incredible peace in his voice that indicated the presence of inner calm. But he was sectarian, and often taught an idea with sentences like "we believe the Mutazilites were misguided." He left little room for diversity of views, for there was only one true path.

But while describing Halima holding infant Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him) and breast-feeding him for the first time, Hamza could not hold back his tears nor keep his voice from breaking. In moments like these, I felt nothing but love for the California convert who spent years in the deserts of the Middle East learning his religion. The co-founder of Zaytuna also made references to contemporary western literature and philosophy. He was socially conscious of the ills of free-market capitalism: "Muhammad used to hug trees. Our Prophet was a tree-hugger!" he would say.

There was so much to admire about Yusuf’s character. He made it a point to discourage the cult-like bunch that swirled around him. On the first evening, when he walked into a room full of people in the Music Hall, the front-row bunch stood up and would not sit until he did, despite his disapproval. When he did sit on a few pillows on the hardwood floor, he said , "please don't do that, I'm afraid that one day I might walk into a room expecting it."

The contradiction and confusion lay with the theoretical backbone of Zaytuna’s teaching methods. While Hamza Yusuf may not have approved of being treated like a celebrity-shaykh, Zaytuna preached that a proper Islamic education required the guidance and supervision of a shaykh, where learning took place through proper adherence to adab.

Most of the front-row crowd attended these spiritual retreats routinely, in the different cities that they were held in. Some were trying to get noticed among the shuyukh so that they could be accepted under the wing of a shaykh to pursue further studies. Others went to the deserts in the Middle East, where pure Islamic knowledge awaited under the tents of the elderly, but water was scarce. It was all very much a romantic method of learning. Loving and surrendering oneself to a shaykh in order to find Ultimate Love, like Rumi did. Zaytuna wanted to reform Islam by restoring the lost status of the Muslim scholar. But this method was vulnerable to abuse, for absolute power lay in the hands of the shaykh. The next few days demonstrated Zaytuna’s fatal flaw.

Days into being instructed on marriage according to Bukhari and Shaykh Jamal, which was taking up a large chunk of our time in Calgary, and we came across a hadith about the curses that the angels sent to the woman who refuses her husband sex. "Not in the mood? You get yourself in the mood!" came Shaykh Jamal's instruction, furious with us women for the cruel moody creatures that we are. He continued in his angry tone. A man had a right to his wife and her duty was to fulfill him all the time, she had no right to ever refuse him. I sat, motionless, trying to comprehend who this God was that tolerated marital rape. Had this been a political science class, I would have made the instructor's life a living-hell, but my fury had been silenced by adab. I was being force-fed those smelly kebabs and then some. That God was my Grandfather, staring coldly.

When the session ended, I tried to articulate my anger to someone to release myself of it. A young woman who sat in front of me and said she was a social worker tried to justify things to me, because that's what women do when they still have faith in a belief system that turns against them. They justify it to themselves and each other. "This is difficult for me too," she said, "but we have to try and understand where Shaykh Jamal is coming from." Yes, and while we are at it, let's sympathize with my Grandfather for the 13 lives he ruined: those of his children, not to mention the lives of the two wives who continue to serve him. Hell, let's also sympathize with the imperialists, with those responsible for the slave-trade, and let's have some sympathy for President Bush and understand where he is coming from, trying to bomb the world to peace or pieces. Let's be understanding of those who continue to screw us.

Before Maghrib prayer, Shaykh Jamal answered the redundant questions once again, save the best for last: "Shaykh, is it permissible to marry a Shia girl of the Ja'fari madhhab?" The question was read out-loud. After a minute's pause, the Shaykh replied, "No."

I walked out into the snow, numbed by the cold. Alienated. Alone. Othered, with no cell-phone service to connect me to a place out of here. Overwhelmed by the darkness of what seemed like jahiliyya, but not ready to submit to it. I went into the cabin, sat on my bed and ate chocolate, indifferent to the crumbs--let the mice come and take me away.

We took a late-night stroll on the snowy hills. "We" being a handful of us from both sides of the curtain. During this walk, I learned what was happening on the other side of the curtain. During dinner, my friend (who is a boy!) had approached Hamza Yusuf and asked about the proper adab in making a complaint about one of the shuyukh. Yusuf had asked who this shaykh in question was and my friend had said, "Shaykh Jamal." "What has he done?" Hamza Yusuf wanted to know. “His commentaries are borderline misogynistic,” my friend had said.

“Borderline?” I interrupted his story, “He was an all-out, unapologetic misogynist! Why are you sugarcoating it for him? Whose side are you on anyway?” Okay, so I was in a bad mood, being mean to our dear comrade, the man-feminist.

My friend went on to explain that Hamza Yusuf had gotten defensive about such "unfounded" accusations and asked the guy standing next to our comrade if he also agreed with this description of Shaykh Jamal. The poor guy who was put on the spot by the Shaykh that the UK's Guardian has called "the most influential Muslim scholar in the west," told Hamza what he wanted to hear. Shaykh Jamal? Misogynistic? No way! Alright then, case closed, and don’t go around spreading such venom about the shuyukh young man!

To add insult to injury, the fine gentlemen who had been present at the occurrence of this exchange had later asked our comrade, "Dude, are you some sort of feminist?" When he replied in the affirmative, another brother then declared, "Dude, there’s another three-letter word for that which starts with an ‘f’ and ends with a ‘g.’" Leave it to our genteel Muslim brethren to complement their misogyny with some homophobia.

That night, I did ablution in the bathroom while listening to two girls argue over whether or not it was fard (obligatory) to cover one's nose under niqab in the Hanbali madhhab. A girl waiting for the sink behind me said, "you are doing your wudu wrong, the water on your arm is supposed to be rubbed up, not down." I turned around and gave her a nasty look. I should have told her that this was the backwards Shia-method of making wudu, that our waters were always headed in the wrong direction, but I simply walked out of the bathroom.

I'm sure that Isha prayer I prayed was not accepted, not because I rubbed the water the "wrong" way, but because all I thought about during prayer was the insignificance of this fixation with the rules about how to rub the water. I thought about the nonsensical argument that strict implementation of these rules would save Islam. This method had already been exhausted by us Shias, creating a fiqh-centered Islam. We had a Revolution and implemented such an Islam as the rule of law in Iran. We made it obligatory for everyone to choose a shaykh or Ayatollah and follow his living verdicts in the resalats. We even had families indoctrinate their children with proper adab so that they dare not question the Great Ones. What we ended up with was a soulless religion and a country full of young people who wanted to have nothing to do with it. If Zaytuna intended to Shia'nize Sunni Islam and have a following that demanded blind submission to the scholars, we Shia's had already traveled that road, and the destination was not reform. I had no hope in a movement that discouraged individual critical thought.

We (the women) had begun the week by committing to read a section of the Qur'an so that together we could complete the whole thing. On New Year’s Eve, as the clock struck twelve, we sat in a circle and bonded with the Words and each other. There were hugs and tears when the final sura was read, and the prayers that followed. If nothing else, we shared a beautiful Book, and that was enough, at least in those few moments, to feel Oneness.

The last days were spent on damage control. It appeared that Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid were not aware of the content of Shaykh Jamal’s program, and upon realizing what had been said, they reacted by organizing a session to make a few things clear: Islam values women, Islam is not pro-slavery (at some point, Shaykh Jamal had commented that sex with one’s female slave was permissible), etc. There was no mention of the fact that Shaykh Jamal had said otherwise, no condemning of Shaykh Jamal’s statements, no apology, not direct refuting of all that had been seen. This was emblematic of Zaytuna: no matter how wrong the actions of a shaykh were, preservation of his status took priority.

The day we left Silver Creek Ranch, the sun had come up. I slept a deep sleep during the bus ride back. This retreat had brought me no closer to realizing my purpose in the world, but it had made clear what I did not want. Some more kebabs? No thank you!

Nassim Mobasher is a Canadian political science student. She recently returned after spending a year in Iran.