Boxes Too Small

Martin Luther proclaimed the "priesthood of all believers." Shakyamuni Buddha admonished, "Work out with diligence your salvation." Michael Muhammad Knight declared, "You are your Allah." These calls to individual responsibility militate against the tribal tendency of religion. Emphasis on each individual's responsibility to make/find her own spiritual truth makes community-building more difficult. Nevertheless, I believe that only a community that recognizes each person's divinity and authority has a chance of lasting. As long as there are external authorities, there will be competition among them and rebellion against them.

That doesn't mean that rejecting all religious authority will end the competition and rebellion. It goes on internally. Within each psyche, impulses compete with and rebel against one another.

The divine, spiritual truth, God, the ground of healing and wholeness that we call by many names -- whatever we call reality at its most inclusive -- is too big to fit in the box of what any one authority -- person or doctrine -- decrees. External authority is one box too small. The internal authority of our own egos is another box too small. We need the authority of individual conscience, and we also need religious teachers as guides and companions on the spiritual path to help us see our own delusions and mind-traps. We need authoritative teachers and leaders that we trust -- but not so much that we shut down our own conscience. We need to trust our own conscience -- but not so much that we shut out religious and spiritual leadership that can help us see where our egos lead us astray. Lasting, healthy faith community will recognize each person's divinity and authority -- and the members will recognize the value of legitimate community leadership. The test for any authority, internal or external, is this: is it maintaining a small box for spiritual truth, or is it working to expand, or explode, the box?

Our project -- the Unitarian Universalist project in particular and the liberal religious project generally -- is the difficult and fragile task of community with diversity and taking seriously the work of spiritual development. We’re nailing, not two, but three things together: community, diversity, and genuine work of spiritual deepening.

One of the ways that some of us do that is with dual identities: we are Unitarian Universalist Christians or Unitarian Universalist Yogis, or Unitarian Universalist pagans, or, like me, Unitarian Universalist Buddhists. As a Buddhist, I have some rules. It’s not the sort of deal where any one ever chides me about what’s forbidden and what isn’t. But I’ve got a discipline: sit for half an hour, then recite the heart sutra every morning. I know it’s arbitrary. Reciting a random column from the phone book might work as well. But like my mentor the birder, it’s a relief to have a widely shared practice to participate in rather than having to explain, if only to myself, what this weird idiosyncratic odd thing is that I’m doing. I get plenty of exercise at that in the rest of my day.

The practices we choose support our primary identity as Unitarian Universalists, people of different beliefs, making community of freedom, recognizing you are your Allah, yet also standing in awe of the reality as given to us, in gratitude of the grace we receive from the universe without earning it: worshiping together as one faith of diverse beliefs and disciplines. Michael Muhammad Knight today sounds pretty much like a Unitarian Universalist Muslim, as when he says:

“Allah is arranging things beyond all our grasps. The Earth isn’t spinning because you told it to. Your intestines aren’t digesting by your command. You’re made up of a trillion cells that don’t ask your permission before offering their raka’ahs [prayers]. And we think submission is about applying a strict discipline to our worship? We think surrender is about not eating a pig? It’s not that small to me. I can’t fit my deen [faith life] in a little box because to me, everything comes from Allah. Birds sing Allah’s name. To say Allah is in this book and not that one, or he likes this and not that – do you know who you’re talking about? Allah is too big and open for my deen to be small and closed. Does that make me a kufr [apostate, nonbeliever]? I say, 'Allahu Akbar' ['God is greatest']. If that’s not good enough then %$@#! Islam. You can have it. Imam Hussein said: ‘He who has not religion, let him at least be free in his present life.’ So there you go. Now, let us pray.”

So there you go. And let us pray.

Amen.

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This is part 5 of 5 of "Punk Islam"
Previous: Part 4: "The Tolerance Paradox"
Beginning: Part 1: "Nailings"

The Tolerance Paradox

In Michael Muhammad Knight's 2003 novel, which became a 2010 film, The Taqwacores, the young adult Muslim residents of a punk house in Buffalo hatch a scheme to host a national gathering of Islamic punk bands. They'll bring punk bands from all over the country together for one big punk Islam festival-party-concert. Jehangir is the primary energy for organizing the project. There is a controversy in the house about whether to invite a band called Bilal’s Boulder, a punk band that adheres to a particularly conservative and strict brand of Islam.

Jehangir is a advocate of open-ness and acceptance – and Bilal’s Boulder represents strict rules and intolerance of any fudging on those rules. And there we hit that familiar paradox of tolerance: if you tolerate everything, including tolerating intolerance, then you facilitate intolerance. And if you don’t tolerate intolerance, you have become the intolerance. Jehangir argues for tolerating the intolerance, for inviting Bilal’s Boulder. For him, the openness and inclusivity that he wants to move toward would be contradicted by not also being open to closedness.

Bilal’s Boulder arrives wearing turbans and traditional Arabic attire. They size up the house and announce they won’t sleep on the floor in the house, as all the other bands are – because a woman will be staying somewhere under the same roof. They’ll have none of that. They’ll sleep in their van – even though it’s winter and they’re in Buffalo, and it’s freezing.

The next day, during the concert Jehangir himself is persuaded to perform. Highlighting that tension of individual vs community, Jehangir sings a punk cover version of Frank Sinatra’s, “I Did It My Way.” As he finishes, Rabeya, the burqa-wearing “riot girl” performs an act that seems deliberately planned to disturb, shock, offend, and enrage the strict tough guys of Bilal’s Boulder who, having finished their set, are standing in the crowd. They react violently, and in the melee, Jehangir receives mortal blows. The advocate for openness is killed by the closedness that he had insisted on being open to.

Community is hard.

Since writing The Taqwacores, Michael Muhammad Knight has been drawn toward an offshoot of the Nation of Islam called the Five Percenters, who reject the traditional Muslim belief that God is separate from humanity. Says Michael Muhammad Knight:

“The Five Percenters have a devastating critique of organized religion that, to me, mixes with punk rock because in a so-called punk view of religion, you are your authority, and you’re not entrusting your soul to other human beings. The basic idea of the Five Percenters is that all this divine power that you fear as being something outside of yourself – that’s gonna come down and crush you -- all that power is actually within you. You are your Allah. So rather than entrust your religion to the imams or the priests or whoever, you become the master of your own cipher.”

Knight, it seems, is re-inventing the Protestant reformation – for, after all, it’s been 500 years since Martin Luther proclaimed the priesthood of all believers. Knight is applying that Reformation concept to Islam rather than Christianity, and perhaps, "You are your Allah," goes a bit further than, "Priesthood of all believers." In any case, the Protestant reformation requires periodic re-invention, for in our quest for community we are prone to forget that each of us is of the priesthood, you are your Allah, no one can make your spiritual truth but you, no one but you can do that work. It's up to you to open yourself to grace, which then takes over.

That’s a hard basis to make community upon. Hard. Not impossible.

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This is part 4 of 5 of "Punk Islam"
Next: Part 5: "Boxes Too Small"
Previous: Part 3: "The Unbearable Difficulty of Community"
Beginning: Part 1: "Nailings"

The Unbearable Difficulty of Community

Both the fictional characters in the The Taqwacores, and the real-life American-born young-adult Muslims who resonate with the novel, have choices. Many of them are first-generation Americans, children of middle-eastern or Asian Muslim parents, and many of them are many-generation Americans, like Michael Muhammed Knight himself, who were drawn to, and converted to, Islam as teenagers. These are American young adults who are choosing to leave behind their parents culture, either by becoming Muslim or by submerging in the punk scene.

They’re choosing to go in for a practice with a lot of rules. Even the hard-partiers generally get up before sunrise to make fajr. A number of them take on more rules, and adopt the straightedge identity: abstinence, no alcohol or drugs. And, no pork, five prayer times a day. Strict discipline.

The rules give life structure, and the structure gives life meaning. Most of all, rules give us belonging and community. You know you’re in the community of those who follow those rules, and it flat doesn’t matter if the rules are arbitrary.

Following a rule, adhering to precepts, gives followers a label, and, yes, labels have their shortcomings. Labeling others always leaves out most of who they are. When we choose a label for ourselves, though, it can be a validation.

When I was a graduate student, my mentor professor happened to mention his birdwatching hobby. He was a birder. For some reason we were discussing whether it mattered that there were other people who were also birders. He indicated that if there weren’t other people doing it – creating and maintaining the institution of birdwatching – then going out with binoculars on cold winter mornings day after day would be this weird idiosyncratic odd thing that he just wouldn’t have the energy to work out how to explain to himself or others. But participating in a widely shared practice – which means taking on a label – in this case, “birder” – gave the activity a meaning, a way for it to make sense and be understood.

The need for identity – for “this is who I am, so this is what I do” – is a universal human need. It’s nice to have identity: Muslim, Christian, UU, Punk, Democrat, Republican, teacher, lawyer, doctor. It’s nice to have the words to say who you are -- and whose you are.

The Taqwacores explores the interplay between the call of the rule and the countervailing call to freedom, acceptance, and diversity. On the one hand, a community based on shared rule-following requires putting some energy into policing those rules: making sure everyone follows them: pretty much, most of the time. I understand the impulse to orthodox judgmentalism with its rules and strict procedures. If we don’t all follow our rules, then who are we? We don’t get to have the connection of a shared life pattern if you don’t follow the pattern.

On the other hand, I also understand that part of the human heart that rebels against orthodoxy’s constraint. A part of me -- and of most of us -- cries: come on, lighten up, open up, accept and embrace diversity of belief and of practice.

Community is hard, and it’s always falling apart, and we’re always looking for it, trying to find it, or build it.

Community based on strict rules can be very attractive: it’s so clear and direct. But there’s a price to be paid for those rules.

The Unitarian Universalist approach to community is to have very little in the way of rules, to eschew the very idea of orthodoxy or orthopraxy, to celebrate diversity. This means that it isn’t so clear what binds us together. For a lot of people, religious liberalism doesn’t feel very satisfying. There’s also a price to be paid for minimalism on rules. Community is hard, anyway you cut it.

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This is part 3 of 5 of "Punk Islam"
Next: Part 4: "The Tolerance Paradox"
Previous: Part 2: "Yeah, But What Type of Punk Muslim?"
Beginning: Part 1: "Nailings"

Yeah, But What Type of Punk Muslim?

Originally, Michael Muhammad Knight was giving away photocopied spiral-bound copies of his novel, The Taqwacores, for free. It was later picked up by a punk record label and published in 2003.

The novel describes the exploits of the of denizens of a Muslim punk house in Buffalo. These include:

Yusef, the first-person narrator, a fairly straightlaced US-born son of Pakistani parents. He has come to Buffalo to study engineering, and his Muslim parents thought it would be more wholesome for him not to live in the campus dorms.

Umar, a Straight-edge Sunni Muslim who tries to enforce Islamic rules.

Jehangir, a hard-drinking, dyed-red-mohawk-haircut-wearing Sufi punk who announces morning prayers with an electric guitar on the roof.

Fasiq, an Indonesian skateboarder.

Amazing Ayyub, a shi’a skinhead.

Rabeya, the house’s only woman, who wears the full-scale body-tent style of burqa and studies feminist Islam.

And various other comers and goers.

Right away, a reader like me is wondering: is this really Islam? I know I’m not in a position to judge who’s really Muslim and who’s just appropriating some of the language because they’ve decided it sounds cool. I’m not in a position to say who is a true Christian or fake one, a true Buddhist or fake one, or even a true Unitarian Universalist or fake one. Generally, I let people pick their own labels. If you self-identify as a Daoist, a witch, or a Jew – or as a woman, or as a man – then, for my money, that’s what you are. What these kids are doing might not look like Islam to the Ayatollah Khomeini, but they study the Koran, debate about how to interpret it as a guide for their lives, say their prayers facing Mecca, and call themselves Muslims.

Yusef and Jehangir (from the film adaptation)

There’s a huge diversity within the group of people who call themselves Muslim. It's good for us to know that, in concrete specifics. Many “young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks, [felt] repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders.” (New York Times, 2008) They didn’t want either of those two options, so they made a third way, and the novel, The Taqwacores, became a blueprint for their lives.

One Moral of this story: If you don’t like either side in a conflict, make a third way.

There’s even huge diversity among the punk rock Muslims. Some of them drink a lot, smoke hashish, and engage in casual sex. Some of them are in the “straightedge” camp and eschew all those things.

What really is Islam is a central question for Michael Muhammad Knight, and the novel reflects its author’s wrestling with that question. Half-way through, narrator Yusef muses:

“Jehangir’s romanticism just equaled a spiritual, cultural and ideological laziness: in all things the path of least resistance. Allah wills, right? As a mumin [believer] I was ruined. How long had it been since I had attended a real jumaa? In a masjid, with men and women separate and khutbahs from qualified imams? Had I journeyed into apostasy? What did that even mean? We lived in a non-Muslim state where I had no fear of shari’a’s penalty, but there’s more than one way to chop off a head. What would it do to my parents to find out how this house really functioned?”

There’s something very basically American about this wrestling with identity. Who are we? What do the terms which gave meaning to life in the old country mean on this new soil? The way these questions are playing out for the growing numbers of American-born Muslims is merely one of the more recent versions of the basic American story of struggling for identity.

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This is part 2 of 5 of "Punk Islam"
Next: Part 3: "The Unbearable Difficulty of Community"
Previous: Part 1: "Nailings"

Nailings

Comedian George Carlin – a muse to whom I often turn – said back in 1972:

“You can buy anything in this country. Anything you can think of! You can probably buy a left nostril inhaler if you look around long enough. With your state motto on it. Glows in the dark -- anything, man. If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some [body] will buy it from you.”

Call it American innovation if you’re looking for a positive spin. Call it American hucksterism if you want to be a less positive.

Peanut butter and jelly – slapping together two things that had never been put together before. It’s a combination you will rarely find anywhere outside America.

Convenience stores with fast food chains inside them – nailing together things that hadn’t been nailed together before. Stop in and get gas, whatever that might mean to you.

The smart phone is basically the result of taking a cell phone, and nailing lots of other things to it. I can’t wait until it’s also my garage door opener, my TV remote control, and an electric razor. Is there an ap for that? I don’t know what’s taking them so long.

This country’s origins as a nation-state involved two kinds of Europeans coming over here. Pilgrims and puritans came here seeking a place to build the city of god. Then there were a lot of other Europeans that arrived on these shores because the British, French, and other colonial empires were using North America as a penal colony, often under the guise of indentured servitude. They were shipping their undesirables here. In the 18th-century, 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America.

The two main strands that formed American culture were the churchy types who liked rules and the criminal types who really didn’t get along with rules. We’re a nation created from nailing together two very different things.

When other religions began arriving here in notable numbers in the 20th-century, they, too, found themselves culturally nailed to things they had not been nailed to before. When Islam met the African American culture of the 1930s, the Nation of Islam was born. When a few Japanese Zen masters met the Beatnik and Hippie US culture of the 1960s, American Zen, culturally very different from Asian Zen, was born. And so on.

Do Unitarian Universalists also nail together things that are generally regarded as very different? Boy, howdy! "Syncretism running completely amok," we've been called.

How about these two: Punk rock and Islam. Surely those haven't been nailed together? They have!

There have been Muslim Punk bands since at least 1979, in fact. Punk Islam turned into a movement with the 2003 novel, The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight.

Michael Knight was born in 1977 in West Virginia, his father a Pentecostal and his mother Irish Catholic. When Michael was age 2, his mother took him and fled from Michael’s mentally ill and abusive father. Knight’s first exposure to Islam came when he was 13 and heard about Malcolm X in the lyrics of the hip-hop band, Public Enemy. He started reading more about Malcolm X, and about Islam, converted to Islam, and, at age 17, went to Pakistan to study Islam at Faisal Mosque. Now named Michael Muhammad Knight, he spent several years in Pakistan.

He grew gradually disillusioned with orthodox Islam. After returning to the US, he wrote The Taqwacores -- a novel about a group of Muslim punk-rockers living in Buffalo, New York, Michael Muhammad Knight imagined the book as his "good-bye," to Islam. In the novel, the narrator, Yusef, draws parallels between Islam and punk:

“I stopped trying to define punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren’t so far removed as you’d think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way – the energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotion had crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth.”

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This is part 1 of 5 of "Punk Islam." 
Next: Part 2: "Yeah, But What Type of Punk Muslim?"