by Irfan Khawaja
I’ll take my time anywhere
Free to speak my mind anywhere
And I’ll re-define anywhere
Anywhere I roam–
Where I lay my head is home
–Metallica, “Wherever I May Roam”
People sometimes ask me what religion I am. More formally, I suppose, the question they’re asking is, “To what religion do you profess conviction?” There are, of course, different motivations behind this question. Sometimes it’s plain old curiosity. Sometimes the questioner has read something I’ve written, and is trying to make heads or tails of it, or of me. Sometimes, it’s an official gatekeeper who needs to know my sectarian affiliation to determine whether I have the right to go where I want to go, or do what I want to do. In some ways, these last gatekeeper-type questions are the most interesting. Consider a few.
To enter the Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem, the Muslim waqf authorities imperiously demand to know whether I am in fact a Muslim. Since I claim that I am, they then demand that I recite the Fatiha–the Exordium of the Qur’an–to prove it. I grudgingly do, and they grudgingly let me in.
To enter the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, the Israeli authorities paradoxically demand to know whether I am, by their Jewish standards, Muslim enough to make entry. The last Israeli border guard to do this, just this past March, was a gum-cracking American–from Long Island, judging from her accent. Officially, she needed to know whether I was as Muslim as I claimed to be. Less officially, she wanted to know where in Jersey I was from. I must have given her all the right answers: she frisked me, then let me in. Worse things have happened.
When I accompanied my mother on the umra pilgrimage to Mecca back in the 1990s, she was forced to apply for a religious visa for the both of us as a condition of entry into that holy nation. To do this, she had to tell the Saudi officials–under oath–that I was as wholeheartedly and sincerely a good-faith Muslim as she was. This wasn’t really true, but I’m sure that it felt true to her, being the proud Mom that she is. It didn’t feel all that true to me, so that when we approached the checkpoint on the Jeddah-Mecca Highway just before entering The Holy City–and someone mentioned in passing that religious imposters could be shot on sight–I started to sweat a little, and wonder about worst-case scenarios.
Things went fine. The guard took one look at me, then one look at my light-skinned mother, and somehow leaped to the conclusion that my mom was my wife, that she was an American and that I was not, and that I had converted her to Islam. Never have so many cringey misinferences borne such salvific fruit. I guess the hijab concealed what I thought was the perceptible difference in our ages. He went on a bit in fulsome congratulation. I nodded, sagely. It didn’t seem like the time for pedantic corrections. He waved us through. We drove into Mecca, past McDonald’s, parked the car, and made it to the mosque just in time for an unforgettable isha prayer. I think my gratitude that night was real.
So am I a Muslim? Or am I just a chameleon-like religious bullshit artist? It’s customary, at least in American discourse, to answer direct questions of this sort by employing evasive circumlocutions. You ask someone what faith they profess, and they give you an autobiographical story about the faith in which they were raised. Being the good American that I am, I intend to follow suit, at least for a bit.
I was raised a Sunni Muslim in a Pakistani-American household in north Jersey. My mother and maternal grandmother inculcated me in the basics of the Islamic faith at an early age, whether I liked it or not, and so by default I became a Muslim. I did my prayers with nearly-unfailing regularity, or at least as much regularity as could be expected of a suburban American teenager. I fasted during Ramadan, even when I was on the high school track team. I abstained from eating pork or drinking alcohol (or smoking pot) even when everyone around me was doing all of these things. I made heroic efforts to abstain from sexual relations out of wedlock until the temptations to transgress exceeded any reasonable human bounds. I recited the Qur’an every day in Arabic, and read it as often as I could in English until it became a kind of constant companion.
Granted, I outsourced almsgiving to my affluent parents, and never managed to go on hajj, the greater pilgrimage, but I would have given alms if I had the money, and as mentioned earlier, went on umra, the lesser pilgrimage. Most importantly, I believed, in the literal, full-fledged, wholehearted sense—in God, the hereafter, divine creation, divine justice, the angels, the demons, and all the rest.
I never really got along with most of my fellow Muslims, had a particular antipathy for the imams I met, and found most mosque services soporific. But that didn’t much matter. The Protestantized American brand of Islam we lived didn’t require communal worship or communal solidarity. So I became a solitary, privatized atom of faith.
I ended up learning communal worship, oddly enough, from Jews. As a child, my mother shipped me off to Jewish day camp on the grounds that she had to ship me somewhere—unsupervised time was the Devil’s workshop—and since there were no Muslim day camps in those days, the choice was between the Jewish Y in town and the Christian one. Neither choice was optimal, but the Jews at least had respectable dietary laws, whereas the Christians would eat any damn thing you put in front of them. Jewish dietary laws overlapped with Muslim ones, but were stricter, so Jewish day camp it was: rigor, to paraphrase the Muslim call to prayer, is better than laxity.
So off I went to the Y to become a little “Maccabee”–celebrating the sabbath, eating challah, drinking Manischewitz grape juice, singing songs about Zion, and longing, vicariously, to spend “next year in Jerusalem” with my Jewish friends. Decades later, the decade I spent in a Jewish household through the equivalent of common law marriage intensified my eccentric sense of being half-or quasi-Jewish. Alienated by the weirdness of the American mosque scene—and increasingly, alienated from organized Islam itself—I found myself more amenable to being dragged by my partner to the synagogue on the High Holy Days, and eventually amenable to the idea of dragging her there when her religious zeal flagged. The Torah and the siddur came by default to displace the Qur’an. Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Passover came to displace Eid. Later in life I would join a Reconstructionist synagogue, where I avidly attend services to this day.
There was, of course, an Ayn Rand-inspired phase of militant atheism in there as well. Despite all this religious activity, I had in fact completely lost my faith in God sometime near the end of high school, a loss that was the most traumatic event of my life until that point. It was primarily a loss of faith in any cosmic scorekeeper, which is what God was to me, along with any metaphysical guarantee of anyone’s maintaining a cosmic sense of proportionality between virtue and reward. Sometime around the age of seventeen or eighteen, my faith just gave out, to be replaced by a despairing week of Buddhism, followed for years after that by a kind of depressing spiritual void.
Rand’s Objectivism, which I encountered sometime in college, was just the thing to fill the void. I was always less interested in or committed to the libertarian politics commonly associated with Rand than with the meta-ethics and moral psychology in her views that functioned as a replacement for my lost religious faith. It was just the message I wanted to hear. There was no God, no heaven, no hell, and no supernatural guarantee of anything. But the world was fundamentally, metaphysically, a “benevolent” place, open to human flourishing through the exercise of agency, foresight, and virtue, assisted by political freedom and a bit of luck. Rand’s distinctive valorization of integrity nicely fit an Islamic template: better a commitment to virtue than a fixation on temporal goods. Her moralized egoism fit the same template: the virtuous soul benefits itself; the vicious one wrongs itself. And her crusading adversariality was, from my perspective, a safely secularized version of Islamic jihad. It all seemed a match made in heaven.
New faith found, I was content mostly—though not without misgivings—to discard the old ones. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were reason enough to push Islam out of my life. My lifelong anti-Zionism (and the dissolution of my relationship with a Jewish partner) seemed to cut the rationale out from any allegiance to Judaism. Objectivism was the faith–excuse me, Rationally Validated Philosophical System–that superseded and abrogated all others. Best of all, it didn’t require the irrationalities of faith. Or so I thought.
Eventually, Objectivism came to seem just as irrational as what had preceded it in my life, and in some ways, seemed more harmful. So I turned my back on the Objectivist and libertarian organizations of which I’d been a part, and apostatized from the “faith” itself: back into depression and the void, this time without the distractions of a week of Buddhism.
How does any of this answer my opening question? It doesn’t. The question was what I believe. The answer I’ve just given says that I was raised a Muslim, became a quasi-Jew by default, became an Objectivist by conviction, apostatized from Islam, abandoned Judaism, and rejected Objectivism. This tells you what I don’t believe, not what I do. Judging from that answer, I’m an all-round non-believer.
That’s not entirely wrong. Suppose we demand a litmus test for adherence to each of these “faiths.” Islam asserts that there is but one deity, and that Muhammad is His Prophet. Judaism asserts that there one God who revealed himself to Moses, made a covenant with the Israelites, promised and gave them and their descendants the Promised Land, and chose them and their successors as a “light unto nations.” Objectivism asserts that reality is an objective absolute, reason is our only means of knowledge, morality consists of the pursuit of self-interest as determined by the requirements of survival qua human, laissez-faire capitalism is the “unknown ideal,” and Romantic art the highest expression of the human spirit.
Do I believe any of these things in any literal, litmus test way? No. I don’t believe in God, don’t believe that Muhammad was His prophet, and don’t believe in the divine authorship or inerrancy of the Qur’an. So much for Islam. Disbelieving in God, I don’t believe in the divine inspiration of the Hebrew Bible, or that God revealed anything to Moses, or made a divine covenant with the Israelites, or gave them permission to conquer Canaan. Nor do I think the Jews are in any sense a Chosen People, or that Israel—in any historical iteration—is a “light unto nations.” As for the tenets of Objectivism, Objectivists regard them as a demonstrable, provable set of doctrines, not a faith. I don’t. Some of it, I’d say, is insightful; much of it, reactionary nonsense. It has its assets, it has its liabilities, but very little of it has been proven true in any sense of “proof” worth taking seriously. In many ways, I think of Objectivism, epistemically, as being on par with Judaism and Islam, almost as faith-based an enterprise as its Scriptural rivals.
If someone now asks me for a profession of faith, I suppose I’d have to say “none.” I’m not a Jew or a Muslim, and not an Objectivist, either. Despite spending decades in the Catholic university system–under Thomist tutelage at Notre Dame, under Franciscan supervision at Felician University–I’m certainly no Christian. And a week of Buddhism three decades ago was a week too long. Yet I hesitate to call myself an atheist, because this literal-minded, litmus-test approach to religion oversimplifies things.
I’m not a “real” Jew, but I voluntarily, enthusiastically attend synagogue, participate in Torah study, and celebrate Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Passover (though not Hannuka or Purim).
I’m not a real Muslim, but I keep halal, abstain from alcohol, fast during Ramadan, pay zakat, and even pray—or at least go through the motions of prayer—when the inclination hits, as it sometimes does. I celebrate Eid-al-Fitr (though not Eid-al-Adha or Mawlaud un Nabi), and though I was raised Sunni rather than Shi’ite, I commemorate Ashura in the spirit of mourning and remembrance associated with Shi’ism (though without recourse to the Shi’ite practice of self-flagellation). I’m not the member of a mosque, but feel entirely comfortable in one—indeed, take a certain joy when I go—and absurdly enough, have led congregants in prayer as we circumambulated the Ka’aba in Mecca, possibly one of the few atheists to have pulled off that feat in Islamic history. I read the Qur’an for comfort and for edification, though not as though it had divine origins.
As for Objectivism, you can take a guy out of Objectivism without ever quite taking the Objectivism out of the guy. I feel distinctly uncomfortable in an Objectivist milieu, and refuse to think or act in ways constrained by its strictures. But I still often think and talk in Objectivese, and don’t regret the fact that I do.
What’s going on here? The Objectivist part of the equation is probably the easiest to explain. We often once adopt doctrines, then reject them, but then find that they enjoy a kind of doxastic half-life within us: we reject some things, accept others, half accept yet others, and maintain an uneasy half-allegiance to still others. Simple enough. No need for a wholesale, root-and-branch rejection of absolutely every claim. But what sense does it make for a professed atheist to profess an attachment to Judaism or Islam, or worse, to both at once? Judaism and Islam demand belief in God. Atheism rejects belief in God. Acceptance and rejection of God are fundamentally incompatible attitudes. Incompatible attitudes can’t, without contradiction, both be avowed at once. Shouldn’t that settle the matter?
It doesn’t. There’s a way of holding all of these beliefs simultaneously, and without contradiction. The answer lies with a philosophical position known as fictionalism. Fictionalism is a belief in useful or salutary fictions. Think of actual fictions drawn from art. You read a novel or watch a play or see a movie or immerse yourself in a painting or a piece of music, and get pulled into the mimetic world that artist has created. Depending on the intensity of your reaction, you dwell there for awhile. Depending on who you are, and on your psychological disposition and needs, you may dwell there a long while. You may in fact be inclined to enact the fiction in some ways—cosplay, for instance, or recital or performance. You may in fact feel inclined to put what you learn from the fiction into practice in non-fictional life.
Despite their apparent irreligiosity, many Objectivists live their lives this way, immersed in Ayn Rand’s fiction as thoroughly and earnestly as any orthodox believer is immersed in Scripture. Rand’s novels don’t resonate for me—and never have—in the way that, say, the Books of Job or Ruth or any of the surahs of the Qur’an do. It’s not that I believe, literally speaking, in the ontological claims presupposed by Scripture. What I mean is that Jewish and Islamic (and to a much lesser degree Christian) Scripture are fictions into which I can imaginatively enter, and into which I wholeheartedly desire entry—not at divine command, or at any command, but of my own volition. Judaism and Islam are, for me, not so much dogmas or doctrines but ways of life.
I can now answer my opening question. What faith do I profess? Well, I’m a fictionalist Judeo-Muslim with an Objectivist twist. I enter voluntarily into a Judeo-Muslim Scriptural and traditional outlook, interpret it in recognizably (or maybe not recognizably) Objectivist terms, throw in whatever else seems right to me, whether ethically or politically or aesthetically or otherwise, and I take things from there. “Entering into the fiction” for me is not just an attitudinal but a practical stance: I don’t so much profess as practice both Judaism and Islam with wholehearted sincerity and contentment.
Is what I’m engaged in really faith at all? Probably not. But so what? I’m a pragmatist about things like this. It works.
Does it bother me that I enter into a theistic fiction without literally believing in the God behind that fiction? No, no more than it bothers me that I can read Homer or Sophocles without literally believing in the reality of Zeus or Pallas Athena. I don’t really believe in the literal reality of the characters that populate the Bronte novels, or the fiction of Willa Cather, but they often seem more real to me than most people I do meet.
Is there something frivolous or voyeuristic about treating religious faith as a kind of touristic plaything to be entered into and out of at will? Maybe, but I don’t think I’d use those particular terms, and if someone else insisted on doing so to describe my religious fictionalism, I guess I’d start to regard frivolity and voyeurism so conceived as virtues rather than vices. There’s nothing frivolous, in my view, about fasting for Ramadan, or spending your Saturday morning in Torah study, or paying zakat to people and organizations that ill-informed government officials regard as “terrorist.” Nor is it voyeuristic, as I see it, to immerse oneself in texts and experiences at a distance from one’s upbringing, whether or not one wholeheartedly accepts the metaphysical presuppositions of everyone else immersed in those texts or experiences. I find it enriching.
Does my fictionalism amount to a form of bad faith that undercuts the authentic, literal faith of actual religious believers? I don’t know. Granted, I don’t necessarily belabor my fictionalism when I walk into a mosque or synagogue, and for all I know fail the average believer’s criteria for a good faith avowal of their faith. If they asked, I wouldn’t—barring, I guess, literal physical danger to my life—lie about it. It’s an interesting question what would happen if they didn’t like the answer I give them.
This last issue brings me face to face with the topic of faith and isonomia. Isonomia is equality of political rights. One of the rights central to the liberal political tradition is religious toleration. For obvious reasons, an adherent of religious fictionalism is bound to have a strong stake in strong rights of religious toleration. Jews, Muslims, and atheists have all been persecuted somewhere or other on religious grounds. A Judeo-Muslim fictionalist risks persecution where all three have been persecuted, and risks it by all three as well. I’m not sure whether one adds persecutions or multiplies them, but either way, an avowal of Judeo-Muslim fictionalism seems a recipe for trouble.
In one sense, Judeo-Muslim fictionalism is a humble creed: it embraces Judaism, Islam, and atheism as something from which the fictionalist can learn the most profound lessons that human civilization can teach. In another sense, however, Judeo-Muslim fictionalism seems a calculated affront to conventional religious faith, a problematic, frivolous, even traitorous sort of boundary-crossing incompatible with the expectations of ordinary faith or ordinary infidelity.
As a Judeo-Muslim fictionalist, I reserve the right to be a Jew or a Muslim–or neither–at will. I go where I want to go, and do what I want to do, unconstrained by the strictures that hold ordinary or orthodox Jews, Muslims, or atheists in place. Atheists and Muslims have no prima facie reason to attend Torah study or celebrate shabbos at a synagogue, but I do. Jews have no prima facie reason to attend juma prayer at the local mosque, or pray at the shrines of Muslim saints, but I do. Atheists have no reason, as atheists, to perform hajj or fast during Ramadan or Yom Kippur, but I do. Neither Jews nor Muslims have reason to read Scripture by treating God as an occasionally errant colleague or peer, but I do. Atheists often read Scripture in a spirit of mockery, derision, dismissal or scorn, but I don’t. I could go on.
Jews, Muslims, and atheists all make claims to religious freedom, but usually make those claims under a single description–”Jew,” “Muslim,” “atheist.” As a fictionalist, I make the same claim to freedom under all three descriptions at once, reserving the right to add as many more descriptions as I wish. In short, when it comes to religious freedom, I demand the right to have things all ways at once, and demand the right to act on it without apology. Some may find that endearing. Others may find it offensive. I regard it as non-negotiable.
Fictionalism throws a monkey wrench into traditional liberal defenses of religious freedom. The classical defenses of religious freedom, going back to Locke, typically conceive of the religious believer as the adherent of a single faith, defending his or her right to operate within that faith in the company of believers of other faiths. At most, there is occasional talk of a believer’s transition from one faith to another, or in the extreme case, of a lapse from faith to infidelity. But setting aside Straussian claims to “esoteric reading,” it’s rare (if that) to encounter explicit discussions of attempts to occupy several putatively incompatible faith perspectives at once, much less to combine all of those with atheism. People just didn’t do that kind of thing. And so, there is little discussion or defense in the liberal tradition of the freedom required to do it.
Fictionalism demands something stronger in the way of religious freedom than almost anything one finds in the classical liberal tradition. It demands, as Metallica puts it, the religious right to go wherever one may roam. It demands the right not just to espouse a faith, but to act as though one espouses it. It demands the right not just to espouse a faith, but to leave it, and not just to leave one faith for another, but to leave a faith at will to immerse oneself in another–at will. I don’t recognize the waqf’s authority to function as gatekeepers at Al Aqsa, or the Israeli Border Police’s authority to ask my faith in Hebron, or the Saudi monarchy’s authority to demand a religious visa as a condition of entry into their “kingdom” or into the precincts of Mecca or Medina. I regard these places as the heritage of mankind, and regard myself as having the right to enter by the functional equivalent of engraved invitation. The faithful may not be able to see the writing on that invitation, but then, I can’t see the deity they invoke to keep me out.
Would I, if called to task by the conventionally faith, back down and leave a mosque or synagogue at which I was unwelcome? I guess I would. No point in worshipping in an atmosphere of animosity. But would I grant anyone’s right to throw me out? Not really. That, it seems to me, is the final frontier of the defense of religious freedom. Religious freedom is not just the right of the faithful to practice their faith, or the faithless to leave it, but of fictionalist poseurs like me to act the part, even fake it, without persecution. It’s an audacious claim, I know. But so is every claim in this domain. Audacity never stopped the faithful or the faithless. I don’t see why it should stop the likes of me.
Irfan Khawaja is a philosopher by training and writes from New Jersey. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 