Journey to the End of Islam by Michael Muhammad Knight

Author:Michael Muhammad Knight
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2016-02-01T17:53:37.482000+00:00

52.

From Cairo I headed back for Damascus and spent a few days looking at all the tombs again, just trying to pursue a straightforward Islam without getting spooky and neopagan about it. You can retreat into your brain and get dense, I thought, as long as you have a round-trip ticket; no good in getting stuck there.

But I also made my own relic: at the shrine of Fatima Sughra, the caretaker had given me a foot-long strip of green fabric for the purpose of collecting holy dust from the tomb and then rubbing it on my face. This cloth had gone with me through my travels, touching every site that I touched: the heads of Husayn in both Damascus and Cairo, the shrine of Mary at Sayednaya, the tombs of John the Baptist, Abel, Bilal, Lady Zaynab, Lady Sakina, sixteen heads of Karbala martyrs, the Ahlul-Bayt tombs at Bab al-Saghir, the handprint of Gabriel, the maqams of Khidr and Abraham, the meeting place of the Abdals, the cave of the Sleepers, shrines of Shaykh Abadir and Aw Ansar and Emir Nur in Harar, the tombs of Ibn ‘Arabi and Ibn Taymiyya, the tombs of Seth and Idris at Giza. The cloth itself was worn and fraying with threads hanging off, looking much older than it was, which only helped its gravitas as a sacred object.

The last Friday before flying home, I went to jum’aa prayers at the Umayyad Mosque, the old mosque of empire. Saladin was buried somewhere in the immediate area, and his statue stood outside. I climbed onto the pedestal with him and did a Hulk Hogan pose. On the day of my flight, the Mathematics would read as Wisdom Understanding, which adds up to Power (2 + 3 = 5). The corresponding degree in Master Fard’s lessons asks about Islam’s reclaiming of Jerusalem from the devil—the answer building on Jesus as a prophet and righteous man whose name and face were used by the Ten Percenters as shields for their dirty religion. But it was the same with Muhammad and Mecca.

“Whoever has been given religion through God Almighty,” wrote al-Ghazali, “must love his own emperor and remain obedient to him.” Al-Ghazali took the pre-Islamic Persian concept of farr, the divine light of kings, and put it on his sultans. In Harar, they enshrined their dead emirs as saints. I was moving towards the anarchist critique of religion, “No gods, no masters,” which felt pretty much the same as Master Fard’s breakdown of society with the 5, 10, and 85. What would it take to wash my Islam clean after the dirty touches of kings?

In 1190 a Christian prophet told King Richard the Lion-Hearted that Saladin was the Anti-Christ who must be defeated to resurrect Jerusalem. We were dancing the same steps in our Republican theocracy, the Southern Baptist Caliphate—where George W. Bush declared that God wanted him to be president, John Ashcroft called the separation of church and state a “wall of religious oppression,” and John McCain

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.