American Muslims are so American they are…boring?

At last September’s Religion Newswriters Association pow-wow in San Antonio, veteran religion reporter (and bead-blogger) Kimberly Winston pulled me aside to tell me about Melody Moezzi, the young author of the Dec. 2007 book, War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims. “You have to meet her,” said Kimberly, who profiled Moezzi and her book last year in Publisher’s Weekly. In spite of this glowing review from a respected peer, it has taken me more than six months to sit down and read the whole book, which I finished last night.

Although its subject, American Islam, is right up my personal and professional alley, I found War on Error hard to read — or at least hard to read without a pen handy to mark up the margins with my questions and criticisms. Moezzi as a writer turns out to be inescapably, maddeningly and refreshingly young — like a blogger, she constantly injects personal opinion while expressing disdain for more rigorous information-gathering strategies; statistics and surveys, for examples, are dismissed as “dull, lifeless and easily manipulated.” (In case you are wondering where this po-mo outlook comes from, you may find it helpful to know the now-29-year-old Moezzi was educated at Wesleyan.)

In the book, Moezzi offers 12 profiles of American Muslims, including herself, but these profiles are not researched, contextual portraits like the ones in Paul Barrett’s standard-setting 2007 book, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion. Moezzi’s strategy (and research process) is a lot simpler: She wants to introduce us to her friends. By showing us all the strange, unexpected and admirable ways Islam intersects with her own life, and the lives of her husband and her friends and acquaintances, she seeks to do what so many writers are trying to do these days: dispel stereotypes about Muslims. She describes her mission this way:

I decided to write this book to tell the stories of my fellow American Muslims, stories I felt weren’t being told. I wanted to affirm the experiences of Muslim Americans as Americans, as grounded in the American dream and the American ethic as any others. The stories here are but a few of many, yet they suffice to verify that the phrase “Muslim American” is neither an oxymoron nor a predicament of circumstance.

(In case you are worried about Moezzi’s hegemonistic, neo-colonial use of the word “American” here, fear not: there is a footnote explaining the necessary evil of using such a “broad and ambiguous” label.)

The problem with this mission is perhaps the problem of the book. If you are trying to debunk the idea that all Muslims are bomb-carrying, women-oppressing fanatics, then pretty much any description of a real-life Muslim becomes noteworthy. This framework is what has driven a lot of post-9/11 press coverage of Muslims in America: Hey look, a Muslim that’s a comedian, or country singer, or volunteer doctor. But how interesting is it, actually, to discover that others are in fact just like you? This approach reaches full flower in Moezzi’s book, with its idiosyncratic look at the normal lives of American Muslims. We may not have arrived in the promised land of normalcy yet, but Moezzi’s book takes us one step closer to seeing American Muslims, as Farid Senzai put it during a RNA webinar this month, as being “as boring as the rest of us.”

Back to the book itself. Let’s start with the cover. Although I put this book down several times, I was drawn back toward it again and again in part because the cover is so stunning: It features a beautiful and moving interpretation of the American flag by Iranian-American artist, Sara Rahbar. The title, however, is vexing. While “War on Error” seems to be an obvious jab at the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror,” the linguistic satire doesn’t quite work: “War on error” makes me think of nothing so much as a high school English teacher on a campaign to stamp out grammatical wrong-doing.

What made me put the book down when I started reading it a few months back was Moezzi’s dogmatic proclamations about the true nature of Islam. She writes:

While some Muslims may claim that only Muslims, or for that matter only Sunni or Shi’ite Muslims, can ever hope to attain Paradise or Heaven or spiritual deliverance, the Qur’an clearly states otherwise. Such contradictions in practice have misled and misinformed both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Let me break out the auto-numbering to analyze this. Here are the problems with Moezzi’s theological set-up for the book:

1. The Qur’an isn’t a big interfaith conference: Yes, the Qur’an has many verses that are “inclusivist.” But as Islamic scholar Seyyid Hossein Nasr recently noted, the Qur’an, like all scripture, also has what he calls “exclusivist” verses, which imply that only Muslims, or only rightly guided Muslims, have a shot at heaven. So let’s keep it real when we’re quoting from the Qur’an. After all, selective use of the Qur’an and other scripture is exactly how Muslim extremists and Islam-hating right-wing pundits “prove” that Islam condones acts of terror.

2. Islam is not sola scriptura: Yes, the Qur’an is centrally important, but it is not the only touchstone of faith — there is hadith and tradition and the scholarly consensus that has built and developed Islamic law over the ages. There are various modernist groups that push for a Reformation-style sola scriptura approach and a rejection of scholarly accretions: some of these groups are quite liberal, but the most prominent is probably the ultra-conservative Salafi movement. So Moezzi should take care in adopting a “because-the-Qur’an-says-so” approach to explaining Islam — that can come back to bite you.

3. Is there really a true Islam? Moezzi is arguing, as many other American Muslims have attempted to do, that there is one true interpretation of Islam. While liberals may be delighted that Moezzi’s Islam coincides with a progressive agenda, one that has room for pot-smoking, homosexuality and women-led prayer, dogmatism of any flavor remains dogmatism. Many Muslims will dismiss Osama bin Laden or other terrorist operatives as “not really Muslim.” But who in fact gets to decide who is a Muslim? Are we to trust Moezzi as having a definitive perspective on Islam? Again, the theological thinking that Moezzi employs in the progressive cause is the same used by extremists.

One of the theological roots of modern jihadi ideology is the idea, put forth by Seyyid Qutub, that righteous Muslims may decide that other Muslims are, in fact, unbelievers (and therefore may be attacked.) Takfeer, as it’s called in Arabic, is such a threat that hundreds of the world’s most prominent Muslim leaders gathered in Jordan in 2005 to forbid it. The messy fact is, no one can speak definitively for Islam. The religion, like any religion, cannot be boiled down to a single perspective, whether we like that perspective or not.

Now that I’ve satisfied my critical faculty, let me tell you what I liked about the book beside the cover art. For one thing, Moezzi’s writing is thought-provoking, if in a prickly, provocative sort of way. When she’s interviewing her subjects, for example, she doesn’t shy away from disagreeing with them (or, say, noting their “annoying rationality.”) While interviewing Faizal Alam, founder of the queer Muslim group Al-Fatiha, she puzzles over why, as a teen-ager, he was anguished about whether or not he, as a religious person, should attend his high school prom. She writes, “Actually, I’m not quite sure why these two things are necessarily competing interests.” Later she describes why Faizal is a hero — creating a livable space not just for himself as a gay Muslim but for others — and why she, as a teen-age patient with a life-threatening pancreatic condition, was not: “When I was sick, people were always telling me what a great ‘fight’ I was putting up. But the truth is, I had no other option…I just hung out and the doctors do the best they could.”

While two of her portraits are breathless, insubstantial paeans to Muslim women writers (G. Willow Wilson and Asra Nomani — yes, the Asra Nomani that has already written her own book, been profiled countless times, and even been depicted in a major motion picture), the others are, at moments, intensely interesting: Moezzi’s own religious awakening in Glacier National Park; an Iranian-American’s woman’s grief-stricken questions about the untimely death of her brother; an observant Muslim Yalie who raps about Ohio.

I won’t spoil the other good parts. In spite of my critical reservations, the book is mostly entertaining to read; those teaching about Islam in America may find the individual portraits helpful. Also check out Moezzi’s complete bio, and you can wonder why, like so many COFOBs (the term she brilliantly employs to describe American-born children of immigrants, i.e. “Children Of ‘Fresh Off the Boat’”) she maintains a lawyer/doctor/engineer (circle one) professional life while pursuing a more artistic one on the side. And for a thoughtful conservative American Muslim perspective on the book, one that takes Moezzi to task for interviewing so many less-than-observant Muslims, see blogger Umar Lee’s review.