“YOU'RE moving to Saudi Arabia?” The woman contorted her face until I could almost taste her disgust. Her hijab was secured with a brooch and wrapped neatly about her head, accenting the troubled features on her normally smooth brown face.

“I could never live there.” She shook her head. I detected pity in that gesture, and I knew that my worth had shrunk in her eyes. She had expected more of me, better even.

How could an intelligent woman like you do this to yourself?

These were the words she really meant to say, but she didn’t have to speak them. I read them in her eyes.

I was silent. I didn’t think there was anything I could do to repair my image, or to tap into her human, or even Muslim, sense.

At least not then.

I gave a tight-lipped smile, though I’m sure she couldn’t have appreciated the gesture since she could see only my eyes through the veil I wore at the moment.

I was at work, and I had to get to class. So I exchanged polite conversation before excusing myself and walking swiftly down the hall to where I was due to teach an English lesson…

What?

I put the book down. I couldn’t read any more. There were only so many contradictions a person could digest at once.

I glanced at the clock on the dresser of my bedroom. It was late. I should sleep. The adhaan for Fajr would be in only four hours. And since moving to Riyadh a few years before, I liked to hear the sound reverberating throughout the city as I sat on my prayer mat, having finished praying Witr only minutes before. That way, I could pray in the last third of the night, my favorite time to pray Qiyaam.

And the favored time at which Allah answered prayers of supplicants—prayers I desperately needed responses to.

After reciting the adhkaar before going to bed, I shut my eyes. But it was difficult to sleep because I was still upset.

The passage from the book had troubled me greatly…

Not because it was the first time I’d heard orthodox Islam discussed—and dismissed—in this manner (as nowadays it was becoming “chic” to equate the following of Islam as understood and practiced by the Prophet, sallallaahu’alayhi wa sallam, as some twisted, “Arabized” version of Islam).

But because I had…well….expected more, better even…

…I’m an avid reader, and one of the genres I love is ethnographies. I love this genre because it gives the voice of the culture or group under study to members of the culture or group itself. I love the objectivity the genre affords. Even as the ethnographer offers personal perspectives of and reactions to the culture or group being researched, a fundamental characteristic of these studies is that the researcher gives the most basic right of “ownership of” or “definition of” the culture to its adherents.

The field is quite intriguing…

When it’s approached correctly.

Needless to say, when I saw that an American Muslim woman had conducted such a research, and about American Muslims themselves, I was ecstatic. I immediately ordered the book from Amazon.com and waited as patiently as a “bookworm” could for a book to arrive from thousands of miles across the Atlantic…

…Now, before I go on, I think it’s important to make a disclaimer here.

Unlike most American Muslims I know, I do not consider myself as part of any Islamic “movement” or “sect.” Nor am I in the habit of calling myself “Sunni,” “Salafi,” “Sufi” or any other label.

As can be surmised from my novel Realities of Submissions—a fictional account of a character Renee who suffers from attaching an “I’m a saved Muslim” label to herself and finds herself amongst people who are far removed from Islamic principles, let alone Islamic “safety”—I prefer the simple “label” of Muslim, as I always have.

Issues regarding sects and labels and the like…well…they give me a headache…even though I know that sects and misunderstandings and innovations and plain-old “tall tales” about Islam do exist and thus must be addressed.

That said, I must also say that I’m aware that labels are often used by laypeople—as is the case more often than not—to simplify the complicated, to complicate the simple, or to absolve themselves from following Islamic truths…

Particularly, if the truth is uttered by someone not in their “group.”

…Or by someone they consider “Arabized.”

Anyway…

Due to my belief that the religion of Islam is authentic only insomuch as it adheres to what the Prophet, sallallaahu’alayhi wa sallam, actually taught, I would be—to Muslims who find some need or benefit in labeling me—considered a “Salafi.”

By definition, a Salafi is “one who adheres to that which came before.” Thus, anyone who believes that the earliest Muslims, namely the Prophet and Companions, represent the most authentic form of understanding and practicing Islam could be considered a Salafi.

[….Call me naïve, but even before I heard this term, I thought that this was the definition of following Islam itself—adhering to the teachings of the religion that the Prophet taught to his Companions. After all, Islam is “that which came before.”]

But I digress…

“The Salafi movement, a very modern movement compared to Sufism, links American Muslims to Muslims in Saudi Arabia… Virtually, synonymous with the Saudi-based fundamentalist ideology Wahhabism, Salafi teachings advocate that Muslims return to a pristine form of Islam that exactly replicates the practice of the first three generations of Muslims…”^[1]

Now, those who will most easily understand my upset at this “definition” are those who are familiar with the general principles of “defining terms,” especially when these “terms” involve people foreign to the audience (as is the case with ethnographies).

The author’s use of CNN-type anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric to “define” Salafi speaks for itself, as it fails even non-Muslims’ litmus tests for objectivity and fairness when describing “the other.”

The hypocrisy in this tactic is clearly seen when Muslims of the author’s persuasion become indignant when people describe their version of Islam as “Americized” or “Westernized”…

…Dishonesty is one of the first signs of an insecure position.

Name-calling often comes next.

This author achieved both in her “definition.”

And she applies a very interesting tactic in doing so: If you make sure your audience’s first impression about a group unknown to them is a bad one, by the time they read anything remotely praiseworthy or “objective” about the topic later on, they already have a bad taste in their mouths...

Classic.

But the author’s transgressions against objectivity don’t stop there.

At the end of her “definition,” she couldn’t resist using the term “pristine” to describe the Islam “Salafis” wish to emulate. And “pristine” is a term that carries a very well-known negative connotation in the Western world when religion is being discussed. (And if she didn’t intend “pristine” in the negative sense, then that necessarily means, by her own admission, that the Islam she favors is “impure” or “polluted” in some way.)

What’s more is that she couldn’t resist putting the adverb exactly before the verb replicates although the verb alone would have been quite sufficient…

This literary redundancy serves a convenient purpose, psychologically speaking, when you wish to cut off all possibility of someone seeing any authenticity in or camaraderie with what you yourself disagree with. The result is this: In case, you too believe in replicating Islam as the Prophet taught, beware that these people want to do it exactly!

The condescending CNN-type anti-Muslim rhetoric mentioned in the first part of the definition guarantees that the adverb “exactly” will conjure up images of weather-beaten camels and dirt-stained turbans atop heads of Bedouin men carrying blood-stained swords…

…Needless to say, I stopped reading.

I hadn’t expected to agree with the author’s perspectives…

But I had expected a genuine ethnography...

I closed the book.

And I didn’t plan on opening it again.

It’s too bad that—like what the fictional character Latifah encounters in my short story “From the Diary of an Extremist”—even as Muslims cry for fair representation and “equal treatment” in the West, many don’t hold themselves to the standards they ask of non-Muslims.

I’ve found that this double-standard is quite consistent, especially when Westerners of the author’s persuasion wish to discuss what they see as “Arabized” Islam.

It goes without saying…or maybe not, given the author’s deliberate anti-Arab rhetoric…that we’re not talking about embracing “extremism” or terrorism here.

We’re talking about dealing fairly with “the other” when it comes to defining how they believe, especially when they don’t have the benefit of speaking for themselves, as is the case with ethnographies.

Dismissing someone’s understanding of Islam by using derogatory or misleading labels tells more about the mindset of the speaker than it does about those being criticized.

But it’s not the label itself that’s the problem.

After all, you’re free to believe that something is “Arabized,” “Saudi-based,” “Westernized” or what have you. And you’re certainly free to describe it as such.

The problem is when your personal criticism of an ideology becomes the definition itself.

This is the author’s fatal flaw.

She was so eager to show her contempt for “Salafi” ideology that she couldn’t even hold her criticisms (evident in terminology like “fundamentalist,” a term she knows full well is synonymous with “extremist” in the West) until after she had at least defined the group she loathed. (It’s also telling that I could tell, from the first pages of the book, that she disagreed with this ideology, and quite vehemently. In the world of “academic literature,” that’s a big “no-no” for a writer or researcher.)

But to be fair, I have no idea if she redeemed herself later. She may have.

But, in my case as a reader, her tactic of “present the negative first” had the reverse effect: Just as she intended to cut off all possibility of her readers seeing the “Salafi” ideology as even remotely authentic, she cut off all possibility of establishing her research as such.

…Today, I sympathize with the author.

Because I know she is not alone. Most of us—and it would be dishonest to exclude myself here—struggle with the same emotionalism from time to time.

It’s scary to imagine that you could be the one who’s wrong. So when that scary feeling overtakes us, we frantically protect ourselves…

We shut our eyes and cover our ears…and shout out negative labels and names at “the other.”

Ah…

But such eye-shutting, ear-covering, and name-calling tactics are the classic copouts amongst those who don’t want to be held to the stringencies of objectivity…

…And who don’t have concrete Islamic proof for a position they hold—or concrete proof against a position they don’t hold.

But in my case, to be honest, I don’t always mind that my understanding of Islam is called “Arabized” or “Saudi-based.”

Because, truth be told, in most anti-Arab Muslim circles in America, these labels are simply synonymous with “orthodox Islam” or “the Sunnah.”

But it sounds better…if I’m uncomfortable with self-reflection and objective discussions of what “Islam” entails…to just give it a name.

A label, even.

Anything that I can safely distance myself from.

That way I don’t need to reflect.

In fact, that way, I should never reflect. I mean, what sane person would even consider the authenticity of something people call “Wahhabi” or “Salafi” or “Saudi-based”? I may tell myself.

After all, anything that originates from Arabia (like Islam itself) or is spoken by anyone from Arabia (like the Prophet himself) doesn’t warrant even my reflection or du’aa to determine whether or not I have an obligation to Allah to believe or follow it…

After work, I continued my packing. I was excited about moving to Saudi Arabia. Some years before planning this move, I’d heard a speaker at the masjid I attended in America mention a hadith about the virtues of the city of Madinah—the City of the Prophet, sallallaahu’alayhi wa sallam—and of living and dying there.

Ah… What I would give to live in Al-Madinatul-Munawwrah—the City of Light!

As I listened to the lecture, I’d made du’aa that Allah would bring me to Madinah as my final home on earth.

And now…years later…I couldn’t keep from smiling in reflection of Allah’s Mercy in answering my prayers…I was on my way to live a couple-of-hours plane ride from the Blessed City!

You’re moving to Saudi Arabia?

The woman’s question echoed in my mind.

And in response, I felt my heart smile in anticipation of this monumental blessing…

Yes, I am inshaaAllaah, I said to myself in excitement. Can you believe it? I’m moving to the land that is home to the most beloved cities to Allah!

And I could think of nothing that made me happier.

…Because a believer loves what Allah loves...

…That’s why I love Saudi Arabia.

And it makes me all the more excited and happy that I have the unique opportunity to study Islam here, too. 

Umm Zakiyyah is the internationally acclaimed author of the novels If I Should Speak, A Voice, Footsteps, and Realities of Submission. To contact her, write to ummzakiyyah@yahoo.com or join her Facebook page.

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