Broken Frontier

Last night my husband and I attended a fundraising banquet for a local Islamic school. I love my community, but I always go to these things with low expectations—western identity and Islamic religiosity are not a clean fit, and I often emerge from gatherings of American Muslims in a state of mild existential horror. (I am an American and a Muslim, but I made the decision long ago not to try and crowbar them into one hyphenated label. I leave that to people with less regard for their sanity.) Which is not to say the people themselves are not perfectly delightful—they’re just fighting different battles than the ones I’ve chosen to fight.

While I was browsing through items in the silent auction, I started chatting with a woman in a green-and-yellow headscarf. She asked me what I did for a living. I told her I write. She asked what. I told her all kinds of things—articles, essays, and I’ve got a book coming out this spring. I instinctively avoided comics. This was not a comics crowd; these were Microsoft Muslims, for whom technical sciences were the only acceptable points of entry into secular life. I’d listened with interest to the opening statements of the school’s organizers and advocates, who talked about the necessity of educating young Muslims in physics and mathematics, and stressed how far behind the Muslim world lags in scientific development.

All good points and worthy goals. But I couldn’t help noticing that the role of art and literature was completely absent from this discussion. These days art makes most Muslims (yes, most; I am completely comfortable making this sweeping generalization) a little nervous. In our new technocratic orthodoxy, the imagination is like the appendix: a suspicious, unnecessary organ, to be removed at the first sign of trouble.

Trouble, I should have told her—I trouble our brothers and sisters for a living. For a practicing Muslim I have an unusually overactive appendix. The faith that inspires so many to a life of unbending rationalism has inspired me to speculative fiction. God knows why. As soon as I gave up booze and bacon the stories started coming faster than I could write them down. And while almost everyone I know is indulgent if not proud of this eccentricity—there is a lot more genuine affection in religious communities than I think people realize—I still worry that the best minds of contemporary Islam are continuing to put distance between religion and art.

Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of Islamic civilization, which naturally included artists, malcontents and hedonists, was gradually eroded. Since this time span corresponds roughly to the period of European colonization, a lot of people blame Europe for the arrested development of Muslim cultures. I think it’s more complicated than that, since this repressive tendency is perpetuated with vigor and purpose by Muslims themselves today. Once upon a time, even the geisha-like courtesans of Mughal India were taught Quran and religious theory by local sheikhs—you could live on the colorful fringes of society and still be, as my husband eloquently puts it, within the embrace of mercy. There was an understanding that the richness of a civilization stems from its imperfections. If you were invested in that civilization, it invested in you. Warts, artistic impulses and all.

I would like to believe that this is still true, or at least, that it can be made true again.