Electromagnetic

You have to be very careful while you’re pregnant. You can’t smoke. You can’t drink alcohol. No beer. No wine. Especially not drugs. Everything you put in your body goes straight to the baby. If you smoke, it’s like giving a cigarette to your baby (Maria Full of Grace, dir. Joshua Marston, 2004).

How precious is a baby? What would you be prepared to sacrifice in order to protect yours? What about your spirit? If you knew something endangered it, would you change your life in order to keep it safe? They ask you about the Spirit. Say: “The Spirit is of my Lord’s command, and of knowledge you have been given but little” (Qur’an 17:85). The eyes and the ears are windows to your heart and doors to your spirit. Protect it by exercising caution about what you gaze at and to what you lend an ear so that you can return to the Beloved with a pure spirit.

Generally, the fanjabi is a fan of Islam who self-identifies as a Muslim and observes hijab (i.e. adheres to the rules related to clothing in Muslim sacred law). A fanjabi can be male or female. More specifically, a fanjabi behaves like a groupie of religious looking men–whether they are Imams, shaykhs, and even just good “brothers” or “sisters.” (S)he is an enthusiastic and spirited consumer of Muslim paraphernalia, yet (s)he also expresses the hijab-clad modesty and faith of a person who has chosen to live a life devoted to God. A religious exhibitionist often confused with an attention whore, the fanjabi loves to act, perform, and attract the attention of others. (S)he loves to be witnessed by anybody, even (or especially) the camera. (S)he loves the things of the world yet (s)he also loves God. Unresolved, this psychological incongruity can degenerate into hypocrisy. That is a whole other world of trouble.

If you mistake proximity for intimacy, attraction for attachment, and liking for loving, you might become newlyweds dead set on divorce. Dear heart! Are you so foolish that you continue to desire one who devalues your worth after knowing you by not desiring you in return? Are you so foolish as to continue to be affectionate with one who is not affectionate with you? Are you so foolish as to esteem one who treats you without esteem? Awakening from the dream of your lust, bored with each other, you might find yourselves to be newlyweds dead set on divorce.

Conversion is tawba, and just as the latter does not cease in life, neither does the former. We continue to convert, to make tawba, until we awaken in death. For some people, true tawba requires never forgetting the past. For others, true tawba requires forgetting the past forever. These two modes are not mutually exclusive.

In any case, to absolutely fix conversion into an event rather than experience it as a process of change over the course of a lifetime often leads to neglect of tawba and engagement in a kind of superficial pop-celebrity-like project of image reinvention. Mere self-indulgence. Arguably a peculiar luxury of the young, affluent, and idle. To understand authentic conversion requires a sophisticated study of tawba. Otherwise, we are not doing much more than taking some perverse pleasure in religious exhibitionism. Testing how much we can shock others. Making a fashion statement.

Riyā’ is a complicated sexy beast.

Four signs or symptoms of riyā’ include:

1) Sloth or laziness

2) Absence of expressions of devotion to God when alone

3) Increasing action when flattered

4) Decreasing action when criticized

The root cause of riyā’ is desire. It is desiring from others what should only be desired from God.

Treatment for the malady of riyā’ involves purging four things from the heart:

1) love of praise

2) hate of blame

3) seeking benefit from other than God

4) fearing harm from other than God

To my surprise and disappointment, I find most academic book reviews seem to showcase the reviewer’s skill at jockeying for position in a field of scholarship rather than sustained and careful critical analysis of the book under review. Worse, and not infrequently, reviewers seem to have not completely read the book but to have proceeded writing the review anyway with no other discernible motive except to be contentious. Even more disgraceful are those reviews that fail to treat the book’s ideas and arguments but settle for attacks on ideas not necessarily even directly discussed in the book being reviewed that some scholars associate with the work of the author.

Some contemporary Muslims think of Islam mechanically rather than organically. They fail to see it as a living entity and treat it like a cadaver. Their relationship with Islam is like that of the mortician with the corpse whose efforts attempt to normalize it in the eyes of others, to mask what they think it is, a dead body fit for nothing else but a harvest of its organs and a grand funeral party following its burial.

If we understand Islam to be a living entity, we might be able to liken attempts to reform it to the experimentation of an amateur scientist engaging in neurosurgery. This amateur scientist (Y) hypothesizes that the depression that somebody (X) experiences must have its cause in the formal structure of the brain of X. So Y collects some surgical equipment, and with a rudimentary knowledge of neuroanatomy gleaned from introductory textbooks (and perhaps bolstered by the unquestionable reliability of Wikipedia), proceeds to operate on the brain of X to alter it by excising those parts of its structure which hypothetically cause X to become depressed.

If this seems ridiculous, consider that it is analogous to what self-proclaimed Muslim reformers are trying to do to Islam in North America. It is cosmically criminal if not legally so. Instead of healing Islam in a holistic way, restoring it to health, contemporary reformers are attempting to conduct cosmetic plastic surgery to change the formal features of Islam that dissatisfy them. Suffering from compounded ignorance, they are behaving like John Donne’s triple fools.