but “rightly guided caliphs” represents a later judgment, which the men who have been assigned this title had never claimed for themselves. The title is an act of rehabilitative nostalgia, created after the point at which right guidance seemed to go south, a longing for what appears—when viewed from a distance, with vision blurred by time—to have been an era of innocence and perfect unity.
Golden Ages are sanitized imaginaries of messy realities and generally fail to survive closer scrutiny. When I started to ask the wrong questions and Islam’s sacred past became more complicated for me—that is, when I learned that my authoritative heroes fought and killed each other in civil wars—the whole edifice came crashing down. The myth of seamless unity among the earliest Muslims collapses pretty easily, and I couldn’t hold up the notion of Islam’s “greatest generations” when these people chopped up the body of Muammad’s own grandson in the desert of Karbala.
For me as a teenager, everything had been based on the collective perfection of the Salaf. The tradition was what they gave us; if we could doubt them, what was left of Islam? Losing my faith in the Salaf felt like losing myself as a Muslim. To some extent, it meant losing Muammad, who was unknowable to me except through the mediation of those who had walked with him. Dismantling the myth of a long-lost Golden Age led me to question the image of Muammad that had been transmitted to us from that generation. I had previously believed in the apologetic boasts that Muammad’s life had been more thoroughly recorded than that of any historical figure prior to modernity—we knew how he cleaned his teeth, how he stood and sat and ate, and so on—but I lost my confidence in the people who told me these things. The truth-making power of Muammad’s life disintegrated.
In the winter of 2002, as I worked on my first novel, The Taqwacores, I had no confidence in my claim to be Muslim, in part because as far as I knew, there was no Muslim community that would have me. The fictional punk house in the story functioned as a kind of mosque for its residents, but a mosque with no imm, which meant that each individual had to become authoritative for his or her own self. This was the Islam of my fantasy, but I did not have faith that it could be real until distributing the book led me to encounters with real-life Muslim punk kids. The notion of a “taqwacore” community signified different things to each of us. One of taqwacore’s appeals for me was its dream that we could make a Muslim community for ourselves without acting as coercive regulatory powers upon each other.
Since I had imagined myself as living in self-imposed exile from a vaguely defined blob of homogenous “orthodoxy,” my comfort came through celebration of the equally slippery term, heresy. Rereading the sacred past as one of fracture and chaos rather than unblemished unity, I championed a positive relationship to all Muslim expressions deemed unacceptable. Instead of treating Islam as a zero-sum game, demanding that all of us are either in or out, I imagined a new binary: the Islam of the center versus an Islam of the margins. If Muammad’s grandson was butchered by the Islam of power and authority, the only conceivable Islam for me would be an Islam that lived on the outside, far from the polished institutions and acceptable Friday-afternoon imms. It became my quest to engage those corners of Islamic tradition that most Muslims would dismiss as absurd or dangerous. It turned out that Islam offered a rich legacy of rebel saints and charismatic weirdos, a long parade of Muslims who were called infidels by their fellow Muslims. Their presence in Islam’s archive changed what the archive could tell me.
With recognition that something had gone terribly wrong in the Golden Age and the Salaf’s imaginary unity, I maintained my attachment to Sh’ism, especially the story of usayn. While Salafs have composed vicious polemical tracts against Sh’ism, charging that Sh’s have transgressed the bounds of proper Islam, I dipped heavy not only into Sh’ism, but the expressions of Sh’ism that even the majority of Sh’s would condemn—the radical so-called ghulat, “exaggerators,” groups from long ago that had elevated members of Muammad’s family to levels approaching prophethood or even divinity. My alternative Islam also came from people like ninth-century ecstatic Mansr al-allj, who allegedly called himself by God’s Name and was executed for building his own Ka’ba in his yard. Retreating from the established voices of Islam’s imaginary center, I found comfort in obscure characters who often amounted to only historical footnotes. One was Mu
but “rightly guided caliphs” represents a later judgment, which the men who have been assigned this title had never claimed for themselves. The title is an act of rehabilitative nostalgia, created after the point at which right guidance seemed to go south, a longing for what appears—when viewed from a distance, with vision blurred by time—to have been an era of innocence and perfect unity.
