Thoughts of an American Muslim

Three years ago David Miller embraced Islam and became Yousaf Omar. This transition had a great deal to do with his disillusionment from his society. Here he reflects on the nature of American culture through the worldview that has transformed him.

Whenever I think about myself living in the United States these days, two stories come to mind. The first is from Maulana Rumi and the other, although a joke, is very revealing of the viewpoint that prevails here.

In the first book of the Mathanavi, Rumi tells a story of a man who lived in a desert and who, urged on by his wife, agreed to take an offering to the King in the city. The offering was a pitcher of rain water, which the man and his wife had laboriously collected. They considered this water precious because it was sweet compared to the brackish water of their well, their only major source.

Meager though the offering was, the King received it in the spirit in which it was offered and, emptying the pitcher, filled it with gold. The King also arranged for the man to return to his home on a boat. Seeing the vastness of the river on which he traveled, the man marveled at all the water the King had at his command and at the way he took the poor man’s meager offering and rewarded him.

It is one of Rumi’s renditions of the Islamic ethos. In fact, it is so rich in implications that Rumi himself narrated it with more than the usual splendid digressions which enrich his work. The King, Maulana makes clear, is God and His bounty is as boundless as all the water on earth.

What enchanted the story was the understanding that prevailed throughout, an understanding of an Islamic Ummah, of compassion, of knowledge of the world, of tolerance and of the recognition of the different kinds of people which constitute the Muslim world.

I must admit, however, to one question which continued to bother me until most recently. Was Rumi’s society an ideal or did it really exist?

Then, a couple of weeks back, I read in a special travel supplement to the New York Times of an American author, Annie Dillard, giving a short description of her ‘sojourn’ in North Yemen. She was there during an earthquake and she described how people shared their possessions with the victims and gasoline station owners ‘opened their tanks’ so that the gasoline would be free and how wage earners contributed one month’s wages.

A Yemeni told her of some of his people’s responsibilities: ‘If someone is sick, or old, or poor, well, we give our food; we get that person clothes; we build for a widow a new house if the old one is falling down.’

The remarkable thing about Dillard’s description is how full of appreciation it is. Most American travelers, returning from Islamic countries, do not give positive reports of Muslims, even of those who have been hospitable to them. They were unable to see any women, these travelers complain, except those who were heavily veiled. They mention how exasperated they became because of the constant references to God and the frequent addition of Insha’ Allah to statements about the future. Even writers sympathetic to Islam often reveal a bias. They describe the tabs as ‘worry beads,’ without any regard to what dhikr is and how serenity is achieved through the remembrance of Allah.

Rumi’s story presupposes a vital aspect of the Islamic ethos, the presence of a moral understanding among all the people. The trust the wife places in the King, the treatment of her husband at the palace gates, the ready acceptance of his meager offering, the fact that those with the King also took this acceptance in stride, the way the husband was treated in the King’s city.

A world, in short, so conspicuous by its absence in this narcissistic country called the United States. There is a moral aridity here which parches the throat and lips and which also parches the soul. It is best summed up in a joke.

There was a rich girl in a class who was assigned to write on a poor family. ‘Once upon a time’ she wrote, ‘there was a poor family. The father was poor, the mother was poor, the children were poor, cook was poor, the maid was poor, the butler was poor and the chauffeur was poor.’

The United States is that girl, unable to see beyond a very limited set of assumptions it holds dear. After all, its people insist that their country is the epitome of civilization by virtue of its abundance of wealth and weapons (their only criteria for judging whether a country is civilized).

There is something drastically lacking and that is a commonly understood sense of either morals or ethics.

The United States today is, in short an amoral world. Not immoral, which presupposes the existence of morals, which in turn means that the people are fully aware that they are doing wrong when they do, but amoral. A ‘people’ as the Qur’an puts it, ‘without any awareness (of right or wrong)’ (11:29).

People are killed here for the little money they possess and they are killed without the least compunction. The murderers bring to mind Lieutenant Cally who dismissed the My Lai massacre he was responsible for as ‘no big deal.’

One might argue that there is a resurgence of religion here in the United States and point to the rising number of churchgoers. But figures are deceptive. Religion has become a ritual confined to the Sabbath. What people do the rest of the week appears to have no connection with what is expressed in church. And yet national leaders insist on calling America a Christian country.

What people say and what people do are two completely different thing. Reagan was, some months back, described as a great Christian, despite the fact that he doesn’t attend church. Ironically, while this statement was being made, a former president, Jimmy Carter did not concern himself with labels. With his Christian service group, he came to New York, renovated an apartment complex to be used by the poor, and left without seeking any publicity.

Religion here is at best lopsided. One watches with fascination a fundamentalist Christian church service in a huge auditorium filled with impeccably dressed people listening to a group of teenagers singing a song relegating everyone else to hell — Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Marxists, Atheists. The people are all white. There is not a single black or brown face there. Equally difficult to accept is that church priest night, glorify God 33 times, praise whimsies and ministers describe as ‘bums’ those without homes or food or clothes, those who sleep in the park even in sub-zero temperatures.

The lopsidedness is also illustrated by another story they tell here. A boy went up to his father after school one day and said that he did not understand what the teacher was talking about when she mentioned a ‘moral problem.’ The father thought for a while and decided to illustrate what she meant.

"You know," he explained, "that your uncle and me own a stationary store. Well, one day a customer comes in to buy some pencils. He hands me a twenty-dollar bill and I mistake it to be a one-dollar bill and I give him the change accordingly. But the customer doesn’t notice. He’s heading for the door and I look at him and at the twenty-dollar bill and then I realize I am faced with a moral question: ‘Do I share the twenty-dollar bill with your uncle or not?’"

More often than not the Americans appear to be a people who are as the Qur’an puts it, lost in darkness (zulmat) after their ephemeral light has disappeared. They neither listen to those who talk sense, nor do they know what to do.

‘Whatever became of sin?’ asks William F. Buckley, Jr., who shares with the fundamentalists much of the conservative ideology, in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine. It is, not surprising, precisely the question Karl Meninger of the Meninger Clinic asked in his book published in 1973, Whatever Became of Sin?, a volume aimed at solving all kinds of social problems through ‘an ethical system for today’s world.’ The book sold more than 125,000 copies in hardcover alone and about twice as many in paperback.

The question these authors should be asking is, ‘Is anyone listening? Is anyone listening to those who remind the people of vital necessity of values to keep society together?

The majority of Americans simply do not know that they are committing some wrong. And when the very few do, they do not know what to do about it.

A fine, recent example is a school’s attempt to cut down and eventually eliminate promiscuity. It forbade the holding of hands within the school buildings. Evidently, educators still have to learn about the youngsters they have to deal with. The students reacted with the way they usually do, by overdoing what has been forbidden. Worse, they took to the city streets in a demonstration. Many were arrested and thrown into jail.

A sorry state of affairs, in a country which considers itself the greatest in the world.

How did all this come about? The reasons should be of special interest to Muslims all over the world, especially to those attracted to the glamour of things American.

One of the chief reasons is not far to seek. Hollywood. It is difficult to believe nowadays that at one time amorality was largely confined to cinema screen. People then had a moral ethical sense. One has only to compare crime figures to those of today. Nowadays, movies and television shows are so highly emulated that at times it is difficult to distinguish between what is happening on the screen and what is happening in real life. Show business dominates this country. Movie and television stars are worshipped. The stars consider themselves sacrosanct. When the Reagans moved into the White House, they behaved like royalty and talked of the Carters as common people.

Another important reason is one that created an enormous chasm between what happened before and what happened afterward World War Two. It was a war then, to quote Nietsche ‘everything was permissible.’ It was, as everyone knows, the most brutal war ever fought.

It was during that period that compassion disappeared. Other countries might have recovered it, but not the United States. In addition, that brutality and that freedom to do anything one wanted without any restraint whatsoever did not disappear in this country with the end of the war. Both persisted and, worse, increased.

The Americans were basking in what then appeared to be a perpetual and luxurious sun. The United States had gone into the war a debtor nation and it emerged a creditor nation, with all the allies owing it millions upon millions of dollars. The war effort had also helped to enrich the country.

With affluence came an increase in the two other factors that helped sunder human relationships, the automobile and the telephone.

The automobile gave individuals a power they did not otherwise possess, a power that enabled them to do a number of things unabated. It enabled them to disappear from the scene where they had done wrong. If a person didn’t like a neighbor, he or she moved, to another part of town, to another town, to another part of the country almost a continent away.

The ensuing mobility became a habit, most often in its worst aspect. More and more Americans moved away from their parents and, equally significant, away from their roots. This has become so much of an accepted part of American life that no one nowadays asks whether ‘street people,’ those so poverty-stricken that they have no live in the streets, have any relatives.

The telephone further exacerbated what was rapidly becoming an American way of life, fragmentation. Personal visits became a thing of the past. People talked with even the closest relatives only over the phone. This, too, became widely accepted. As a result, practically everyone overlooks the irony of a telephone company’s television commercial, which asks people to use their long distance service to ‘reach out and touch someone.’

If there is one person who typifies the direction the United States was heading for as far back as World War One, it is Hemingway. His life and his books parallel the road to amorality. In the beginning of his career he profited from those days when the dollar was king and Europe was the ‘playground’ for Americans.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald put it sarcastically in ‘Babylon Revisited’: when there was snow all over Paris, "if you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.’’ But Fitzgerald knew what was happening to America and the dream the country was trying to realize. He very finely delineated the dissipation of that dream in his novel, The Great Gatsby but it was too painful and hence no one paid much attention to him.)

In Hemingway’s early stories and novels, the absence of morality was clear, depicted as a consequence of the brutality of war and concomitantly expressed in brutal terms. His heroes suffered from ‘moral wound,’ one of them in fact having been injured in the war as to render him incapable of having any sex.

But soon, Hemingway’s name became synonymous with the playground and later with hedonism and eventually with amorality. His heroes indulged in sheer pleasure — bullfighting, big game hunting, big game fishing — all of them filled with violence of one kind or another.

Hemingway eventually became the most famous writer in the history of the United States and one of a very few who made the front pages of newspapers. He was therefore widely read, thus becoming an exceptional writer in one other respect. He, too, joined the very few authors whose books were avidly read both in the public world and academia. And there is the rub.

One of the major reasons for his popularity in the university world was that his amorality — characteristic of almost all his later works — appealed to professors and students alike. Here was a world they aspired to, one without any restrictions whatsoever. As a result, without intending to, there was a tacit support for what was already taking place in society.

So that when American society achieved its peculiar kind of freedom — an amoral ethos — it did slife: "When you o because the upholders of the most vital part of culture sanctioned it. Without that underpinning, there might have been some hope for this country. Right now there isn’t any hope and the most tragic thing about all of it is that the American people are not aware of it.