Idolator Islam
Ali Eteraz
I’m not interested in Muhammad who is a Prophet; or Muhammad who is a messenger; or Muhammad who is anything other than a man. I am interested in his mere humanity. Not his nine-wife-satisfying virility, nor his outerworldly beauty, nor his paradise-like-breath. His mere humanity means I am interested in his inadequacies. This means that I am interested in his psychology; in his insecurity; in his weakness; his over-compensations; his sorrow; his loss; his loneliness and, yes, his virulence; and, all in all, like I said — I am interested in Muhammad, the man.
Before I can accept the man, however, I have to know the child. Each and every one of us, is only the adult we began to come as children. Yet, with Muhammad we not permitted ourselves such a knowing. I love a woman not only for the being she is today, but for the being she, as a child, said she one day wanted to be. If you clamor that I should love Muhammad, then I clamor that I shall have to become intimate with him, will have to sketch portraits of him. Otherwise, it cannot be love. If you should be opposed to this, then do not ask me to love. If you simply do not accept my way of loving, then you simply don’t know love.
He was once an infant — who came fatherless into the world. He was once a child — who lost his mother at six. He was once a youth — who lost his dear grandfather at twelve. He was once an adolescent — who lost his guardian uncle to illness. In other words, Muhammad, long before he was a man, was alone. What? Protestation, again? Either you do not wish me to know his heart, or you do not know what loneliness can be. Which is it? Either way, without sorrow, there is no Muhammad. To know how Qurans and Shariah spilled from him, we must know how death ran after him. To know how he painted an altogether Eternal God on an Eternal Kursi, we must recognize that in every postulation of permanence, the backdrop is the feeling of longing. It has been the orphans, the fatherless, the motherless, the clanless, the lonely, who have left to mankind everything that claims to be eternal, whether it be law or word or image or god. Perhaps such children, through the gravity of their loss, have no choice but to create home in ways other than those of the rest of man. Name me a child who did not grow up on the fringes of loneliness and left for us some kind of idol, some kind of art, some kind of god. You show me one such child, and I will call him forgotten.
Like Jesus, who grew up fatherless in a society of patriarchs, Muhammad grew up with a lack — clanless in a society of tribes. Usually a man such as Jesus would have to live a life of defending his very humanity as a consequence of the circumstances surrounding his birth. Instead, he went after all those — be they familial or political — who were cruel to their sons. He made what he lacked the object of his obsession. So, with Muhammad. Where he was solitary, an exile from the Qureish, he made an Ummah, a brotherhood greater than all tribes. Where he longed for a family, he indulged in a family-making of the grandest proportion. To bring in by way of marriage — since the ways of blood-relations were absent — everything from mothers, to sisters, to cousins, to nieces, and, of course, lovers. All of them were to him different elements of a greater family, though he called them “wife.” Islam, it turns out, is simply that, which, as with Jesus, gave a social exile a place to belong. Is it, then, any wonder that Christianity and Islam have been the world’s great missionary faiths? Judaism and Buddhism have always been far more strict with who is let in, and it makes sense, as they were handed down by princes, men who had great followings.
Why then, instead of being receptive to the notion of Muhammad’s spiritual makeup, have we made him into some kind of austere caricature of himself? A cold, unfeeling man. As if being a man means being dispassionate. Rest assured, it is us who made Wurther into a Warrior. Before the West called him Mahound we were calling him Invader. We were the ones who spoke of the “conquest” of Mecca. We who talked so disparagingly of “the pagans” that Muhammad overcame. We who attributed stoning to him; attributed to him battle-martyrdom; we, who, even when he went to heaven, sent him upon a winged stallion, as if it takes a cavalry charge to be near God. These are descriptions the belivers posited. This is not Orientalism. This was long before Edward Said. Long before the Crusades. It was us — you and I — who celebrated Muhammad on the basis of his virility instead of humility. You and I who emphasized his political leadership, without reminding ourselves that he began with shepherding a flock of sheep. It was you and I who did not allow Muhammad to remain a man. We wanted him to be able to predict the falls of Rome, Constantinople, and the coming of the anti-Christ — even the occurrences (the details) in the Day of Judgment. We wanted all this because we were weak. We could not accept that we followed the suggestions of a man who fought not pagans but loneliness. We could not accept when he was like us — because we could not accept ourselves. So we twisted him. We gave him foresight as if he were a soothsayer; we gave him Hercules’ strength; Don Juan’s charisma. We gave him the all-seeing eye of God. We went so far as to say that on the Day of Judgment, Muhammad would rise to become greater than God. Don’t believe me? It was you and I who said that when God condemns, Muhammad saves.
Muhammad was only a man who left a book for posterity. Yet now Muhammad is an idol. And idol that is exclusively maintained by the Muslim. In fact, as recent events demonstrate, we do not allow anyone else the permission to idolatorize him. Just us.
Ghalib warned us not to lift the covers off the Kaba lest we might find an idol. I peeked. I found the idol was called Muhammad.
Ali Eteraz is the author of the prose work, Children of Dust, forthcoming on October 13 with HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins.