reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that’s no less simplistic. Anyway, a certain brand of pamphlet Islam is where I come from. Once I entered into a Muslim community, pamphlets became maps to show me the straight path. I also left Islam through the pamphlets; in the period that I considered myself an ex-Muslim, it was because the pamphlets’ easy answers and imaginary hegemonies couldn’t hold up to the complexities of being a Muslim in my real life. The pamphlets are meant to be read once and passed along; their arguments disintegrate if you spend too much time with them.
But there had to be a time when it was really that simple, right? Wouldn’t a “pamphlet Islam” be closer to the original Islam, the Islam of our Prophet? The stuff that can’t fit into a pamphlet amounts to later elaboration and refinement, which, if I’m trying to recover my Salafism, is unnecessary. Safi critiques the popular catchphrase that Islam’s truth lies in its simplicity, but if I imagine what Islam would look like in the presence of the Prophet, an Islam in which people did not theorize on questions of authority and interpretation, it had to be simple. Perhaps in Muammad’s lifetime, if you upheld him as center, you could really start a sentence with, “Islam says _______________.” To deny Islam its supposed simplicity is to admit the hard truth that we are functionally a prophetless community, that we have no organic center. The pamphlets aim to assure us that Muammad’s absence changes nothing.
At a Muslim Students’ Association “Islam 101” event intended to teach non-Muslim students about Islam, I sat and listened to a woman correct the audience on popular misconceptions. All her arguments were clichés that I had digested and regurgitated roughly two decades earlier: Real Islam cannot be violent, because the Arabic word islm shares its root letters with another word, salm, that means “peace”; Muslims love and honor Jesus as a virgin-born prophet of God; Islam respects women and gave them unprecedented rights; Muslims made great contributions to science while Europe was lost in the Dark Ages. Even in my post-ayahuasca love for my sisters and brothers, I felt a temptation to challenge her: When she quoted the Qur’n as stating that Mary guarded her “chastity” and Allh breathed into her, I wanted to point out that in Arabic, the word that she read as chastity—farj—more precisely signified genitalia. This matters because in 66:12, Aanat farjah fanafakhn fh min rin can read not only as “She guarded her chastity so we breathed into her from our spirit,” but also “She guarded her vagina so we breathed into it from our spirit,” and no one wants to think about Allh or Gabriel breathing into Mary’s vagina (some translations, drawing from an uneasy interpretive tradition, suggest in their parenthetical notes that Allh breathed into the sleeve of Mary’s garment).5 I let this and some other questions go unasked. At the end of her talk, she left a stack of pamphlets on a table. I picked one up: A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, by I. A. Ibrahim. Its first edition was published in 1996, within a few years of my conversion. At a total of roughly seventy-five pages, maybe it’s too big to be called a pamphlet, but it still reads like pamphlet-grade discourse. The cover shows Earth in space, with an open copy of the Qur’n at the far end of a light beam that meets Earth in the Indian Ocean, several hundred miles from the coast of South Africa, as if to represent the Qur’n blasting off from the Indian Ocean into space. The Earth and extraterrestrial Qur’n appear above the Masjid Haram in Mecca, illuminated at night and crowded with white-garbed worshipers, and the surrounding cityscape. It appears as though an alternate Earth looms over Mecca in the night sky, and that this alternate Earth produces a giant Qur’n somewhere in the southern region of its Indian Ocean, and that this Qur’n leaves the alternate Earth to descend upon the Ka’ba of our own planet. Giving these details much more attention than could have been intended, I briefly wanted a world in which this was really how things worked.
So I considered A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam as a pamphlet to start me back at the basics, a boiling down of Islam to its crucial points. This is Islam at its most simple: the sectless, undifferentiated Islam, as pure and clean as it has always been. If that is the mission, A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam cannot confess to representing any particular Muslim orientation, since to do so would confess that a variety of Muslim orientations exist. There are no mentions of terms like Sunn or Sh’, let alone more specific designations such as Salaf, and at no point does the pamphlet acknowledge that Muslims have ever disagreed with each other on anything. Pamphlet Islam can never say that it doesn’t have an answer, or that we could choose from multiple answers, or that the singular correct answer might take more than a paragraph.
This is why, even if I consider the pamphlet a Salaf product, I can’t call the woman who provided it a Salaf; she wouldn’t have to be a self-identified Salaf to accept the pamphlet as genuinely “Islamic.” The pamphlet reveals its Salaf genealogy only through its publisher (the Houston branch of Saudi-based Dar-us-Salam Publications), suggestions for further readings (including the work of Salaf scholar Bilal Philips and the Hilali-Khan translation of the Qur’n), and directory of Muslim organizations, including groups such as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). An ideology is most successful when it’s no longer recognizable as an ideology but accepted simply as “common sense”; religious sectarianism
reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that’s no less simplistic. Anyway, a certain brand of pamphlet Islam is where I come from. Once I entered into a Muslim community, pamphlets became maps to show me the straight path. I also left Islam through the pamphlets; in the period that I considered myself an ex-Muslim, it was because the pamphlets’ easy answers and imaginary hegemonies couldn’t hold up to the complexities of being a Muslim in my real life. The pamphlets are meant to be read once and passed along; their arguments disintegrate if you spend too much time with them.
