Stories Of New Muslims

7.Mr. Nuh Keller

 

What follows is a personal account of a scholar I
have been writing to for over a year and had the blessing of meeting when I
invited him to do a lecture tour around England. He is quite unique in that he
seems to be one of the few reverts/converts to have achieved Islamic
scholarship in the fullest sense of the word in traditional and orthodox Islam,
having studied Shafi'i and Hanafi Jurisprudence (fiqh) and tenents of faith
(`aqidah). I hope it will serve as an inspiration to those who have moved
closer to Islam but have not yet taken the Shahadah, and as a reassurance to those that have taken the Shahadah but are trying to find their feet in the
beautiful ocean of Islam, and also as a reminder and confirmation to those of
us who were blessed with being born into Muslim families, Amin.

Mas`ud Ahmed Khan

 

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern
United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The
Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if
anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and
especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to
the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.
One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that
occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to
laymen that the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke
about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they
seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the
human soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the
changes, week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the
language from Latin to English, finally bringing in guitars and folk music.
Priests explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for
relevance left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the
first place.

A second reason was a
number of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no
one in the history of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to
explain in a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at
least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who
ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth;
and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a
considerably minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just
one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end,
would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other
two were always stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be
in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the
way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it
plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every
particular, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite
on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever
really believed, in childhood or later.

Another
point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and bonds in the
hereafter it called indulgences. Do such and such and so-and-so many years will
be remitted from your sentence in purgatory that had seemed so false to Martin
Luther at the outset of the Reformation. I also remember a
desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order of a book that could
furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition,
but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and devoid of a coherent
thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base one's life upon it. Only
later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants
by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and
downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplaying it all, except the snippets
mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that
could not be read as an integral whole.

Moreover, when I went
to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially the
New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern
hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary
theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of The Problem of the Historical
Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this
century. A textual critic who was a master of the original languages and had
spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German
theologian Rudolph Bultmann that without a doubt it is true to say that the
dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of
Christ as he actually lived it could not be reconstructed from the New
Testament with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of
Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I reasoned, what was left
for its enemies to say? And what then remained of the Bible except to
acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures
projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as
to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like
Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later
accretions to the New Testament there was something called the historical Jesus
and his message, how could the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it,
should it be found?

I studied philosophy at
the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have
the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these
questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that
Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then embarked on a search that is
perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in the West, a quest for meaning in
a meaningless world. I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the
philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a
philosophy.

I read the essays of
the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of
the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all
passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence remained.
I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also
drew attention to the fact that a person won’t to repudiate in later years what
he fervently espouses in the heat of youth. With a prescient wish to find the
Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism
that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read
the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich
Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of
mankind with brilliant philological and psychological arguments that ended in
accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science
in particular, of being so inherently determined and mediated by concepts
inherited from the language of morality that in their present form they could
never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immunological value against
total skepticism, Nietzsches works explained why the West was post-Christian,
and accurately predicted the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century,
debunking the myth that science could function as a moral replacement for the
now dead religion.

At a personal level,
his tirades against Christianity, particularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave
me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a
small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as
the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deity suicide on the cross) from
essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to
be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and
defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man
accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or punishment. It
was during this time that I read an early translation of the Koran which I
grudgingly admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it
presented these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought, there could not
be a more essential expression of religion. As a literary work, the
translation, perhaps it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile to its
subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for
its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire
to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from
school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it
happened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a
time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not
something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a
passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an
inauthentic way of being.

I carried something of
this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I
studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral judgments were reached
reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed
light on the question of meaninglessness, which was both a personal concern and
one of the central philosophical problems of our age.  According to some, scientific observation could only yield
description statements of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its
weight is two kilos, Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which
the functional was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments
the functional element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of
scientific observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was
logically meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that
reminded me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a
moral philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog.
For such a person, expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but
convention.

As Chicago was a more
expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found summer work on the
West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea proved a school in
its own right, one I was to return to for a space of eight seasons, for the
money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the power and greatness
of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of man. These things
lay before us like an immense book, but my fellow fishermen and I could only
discern the letters of it that were within our context: to catch as many fish
as possible within the specified time to sell to the tenders. Few knew how to
read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose like great
hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our bow one
minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next moment
reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring upwards towards the sky before
topping the next crest and starting down again.

Early in my career as a
deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul Sartres
"Being and Nothingness", in which he argued that phenomena only arose
for consciousness in the existential context of human projects, a theme that
recalled Marxs 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by man, meaning, for
example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his consciousness
hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for
example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a
forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain
only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on,
according to the instrumental relations involved in various human interests.
But the great natural events of the sea surrounding us seemed to defy, with
their stubborn, irreducible facticity, our uncomprehending attempts to come to
terms with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us
without making sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it
was true, would ask God help at such moments, but when we returned safely to
shore, we behaved like men who knew little of Him, as if those moments had been
a lapse into insanity, embarrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of
the lessons of the sea that in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps
even preponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him
were large, and he did not control them.

Sometimes a boat would
sink and men would die. I remember a fisherman from another boat who was
working near us one opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled
across the water as he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead,
stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later,
his boat overturned while fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and
drowned. I saw him only once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern
of his boat. The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the
towering sheer cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet,
the cold and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers
these made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed
to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an
occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season,
invariably the sole non-family member who worked with them, his loss saving
them the wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.

The captain of another
was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab
each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his
boat at the city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before.
The captain was presently indisposed in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had
been vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to
prove how tough he was. He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw
him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked
in his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from
just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels
of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof
windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he
communicated by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their
gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights
attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into
day. The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew
out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to
have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than a
season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say, a
lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made
in the Bering Sea in those years, before over fishing wiped out the crab.

At present, he was at
anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he came aboard to sit
and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times gazing
thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking at
each other sharply when something animated them, as the topic of what his
competitors thought of him. "They wonder why I have a few bucks", he
said. "Well I slept in my own home one night last year." He later had
his crew throw off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes flickering warily
over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of
smoke from the stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like physique, his endless
voyages after game and markets, reminded me of other predatory hunter-animals
of the sea. Such people, good at making money but heedless of any ultimate end
or purpose, made an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men
didn't need principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without
such principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being
more thorough, and technologically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale,
and with greater devastation than the animals we hunted.

These considerations
were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware
through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been
successful in the past at significantly influencing peoples morals and
preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there was little hope for it
to do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and
societies in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many
intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered
which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to
nihilism, the perspective that sees human civilizations as plants that grow out
of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a
time, and then dying away. Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among
them Emile Durkheim in his "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life",
or Sigmund Freud in his "Totem and Taboo", which discussed mankind as
if it were a patient and diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a
collective neurosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a
thorough scientific atheism, a sort of salvation through pure science.

On this subject, I
bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of "Knowledge and Human
Interests" by Jurgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as
pure science that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady
improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunderstanding
scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of
values, still less of interests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for
example, were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient,
profitable, or important. Habermas had been of a generation of German academics
who, during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country,
but insisted they were simply engaged in intellectual production, that they were
living in the realm of scholarship, and need not concern themselves with
whatever the state might choose to do with their research. The horrible
question mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi
atrocities became public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the
ideology of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was that the
nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer
tenable.

I began to reassess the
intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education
must produce higher human beings. But at the university, I found lab people
talking to each other about forging research data to secure funding for the
coming year; luminaries who wouldn't permit tape recorders at their lectures
for fear that competitors in the same field would go one step further with
their research and beat them to publication; professors envying with each other
in the length of their courses syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed
to associate with ordinary, unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with
in sophisticated academics as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at
fishermen who, after getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise
back and forth in front of the others to let them see how laden down in the
water they were, ostensibly looking for more fish; what could one say about the
Ph.D.s who behaved the same way about their books and articles? I felt that
their knowledge had not developed their persons,  that the secret of higher man did not lie in their
sophistication.

I wondered if I hadn't
gone down the road of philosophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked
my Christianity and provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the
big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was somehow connected I didn't know
whether as cause or effect to the fact that our intellectual tradition no
longer seemed to seriously comprehend itself. What were any of us, whether
philosophers, fishermen, garbage men, or kings, except bit players in a drama
we did not understand, diligently playing out our roles until our replacements
were sent, and we gave our last performance? But could one legitimately hope
for more than this? I read "Kojves Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel", in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate
in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able to answer any possible
question on the ethical implications of human actions. This made me consider
our own plight in the twentieth century, which could no longer answer a single
ethical question.

It was thus as if this
centuries unparalleled mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making
us things. I contrasted this with Hegels concept of the concrete in his "Phenomenology
of Mind". An example of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary
physical reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its
interconnection with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of
production that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic
standards that dictated its color and design, the systems of marketing and
distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical circumstances
that had brought about the readers literacy and taste; the cultural events that
had mediated its style and usage; in short, the bigger picture in which it was
articulated and had its being. For Hegel, the movement of philosophical
investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real.
He was therefore able to say that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose
object was the ultimately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an
irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our
culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider
humanity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.

At this juncture, I
read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
who believed that many of the problems of western man, especially those of the
environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion,
which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the natural world and
to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with
ever more effective technological styles of commercial exploitation that ruined
his world from without while leaving him increasingly empty within, because he
did not know why he existed or to what end he should act. I reflected that this
might be true as far as it went, but it begged the question as to the truth of
revealed religion. Everything on the face of the earth, all moral and religious
systems, were on the same plane, unless one could gain certainty that one of
them was from a higher source, the sole guarantee of the objectivity, the whole
force, of moral law.

Otherwise, one man’s
opinion was as good as another’s, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of
conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised
to the strong eating the weak.

I read other books on
Islam, and came across some passages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from
"That Which Delivers from Error" by the theologian and mystic
Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crises of questioning and doubt, realized that
beyond the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of
the earth from which illumination may be received, the very point to which my
philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegels terms, the Wise Man, in
the person of a divinely inspired messenger who alone had the authority to
answer questions of good and evil.

I also read A.J.
Arberrys translation "The Koran Interpreted", and I recalled my early
wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim
scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine
revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In
its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality, its uncanny way of anticipating
the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them; it was a
clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the
awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation of social and
economic justice among men.

I began to learn Arabic
at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of
success, decided to take a leave of absence to try to advance in the language
in a year of private study in Cairo. Too, a desire for new horizons drew me,
and after a third season of fishing, I went to the Middle East. In Egypt, I
found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure
monotheism upon its followers, which struck me as more profound than anything I
had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all
influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever
seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot
remember them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will
serve to illustrate the impressions made.

One was a man on the
side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him
praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in
front of him, but suddenly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting
to disturb him. As I watched a moment before going my way, I beheld a man
absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my
opinions about him or his religion. To my mind, there was something
magnificently detached about this, altogether strange for someone coming from
the West, where praying in public 
was virtually the only thing that remained obscene.

Another was a young boy
from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke
some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he
walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he
could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.

Another was a Yemeni
friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the Koran at my request to help
me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the chair where I used to sit
and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom to stack the books on the
floor. When I set the Koran by the others there, he silently stooped and picked
it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me because I knew he was not
religious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.

Another was a woman I
met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved road on the opposite side of
the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat shabbily clothed, and she was an
old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked up, and without a word
or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly that in my surprise I
dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried away. Because she
thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave me some money
without any expectation for it except what was between her and her God. This
act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed to have motivated
her but that.

Many other things
passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I
found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was
more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain
nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other
religions or even atheisms effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have
more than we did.

Christianity had its
good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with confusions, and I found
myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their fullest and most
perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from our early
catechism had been Why were you created? To which the correct answer was to
know, love, and serve God. When I reflected on those around me, I realized that
Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and understandable way to
practice this on a daily basis.

As for the inglorious
political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach
against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a natural order of
world ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of
history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been witnessed before in the
thorough going destruction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by
the Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the
steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of
destiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it
a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I
reflected, merely the turn of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic
crystallization of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.

When a friend in Cairo
one day asked me, Why don't you become a Muslim, I found that Allah had created
within me a desire to belong to this religion, which so enriches its followers,
from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial intellects. It is not through
an act of the mind or will that anyone becomes a Muslim, but rather through the
mercy of Allah, and this, in the final analysis, was what brought me to Islam
in Cairo in 1977.

"Is it not time
that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled to the Remembrance of
God and the Truth which He has sent down, and that they should not be as those
to whom the Book was given a foretime, and the term seemed over long to them,
so that their hearts have become hard, and many of them are ungodly? Know that
God revives the earth after it was dead. We have indeed made clear for you the
signs, that haply you will understand."  [Qur'an 57:16-17]

Nuh Ha Mim Keller is the translator of "The
Reliance of the Traveller" [`Umdat as-Salik] by Ahmed Ibn Naqib al-Misri