After our Hajj 1432, as Shahinaz and I hugged tearfully, we knew the immensity of the dangers we had overcome. Even our hugging at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz airport was forbidden! By then we couldn’t have cared less about the mutaween. Thousands of departing pilgrims were armed with gallons of Zamzam water and King Abdullah waved bye-bye from banners. It was as if the Saudis were eager to get rid of us.
“And who wouldn’t?” texted Adham with his familiar sarcasm. “Now we have to go and clean the mess you all made in Mecca. Yuck!” This journey had changed me forever in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years.
I texted Adham back, this time seriously, “Muslims leave Mecca, but Mecca never leaves them.”
“I hope Hajj teaches you no more melodrama ;-),” he replied.
Young Wahhabis passed out flashy pink booklets of propaganda with titles like The Life, Teachings, and Influence of Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab. Did they know putting a pink tint on the Kaaba might not be a good idea? Such books printed in all the languages Muslims speak exist in an infinite number of mosques worldwide. This was Saudi da’wa in action. They export Wahhabi Islam without raising a single saber.
During my thirteen-hour flight, I fully caught up with the Kardashians. It seemed that Kim was trying desperately hard to make another baby. Khloe and Lamar were headed to splitsville, Scott was back in rehab, and Saint was merely a glimmer in Kanye’s eye.
My Pakistani cab driver cruised up the West Side Highway toward Harlem. A recording of the Quran droned from his stereo. A decorative disc dangled from his rearview mirror. I leaned forward for a closer look. Etched in its surface was the Kaaba. The stereo called out, “Pilgrimage thereto is a duty men owe to Allah, those who can afford the journey; but if any deny faith, Allah stands not in need of any of His creatures.”
We passed a halal food cart on Sixth Avenue. It felt reassuring. I was getting home. Manhattan’s “halal” food carts are now ubiquitous. I have always talked to their mostly Arab workers and wondered if their purveyors know that the “music” they play from their carts is nothing but Quranic recitations and that halal is just the Muslim equivalent of kosher.
The reciter was intoning from the third Surah of the Quran (Al Imran, or “The House of Imran”) and its 97th verse. The qari (a Quranic reciter who follows the rules of recitation called tajwid) had a particularly beautiful voice.
I couldn’t believe the serendipity. “I’ve just returned from my Hajj,” I told my cab driver.
He turned around. “No way! I want to go so badly. I have been saving my whole life.” I could hear the deep yearning in his voice. The name displayed on his ID tag was Muhammad Pervez.
“Mashallah!” he said, using an exclamation used by Muslims upon hearing good news. “What was it like?” I told him I shared his name.
“Oh, it was wonderful. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, so to speak.”
He laughed. I rhapsodized at length. I deliberately omitted all of the garbage, the pickpocketing, the inequality—I accentuated the positive, just as my elders returning from Hajj used to do. The darker sides of the Saudi-controlled pilgrimage couldn’t be told.
“How much did it cost you?” he asked.
“For me and a friend—we paid around $12,000, but that includes everything.”
“Oh,” he said. There were practically tears in his eyes. “I could never afford it. Surely there are cheaper ways?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “The Hajj is meant for all.”
“Listen, this is not an accident that I am in your cab and we share the same name. You are being called by Allah,” I added.
“I always keep it in my heart,” he said, guardedly revealing a life-long quest.
“Where do you pray?” I asked Pervez as he unloaded my bags.
“96th Street Mosque,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll see you there one day. I try and go every Friday, and maybe after Hajj now there will be new rigor and discipline.”
“Inshallah.”
I started walking toward the front door of my building when I turned back. “What day and year is it? I’ve been living in Mecca time, where it’s 1432.”
He laughed and told me. As tip, I gave him $40, all the cash I had. It was an action of zakat, I told myself.
When I reached my apartment, Keith and I embraced tearfully. Then we lay down and just spooned for hours silently. I wasn’t able to describe my experience to him, and he didn’t push me to. We’d been together for long enough to reach the stage of nonverbal communication taking precedence over the empty chatter new couples feel compelled to engage in. It was enough simply to be in each other’s arms.
I had returned just in time for Thanksgiving. Keith cooked all day to prepare an elaborate feast. I understand Thanksgiving’s violent roots, but it is such a uniquely American, nonsectarian celebration of pluralism. All Muslim and most Hindu festivals I’d experienced growing up were religious. But the turkey gets even avowed atheists like Keith to reflect on their lives and their gratitude in a way that you don’t normally see outside of a mosque, church, or synagogue.
Our Thanksgiving table included a gay Hindu man, a transgender man from Berlin, his French girlfriend, and a black woman—Harlem-born and bred. We went around the table and gave thanks.
My Harlem friend had a terrific sense of humor. “Today I am grateful for the silent majority that kept my favorite Kenyan-born, socialist Muslim in office!” She offered me a glass of wine.
“I don’t drink anymore,” I said.
“Oh, that’s what Saudi Arabia does to people, does it?” she joked. “What else did you change?”
“So much,” I said. “And yet so little.”
“Well, it definitely made you skinny. Hajj diet people! Hajj diet! Move over, Atkins, South Beach, and all the other blah blahs!” she exclaimed. There was mirth and gratitude at our table that night.
I had learned a lot in Saudi Arabia. And with all the years of study and real work, I felt I had finally won the right to sit at the table of Islam’s ongoing reformation, forced upon it by 9/11. This is important. Islam didn’t ask for a twenty-first century reformation. It’s been forced to embrace one because of 9/11 and more. Post-Hajj, I can confidently say that the legacy of Saudi Arabia and Wahhab seen in history’s vast moral arc will be destructive. And unfortunately the dogma (whatever you call it, Salafi or Wahhabi) has been more successful than oil in being the biggest Saudi export. Very few mosques in the world remain untouched.
Muhammad’s legacy has been annihilated. Getting my hands dirty in many Muslim nations, living, studying, and filming with the most religious within my faith I believe gives me the authority to be one of those reformers. Wahhabi mindsets drool at ijtihad as a continuing tradition. But allowing Muslim pundits amongst us—let’s say those in the West—to erroneously offer ijtihad as a solution would be a historical mistake.
How can it be a solution, in fact, when an ijtihad-loving Deoband issues illogical Wahhabi fatwas such as “all photography is un-Islamic” (2013)? Or that a family surviving on the earnings of a woman was un-Islamic, and that men and women should not work together (2010)? In modern India? Impossible.
The biggest problems in the Muslim “worlds,” as I discussed with Ghalib, are illiteracy and poverty. Standard modern education is unavailable to the majority. And what’s available in places like Nadhwa doesn’t produce mujtahids—sharia-compliant scholars using independent reasoning (ijtihad). Does just being a gender-studies major lead to paying jobs? No. Nadhwa graduates face the same fate. Jobs for the ones not on their way to jihadist camps are pretty much impossible.
Therefore, for Islam’s majority, their mujtahids are Wahhabi. Most are dangerous. And it’s their style of ijtihad that a Wahhabi or Daesh mind seeks. No one cares about the “gay imam” in South Africa who offered ijtihad as a solution in my first film. I have come to disagree with the conclusion of my own A Jihad for Love. I wonder if he has finally learned to engage with world politics or if he is still lost in the Quran?
The House of Saud helped build a global terror network. In 2003, it arrived at the House’s own doorstep when bombs exploded in Riyadh, killing thirty-nine. Osama berated the Sauds as un-Islamic in his frequent faxes and later Al Jazeera “interviews.” After 9/11, the bin Laden family furiously began undoing any umbilical cord that would connect Osama to them or the House of Saud while shuffling their billions to offshore accounts. But how could they? 9/11 was a recent memory.
In the kingdom, its grand muftis serve at the pleasure of the king and, in return, the Saud monarchy survives only because of Wahhabi religious favor. Abdullah, then king, ordered the infiltration and monitoring of all Islamic charities that existed in his fiefdom and predictably ran to his always-obedient one-eyed grand mufti (Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al Shaykh), who was also chairman of the senior ulema, to produce a detailed fatwa-on-demand. In part, Al Shaykh said:
Firstly: The recent developments in the United States, including hijacking planes, terrorizing innocent people, and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts.
Secondly: Any Muslim who is aware of the teachings of his religion and who adheres to the directives of the Holy Quran and the sunnah will never involve himself in such acts, because they will invoke the anger of God Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on Earth.
There was more, including a subtle reference to the media’s “defaming” Islam.
Not one Saud or ulema mentioned that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers held Saudi passports.
Saudis like Adham laughed. Had the monarchy forgotten that it had created and funded Osama’s jihad? Didn’t the Saudis know how much support he and now Daesh had amongst their own?
The nineties’ Grand Mufti ibn Baz made jihad-lite fashionable. Young Saudis were encouraged to go for jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They had to learn Islam’s “challenges.” It was like a semester abroad, and the jihadi-fied returnees strutted around like peacocks in their fatigues and military accoutrements at the Jeddah corniche. Didn’t girls love men in uniform? Islam and violence? Never a novelty for the Saudis.
“Jihad of the Sword” is not unfamiliar to most Saudis or me. It has always had discreet support amongst some ordinary Saudis, many scholars, and even within the Saud and bin Laden families. Officially, the Sauds were partners in George W. Bush’s “global war of terror.” Ties between Dar al Bush and Dar al Saud went way back. Soon after his election and a few months before 9/11, Bush had asked the CIA and FBI to “back off” investigating the bin Ladens and Saudi royals. At the time of writing, Zacarias Moussaoui, the infamous al-Qaeda operative who is under life imprisonment, told lawyers that members of the Saudi royal family, including former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud, “supported” al-Qaeda to carry out its attacks.
I had arrived in Saudi Arabia just a few months after Obama got Osama. Getting rid of the body was urgent. No one in the Obama administration wanted this man to achieve “martyr” status. Did they not realize that for many he was anyway? WikiLeaks has claimed that his body was brought to the US for pathological analysis and then cremated (against Islamic doctrine). Others say he really was dumped off the USS Carl Vinson, wrapped in a shroud and 300 pounds of chains. CIA head honcho Leon Panetta said in his book, “Bin Laden’s body was prepared for burial according to Muslim traditions, draped in a white shroud, given final prayers in Arabic, and then placed inside a heavy black bag.”
A few Muslim scholars disagreed with how Obama did it. Did they want a funeral procession? Even Amnesty International made the ridiculous claim that since he was found unarmed he should have been taken alive.
It was also a few months after the fires of an Arab Spring were lit. The Shia in the East were predictably protesting and this Hajj season had to be monitored carefully. When I was there, the mutaween were on edge and particularly proliferating. I was often in trouble with them. I had chosen Hajj 2011 deliberately.
In his lifetime Osama bin Laden had learned to detest his homeland, and yet conveniently both he and now Daesh take much of their logic from the Wahhabi Islam that is indistinguishable from the nation of its birth. The abominations of the Wahhabi state continue and often resemble Daesh and what remains of al-Qaeda. Many Saudi tweets said by mid-2015 that the Saudis had beheaded more than twice the number Daesh had. This airing of dirty laundry on Twitter and infuriated the monarchy and its new King Salman, who obdurately proclaims a new era. How? No one knows. His subjects are busy tweeting, the densest user base for Twitter along with Kuwaitis. Some say seven million Saudis are users. Do they know that this sophisticated surveillance state, built during the time bin Laden lived there, has moved with time—today policing Twitter, like daily life?
King Salman heads a shaken yet rigid state unlike any other. In October 2016, the New York Times reported that the long-named Prince Turki bin Saud bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabeer had been executed for murder, probably by beheading. The Al Saud and grand mufti were in warning mode: If we can behead our own blood, a prince, imagine what can happen to an ordinary mortal. It had been four decades since a royal had faced the sword. The fear spread virally. Adham, like other young men, began to wonder if this meant a return to the brutal past. In reality, the brutality had never gone anywhere.
The Al Saud are famously opaque, yet the younger royals continue Instagramming their lavish lives, much like the Kardashians and the Real Housewives of everywhere. Probably the second-most-powerful man in Saudi Arabia is the thirty-one-year-old deputy crown prince Salman, who is the king’s son. He sees his path to kingship clearly, while obliterating any power that the first in line to the throne—the diabetic, doddering, fifty-seven-year-old crown prince Nayef—has. Salman has his hands in practically every national matter in the kingdom. Yet his love of objectionable excess led to his purchase of a 440-foot yacht he had spotted while vacationing on the Riviera. This profligate spending does not sit well with the always-tweeting Saudis, who were shocked to learn of its $550 million cost. This is a time when the regimented “clergy” has been ordered to proclaim frugality. It’s an Islamic virtue, they say, and helps the country remain stable in uncertain times. The government has slashed the state budget, frozen government contracts, and cut civil employees’ pay at a time of low oil prices. But the Al Saud, as per tradition, never stop shopping.
Even so, if Salman Junior emerges victorious in the collusion-filled palace intrigues, friends like Adham point out how he is seen as a palatable and young choice, as if he were the ascendant Saudi Obama. Salman poses in royal threads on the website of his pet project—Vision 2030. The site claims the project will kill Saudi dependence on oil and save the flailing economy. Big text on the website says, “Our Vision: Saudi Arabia, the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds, the investment powerhouse, and the hub connecting three continents.”
The prince also established an “Entertainment Authority” to placate his majority young subjects with things like comedy shows. Does the future of young Saudi Arabians lie in the hands of this charismatic man in his thirties who purportedly understands them? Will his subjects question what in great part was his decision for the misguided Saudi-Iran proxy war in Yemen? What would he do to hypocritically curb his enormous family’s excesses? Princess Maha from the powerful Sudairi wing of the family infamously fled the ultra-luxurious Paris Shangri-La Hotel in the middle of the night to avoid paying a $7.5 million hotel bill.
“Everyone loves him,” texted Adham. There are more than 10,000 royals in the kingdom, and depending on rank, each gets his or her share of the depleting moolah.
On October 15, 2016, the New York Times reported, “The White House got an early sign of the ascent of the young prince in late 2015, when—breaking protocol—Prince bin Salman delivered a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy during a meeting between his father, King Salman, and President Obama.”
Saudi tweeters don’t tweet against the monarchy or religion, and thus the heavily monitored Twitter is good for the royals. It allows their young subjects to vent, and a Trump-like state of distraction seems to have formed.
Not with the regularity of Trump, but for similar reasons of diversion, King Salman tweets frugally to his couple-of-million followers. Everyone knows about the disappearing petrodollars. And even economists like Adham’s well-liked uncle says privately that at least a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line. Surely this number includes the immigrants in servitude? A Saudi version of poverty porn, à la the favelas of the film City of God, exists for Hajjis who look for it. My trip into Mecca’s fetid by-lanes, like the one I had taken with my almost-trick Muhammad, was proof.
I believe that affluent Saudi youths got used to this peculiar nanny state. Every king threw subsidies at every problem. Most still believe the Al Saud will never let them down.
“We are too lazy for revolution,” Adham said.
When the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s only real election by a landslide, I was one of the unsurprised few. This Ikhwan was nothing compared to Wahhabi ones, I reasoned. Egypt’s demographics are clear: majority poor, illiterate, and thus devout. Their Ikhwan built decades of ingratiation and goodwill amongst these grassroots. For them, at the time, Mohamed Morsi’s becoming president was a legit outcome. Moral policing was not number one on their agenda. So Egypt continued to be a kind of Saudi Riviera for those who were not rich enough to rent villas in France. Therefore the annual summer ritual of gaudy and vulgar Saudi excess in Beirut or Cairo has never stopped, even through dictators and revolutions. I have seen both women in “burqinis” and women in full-on abaya floating in the pool of the Four Seasons. Words cannot describe the comicality of a bloated black sack with a human under it in a five-star swimming pool. Yet another example of Saudi patriarchy.
With the oil drying up the House of Saud, try to take some comfort in this: The Hajj economy, at least, is never going away.
Adham had done his bachelor’s in Islamic theology, which he said was “convoluted.” In 2009, he enrolled in an engineering program at the controversial King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Jeddah. KAUST made headlines because ikhtilat was halal—a key Twitter igniter. The ikhtilat is just one reason why conservative Saudis stayed away, keeping Saudi enrollment relatively low. In addition, like in Mecca, women at KAUST allegedly don’t need to cover their faces. As long as their ungodly hair is covered, it’s all halal. But foreign students clamored for admission, imagining degrees from here would lead to high-paying jobs in the region. Meanwhile, a quote from Sheikh Ahmad al-Ghamdi, the puritanical head honcho of Mecca’s cruel mutaween, circulated like wildfire, and Adham texted me a link to the report in Okaz, the Saudi newspaper version of the New York Post.
Ghamdi said ikhtilat should be allowed. There was no need for gender segregation.
“Here comes change!” texted an obviously jubilant Adham. The Ha’ia (another name for the religious police) freaked out.
Ghamdi was fired.
But he built his own cult on Twitter and TV. He has at various times said it was OK for women to drive and shops didn’t need to shutter at prayer times. He said that in the Prophet’s time women rode camels, which was way more provocative than veiled women driving SUVs. Ghamdi is sly, and he, unlike most, knows the loopholes in religious laws that allow him his chutzpah. He is an insider gone rogue. In a July 10, 2016, New York Times article, Ghamdhi said about the mutaween: “Often, people were humiliated in inhuman ways, and that humiliation could cause hatred of religion.” He said false eyelashes were OK and he appeared on TV with his made-up and facially uncovered wife.
Ghamdi’s views are probably shared by the majority in Saudi society and even by the royal family. This man comes from Islam’s very heart, Mecca. And perhaps policing morality there actually helped him realize how diverse Islam really is. Still, addressing these matters in public is rare. And his statements forced Salman to put the mutaween in line. But how will someone like Ghamdi make a living now?
Adham sent a picture of a KAUST cinema. “A land of no cinemas now has one. Wahhabi logic?”
“They will keep their mouths shut because the Saud built it,” I replied.
Any reform there will be glacial. A strictly government-scrutinized and -patrolled film industry is forming. At least two fiction films, Wadjda (2012) and Barakah Meets Barakah (2016), have been submitted to the Oscars as “Saudi films.” I am proud that my film, A Sinner in Mecca, is the world’s first foreign-produced documentary set in Mecca and Medina, portraying the Hajj and the country from deep inside, warts and all. It’s not a government-approved junket film but an unprecedented guerrilla-style documentary made on an iPhone. This, too, makes me an active participant in the ongoing revolution forced upon Islam after 9/11. Muhammad, though, would not hesitate to say that we live in a time of jahiliyah (ignorance). He would quickly realize the biggest problems that ail twenty-first-century Islam are poverty, illiteracy, and joblessness.
Muhammad would have favored what would have shocked suffragettes of decades past: Saudi women finally voted, after getting franchised in 2015. Twenty-one women candidates were even “elected” to municipal office. I put “elected” in quotation marks because in this land of no music, cinemas, or political parties, this sorry attempt at democracy is farcical. In the minds of many Wahhabis, we are still in the three centuries that followed Muhammad’s death. Usually, they don’t open their mouths when the king periodically pays lip service to reforms and human rights, conditions they have never lived in or understood.
Like every grand mufti, Baz’s successor, al Shaykh, is “House of Saud compliant.” He famously issued fatwas saying chess was un-Islamic and he banned Pokémon Go, the smartphone virtual-reality game phenomenon, because it was “gambling.” Relatively early in his tenure, in 2007 he had aroused universal uproar in the Muslim world by issuing plans to destroy the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the tombs “around it,” and the Green Dome above it. This was perhaps the pamphlet my group leader in Medina had spoken about. Truth is, the Saudis know they dare not touch the dome. Worldwide (imagine more than 1.6 billion outraged Muslims) fitna is assured.
Palestinian extremist Abdullah Azzam, his former Saudi student Osama, and the still-alive Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri fathered the deliberately named al-Qaeda. It means “foundation.”
They were all influenced by a radical ideology that Egyptian Islamist Syyed Qutb wrote about in his prolific career. Qutb was seen as influenced by a theologian called Hassan al Banna, who fathered the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn), which has no connection to the Daesh-style Ikhwans of today. Regardless, all these men at different points in history have been experts at using the Quran and our canon, producing violent and illogical material.
The success of Daesh, unlike an al-Qaeda of a different time and space, has been its prowess at using the social web. Even in 2011, Daesh couldn’t have dreamt of “recruiting” in European capitals from London to Brussels. But, in truth, all it takes is a lonely room, no job, a pre-existing psychopathic mindset, and a laptop. The glossy new mujahideen of this disparate entity the world has taken to calling ISIS or the more sensible Daesh carry European or even US passports. And because of them, people like me, with my name, my beard, and a still-new US passport, are profiled at airports.
A recent victory, therefore, felt especially sweet. Traveling to Europe and stuck in one of the horrendous TSA lines at JFK, I ended up with a TSA official who recognized me from my film A Sinner in Mecca. I was flabbergasted as he said how much he loved the film, which he found while zipping through Netflix.
“You are a brave man, sir,” he said and directed me to the TSA Pre-Check line, where you zoom through security and don’t have to take your shoes off. I still wish I had taken a selfie with him. His nametag said “Julio,” so I imagined he was Latino.
With each issue of Dabiq, Daesh’s very own Vanity Fair, becoming sleeker, and every HD beheading or thrusting off a building uploaded on YouTube, Daesh are empowered almost daily to be the spokespersons for Islam, and I can understand why this leads to Islamophobia. The world’s richest and most influential (Wahhabi) Muslim ideology from Saudi sands has done the gravest harm to modern Islam. The West is seeing its macabre consequences, sponsored by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
As the “Christian West” (misleadingly) cowered, the filmmaking and typesetting skills of the uber-savvy media arms of Daesh only got stronger. Dabiq spawned a new, shorter, sharper, and more “global” online rag called Rumiyah. TV pundits quoted from it: “Mow the infidel down like grass.” The Islam supremacist logic of Daesh remained. The videos, too, got sleeker—a particular one of two Turkish “soldiers” being burnt to death stuck with me. This was cinematic. There were clearly multiple cameras and cinematic concepts like cutaways and pull-focus used. The jittery, low-res shakiness of handheld phone shots was gone. The very latest in directorial skill and technology was being deployed.
“Rumiyah” was no accident. It meant Rome. This new rag, notably published in many more languages, titled itself (Dabiq-style) on obscure logic. Daesh’s “media arm” Al-Hayat Media Center (named after the region’s biggest newspaper) had dug up some questionable Islamic prophecy from the fifteenth century. It said Rome—and, by extension, the West—would fall after the Muslims took Constantinople and presumably restored the glory of the long dead Ottoman Caliphate. The idea of Christendom (the Vatican-containing Rome) being Dar al-Harb (House of War) suits the Muslim supremacists of Daesh just fine. Christianity at war with Islam? Tried, tested, trusted, and thus dusted from historic obscurity into being front and center, on stages built by either Al-Hayat or the Trump White House.
Al-Qaeda had always been obsessed with Bollywood-style spectacle. How many can you kill and how (3,000 had perished in a hundred minutes on 9/11, the visual component the planet lived horrifically on live TV). Trucks driving into crowds would never replicate that spectacle. But for a historic minute, it did seem Daesh just wanted massacre, never mind the optics. Massacres of Muslims right up to current times no doubt get less or no airtime in the West.
The secretive monarchy though seems to get stronger: The Wahhabization of the planet is complete and Salman deceptively claims a great non-oil-related economic future. Just like Trump, they have no problem lying shamelessly. In June 2016, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey met with a high-level Saudi prince visiting New York. It was hardly a courtesy visit. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the forty-first richest man in the world according to Forbes magazine, owns much more of Twitter than Dorsey does. Talal is at 5.2 percent and Dorsey is a poor third at 3.2 percent. The latter was being obsequious out of necessity. Talal had been public about his desire to see the newly re-minted Dorsey replaced. And this cruel irony had brought one of America’s greatest innovators to his knees in front of a corrupt Saudi prince. He needed to keep his job.
“The Sauds probably run the damn thing by now!” I texted Adham, who predictably had no idea of the Al Saud-Twitter connection. In the meantime, millions of ordinary Saudis, princes and princesses, the king, and crucially the ulema (religious scholars) fight for space in the Saudi Twitterverse. Following their traffic is critical.
These are times of social-web sheikhs and Twitter fatwas. Saudi Wahhabi cleric Mohammed al Arefe claims to be the most influential Arab Islamist ever with more than 15 million followers on Twitter. Some of Arefe’s Twitter fatwas are bizarre, many dangerous. About the always red-hot topic of women driving, Arefe tweeted it was wrong because it would lead to more accidents. He must have missed the memo that statistically Saudis are amongst the world’s worst drivers. He said it was OK for husbands to “Quranically” beat their wives, but the “beatings should be light and not make her face ugly.” Many followers were not amused. “How,” I texted Adham after the beatings-fatwa tweet, “is this man allowed to even exist in this century? Why do people follow him?”
“You have no idea how many people love him.” Adham said, adding that what his friends really needed was legal ikhtilat, not “this joker Arefe.” They are “at breaking point,” he said. The cruelly enforced Saudi misogyny makes modern Iran, where women drive and run in elections, feel like a paradise.
Other powerful Twitter sheikhs include Nasser al-Omar (1.8 million followers) and Saud al-Shureem (1.25 million followers). Each one of them can be rabble rousers and some, like Arefe, are.
Arefe once tweeted at the Emirati music diva Ahlam, asking her to become pious and use her fame to preach Islam since Ramadan was approaching. She politely refused. Gulf newspapers quoted Arefe at a conference, “The Shia are nonbelievers who must be killed.” Arefe survives because he says things the Al Saud want to but cannot.
But profound perversion also lives within the religious establishment. TV preacher Fayhan al Ghamdi raped, tortured, and killed his five-year-old daughter Lama in 2012. He paid more than a million Saudi riyal to Lama’s already divorced Egyptian mother as blood money. The barbarian was released. The hashtag #AnaLama (#IAmLama) proliferated and died. The beheading-needing Ghamdi is alive.
For me, the voice of Amr Khaled, the idolized Egyptian televangelist, held in high esteem by millions, with more than 7 million Twitter followers, had more promise. He was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people and was the sheikh of rawshaha (hip and cool) who unimaginably made religion “fun.”
Meanwhile in Saud-land, a newly moderate, sixty-year-old Sheikh called Salman al-Ouda is closing in on Arefe with 10 million followers. Ouda is also director of the popular, some say extremist, Islam Today website. He was once admired and quoted by Osama bin Laden and he returned the favor. In the nineties, the Sauds had imprisoned him for five years after he publicly attacked them for hosting infidels (American troops). Later, he did a 180, scolding Osama in a famously melodramatic “letter” broadcast by MBC (Saudi State TV):
My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of al-Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions of victims on your back?
Notably, Ouda was still calling Osama a brother though this was the perfect moment for takfir.
In 2016, Ouda allegedly spoke to a Swedish reporter. The story got picked up by CNN Arabic, Huffington Post, and more. It was the stuff of sensation. Ouda allegedly said, “Even though homosexuality is considered a sin in all the Semitic holy books, it does not require any punishment in this world.” Alluding to Daesh, he added, “By condemning homosexuals to death, they are committing a graver sin than homosexuality itself. Even though homosexuality does not distance oneself from Islam, Islam does not encourage individuals who have same-sex attraction to show their feelings in public.” He added, “homosexuality doesn’t mean a person is not a Muslim.”
There followed a Twitter storm in the majority-homophobic Middle East. Ouda was cleverly killing his two birds, Wahhabis and Daesh (which is busy pushing homosexuals to their deaths) with one (homosexual) stone.
“A former hero of Osama bin Laden saying homos are OK! Is this possible?” I texted Adham.
“If this is true, Parvez, his words matter,” texted Adham.
With Daesh ever close to Saudi borders, Ouda tweets with fanatical zeal against them and extremism. Ouda went on Rotana, a TV channel owned by Prince Talal. A YouTube video of that interview was uploaded on June 21, 2015, in which Ouda said armies and wars were not the solution. Daesh have a strong media presence and use rhetoric that appeals to the uneducated, he said. For the poor masses, said Ouda, Daesh represent victory and power.
My thesis was getting stronger. The Twitter sheikhs proved that Muhammad created not just a spiritual Islam. In many ways (especially with the Medina constitution), Muhammad was also creating a political Islam. The marriage of the two would evolve differently wherever Islam went. Iran loved it. Al Saud fear it.
Adham sent hilarious videos of the Saudi comic-sheikh Amr Khaled in Ahmad al-Shugairi. He is the self-described “Elvis” of televangelists. He has almost 6 million followers and tweets about his bland TV show Khawater (“Thoughts”). In a 2009 piece about him, the New York Times said, “(He) effortlessly mixes deep religious commitment with hip, playful humor.”
“Like you call the Kardashians your Xanax . . .” Adham texted.
“And . . . ?”
“That’s how I use Khawater!”
Shugairi claims he is interested in spreading the ideas of da’wa and jihad al-nafs (“struggle with the self”). The Islam of Khawater is sugar-coated. Lying as comfortably as Trump, Shugairi says he is the “only” nonsectarian Muslim.
These Twitter sheikhs are influential state actors. For cultural cues, Muslims, especially Arabs, have always looked toward India’s Bollywood and the music, cinema, and culture of Egypt. For religious cues, they sadly emulate their Wahhabi clerics. The Saudi Project of the export of its Wahhabism is clearly bigger than its oil exports.
In comparison, Egypt, with its relatively low Twitter population, produces modern Islamic leaders like Islam Behery, whom Egypt’s newest dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, sentenced to one year in prison in 2015 for “contempt of religion.” Behery’s TV show was cancelled but not his voice. He was released in six months and said, sarcastically, “Many thanks to President Sisi and his religious revolution . . . I am thankful for freedom of expression in Egypt.” He remains an open critic of many hadith quoted in Sahih Bukhari among much else that needs to change in Islam. A Behery in Saudi would be sentenced to death, probably by the preferred public beheading.
By 2013 I had started taking Daesh very seriously. It made sense that my time in Saudi Arabia had a sense of premonition, of the coming plague. Muslims like me tuned in to all the chatter on the Arab, Persian, and Urdu social webs. I perused the sleek issue of Dabiq magazine. Its cover showed Shia mourners at Karbala. The title said, “The Rafidah: From Ibn Saba’ to the Dajjal.” That title made perfect sense with the accompanying picture. Karbala in Iraq is the second-holiest city for Shia, the scene of the momentous Battle of Karbala. It claimed the life of Shia Islam’s most revered imam, Husayn. It’s always been a Sunni target. The pejorative Rafidah (for Shia) are enemies for Daesh and Wahhabi alike. Ibn Saba is the name of a seventh-century Yemeni Jewish convert to Islam, and Dajjal is the Antichrist.
There is historic logic to Dabiq, the Daesh magazine title. Dabiq is a humble little town in the north of Syria. Most maps don’t include it and Daesh is close to losing it, and thus the need for a Rumiyah to eventually replace Dabiq. Some Wahhabi eschatology believes that this will be the location of the final “end of days” battle between “forces of Islam” and the “forces of ‘Rome.’” Daesh claims Quranic validity to this obscure if real mention and Rome for them represents the “armies of Christianity and America.” Page one warns the rag will “also contain photo reports, current events, and informative articles on matters relating to the Islamic State.”
These barbarians are masters at using the social web, and also graphic design, cinematography, typesetting, video editing, and photography. Final Cut Pro, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and Google Docs are probably used, too. Dabiq editors and content producers could be sitting anywhere in the world, even America, using free IP address–changing apps like TunnelBear.
With perilous economic indicators, the endless flow of fully state-funded Saudi students to American schools has ebbed. In addition, their monarchy has not changed its habits. In 2015, the usual Saud gravestone annihilators did a hypocritical about-face and remodeled the grave of ibn Wahhab in Diriyah, a suburb of Riyadh, now a tiny Muslim Disneyland with three museums, of which one was solely dedicated to Wahhab. These paragons of no-shirk virtue were hoping no one would notice. Adham sent me pictures. To me it looked like a theme park of terrorism.
At this point, 90 percent or more of Islamic history has been bulldozed. Because it was yet another construction site in dug-up, crane-filled Mecca, I didn’t realize I had witnessed the aftermath of the destruction of the home of an important Sahaba (companion) of the Prophet called Abu Bakr, reduced to rubble for a new Hilton hotel—allegedly the world’s largest hotel. More destruction. The bill will be $3.5 billion. Anything that is antediluvian is destructible in Wahhabi-sanctioned bin Laden hands.
This Hilton was going to be called the Abraj Kudai, not far from the Abraj al-Bayt with its Starbucks where I once prayed and hung out. Paris Hilton had joined the nouveau riche melee, opening a store in Mecca Mall, which she had tweeted a picture of, saying, “Loving my beautiful new store that just opened at Mecca Mall in Saudi Arabia!”
Cranes busily sifting centuries of sand, oblivious to what might lie beneath, had filled the site even when I was there. Rumors had it that the Saudis were commissioning 10,000 rooms, a helipad, many malls, and more than fifty restaurants. It would include twelve towers, “royal suites,” a “convention center,” and “prayer rooms.” The bin Ladens of 2016 had gained even more power. They still held the contracts for the continuing $21 billion expansion of the Masjid al-Haram, the “Haramain” high-speed rail-rink, which was open in Saudi-style apartheid only to Arab citizens of the Gulf Cooperation Council in 2011, and the contract for the “world’s tallest building,” the other Kingdom Tower in Jeddah.
The vulgar excess of the Al Saud has always been transformed into reality by the bin Ladens.
Adham explained a new malaise, “Waithood,” often also a hashtag. Getting wives was impossible. Parents demanded larger mehr (dowry) for their educated daughters. More women than men have been abroad to get their hard-fought degrees. Costs of weddings and new homes are astronomical.
“I just wish you could have gotten out of Mecca and Medina,” Adham said, adding, “You would find so much more material here in Jeddah. I could have introduced you to all the angry, young, and broke Saudis you want—tayyib as many! And they love to talk and tweet all the fucking time. There’s even a couple of cool graffiti guys. We have our own Banksy of Jeddah! Have you seen the ‘No Woman, No Drive’ video?”
“What was I to do?” I replied. “They took our passports away.”
“Can we have two tickets for Jihad please?”
Two older men were at the ticket booth of the IFC Cinema in New York’s West Village. My film A Jihad for Love played to usually packed houses for five weeks at this movie theater in the summer of 2008. In the late afternoons, I would often hang out around the box office to see how many people were there for the film. I was overjoyed when audience members said just “Jihad” while buying tickets. By putting jihad and love together, had we made a dent in Islamophobia? Even a little bit mattered.
I was taking away the horror of jihad’s other Islamic definition when I answered journalists everywhere, “In the Quran, jihad is understood as a struggle with the self in a path towards God.” My film company was called Halal Films, because in my deepest self, I believe Muhammad would approve of what I had done. And halal literally meant permissible, the opposite of haram (if it was being used and pronounced as “forbidden”). Years later I would call the film company for A Sinner in Mecca Haram Films, using the word with its other (more important) meaning, “noble sanctuary.”
At the end of Jihad, Zahir, the gay imam, conducted a PowerPoint workshop for about fifteen “straight,” “devout,” Muslim social workers in Cape Town. Debating Quranic semantics, they were mere drops in Islam’s vast oceans of “homophobia.” His solution to what I call the “problem of homosexuality” was ijtihad, and he got the last word in A Jihad for Love. I have now come to disagree with his logic.
Knowing what I know now, I would also not dismiss jihad so easily, and I would not say “in the Quran” but “in Islamic exegesis.” I started to study my religion with adult vigor only in the mid-nineties. I began with what would become a heavily dog-eared copy of Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Quran, full of marginalia in my bad cursive. It traveled with me to KSA. Most Muslims I knew then would say jihad was a Quranic calling to strive as a better Muslim. But the other jihad, only to be used in self-defense, does exist both in and out of context. As Muslims, it is our responsibility to acknowledge both kinds. Quranically, violent jihad is often the last option. But the Quran sometimes seems to sit on the precarious wall between an offensive vs. defensive jihad.
If a Daesh terrorist sat across from me, I would use the verse below. The problem is that he could find one for his argument, too. Al-Hajj (“The Hajj”) 22:78 partly says:
And strive in His cause as ye ought to strive (with sincerity and under discipline). He has chosen you, and has imposed no difficulties on you in religion; it is the cult of your father Ibrahim. It is He Who has named you Muslims, both before and in this (Revelation).
The Arabic word jihad as “strive in His cause” subsumes striving in the way of God entirely in this chapter above. I know it is dangerous to parse the Quran. But if Daesh and backward imams worldwide are doing it, so can we.
In Ayah 39 of the same chapter, God gave the Sahaba, then refugees to Yathrib (Medina), permission to fight back. This, again, for some scholars is a nod toward the pacifism they claim is inherent in the Quran. War is sanctioned only in self-defense, they say, quoting 22:39: “To those against whom war is made, permission is given (to fight), because they are wronged and verily, Allah is most powerful for their aid.”
Many say that the Quran revealed the importance of this principle to Muhammad. Surah 3, Ayah 159 (Al Imran, “the Family of Imran”) says:
It is part of the Mercy of Allah that you dealt gently with them; Had you been severe or harsh-hearted, they would have broken away from you: so pass over (their faults), and ask for (Allah’s) forgiveness for them; and consult them in affairs (of moment).
The spoils of war in seventh-century Arabia must have included noncombatants, women, and children, and the Quran was encouraging dealing with them “gently.” POWs in Vietnam, the Second World War, and even Iraq have never been dealt with gently.
Was the Quran the best defense for itself? Yes, except for a few instances where it contradicts itself.
The Quran I had loved today faces grave challenges. Islam apologists (usually Muslims raised in the West) come equipped with hastily crammed parts of the Wikipedia canon of Islam. They love to “quote” a cable-ready fragment from a parsed 2:256 (Al Baqarah, “The Cow”) verse. I, too, have used it.
“There is no compulsion in matters of faith, says the Quran,” they quote, smiling benignly. This is the kind of “good Muslim” cable likes to parade. Are we as Muslims living in the West guilty of not practicing Quranic exegesis? Unfortunately true. In addition, our best efforts are drowned out by the din of Islamophobia.
Some Islamophobes have done their homework. They point to more than 100 verses in the Quran that they claim sanction violence. We need to find a larger number and demolish their arguments verse by verse. Has the violence inherent in all monotheisms been studied and compared fairly? It has. But the academy of the West speaks to no one in Deoband, for example.
Let’s try exegesis in verses 190 to 193 of the same second chapter.
2:190 says, “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.”
2:191 says, “And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have Turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith.”
2:192 says, “But if they cease, Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.”
2:193 says, “And fight them on until there is no more Tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah. But if they cease, let there be no hostility except to those who practice oppression.”
This part of the Quran seems to make clear that if there is a fight at all, it should be against the aggressors. A Medinan verse, it must surely allude to a period after Muhammad’s Hijra forced by the Quraysh who had devised his gruesome assassination. There is an emphasis on not fighting unless attacked. The same Ayah 191 that uses “slay” as a verb also says, “Tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter.”
“Those who suppress faith,” also in Ayah 191, refers to the Quraysh and other Bedouin tribes Muhammad had yet to convert, not Jews and Christians, as is wrongfully interpreted. The Quran, Islamophobes need to be told, goes to great lengths to command kinship with the Ahl al-Kitab (“The People of the Book”), Jews and Christians.
This messy but poetic book has some answers, not all. But the contradictions of the book and its canon need to be used in its favor. An ideal world would be a Saudi-free curriculum at every school where Muslims learn.
Does Islam have a problem with violence, carried out in its name, using as justification verses from its book, the Quran? Any reasonable Muslim (and I hope I am one) would answer yes.
It seemed I had grown up with a faith of fear. Mecca killed my fear of faith. Post-Hajj I feel a blessing always in propinquity. I was glad that my Hajj was not a product of mere taqlid, or blind following. It was born from a centuries-old, innate Muslim thirst for knowledge. And perhaps it was my solitary attempt to become a mujtahid, even if to a very small extent.
In addition, my thesis that poverty and illiteracy are Islam’s biggest problems has never been stronger. I am even able to admit that most Muslims I grew up with would not understand most of this book’s content. Europe is once again home to massacres of the innocents. The carnage in Paris was just five days old, and this particular film festival that had invited me asked if they should go ahead with the screenings. When I said yes, they added two. Sold out every time and long debates afterward.
“Is this a battle of civilizations?” asked a reporter from Le Monde.
I told him I couldn’t answer him with a soundbite, adding, “But what I can say to you is that I am not willing to make statements like ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ because they are reductive.”
“So you are saying Islam is not a religion of peace?” he persisted.
“I never said that. You are twisting my words. I said the time to make such reductive statements has run out.” I was wearing a “Je Suis Paris” T-shirt, numbers of which were probably being hastily manufactured in Bangladeshi or Chinese sweatshops and sent by shiploads to the West. I wore it thinking it protected me from xenophobia, which is now rampant in contemporary Europe.
I was protecting myself, in my own little way. It was a Friday and I found a dingy little basement mosque to go and perform Zuhr prayers. It was almost empty. I had never been surrounded by fewer than 150 people at any Jummah I ever attended. Did the Daesh suicide bombers realize that they had launched a full on attack on Islam as well? Was this even an organization, or was it open season for any psychopath to find guns, commit massacres, and invoke “ISIS”? Paris disturbed me deeply. It was so hard to buy guns in Europe. Mass murder was gun-obsessed America’s expertise.
I was traveling to many EU nations (including what was then pre-Brexit UK) with my film, A Sinner in Mecca. Traveling in and out of the US with frequency to Europe, I was detained by US Customs more than once, agents even recalling my checked bags to examine every article of underwear I possessed. I felt violated. Was I racially or religiously profiled? Probably both. Did my new status as a US citizen make me feel safer? Not for a minute.
Fear of Muslim refugees was rampant. At one film screening in Copenhagen, an older gentleman showed up with a sheaf of papers. He had waited to talk to me, so we sat down for a coffee. He waved printouts from a website I knew well called religionofpeace.com. It was an extreme right-wing attempt at molding Islam the way one group saw it: the single biggest threat to humanity. The Islamophobic “David Horowitz Freedom Center” had been incredibly smart to grab the name while it was still available. Why would Islam and peace connect, anyway? Islam’s apologists literally fed this website’s raison d’être.
I decided to go to a section of his sheaf, “What would Muhammad do?” I took it from him and said, “OK, let’s try to look at it reasonably. It says Muhammad would have sex with a nine-year-old girl, behead people, require women to cover their faces, own slaves, marry his daughter-in-law, approve of prostitution, gluttonize, recommend wife-beating, beat his own wife, kill prisoners of war, advocate suicide attacks, tell sick people to cure themselves by drinking camel urine, beat children for not praying, have boys as young as thirteen beheaded, have eleven wives at one time, approve of sex with children, lie, enslave women and children, stone adulterers to death, torture someone out of greed, steal, kill someone for insulting him, extort money from religious minorities, keep women as sex slaves, force conversions to Islam, encourage acts of terror, kill a woman, capture and rape a woman, and encourage the rape of women in front of their husbands! Wow, what a long list!” I said, knowing where I needed to go with him. I asked him if he considered the majority of humanity as reasonable human beings. He replied yes.
“OK, so now let’s take Islam. Did you know there are 1.7 billion Muslims? Almost a quarter of humanity is Muslim.” He knew.
“OK, let’s look a little further into this religion. It has been there for fourteen centuries. It created many worldly empires. It did so much for mathematics. It has always had intellect, arts, poetry, architectural wonder, and so much more.” He grudgingly agreed.
I said I wished I had more time but ended by saying, “Let us be in a situation where we take a majority of these contemporary 1.7 billion Muslims as reasonable human beings. If you consider that their faith has survived so long and given so much to the world, then, my friend, nothing on this irrational site would make any sense.” I named a few basic books I remembered and asked him to read them instead. I even said he should read Islam For Dummies. In him, I had one more reason to believe that future scholars of Islam could rightly claim that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were a second Islamic jahiliyah. Meanwhile, “Eurabia” fears in this continent were being stoked with renewed vigor. Xenophobia was being normalized. A hijabi woman (now almost the norm in some cities) was becoming a symbol of the oppression, violence, and darkness of Islam. Mere ijtihad was not going to solve this intractable problem.
A film festival in Prague gave me a “guide” for the day. As we strolled the beautifully preserved streets of this ancient capital, she made her feelings clear.
“I saw your film and you are very brave, so don’t get me wrong,” she said, adding, “We don’t want those refugees here. The Czech Republic is a very small country. We need to preserve our values and our social structure.” Almost immediately we came across graffiti that said, “Who wants to destroy Europe?” I had seen the very same in German scrawled on a Vienna wall.
I pointed at the graffiti and said gently, even though I was seething inside, “When the poor, the disenfranchised, the homeless, the hungry are literally washing up on the shores of Europe, some dying instantly, is it not the responsibility of the ‘civilized’ world to look after them?”
Her answer to that was, “Why don’t the rich Saudis or the rich Gulf countries take them in? Why should it be us?”
Everywhere I went from Warsaw to Stockholm to Vienna, I seemed to be thrust into the uncomfortable position of speaking for the refugees just because I was Muslim. In hindsight, it is the product of the real xenophobia that walks the streets of the endangered, post-Brexit continent. In these small countries live eerie signs, from right-wing election-winning politicians to increasing numbers of hijab-embracing women. The chauvinistic right has longed for this time. I was exhausted being a Muslim on display, yet I did Q&A after Q&A for my film.
“Do you think your film will promote Islamophobia?”
“How can you defend Islam when all these Muslim refugees bring intolerance and homophobia with them?”
On the latter, I cannot be duplicitous: The majority of Muslims in Europe, either settled or coming in, are presumably homophobic.
“What will happen to our values of freedom, of peace, of equality?” asked another.
I answered, “Well, the Fifth Republic right here in the heart of Western Civilization said it best. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Keep that close to your heart and maybe you will know what to do when a downtrodden refugee shows up at your doorstep.”
Daesh “soldiers” have no Quran-study time. They hang at a McDonald’s drive-through of Islam, where they pick and choose—an affront to fourteen centuries of learning. I was not surprised when I read reports that copies of Islam For Dummies was found in possessions belonging to the bombers in Paris and Brussels. For the ignorant, unemployed, semi-literate “radicals” of this imaginary caliphate, books such as these help cram basics like, “How do Muslims pray?” Replacing pray with prey, in this case, would induce the black humor Adham and I share. On their website, the Dummies people say, “Islam For Dummies helps you build bridges of understanding between you and your neighbors in the global village.” Destroying rather than building bridges is what Daesh clearly prefer. And their “global village” would be the delusory caliphate.
Their “Emir” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head-honcho of horror, notably said:
Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State is spearheading it. It is the war of Muslims against infidels. Muslims, go to war everywhere. It is the duty of every Muslim.
Even Baghdadi invoked the specious Islam-apologist argument! Any lone ranger can claim allegiance to Daesh with the latter only learning about a new carnage via the media. In addition, unlike in Europe, Daesh recruitment in fortress America protected by the Atlantic has been sparse at best. The pattern is clear. Islam is being invoked to kill innocents. The perpetrators usually possess EU passports and were born and bred in Europe. I used to joke with friends that the UK is now Englandistan. But the time for jokes is over. A Wahhabi extremist like Anjem Choudary wants sharia in the UK, where he was born and raised. He openly praises Daesh. America has its own version in Maryland-based “Imam” Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa.
Men like these are the products of post-colonial mass migrations, where their poor parents or grandparents reliably fled to the countries that had once ruled them—not a historic novelty. They got what are now EU or British passports but little else. Decades of state-sanctioned disenfranchisement followed. Naked and systemic racism prowled the streets in Western Europe where the children of these immigrants went to schools, never colleges, and then grew up with no access to jobs. The glass ceiling in Europe is much lower than in the UK, where the mega-city of London elected a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. But the England that elected Khan also has extremist South Asian Muslim voices like Choudary. Majority atheism was Europe’s primary religion for decades. But ironically that very same Europe created a few young Muslims ready to blow themselves up in the name of Daesh. Many never got to meet the (allegedly killed) Baghdadi or had even been outside Europe. Like Trump, Baghdadi needs no recruiters.
Daesh is more than happy to be linked to any terrorist attack. Not being state actors, they behave like the famous hacktivist collective that no government has yet been able to defeat.
Daesh is the Anonymous of Islam.
Islam’s war against itself isn’t unusual in the history of the religion. But twenty-first-century Islam doesn’t possess its historical correctives. It is too late to turn the clock back on worldwide Wahhabi indoctrination.
Some Western scholars have (rightfully) said that combat is ordered only against those who are attacking or killing innocent Muslims or fighting against a Muslim state. Do they know “radical Islamic extremists” use the same argument? The West declared war on Muslim lands like Afghanistan and then Iraq, and therefore “combat” against these “aggressors” is justified, Quranically. Daesh recruitment grows exponentially each time Trump says he won’t let Muslims into America.
In classical and Quranic Arabic, the word fitna was used to denote trial and affliction. As is common with the many differences between classical and colloquial Arabic, in modern times today, depending on context, the word can mean charm and enchantment. I am interested in its use as a Quranic principle, and have often used it in this book to mean a state of “strife” or “chaos” that is feared by modern-day Arab power structures and invoked often by them, when challenged by people power.
In a very different time (2008), a Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, got worldwide fame with a poorly produced anti-Islam video called Fitna. There was precedent. In 2004, a little-known Dutch filmmaker named Theo Van Gogh and his subject, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had done similar Islam-bashing with their video Submission. Van Gogh was savagely murdered and his subject gained instant stardom in the US, writing several books. It was said that she, labeled an infidel, became a paid pawn of the right-wing in the US. To me, the video was distasteful because verses of the Quran were written all over Hirsi’s naked body. Cinematically like the former, it offered no particular vision and rudimentary filmic skills.
In 2005, a Danish newspaper published twelve editorial cartoons mocking the Prophet, one even depicting him with a bomb in his turban. I saw those again as a deliberate attempt to create controversy and stoke anger. Islamic aniconism was not a novelty. It had been known for centuries. Charlie Hebdo, whose consequences I personally view as a carnage, was using familiar European anti-Muslim provocation. The aftermath was savage, because Daesh is. It is interesting that the most visible “attacks” for “Islam” happened in Europe. An enormous chunk of the Muslim world was rightfully fearful because riots and savage murder could not be condoned. But the idea of a “backward” religion, a trope used against Islam repeatedly, was back in fashion. These “attacks” are seen as “war” in the world of Daesh. Only in these instances do they avoid universal condemnation. But is modern Islam in an almost ceaseless struggle with itself in addition to fitna? Unfortunately, that is true. But to make simplistic statements like “Islam is several centuries behind” reveals a problematic Orientalist mindset. Because historically Islam was always ahead.
Unlike the “glorious” Islamic history of wealth—be it material, physical, or intellectual—today reliable figures are often thrown around at economic conferences saying that half of the world’s poor are Muslim. Muslims form a quarter of humanity, and a sizeable majority live in abject poverty. The most poverty-stricken countries on the planet include Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Mozambique, and, importantly, India. So eight of the poorest nations in the world include seven with Muslim majorities. The numbers are really mind-boggling and get worse. I highlight India because by 2050, it will have the world’s largest Muslim population and is now at number three. The right-wing Hindutva brigade that rules India today often blames Muslim-poverty statistics similar to these as the reason that “Islam is bringing India down.” What will really happen in 2050 when India has the world’s highest number of Muslims—who will rule whom?
Almost 800 million of the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims are illiterate. More than six in ten cannot read. For the Christian West, literacy is at 78 percent.
In 2009, a very pessimistic assessment of the usually self-satisfied Arabs was offered by the UN’s Arab Development Report:
• Half of Arab women cannot read;
• One in five Arabs live on less than $2 per day;
• Only 1 percent of the Arab population has a personal computer, and only half of 1 percent use the Internet;
• Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed, and this number could double by 2010;
• The average growth rate of the per capita income during the preceding 20 years in the Arab world was only one-half of 1 percent per annum, worse than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa.
Statistics can be boring. But they are important. I had always believed that poverty and illiteracy are directly proportional. These statistics are proof. Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous and desperately poor nation, is evidence. More than a quarter of almost 82 million Egyptians live in abject poverty. And they were never busy tweeting or updating their statuses on Facebook. They were simply trying to put food on the table. While mobile phone penetration was almost at 100 percent, the vast majority of those phones were not smart and were used only for calls. Only forty-four out of 100 Egyptians even know how to use the Internet or have any access to it. The majority of Muslims live in the once undivided but now three different countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India—in other words, the Indian subcontinent has the world’s largest Muslim population. And these three countries have enormously high rates of poverty and illiteracy. Who are the victims of this twin scourge? Muslims. In short, the luxurious hyper-connected Saudis are a rare exception to the average and majority Muslim “condition.”
Six in ten Muslims not being able to read? Are they unknowingly disobeying the call to intellect at the heart of Islam? Are they so wretchedly poor that they literally have no choice? Where is the FDR-like figure for Muslims who could lift an entire generation out of poverty? Do Muslims have a right to call out for a pan-Islamic leader who could unite them under Islam’s original promises, which include basic dignity and literacy (and also available jobs)?
Poverty and illiteracy, both al-Qaeda and Daesh and many before them had found, were ideal and potent breeding grounds for terror. Islam doesn’t need an ijtihad that a quarter of humanity would agree to in this time of ignorance. What it needs are schools and jobs to counter the perverted rhetoric espoused every Friday in millions of mosques, that are not in the West. Muslims around the world also need to teach and learn from their very own “millennials,” an enormous, ever-growing demographic.
Much happened during the year of A Sinner in Mecca’s European tour. The most important was the savagery of the 2015 Paris carnage. Soon after, I took a Thalys train from Amsterdam to Brussels. I was going all the way because two of the national Belgian TV networks needed a “Muslim of the moment” to explain the often inexplicable to their Dutch, French, and German (Flemish) audiences.
For the first TV interview, the anchor asked me how the Hajj changed me.
“How to deal with claustrophobia,” I said, laughing. “But more seriously it was a life-transforming journey because in Mecca I killed the part of me that questioned whether Islam would accept me. In its place was the certainty that it was up to me to accept Islam.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“Yes, with confidence and on my own terms. Not on the terms of the equally dangerous House of Saud and Daesh.”
“Who speaks for Muslims?”
“They speak for themselves. 99.9 percent of Muslims,” I told the anchor who was trying to corner me, “are just like you and me. Decent, hard-working people trying to make their lives work, to feed their families.” I managed to engage him in a discussion about how Europe really needed to win the ideological battle with Wahhabi Islam. He asked me to stay “after the break.”
By now I had done a lot of European press in small European countries. The bloodbath in Brussels was still a few months away, but the city was in complete shutdown because the alleged mastermind of the Paris massacres, Salah Abdelslam, whom his lawyer later famously called an empty ashtray and asshole, had allegedly been found in this city, the home of the ineffectual bureaucracies of the European Union.
I had disembarked into a station with soldiers and canines everywhere. When I got to my hotel a battle tank stood at its entrance. I told them that I was an American filmmaker who had been invited for an interview by a major broadcaster. They searched my backpack and ran some kind of quick background check on my passport. The latter seemed silly because the Belgians and the EU in general were notorious for not sharing intelligence. I asked one of the soldiers if I could have a cigarette before checking in. He turned out to be a fellow smoker and we shared my lighter. Here it was in action: the International League of Nonviolent Smokers, helping each other, as always. Inside, the lone receptionist looked frightened and refused to check me in. The Belgian producer had to be called and thankfully she answered her mobile. I was in.
Later that night, a taxi arrived to drive me to the second TV studio through what I had expected to be a desolate city but was now mired in traffic created by escapee panicked citizens probably expecting a Paris-style terrorist attack. Luckily for them the next day would be off. My Moroccan cab driver complained about Uber. I asked him if he was racially or religiously profiled in “these days.”
“What’s new about that? That’s always been true,” he said. He asked me what film I was promoting. I dared not tell him the title.
“Oh, it’s a documentary about the Hajj,” is what came out of my mouth, and he answered with the expected, “Alhamdulillah.”
The second TV anchor was obsequious, and expectedly I was asked to opine about the refugees and then Abdelslam. I dutifully did. For this interview, I felt I managed a small victory by saying, “To make illogical statements like Islam is the religion of peace only perpetrates a falsehood. Yes, at least 99 percent of the world’s Muslims are not terrorists. But it’s that 1 percent or less that we should have saved from what is ultimately Saudi dogma. We didn’t. And last I checked Obama and King Salman were still BFFs.”
I was hungry that night and the abandoned hotel had no room service or chefs. I walked outside for a cigarette. Thankfully it was the same soldier on duty.
I told him how during previous trips to Brussels I had always “looked for my own people.” I described how I had once made my way from Maelbeek metro station to the neighborhood of Molenbeek during Ramadan. They say today that Brussels’ “Muslim problem” lives in the suburb of Molenbeek, which is 41 percent Muslim. As its notoriety spread, the New York Times even called the neighborhood “The Islamic State of Molenbeek.”
I told the soldier about one old pre-terror Ramadan trip. The neighborhood was alive with festivity, lights, and lanterns, shops selling all kinds of Ramadan goodies, and everywhere the smells of Indian and Pakistani spices. Everyone was out and about that night, I told him, because it was iftaar (breaking of the fast) time.
“I can even smell those wonderful smells,” I said.
“I’ve been there during Ramadan too,” he said. “It has the best shawarma.”
Sharing a cigarette with this armed soldier, standing next to a battle tank, and learning he appreciated Molenbeek’s shawarma, felt oddly comforting.
Within a few months every single reporter, on the ISIS/IS/ISIL/Daesh beat in the world would learn how to correctly pronounce both Molenbeek and Maelbeek.
Exactly how the West learned to spell, pronounce, and find Afghanistan on a map after a sunny, cloudless September morning in what now seems like a faraway time.