The Islamic Pilgrim

A few footsteps into the unknown

I don’t know how to think of Islam outside of its political associations and my own personal experience. I haven’t come to think of Islam much at all outside of a few isolated matters of sporadic interest. That makes me a rather typical American. On the other hand, since I have become almost instinctually suspicious of every sort of evangelism and marketing, I’m mostly immune to both slander against it and evangelism for it. Long ago I made the distinction between Muslims and Islamists, with the latter being those against a line between Church and State. But it hasn’t helped me learn much about Islam itself or its history.

Several years ago just before my engagement with the Foundation for Free Black Thought, I used to discuss philosophical topics in Clubhouse with Rehman Cee. Clubhouse itself quickly became a smelly semiotic swamp, but that didn’t deter either of us from our interactive discovery of wisdom. I ingested Karen Armstrong’s book on Islam and came to understand certain historical things about Islam.

On many occasions, I have considered the devotion of Muslims appropriate to small societies in unique ways. I’m sure I have called it a desert island religion, but that’s because I have never seen its expression in anything like the contexts I’ve come to understand of Mennonites or Amish. In fact, my first investigation of the discipline came from several lunches I had with two co-workers in SoCal; one was Muslim and the other was Mennonite. The Christian internalized his moral center but left his community to embark on a journey into cosmopolitain life. He ended up living in France and marrying a woman from there. There has probably never been a greater fan of cycling the French countryside who wasn’t a Tour de France participant. That’s a long way from Western Pennsylvania. The Muslim has found domestic bliss, here in SoCal’s Orange County. He’s not the sort who would lie about his life on Facebook and I think of him from time to time. In both cases, it was always easy for me to relate to ‘family first’ men, but in neither case did we engage in any sort of evangelism or persuasion. It was always a kind of investigation into how we saw our religious upbringing impacting our view of the world and discover our moral center of gravity. The three of us were middle aged.