How to Be a Muslim by Haroon Moghul

Author:Haroon Moghul [Moghul, Haroon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2075-3
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

My friends and fellow NYU Islamic Centerists went above and beyond what anyone could’ve expected, but our biggest accomplishment grew out of my admission of my own unpreparedness for the role I was thrust into. Not to mention many of our senior leaders were seniors, and a lot of our institutional memory would graduate with them. This was, I realized, why so many Muslim organizations failed to get off the ground. Individuals masquerading as institutions, the problem becoming obvious when inescapably that person declines, fades, passes on, or merely moves on. Or is crushed by his work.

That semester, I took my second-to-last philosophy requirement, Philosophy of Language. I couldn’t get myself to focus, skipped most of the lectures for obligations I felt I had no choice but to attend to, and by the end of the semester found myself with a paper due in twenty-four hours, on top of pending media requests to explain whether Islam and therefore Muslims were not compelled to war with the West. I e-mailed a friend from class, Michael, and asked to read his paper. Then I rather amateurishly rewrote it. I got an e-mail from the professor the very next day, asking to see me in his office. Michael must have received the same. He had us sit across from him—Michael hadn’t the faintest idea why he had been called in—and the professor read from my paper, then Michael’s.

Before he got three sentences into Michael’s, I said, “I did it.” I turned to Michael. “This had nothing to do with him.”

I got a zero (for the paper)—I finished with a C- overall. My lowest grade in four years. Fall 2001 was the only semester I didn’t make dean’s list. I’d been working diligently to achieve a great GPA—for what exactly I don’t know—and now that wasn’t happening. The Islamic Center was hurting me. There was no career here, no paycheck, no ticket to graduate school. But if I learned any lessons, they were small ones. During my last semester, I took a course on Czech literature. It was the only class I took for me and me alone, that had nothing to do with imposed professional ambition, perceived religious obligation, or identity politics. Who knew I’d find something that echoed within me. A part of the world that was Western, like me, but experienced the treachery of modernity, like me. Most Slavs could not imagine that the world had only one direction, that history and national identity were domestic partners, that everything turns out okay. It was also my last final ever. I remember walking to the Astor Place 6 in the rain. What, I wondered, if I went to graduate school and studied Czech, maybe Russian and Hungarian?

I fancied a musty home on a bucolic campus, lined with bookshelves, snow outside and me inside, a fire that still didn’t keep me warm enough, always reading or writing, studying or teaching. I could detach myself from being forced to be a Muslim, from always being called on to defend, explain, and analyze, from the civilizational choices on offer.

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