Huggable Islam

By Michael Muhammad Knight

I drove to New York because I believe in a woman’s right to lead prayer, and my own right to follow; but I didn’t come here to pray, and that’s the problem for many in the progressive scene. This crowd might be too “culturally” Muslim and too genuinely open-minded to produce too many imams, with or without penises. And for some it might just be a watered-down Islam for liberal chickenshits.

I wasn’t sure if Progressive Muslims were generally the type to get mosques up and running, keep them running and make sure they’re open five times a day. The traditionals, on the other hand, have an Islam embedded deep in their guts. Might not be the “right” Islam or the most huggable Islam; sometimes it’s Build, sometimes it’s Destroy. But it’s real and might be spiritually stronger than progressives’ advanced media savvy.

Made it to St. John the Divine and wasn’t sure what to think of that—not that a cathedral bothered me in the slightest, but every detail today seemed loaded with political weight. I picked up a job as security wand-waver while we opened the front gate to let ten in at a time. A small group of protesters stood on the other side with signs reading “MIXED GENDER PRAYER TODAY, HELLFIRE TOMORROW” and something about “Ameena” Wadud not being a Muslim.

Heard some commotion coming from inside and then watched a bearded guy yelling “Allahu Akbar!” while security whisked him out. All the camera crews chased out after him. From the other side of the gate, he put on a show—if this was any country besides America, they’d hang her, that kind of thing—and gave the reporters what they wanted.

When the gate closed for the last time, I put down my wand and went inside the cathedral. There was no Christian iconography to throw us off, just a surrounding circle of journalists with their tripods and feathery boom mics. The jamaat was mostly segregated with women on the right and men on the left, kind of blurred in the middle. I sat in the back by HijabMan and looked at all of us, and felt alright.

Had the feeling that most of these people were coming from an innocent and optimistic place, where the core of Islam is good and the Prophet’s life can be spun towards a proto-feminism. For progressives, it’s just a matter of reinterpreting the texts. I’m not quite there yet. For me, Islam’s ugly secret is that our Black Stone was originally in a vagina-shaped shrine to Al-Lat, but someone ripped it out and stuck it in the corner of a chubby stone dick. All we can do is carry it back to the womb in timid baby-steps.

Imam Wadud’s khutbah would be the brain, but the heart was Sueyhla El-Attar’s adhan. The first adhan to really kill me in a while, it was beautiful in a way that you can’t get from a man.

During the khutbah, I zoned out on breaking down March 18th with the Supreme Mathematics of Clarence 13X. You could do it two ways: 18 (Knowledge Build or Destroy) or 1+8=9 (Born). Knowledge was the foundation, and with your Knowledge you could choose to Build or Destroy—add on or take away. Born, meanwhile, meant the creation of something new. And knowledge could become Born when you made it manifest. Every now and then, Wadud said something to reel me back in. She talked about gender inequality as a violation of tawhid; that for man to put himself above woman, he was taking God’s place. She balanced the see-saw.

Then it came time to get up and stand feet-to-feet. For a moment I was standing next to a woman, but she moved to keep a space of maybe four feet between us. Then I was summoned to fill the gap in another row, so I moved up and found myself standing behind an orange hijab. So the imam said “Allahu Akbar” and away we went, and I saw that orange hijab again when I sat in ruku. Made me nothing but sad for the ones outside waving their hellfire signs, the ones who thought that a woman could only call you to your own self-destruction—the angry boys who said they lived only for Islam but feared that they’d fall into mass rape-orgy if they heard a woman recite Quran.

There was even a point during the prayer that I forgot I was being led by a woman. Then came the salams to the angels and we were done. Everyone seemed to know everyone, so it turned into the social event of the season. As we hugged and celebrated, I realized that we had no Muslim Martin Luther, no Muslim Rosa Parks, no lone voice crying beautifully in the desert. No cult of personality, no enshrined martyr. We were here for ourselves—progressives, culturals, heretics and the unsure.