For the first half-decade of my life as a practicing Muslim, I lived in Cairo. My religious habits and ideas were shaped by devout, entrepreneurial middle-class Egypt. Though Cairo boasts a large community of European and American converts, I had very little contact with other expatriates after my first few months in the city. My avoidance of my own people was born half out of necessity and half out of disgust. I’d married into a lively, loving but very conservative Egyptian family. For their sake, I couldn’t afford the usual expat baggage: the loud, rude, self-entitled breaches of Cairene social etiquette in which the average transplant indulges long after he’s learned better. What began as a matter of cultural expediency quickly became unfeigned: I didn’t (still don’t) understand how you could live in a Muslim country, be a Muslim, and yet remain so out to lunch. There was something in the average western Muslim that seemed immune to nuance. It freaked me out. So I avoided the munaqabat white women who couldn’t speak a word of Arabic and demeaned Egyptian delivery boys (in English!) with a haughty viciousness Queen Victoria would have admired. Though American and a Muslim, I was not an American Muslim. I couldn’t unsee the ridiculous aspects of the convert community. My experience as a Muslim bore no relationship to my experience as an American; they were two sharply divergent histories.
There were upsides and downsides to this situation. The isolation was intense and sometimes brutal. Wherever I went, I was The Foreigner. (Most expats get to be A Foreigner, a white in a traveling enclave of whites and westernized elites; being The Foreigner in an otherwise homogenously Arab community is a very different experience.) The upside was that my initial experience of Islam was of a lived, breathed, vital religion. In Egypt Islam is like a natural extension of the body. It permeates and is permeated by everyday life. People may be dishonest, angry, ugly, crude, vicious, but all these things are artificial, like the industrial waste spewed into the Nile and the sky until it warps babies in the womb. They are all the result of a society squeezed until it broke and bled. When God enters a conversation, the ugliness vanishes, and the disgusting sinner who leers at girls on the subway becomes a poet. The absurdity of that–the horror of it; the wonder of it; the capacity of the divine to wheedle Its way into the grotesque–shaped my relationship with God. For good or ill. I never lost sight of the fact that when I prayed, it was not only to Al Rahman, but to Al Khafid. The Debaser. I could look at His terrible Names without flinching or rationalizing. He created beauty and filth side by side, like a hammer and an anvil, and it is for us to break or bend.
That was Cairo.
When I came back to my own country, I had a naive idea that I could go on being an American and a Muslim, and avoid learning to be an American Muslim. That lasted about six months. What miserable and laughable months. I thought I could just culture-swap–trade in the tunics for hoodies, the Arabic slang for the American slang, and go about my business. But something fundamental had been altered. The number of spaces in which I could see my friends had shrunk–I wasn’t going to go bar-hopping, or clubbing, or to nude cirque nouveau (no, not kidding), or to partially nude mermaid parades (also not kidding)–in short, my previous life as an artsy vagrant had disappeared. I had no choice. I had to find American Muslims, and figure out how they coped.
Luckily, some local Muslims found me. Being Slightly Famous has its perks, among them the fact that people read one’s books and then ask one to come talk about them. In short order my husband and I were adopted into a small but welcoming community of Arab and West African professionals, orbiting a larger community of Muslims from every conceivable background–Pakistanis, Persians, Indonesians, Cham Vietnamese, white converts, black converts, Latino converts. First generation, second generation, third generation; rich, poor, middle class. There aren’t enough of us in Seattle for much segregation. There are no ‘black mosques’, no ‘Arab mosques’. There are five mosques. You go where you’re able.
Coming from a homogenous Arab Islam, this diversity stunned me. I went to a henna party where the bride was Korean and there was a fight over whether to play bangra or rai. The women’s community felt familiar–despite the wildly conflicting backgrounds, it was a space where you kissed strangers goodbye; it was Muslim space, living space, where God was invoked like joy.
At public gatherings–fundraisers, Eid celebrations–everything changed. A kind of stage-play Sunnah took over; a robotic and ritualized showing-off. Here was the howling emptiness I sensed behind the veils of the converts in Cairo, the quiet desperation not for a religion, but for a tribe, in which the cheap signals of dress and speech are celebrated for their own sake rather than God’s. This was a space without irony or the quiet acceptance of imperfection; that supreme marriage of humor and humility that makes life bearable. This American Islam came with an Americanized vision of divinity: e pluribus unum, where diversity is celebrated because it means stronger numbers; good, because there is always war around the corner. Faith is inferior to intellectual orthodoxy. Americans are suspicious of faith. We like religion because it confirms patriotism and groupthink; but faith, faith, is dangerous. Faith is too personal, too naked. American Islam has inherited American spiritual prudery.
I believe in e Unum pluribus, so I am still a foreigner. I sit and make asides in Arabic with other transplants, who are similarly dismayed that the raw ingredients of Islam and America have not congealed in the melting pot to create something edible. They yet might. There is so much potential here. Everyone realizes–and this is something you do not find in the Middle East–that we are the people we’ve been waiting for. No one is going to create this community but us. There are no heroes waiting to take over for us milktoasts. The milktoasts are it. And by God, we’re going to take a run at things before we give up.