By Zain Abdullah

The first time I heard about “bad” Muslims was well before President George W. Bush made his announcements after 9/11.¹ Three years later, Mahmood Mamdani pegged the idea to his book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.² But, for me, it was in 1970. The American Motors Corporation (AMC) had just released its Hornet, an affordable family car with a sporty design, and my cousin Gregory, ten years my senior at age twenty-two, made it his first big purchase. One evening, after our regular run of basketball, we sat conversing in his car. Earlier that year, “Brother” Gordon, as we called him, had been talking to me about the Nation of Islam, an Islamic movement with a Black nationalist agenda. And I wondered what, if anything, my cousin had to say about it. “Well,” he started, “you already have one strike against you ’cause you’re Black. Being a Muslim would be two.” I never forgot those words, and all I could think was that a “strike against” me was bad—really bad.

It wasn’t that he said it with any malice. The entire conversation was rather casual. And at that young age, I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly or the reason he was saying it. I certainly didn’t believe that being Black required a strike. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston boasted that she was not “tragically colored,” rebuffing those who felt “nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal” because of their race.³ I knew nothing of Hurston then, but two years before the talk with my cousin, James Brown released the song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” voicing the sentiment of a newfound consciousness and racial pride, while the civil rights and Black Power movements inspired unrelenting hope and harnessed demands for an unforgiving rage. Muslims from the Nation of Islam also seemed to embody this new awareness. Still, Gregory came of age in another era and under different circumstances. I think now about the irony of his statement, given the context of our conversation. The Hornet was designed by AMC to battle foreign imports, and as we sat in this automobile, his remarks and the manufacturer’s intent now merge before me as a tableaux on American exceptionalism, the idea that there is a divine sanction that says to the world “either you are with us or you are against us”; and if you are not with us, there will be a “strike” against you, too.

But how does anyone really talk about being religious in the world? Hans Küng tried in his On Being a Christian, but was left wanting even after seven hundred pages.⁴ A conversation about what it means to be Muslim is equally complicated, and it deserves, not just requires, a great deal from us. It’s not a simple matter of figuring out what all Muslims believe, then assigning them to a single creed like the arkan (articles of faith) or tawhid, the doctrine about the absolute oneness of God. Nor can we restrict the actions of over one billion Muslims to the five pillars—testifying, prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage. Muslim cultures extend from Morocco to Indonesia and from Australia to Europe and the Americas, with dynasties spanning some fourteen centuries. And the expanse of this heterogeneity across time and space, not to mention a rapid migration propelling Muslim bodies, objects, and ideas around the globe, defies any crude attempts to map Muslims into specific culture areas.

Islam is not an orthodoxy (based on correct doctrine) but is more of an orthopraxy (based on correct practice), which means it pays less attention to theology (kalam) and debates about God. Yet even when it comes to ritual practice, of the more than six thousand verses of the Qur’an, Islam’s holy scripture, only eighty deal directly with law, while most focus more on existential questions about the meaning of life, faith, and ethical concerns about poverty and achieving justice. If doctrine is not a central feature of the Islamic tradition, and the Qur’an is essentially not a book of law, where do we go for a conversation about what being a Muslim means? Perhaps our focus should be on the actual conversations among Muslims themselves, their overarching discourse, to examine some of the key ideas that shape their reality.

The Qur’an, for example, appears to be dismissive of official religion, since the term Islam (submitting to God) signifies a process, a series of attitudes or behaviors rather than a set ideology. Even the Arabic word for religion, din, has multiple meanings relating to various aspects of society instead of an exclusive sacred realm. The word “Muslim,” meaning the one who submits to God, refers to all created things, since everything naturally surrenders to God’s will (Qur’an 3:33). But “Muslim” actually identifies the first step in three stages toward personal development: muslim (submitter), mu’min (believer), and muhsin (perfected humanity). The word muslim occurs in the Qur’an about forty times, with about the same for muhsin, whereas mu’min (believer) appears two hundred and thirty times, and, if we include phrases like “those who believe,” the count would increase by the hundreds. In contrast, kafir, the term often translated as “infidel” or “unbeliever,” has less to do with faith issues than with exploitation, since kafir literally refers to someone who “covers up” what they believe is true, particularly with the intent to deceive others for personal gain. All of this raises many questions about how to translate sacred meanings properly from one religious context to another, and from one society to another. A brief exploration of these terms also speaks volumes about our use of categories and our tendency to reduce Muslims to labels like Sunni (orthodox), Shi’a (partisan), or Sufi (mystic). When we consider the deeper implications of words like Islam, din, Muslim, mu’min, and kafir, we find that the Qur’anic message is essentially a call to belief in a new worldview, or a way of envisioning a world that is different from the one we currently have. This approach will necessarily alter our sense of who Muslims are and force us to rethink their place in today’s world.

I always thought that being a Muslim was a matter of choice, perhaps because while growing up religion was something of a choice for me. The Qur’an also seems to confirm that there should be no compulsion in religion, and that belief is strictly about free will, despite the fact that some Muslim-majority countries consider apostasy a punishable crime.⁵ Certainly, the places where we grow up, though, help to determine what our religious proclivities might be. Eudora Welty writes that “feelings are bound up in place,” and she reminds us of its importance for understanding who we are.⁶ Each location is unique, and each place reveals the context for a Muslim mode of being in the world.

My journey as a Muslim began at birth, and the place was Detroit. I don’t mean this in any religious sense, such as when Muslims claim that every person is born into a perfect state of Islam, or “submission” to God. A typist at the hospital named me “Zane,” except that it appears on my birth certificate with a “strike” across it—almost the way my cousin described it, with a single-lined stroke—and then the name “Zayne” handwritten beside it. But why not name me Joseph, Charles, or Robert, which is my father’s name? The more I learned about my name, however, about its meaning and the Islamic significance of the place where I was born, the more I was forced to question our ability to openly make religious choices.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim, despite his critics, was probably right to claim that there is a strong connection between religions and the societies that gave them birth.⁷ So, my story might go something like this: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, a city widely known for its heavy settlement of Muslim immigrants, and also the place where the Nation of Islam, the Black Muslim movement, was founded in 1930; my Christian parents, who spotted my birthright in a baby naming book, inadvertently chose a Muslim name, which means “good” or “the one who beautifies the believers,” simply because it had a different ring. But all of this sounds much too esoteric and I must admit I didn’t always think this way. Growing up, I guess I believed, like others, that we all had the freedom to choose our own destiny. Then, when I became Muslim in the late 1970s, everything came under the command of divine will (qadr), requiring that all human behavior begin and end with the phrases insha’Allah (If God wills it) and masha’Allah (God has willed it). Graduate school in the early 1990s forced me to rethink much of this, as I began wondering about human agency and whether Western scholarship could adequately explain our religious sensibilities.

Alfred Louis Kroeber, the mid-twentieth-century anthropologist, might offer an explanation with “cultural diffusion,” his view of how cultural ideas move between individuals, sometimes unconsciously and even without direct contact.⁸ For example, my father’s hit record, Tossin’ and Turnin’, made history before I was born. And Black musicians were increasingly attracted to Islam, often changing their names to Arabic ones. He surely traveled in these circles, and I wonder if my parents were influenced by this cultural process. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American essayist, says he never thought of his religion as a choice, when questioned about how he could be a Catholic when the Roman Catholic Church condemns his gay lifestyle. “It’s chosen me,” he replied. “It feels like . . . they’re asking me how can you be your parents’ son?”⁹ Muslims raised in Islamic societies may have similar feelings, since their religious identity often appears inseparable from their ancestry. Tone Bringa writes that “being Muslim” for Bosnians is not about strict adherence to Islamic practices but about how land, family, and gender dynamics shape their religious identities.¹⁰ So a question about what it means to be a Muslim can appear a bit odd, especially if we think it is detached from our sense of place or other realities within the larger scheme of things.

The first time I heard I had a Muslim name was at my high school in East Orange, New Jersey. In 1975, I was in the eleventh grade, and a classmate approached me, draped in her Nation of Islam headdress, tunic, and full-length skirt. “Do you know you have a Muslim name?” she asked sternly. I hadn’t thought about being a Muslim since I had raised the issue with my cousin five years earlier. Her question stunned me, mainly because I was unsure of how to respond or, frankly, whether I even cared. I now realize that the incident is integral to the way I think about being Muslim, and not because it influenced my conversion in any way. Rather, I believe it reveals something about the sociocultural context in which I was raised, which included a heterogeneous mix of Black and immigrant Muslims, Christian evangelicals, integrationists, Black nationalists, and a Black working and middle class.

After high school and a brief stint in the world of disco, my interest turned to Black history. I read J. A. Rogers’s World’s Great Men of Color, Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Before the Mayflower, and a story in Jet magazine about the medieval Muslim empires of West Africa, which described rulers like Mansa Kankan Musa and Askia Muhammad I and how learning was a centerpiece in these African civilizations. All this left me with fundamental questions about life itself. The theologian James Cone professed that religion “pushes you to bring the political in harmony with the spiritual knowledge that you have of yourself.”¹¹ For me, however, the process was reversed. I sought to understand myself as a social being and a political actor first, and then I embarked upon a spiritual quest and a search for life’s meaning.

My mother claimed that I was “religiously inclined,” or at least that’s what she wrote in her 1973 college essay, “My Son.” She added that I disliked attending Sunday school at the local Baptist church, but that I did read the Bible. Both my parents were Bible readers, and my father, perhaps sacrilegiously, highlighted passages and scribbled notes in the margins of his Bible. As a college sophomore majoring in marketing at Fairleigh Dickinson University-Madison, I began my own self-directed, late-night study of the Bible, which often ended at 3 AM. This was not a search for a “soft monotheism,” a doctrine of the three interlocking dimensions of God. When I was growing up, there were portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party co-founder, on our walls, but there was no crucifix. And our reference to God was more or less absolute and indivisible. So, my religious readings, which included Daoism, Confucianism, and even Shintoism, were scrutinized by a hardline belief in a single God.

Later, I met Abdul-Malik, a spectacled, Black Panamanian Muslim selling jewelry in the student center, and we began a series of conversations about the Bible and Islam. I then discovered Abul A‘la Maududi’s book Towards Understanding Islam. Unlike the dense academic texts on Islam that I borrowed from the college library, Maududi’s work was clear and jargon-free. After completing it, I immediately decided to become Muslim. I suddenly found myself repeating the sacred words before Abdul-Malik that signified my conversion to Islam: la ilaaha illallah wa muhammad rasulullah (There is no god but the one God and Muhammad is the messenger of God). In June 1979, my name-change petition was granted, altering the spelling of my first name (presumably to a more Arabic version), and “Abdullah” became my surname. For me, being Muslim clearly did not occur in a vacuum, and even those raised in Muslim-majority countries have sensibilities that are shot through with their own sociocultural realities. Our ability to grasp the full measure of what it means to be Muslim requires a rigorous unpacking of these and other complex settings.

I felt compelled to marry less than two years after my conversion. She was also new to Islam. Being Muslim then meant being chaste and having a measure of self-restraint until marriage. If celibacy proved too difficult, the community found suitable mates, which typically meant passing off the next eligible person in line. Still, we were enthralled by the notion that marriage constituted half of our religion, and the Prophet urged us to fear God for the rest. But, more than that, matrimony is how adult Muslims enter into the inner sanctum of Islam, just as publicly participating in the five pillars demonstrates one’s membership to the wider community. Marriage, then, represents a more intimate place to experience what it means to be Muslim.

The traditional prohibition on premarital sex, however, often forces young Muslims to marry too soon, before they are emotionally or economically ready. And I was among them, divorcing two short years later. But matrimony in Islam is also more of a contract than a sacrament, so marriage among the newly converted, especially when the couple is without familial advice (even from non-Muslim relatives), results in a high divorce rate and a succession of serial marriages. Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera write about what this might mean for Muslim youth, a fast-growing population far exceeding 50 percent in most Muslim-majority countries.¹² Massive unemployment, coupled with prolonged political corruption, has caused a widening gap between sexual maturity (the customary dating age) and social maturity (the average age young people become financially solvent and start a family). The option for young Muslims has been to seek alternative marital arrangements beyond the customary nikah (civil), which is state regulated and usually expensive.¹³ But this hasn’t resolved the issue, since the majority of Muslims favor nikah and exert extreme pressure on violators to conform.

Muslim youth do date and some become intimate without much regard to religion at all, similar to millions of nominal Christians or other individuals who would be considered nonobservant in their faith. Asra Nomani has argued for a Bill of Rights in the Bedroom, a referendum to remove shari’a punishments for consensual sex between adult Muslims.¹⁴ I have discussed elsewhere that globalization is altering Muslim identities and, accordingly, the consensual bond between marriage and sexuality is weakening under the sway of secularization, which is then blurring the line between formal and informal unions.¹⁵ It appears, though, that most Muslims are somewhat conservative and try to marry rather than engage in illicit sex, which is viewed as a major religious taboo. Yet, what concerns me is how marriage has become so closely linked to what it means to be a “good” Muslim. If marriage constitutes half of our religion, what does being a Muslim mean for an expanding population of the perpetually unmarried? And since any prolonged celibacy is equally prohibited, there is a strong tendency that millions will fall into deep states of depression and guilt, especially if they are unable to reconcile the tension of being a single Muslim in a family-oriented religion.

Matrimony, however, is about uniting families and not just individuals. In Muslim societies, the extended family networks typically insulate a new couple, and instead of experiencing isolation as newlyweds, they feel the expansion of kinship. Many practice the traditional custom of arranging marriages between cousins or longstanding neighbors, which serves both to expand the household and to strengthen community ties. Thus, much of what being a Muslim means occurs within the matrix of these larger, familial relationships. In my own case, the idea of an extended family was a foreign one. After my parents separated in the early 1960s, we became “nuclear,” a word that always made me think we were being considered for some sort of scientific experiment. I was raised with two older sisters in a single-parent household. My oldest sister became Muslim several years after me (I expected the other sister would, since she was already familiar with the works of the Sufi saint Inayat Khan). As it turned out, the oldest had been covertly listening to my urgings. She and her husband are the only other Muslims in my family.