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RETURN TO PAMPHLET ISLAM

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. — Nadine Gordimer¹

THE TRUTH STANDS clear from error, the Qur’n tells me, and one of the dominant themes of what I called “Islam” in my teen years was Islam’s awesome clarity: The message presented itself as so simple that it could fit inside a pamphlet with large font and bullet points. For me to reconsider my teen Salafism, I’d have to reconsider what Omid Safi has called “pamphlet Islam”: an Islam forged in the “serious intellectual and spiritual fallacy of thinking that complex issues can be handled in four or six glossy pages.”² These expressions of “pamphlet Islam,” readily available at almost any Islamic center, bear titles such as “The Status of Women in Islam” or “The Islamic Position on Jesus”³ and thus rely on the assumptions that (1) there is such a possibility as a definitive “Islamic position” on anything, and (2) the author has the “Islamic position” on an issue nailed down firmly under his/her control, with no room for it to move.

The term fundamentalist as popularly used in conversations about religion was inspired by Christian pamphlets. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles disseminated its pamphlet series, The Fundamentals, with the intention to “provide intellectually sound, popularly accessible defense of the Christian faith.”⁴ In this context, to be a fundamentalist wasn’t a bad thing: It meant that one upheld Christianity’s “fundamentals” in the face of Darwinism, modern literary theories and biblical criticism, and liberalized churches that denied the Bible’s literal inerrancy. The Fundamentals sought to prove in pamphlets’ limited space that the Bible represented historically and scientifically unassailable fact, that it was only through loyalty to the Bible’s literal truth that one could ground an unchanging Christianity against the unstable modern world.

Safi argues that we can and must do better than “pamphlet Islam,” and I agree, but I’m also afraid that our efforts might only produce bigger pamphlets. Progressive Muslim reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that’s no less simplistic. Anyway, a certain brand of pamphlet Islam is where I come from. Once I entered into a Muslim community, pamphlets became maps to show me the straight path. I also left Islam through the pamphlets; in the period that I considered myself an ex-Muslim, it was because the pamphlets’ easy answers and imaginary hegemonies couldn’t hold up to the complexities of being a Muslim in my real life. The pamphlets are meant to be read once and passed along; their arguments disintegrate if you spend too much time with them.

But there had to be a time when it was really that simple, right? Wouldn’t a “pamphlet Islam” be closer to the original Islam, the Islam of our Prophet? The stuff that can’t fit into a pamphlet amounts to later elaboration and refinement, which, if I’m trying to recover my Salafism, is unnecessary. Safi critiques the popular catchphrase that Islam’s truth lies in its simplicity, but if I imagine what Islam would look like in the presence of the Prophet, an Islam in which people did not theorize on questions of authority and interpretation, it had to be simple. Perhaps in Muammad’s lifetime, if you upheld him as center, you could really start a sentence with, “Islam says _______________.” To deny Islam its supposed simplicity is to admit the hard truth that we are functionally a prophetless community, that we have no organic center. The pamphlets aim to assure us that Muammad’s absence changes nothing.

At a Muslim Students’ Association “Islam 101” event intended to teach non-Muslim students about Islam, I sat and listened to a woman correct the audience on popular misconceptions. All her arguments were clichés that I had digested and regurgitated roughly two decades earlier: Real Islam cannot be violent, because the Arabic word islm shares its root letters with another word, salm, that means “peace”; Muslims love and honor Jesus as a virgin-born prophet of God; Islam respects women and gave them unprecedented rights; Muslims made great contributions to science while Europe was lost in the Dark Ages. Even in my post-ayahuasca love for my sisters and brothers, I felt a temptation to challenge her: When she quoted the Qur’n as stating that Mary guarded her “chastity” and Allh breathed into her, I wanted to point out that in Arabic, the word that she read as chastity—farj—more precisely signified genitalia. This matters because in 66:12, Aanat farjah fanafakhn fh min rin can read not only as “She guarded her chastity so we breathed into her from our spirit,” but also “She guarded her vagina so we breathed into it from our spirit,” and no one wants to think about Allh or Gabriel breathing into Mary’s vagina (some translations, drawing from an uneasy interpretive tradition, suggest in their parenthetical notes that Allh breathed into the sleeve of Mary’s garment).⁵ I let this and some other questions go unasked. At the end of her talk, she left a stack of pamphlets on a table. I picked one up: A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, by I. A. Ibrahim. Its first edition was published in 1996, within a few years of my conversion. At a total of roughly seventy-five pages, maybe it’s too big to be called a pamphlet, but it still reads like pamphlet-grade discourse. The cover shows Earth in space, with an open copy of the Qur’n at the far end of a light beam that meets Earth in the Indian Ocean, several hundred miles from the coast of South Africa, as if to represent the Qur’n blasting off from the Indian Ocean into space. The Earth and extraterrestrial Qur’n appear above the Masjid Haram in Mecca, illuminated at night and crowded with white-garbed worshipers, and the surrounding cityscape. It appears as though an alternate Earth looms over Mecca in the night sky, and that this alternate Earth produces a giant Qur’n somewhere in the southern region of its Indian Ocean, and that this Qur’n leaves the alternate Earth to descend upon the Ka’ba of our own planet. Giving these details much more attention than could have been intended, I briefly wanted a world in which this was really how things worked.

So I considered A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam as a pamphlet to start me back at the basics, a boiling down of Islam to its crucial points. This is Islam at its most simple: the sectless, undifferentiated Islam, as pure and clean as it has always been. If that is the mission, A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam cannot confess to representing any particular Muslim orientation, since to do so would confess that a variety of Muslim orientations exist. There are no mentions of terms like Sunn or Sh’, let alone more specific designations such as Salaf, and at no point does the pamphlet acknowledge that Muslims have ever disagreed with each other on anything. Pamphlet Islam can never say that it doesn’t have an answer, or that we could choose from multiple answers, or that the singular correct answer might take more than a paragraph.

This is why, even if I consider the pamphlet a Salaf product, I can’t call the woman who provided it a Salaf; she wouldn’t have to be a self-identified Salaf to accept the pamphlet as genuinely “Islamic.” The pamphlet reveals its Salaf genealogy only through its publisher (the Houston branch of Saudi-based Dar-us-Salam Publications), suggestions for further readings (including the work of Salaf scholar Bilal Philips and the Hilali-Khan translation of the Qur’n), and directory of Muslim organizations, including groups such as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). An ideology is most successful when it’s no longer recognizable as an ideology but accepted simply as “common sense”; religious sectarianism is best branded as the denial of sectarianism, when it no longer appears to represent one interpretation against others but simply the religion as it is. At that point, your rivals don’t exist. What might be called “Salaf” concepts, successfully packaged as generic and universal Islam, can spread even among people who find Salafism ridiculous.

The sixty-three pages of the pamphlet’s content is divided into three chapters: “Some Evidence for the Truth of Islam,” “Some Benefits of Islam,” and “General Information on Islam.” The “Evidence” chapter takes up the first thirty-five pages, leaving just four pages for “Benefits” and twenty-four for “General Information.” The “Evidence” chapter tells me that the Qur’n expresses a harmony with modern science, which “proves without doubt” that the Qur’n is divinely revealed. Foremost is the Qur’n’s discussion of what happens in the womb. The Qur’n’s treatment of embryonic development (which actually conforms to the stages articulated in ancient Greek medical science⁶) is presented as advanced beyond anything that human knowledge could have attained prior to modern microscopes. The Qur’n’s description of the fetus as developing from an alaqa, which can be translated as “leech” or “blood clot,” is supported with diagrams comparing the human embryo at this early stage to a leech, showing the two to be similar in shape. In the next stage, the embryo is described as mudgha, which A Brief Illustrated Guide translates as “chewed substance.” The mudgha-stage embryo—the somites of which “somewhat resemble teeth marks in a chewed substance”—is then compared to a photo of chewed bubble gum.⁷ With a succession of charts, diagrams, and testimonials from apparently non-Muslim scientists at secular Western universities, the Guide proceeds to argue that the Qur’n’s discussions of mountains, clouds, and the origins of the universe all display a divine knowledge to which human knowledge has only started to catch up.

In this pamphlet’s vision of Islam, the Qur’n looks to modern science for confirmation of its claims; the Qur’n derives its authority from non-Muslim obstetricians, biologists, geologists, and astronomers, institutions such as Georgetown University and Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory, and new scriptures such as Essentials of Anatomy and Physiology and Meteorology Today. As A Brief Illustrated Guide frames its argument, these experts, institutions, and texts give the Qur’n permission to say that it comes from God. For the power of such sources, the Qur’n’s heart becomes its discussion of embryos, mountains, and bodies of water. The most crucial objective in an introductory glance at the Qur’n, A Brief Illustrated Guide tells me, is achieved through diagrams of the human cardiovascular system and satellite photos of cumulonimbus clouds. What’s unclear in this section is how the Qur’n could have proven itself before anyone knew that something called “modern science” would someday confirm it. There’s a certain Islam that confronts me in these pages: an Islam that is presented as timeless and universal (and also a faithful and exact replication of what it had been in seventh-century Arabia) but could not have existed prior to the twentieth century.

Apart from scientific proof, the Guide tells me, the Qur’n is also indisputably divine because it challenges all doubters to produce a single chapter that can match the Qur’n in its “beauty, eloquence, splendor, wise legislation, true information, true prophecy, and other perfect attributes.”⁸ The Guide states that the challenge has not been met, though I am not sure how the contest would be measured. From there, we learn about Muammad’s coming as foretold in the Bible, a theme that in fact goes all the way back to our earliest sources on Muammad. Its placement here rests on the assumption that the non-Muslim reader of A Brief Illustrated Guide holds a deep investment in what the Bible says.

Other proofs in the “Evidence” section include verses in which the Qur’n accurately predicted future events, Muammad’s performance of miracles that were witnessed by many people, and the simplicity of Muammad’s life, which is presented as proof that he was not motivated by a desire for status, wealth, or power. The final proof of Islam’s truth is its “phenomenal growth,” as sources such as The New York Times, USA Today, and Hillary Clinton are quoted as affirming that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in America. “This phenomenon,” says the Guide, “indicates that Islam is truly a religion from God.”⁹

What strikes me throughout the “Evidence” pages is the treatment of humanity’s purpose and ultimate destiny as a math equation. Salafs are supposedly opposed to reason, but the pamphlet repeatedly claims that reason and empirical evidence demand our recognition of the Qur’n as a divine revelation. Whether or not these claims to reason are satisfying isn’t the question; what’s interesting here is that reason itself gets treated as valuable. The “scientific rationality” pitch occupies the first chapter and over half of the pamphlet’s content; by the end of it, the author has exhausted his energy and just slugs through the rest. The four-page “Benefits of Islam” chapter restates more or less the same benefit in four different ways: (1) Islam gets you into paradise; (2) Islam gets you out of hellfire; (3) Islam gets you happiness and peace; (4) Islam gets your sins forgiven. This approach once meshed with my own religiosity. If my experience of Islam is no longer compatible with something as straightforward as A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, have I moved from Islam to something else?

The “General Information” section names Islam’s priorities. The pamphlet points out that “Muslims”—a categorization taken for granted as historically consistent, coherent, and full of descriptive power—produced “great advances” in a variety of sciences, because “Islam instructs man to use his powers of intelligence and observation.”¹⁰ It then tells me that in Islam, Jesus is really important, born of a virgin and performer of miracles; that Islam, “a religion of mercy,” forbids terrorism; that an Islamic state protects the rights and property of all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike; that Islam opposes all forms of racism; and that Islam gives women the right to own and manage their money and bestows special honor upon mothers.

The woman pushing these pamphlets promised that there was a clear difference between “religion” and “culture,” but the Islam produced in A Brief Illustrated Guide could have been coherent only in a particular cultural moment. The cultureless, timeless, and pure Islam of this pamphlet necessarily created itself as a response to something outside it. So while the Guide’s claims of scientific proof for the Qur’n might be immature, I am interested in why this section dominates the pamphlet. The need for secular and primarily Western scientists to cosign for the Qur’n reflects the values of a culture; more importantly, it reflects cultural change, a shift from the arguments and evidence that would have been fruitful in another setting.

Muammad shows up briefly in the Guide, and he is of course a particular Muammad to serve the argument that the Guide wants to make. There are several tens of thousands of reports that depict what Muammad said and did, and these reports fill endless volumes. With a few pages to spare in a pamphlet, which ones get to matter? The Guide author chooses to highlight Muammad’s praises of charity, mercy, community, fair wages, and kindness to animals. None of this is necessarily inaccurate or a fabrication; it all comes from canonical volumes that Sunn Muslims tend to regard as trustworthy. The point is that from a vast corpus of material, the author had to extract what he decided were the essential themes of Muammad’s message and reproduce these themes in a handful of short quotes. Other themes could have been chosen, some possibly in contradiction to the author’s choices.

The other subjects to get attention in A Brief Illustrated Guide do not simply represent the “core” of Islam, but rather the questions that get thrown at Muslims in a particular time and place. The Guide tells us about Jesus, along with modern concepts such as “terrorism,” “human rights,” “racism,” and of course “the status of women in Islam”; as an introduction to the eternal message of Islam, these themes would not have had the same relevance two hundred years ago. Even the specific literary genre in which this Guide is crafted, its style, aesthetic, and organization, and the nature of the institutions and networks that produced and disseminate it—everything between its initial conception in the author’s mind to its appearing on a table at a state university’s “Islam 101” event, hosted by that university’s Muslim Students’ Association—represent much more than “Islam.” This is an Islam whose priorities are determined from outside, from what its advocates have marked as the values of non-Islam. Even when this pamphlet’s vision of Islam disagrees with non-Islam, it does so within the logic of a world that it shares with non-Islam.

Where in A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam can I find the Big Real? We could resort to the familiar metaphor of “old wine in a new bottle,” which assumes that while a vessel might change the apparent shape and color of the liquid that it contains, what’s inside remains unchanged in its eternal essence. But personally, I don’t buy the wine-bottle thing. I don’t know how to distinguish what’s inside the bottle from its exterior appearance, and the oldest bottles that we can examine are still just the oldest bottles; we never get to see the liquid without a container. The “Basic Islamic Beliefs” section lists six doctrinal concerns that have been widely held to be crucial deal breakers. This checklist goes way back—in fact, it’s represented in our textual tradition as coming out of Muammad’s own mouth—but it also became the definitive checklist as a response to a specific historical context that emerged generations after Muammad’s death. In the ninth century CE, these six beliefs comprised an oral pamphlet to reduce the message to clear, easily digestible bullet points that could draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable.

Dar-us-Salam offers a more explicitly Salaf pamphlet in A Summary of the Creed of As-Salaf As-Saalih. The pamphlet begins by explaining that our world’s present religious diversity emerged as the product of distortion and corruption: The Creator sent numerous prophets to the various nations of the world, each offering the same “simple and straightforward religion,” but the followers of these prophets have “changed their beliefs, thus deviating from the original religion.” This even includes the case of Allh’s final prophet, Muammad, whose community has also suffered what A Summary calls the “divisions and disunity” of different groups that assert the supremacy of their own methods and interpretations. “So it is our duty now to guard against deviation from the fundamental beliefs and principles of the only one religion, Islam,” A Summary tells me.

The difference between Muammad’s umma and other communities, according to A Summary, is that amid all these departures and mutations, one group has successfully preserved the original and authentic Islam. With the double-vowel transliteration now popularly associated with Salaf literature, A Summary identifies this privileged group as al-Firqatun-Naajiyyah, the “Saved Sect”: Ahlus-Sunnah wal-Jamaa’ah, the followers of the pious predecessors.

It is by statements of creed, says A Summary, that a religion or sect establishes its “fundamental beliefs and guiding principles” and thus distinguishes itself from other religions or sects.¹¹ A Summary defines the source of its creed as what “Allh said, and the Messenger of Allh said,” as opposed to the “desires and the interference of the limited intelligence of man.”¹²

The first point of A Summary’s ten “fundamentals” includes several points of faith: belief in Allh, his angels, his books, his messengers, the last day, and al-qadar (Allh’s decree). The Salaf, I am told, knew Allh by his self-descriptions without further speculating or elaborating on them. The Salaf did not try to reinterpret what Allh said about himself, nor did they compare Allh’s attributes to those of his creation: The Salaf affirmed that Allh possesses a hand without trying to understand the nature of that hand, nor did they attempt to interpret the character of Allh’s “hearing, sight, knowledge, ability, strength, might and speech” beyond his self-descriptions. The Salaf were neither allegorizers nor anthropomorphists. The Salaf accepted that Allh’s word was not created at a particular moment of time, but exists eternally with Allh, and they would “not allow it to be interpreted by mere opinions, as this is a form of speaking about Allh without knowledge.”¹³ They also believed that everything that ever happened or would happen, good or undesirable, had been decreed by Allh and written in the Preserved Tablet.¹⁴

A Summary’s second fundamental declares faith to be “a statement with the tongue, action with the limbs, and belief in the heart,” and that faith increases with obedience and decreases with disobedience.¹⁵ However, the third fundamental clarifies that those on the creed of the Salaf do not declare any Muslim to be a disbeliever due to sinful actions, “unless he rejects something that is well known by necessity from the religion.”¹⁶ The fourth point tells us that the Salaf considered obedience to Muslim authorities to be a religious obligation, unless these authorities commanded disobedience to Allh, and notes that this position constitutes “the opposite of what the misguided sects believe.”¹⁷

A Summary’s fifth fundamental says that loving Muammad’s Companions is a requirement of faith, and “hating them is disbelief and hypocrisy.” It is clarified here that a Companion is anyone who knew the Prophet while a Muslim, “whether he accompanied him for a year, a month, a day or an hour.”¹⁸ This positions the true Muslim against “innovators” like the Raafidhah (Sh’as), who “curse the Companions and deny their virtues.” The Companions were capable of error as individuals but protected from error as a community. In further disputation against Sh’as, A Summary adds that the Saved Sect loves the family of the Prophet, and that this includes his wives, who were “pure and innocent of every evil.”¹⁹

In its sixth fundamental, A Summary states that only Allh knows the otherworldly fates of his creations, and no one can name his/herself or anyone else as destined for paradise or hellfire. The seventh point requires belief in the karaamaat (“extraordinary feats”) of righteous believers, which are clearly discernible from disbelievers’ acts of witchcraft, magic, deception, or that in which devils might assist them.²⁰

The eighth fundamental concerns method. How do those on the path of the Salaf know what they know? “Evidences and proofs,” says A Summary, rather than “mystical interpretations” or preference for anyone’s word above that of Allh and his messenger. They can follow qualified scholars and schools of law, but none of these are infallible, and it is acceptable that a Muslim could switch from one legal school to another based on whichever school demonstrates superior understanding and evidence for its positions.²¹ Independent reasoning based on the Qur’n and Sunna is allowed but regulated with serious disclaimers, accessible only to those who “fulfill its conditions that are well known with the scholars.”²²

The ninth fundamental is that Muslims on the path of the Salaf command the right and forbid the wrong. Finally, A Summary’s tenth fundamental rejects the “people of innovation who introduce new things into the religion.”²³ To innovate in one’s religion denies the perfection of what Allh has provided, becoming a sort of polytheism: To deny the modes of knowledge and practice prescribed in A Summary essentially renders you a worshiper of idols. The followers of the pious predecessors, therefore, steer clear of innovators:

They do not love them, they do not accompany them, they do not listen to their speech, they do not sit with them, they do not argue with them concerning the religion, nor do they exchange views with them. They prefer to protect their ears from listening to their falsehoods.²⁴

Two things fascinate me about this pamphlet. First, its “fundamentals” emerged as such in response to debates and power struggles between Muslims after Muammad’s death. What it presents as the timeless and original message can be exposed as having been formulated through a specific history. Second, though the pamphlet bears the name of a scholar who supervised its compilation, A Summary seems to deny its authorship. This team cannot be seen as having performed creative or productive work; their job was to deliver an item without leaving any trace of their presence. If this “creed of the Salaf” is really as clear and straightforward as the pamphlet claims, why do we need the pamphlet?

If Muslims are always arguing for Islam against others, whether their adversaries are non-Muslims or fellow Muslims that they see as illegitimate, there can never be an Islam that articulates itself with no input from outside, no culture-free Islam. There can be no pamphlet that just produces Islam as it is—apart from maybe Allh’s supreme pamphlet, the Qur’n, which also had to speak first in response to a world of non-Muslims. But I’ve never known a Muslim who displayed confidence that the Qur’n could speak for itself without help, without supplementary notes, commentaries, contextualizations, and rationalizations. No one simply hands you the Qur’n and walks away, not even the Muslims who would proudly describe themselves as “Qur’n-only.”

Critics blame the rise of Qur’n-only discourse on Protestantism’s sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) argument, which managed to cover the globe in part through European colonialism; but not even Martin Luther let the Bible speak for itself. Regarding the Bible as too unwieldy for common people, Luther appointed himself as a qualified mediator between the scripture and believers. He distilled what he decided were the Bible’s key points into pamphlet form, writing catechisms to produce a “short summary and epitome of the entire Holy Scriptures” and prevent the kinds of misinterpretation that could spawn sectarian disputes and social chaos.

The Qur’n may or may not be “true,” but as A Brief Illustrated Guide reveals (perhaps unintentionally), the rules by which it must establish itself as true are always changing. The effort of this Guide and pamphlets like it to present Islam as a closed system only expose tradition’s openness and instability. I have embarked upon a return to pamphlet Islam before knowing the frames that could determine my own pamphlet. How does the Qur’n prove itself to me, and what does this mean for the idea of a closed system? In the mosque after my ayahuasca vision, the Qur’n proved its value not for the truth of what it said, but for what it did: The Qur’n had a force with which it acted upon my body, regardless of whatever claims it made about itself. I don’t know how to translate that into a pamphlet. Mine wouldn’t be a pamphlet that satisfies the author of A Brief Illustrated Guide, for whom the Qur’n appears as a contestant on a game show, scoring points for giving right answers.

From a certain point of view, this would be the most intuitive way of engaging the Qur’n: Either its claims are objectively true or they are not. There is certainly room to argue that the Qur’n presents its own words this way. Some atheist thinkers operate by the same logic to treat all religion as ridiculous. The potentially heartbreaking part of this is that if I want to dive into the texts and engage the words but lack the kind of zero-sum, no-partial-credit stakes that drive A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam or A Summary of the Creed of As-Salaf As-Saalih, I’m not always sure what I’m doing, or why. In my DMT-powered Islam and my prayer of the morning after, this was not a question: My prayer did not need a formal statement of doctrine in order to do its work. Can my Islam find its perfect expression in a pamphlet with blank pages, or perhaps a script that I find wholly unreadable, like Aurebesh? What happens when I try to confront the Qur’n with nothing to stand between us?