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PI 1 (2) pp. 207226 Intellect Limited 2012

Performing Islam
Volume 1 Number 2
2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pi.1.2.207_1
Keywords
Muslim converts
white converts
performing Islam
reviving
Islamic Spirit
conventions
belief
fetish
Mahdi Tourage
Kings University College at the Western University
Performing belief and
reviving islam: Prominent
(white male) converts in
Muslim revival conventions
absTracT
This article argues that by successfully performing their belief and ostensibly embod-
ying its effects, western converts to Islam (especially prominent white converts in
Reviving the Islamic Spirit conventions held annually in United States and Canada)
believe for the rest of the Muslims. In effect they functions as a fetish. Just as the
sexual arousal of a fetishist is dependent upon the presence of a psychosexual fetish,
for (some) Muslims the deepest indications of faith is invoked by the prominent
converts typical hyper-performativity of their muslimness. As it relates to the
presence and rise to prominence of western male white converts, the emergence of
converts as the signifiers of Muslims belief are becoming apparent. The content of
Muslims belief remains objectively insufficient until it is fetishistically invoked by
the western convert as its signifier.
In October 2010 more than one billion people around the world witnessed as
33 Chilean miners were rescued after being trapped 70 days below the earth.
Nominating them as person-of-the-year, Time Magazine listed a motherlode
Mahdi Tourage
208
of luck and faith as causes for their miraculous survival and rescue [that]
inspired a world desperate for a happy ending to something, anything
(Padgett et al. 2010). Central to this tale of miracles, inspiration and faith
was the figure of one exceptional man, Mario Seplveda. Immediately after
the disaster, when most of the miners were in despair and doubt about their
survival, 39-year-old Mario, known up to that time only as a mere prankster
and storyteller, had a vision that he and the rest of the miners will survive.
The American journalist Jonathan Franklin, who covered the collapse of the
mine and had access to the miners while trapped underground and since,
credits this man with the most crucial function of invoking hope through his
belief in their survival and eventual rescue. Mario was convinced that all his
life was a prelude, a preparation for that moment when his belief in their
rescue saved others from despair (Franklin 2011). When Mario emerged from
the mine enthusiastically handing out souvenir rocks to the Chilean president,
his initial statement became the rescue efforts signature quote: I was with
God and with the devil, and God took me (Wong 2010); or translated differ-
ently: I was with God and I was with the devil. They fought me, and God
won (Anon. 2010).
Whether it is the Chilean miners or Nazi concentration camps, survival
stories usually include one person whose belief in their eventual survival,
despite overwhelming odds and evidence against it, gives hope to the rest of
the desperate people. Contemporary survival stories are in a way defined by
the function of this belief in the eventual outcome of the survival, like popu-
lar self-help books they are modelled on theological assumptions that correct
and appropriate actions correspond to and are the result of appropriate belief.
This particularly resonates with the long and complicated history of Christian
theology that has resulted in the generally unquestioned assumption by
scholars of religion and anthropologists that adherence to any religion must
be understood in terms of belief (instead of, for example, in terms of rituals or
deeds) (Lopez 1998: 21). In the case of Islam belief is not so much about hold-
ing certain beliefs and specific knowledge of God or the unseen. As Sachiko
Murata and William Chittick have shown, in Islam belief can be summarized
as actively recognizing and responding in submission (bearing witness) to
God (1994: 3738). This simplicity, which at least partly explains the attraction
of Islam for some converts, is summarized in the testimony of faith: There is
no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.
This article is an examination of the function of prominent white converts
as it relates to the issues of belief and the ways in which Islamic belief is staged
during popular Reviving the Islamic Spirit conventions (Revivals) that are held
annually in Canada and the United States. The Quranic term iman is a rough
translation of belief in the Islamic context with its attending connotations
of peace and security. The definition of iman according to the prophetic
tradition is a knowledge in the heart, a voicing with the tongue, and an
activity with the limbs (Murata and Chittick 1994: 3738). The ways in which
that knowledge, voicing and activity are ostensibly signified and showcased
by prominent white male converts will be examined. For many contempo-
rary Muslims, prominent western converts to Islam, especially the most popu-
lar white male converts among them who rise to prominence (like Hamza
Yusuf), are the ones who most successfully settle the questions of iman. In this
context, as a subject outwardly embodying belief and externalizing its effects,
a western convert, or in some cases specifically their whiteness, functions
like a fetish. Like the sexual arousal of a fetishist, which takes place only in
Performing belief and reviving Islam
209
the presence of a psychosexual fetish, for (some) Muslims the deepest indica-
tions of faith is invoked by the converts typical hyper-performativity of their
faith. Conversely, when some converts refuse to or cannot fulfil this function
properly they threaten the process of belief production, which explains why
they receive a negative response from the mainstream Muslim community.
Muslim belief still revolves around the existence of God, prophets, holy books,
angels and the Day of Judgement. However, this belief remains interiorized,
that is objectively insufficient, until it is fetishistically invoked by western
converts as its signifier. Perhaps it is time to reconsider William James asser-
tion that proof is derived from belief; at least in the case of prominent white
western converts who are staged in Muslim Revivals we are witnessing reli-
ance of belief on proof.
This is not a historical survey of conversion to Islam even though the
contribution of converts to the unfolding of the Islamic civilization has been
immense as is observed by the famous premodern Arab historian Ibn Khaldun
(d. 1406): It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most Muslim
Scholars both in the religious and the intellectual sciences have been Persians
(non-Arabs) (1958: 3.311). There are historical issues that have some rele-
vance here, for example, the historicity of the understanding of what consti-
tutes belief in the Islamic tradition. However, this is not a historical study but
a phenomenological approach to the public display of belief from a cognitive-
cultural perspective where public representations have priority over personal
appropriations of Islamic belief. Therefore this article complements a recent
study of the authenticity of Muslim converts performing their Muslimness
from a sociological point of view (Moosavi 2012). Even though a few studies
and memoirs have explored the issue of conversion to Islam (Kose 1996; Van
Nieuwkerk 2006; Wilson 2010) there is no study exploring the intersection
of western converts rise to prominence and Muslims belief. It is hoped that
this study will contribute to the broader issues of performing Islam in reli-
gious studies.
belief and PerforMance
Scholars of religion differentiate between belief and faith. According to The
Etymology Dictionary the word belief replaced Old English geleafa in late
twelfth century (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.). Belief used to mean trust
in God, while faith meant loyalty to a person based on promise or duty (a
sense preserved in the phrase in good (or bad) faith and in a few other
common usages). As a cognate of Latin fides, faith took on the religious sense
beginning in fourteenth-century CE translations. Belief had by the sixteenth
century become limited to mental acceptance of something as true, from
the religious use in the sense of things held to be true as a matter of reli-
gious doctrine (early thirteenth century CE) (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.).
Along the same lines scholars of religion argue that belief is a Pascalian exis-
tential wager (Cantwell Smith), a subjectively sufficient judgment with no
necessary link with knowledge, that is, with an external procedure to verify it.
Hume argued that belief is weaker than knowledge, while William James and
Wittgenstein maintained that belief stands alone and is in no need of proof,
the proof of what is believed is derived from the belief itself (Lopez 1998:
2223). We can distinguish between believing something and having faith in
something. Muslims are required to believe in jinns for example, but that does
not mean having faith in jinn.
Mahdi Tourage
210
In the case of Islam belief is not so much about specific knowledge of God.
Being a Muslim is indicated by the simple testimony of faith: There is no god
but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God. That, however, does not
necessarily translate into belief. All believers are Muslim but not all Muslims
are believers. As we read in the Quran: The wandering Arabs say: We believe
(a
-
manna
-
). Say: You believe not, but rather say We submit (aslamna
-
), for belief
(iman) has not yet entered into your hearts (Quran 49: 14). The Quranic term
iman and its semantic filed, to use a phrase coined by Izutsu (2002), is trans-
lated as belief with its attending connotations of peace, safety trust and
security (against untruth and misguidance in this world and against punish-
ment in the next). According to the Quran belief can increase or decrease
(3:173; 8:2; 48:4); it could also be lost and come to naught: God will not make
your iman to be lost (2:138). In the Quran iman seems to be ideally expressed
in pious deeds, like charity, but post-Quranic literature tend to separate iman
and deeds, often equate the latter with Islam (Adand 20012006: 1.218226).
In one instance curiously God is described as al-Momen, which is not trans-
lated as the Believer, but as the Protector of the believers security (59:23).
The outward expression of faith whose interior location is the heart is best
captured in the well-known prophetic tradition that defines iman as: a
knowledge in the heart, a voicing with the tongue, and an activity with the
limbs (Murata and Chittick 1994: 3).
Some of the best examples of prominent Muslim converts could be found
in Reviving the Islamic Spirit conventions held annually in the United States
and Canada. The list of speakers conspicuously includes American converts as
well as some of those who for the lack of a better term will be called born-
Muslims among its motivational and or academic speakers. The website for
the 2010 convention in Toronto attended by about 15,00020,000 people has a
biographical sketch of the well-known regular speakers (Reviving the Islamic
Spirit n.d.). The most famous one, Hamza Yusuf (formerly Mark Hanson),
we are told is a white convert and the cofounder of Zaituna Institute, born in
Washington State and raised in Northern California, travelled to the Muslim
world for ten years to study Islam, became the first American lecturer to teach
in Karaouine in Fes, and currently resides in Northern California with his
wife and five children (Reviving the Islamic Spirit n.d.). Another founder of
the Zaituna Institute, Imam Zaid Shakir, is a black American convert born in
Berkeley, CA, who similarly studied a few years in Muslim world and accord-
ing to the website has emerged as one of the nations top Islamic scholars
and a voice of conscience for American Muslims and non-Muslims alike. He
is presented as an American Muslim who came of age during the civil rights
struggles, he has brought both sensitivity about race and poverty issues and
scholarly discipline to his faith-based work; and as the Imam of Masjid al-Is-
lam from 1988 to 1994 he spearheaded a community renewal and grassroots
anti-drug effort (Reviving the Islamic Spirit n.d.).
What is important here is not the accuracy of the information or partic-
ular details. Conversion narratives are not useful tools for information on
the actual conversion process and subsequent personal transformations.
Conversion is triggered and organized by personal models, A. Mansson
McGinty even argues that conversion is not primarily incited and guided by
dominant discourses, language, or social structures, but rather prompted by
particular personal beliefs, quests, and desires (2006: 9, original emphasis).
Converts appropriate a new Muslim identity which they integrate into their
already existing cognitive framework, therefore McGinty correctly argues for
Performing belief and reviving Islam
211
the concurrent sense of change and continuity, an ongoing process of recon-
ciling old and new in converts lives. However, in the context of mass Muslim
Revival gatherings the cultural model of shared understanding within a
group is more relevant (McGinty 2006: 1011). After all, as will be discussed
below, conversion to Islam and its accompanying narratives are experienced
and narrated in specific sociocultural contexts where selective elements of
prominent American converts narrative of conversion are highlighted and
endowed with significance.
Regardless of converts biographical idiosyncrasies and the debate over
the meaning of religious conversion as a process of multiple, interactive and
cumulative factors, the reproduced narratives of conversion often conform
to a reductive predetermined script (Rambo 1993). For example, conver-
sion is often depicted to be the result of a sudden and fundamental shift, an
on the road to Damascus event, in the life of the convert. The biographical
details of Shaikh Hamza Yusuf traces the origins of his search for mean-
ing to a serious car accident and near-death head-on collision in 1977 when
he was just starting Junior College (Unauthorized Biography 2011). A similar
older narrative circulating among Muslims is that of Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf
Islam, whose search for truth began in hospital when he was very ill with
TB at the height of his fame as a pop star (Amman 2008), or according to a
YouTube video in a near-death experience of drowning in the ocean (Cat
Stevens Transition to Yusuf Islam 2006). Another prominent white convert
from the world of music, Imam Suhaib Webb, was introduced to Islam at the
age of 19 while selling music tapes. He received a copy of the Quran from a
Muslim man selling incense and handing out copies of the Quran. According
to a recent article in the LA Times, his mother Mary Lynn Webb credits his
conversion for saving him from the fate that awaited him in the rap world
(Abdulrahim 2011).
These popularized narratives of conversion present these prominent white
converts as having come from privileged American families, with fathers who
were university professors (Hamza Yusuf and Suhaib Webb), and educated,
activist mothers. The black converts narratives of conversion often follow the
Malcolm X Model: coming from broken families, growing up in poverty and
drugs, followed by incarceration and conversion. More importantly, implicit
in these selective pieces of biographical information is the celebration of
their selection of Islam along with the criticism of their previous religious and
cultural activities, which as Marcia Hermensen observes (regarding a panel of
new American converts to Islam during Islam awareness week on a univer-
sity campus), produce among the Muslim audience the implicit comfort of
the superiority of having been born with Muslim knowledge and identity
(2004: 393). That these popular American converts display certain ideal(ized)
Muslim subjectivities (having spent a few years in Muslim heartlands, read-
ily displaying their mastery of Arabic language, the use of the Quran, hadith
and pious formulas) intensifies this celebratory approach. The display of other
signifiers of idealized Islamic identity too resonates with North American
Muslims, who recognize them as outward expressions of belief. Examples
include visibly Muslim public appearances, pious gestures, Islamic items of
clothing, marrying brown women and having many children, and the use of
what Hermensen calls Islam-speak (2004: 392). Commenting on Muslims
performing Islam Awareness Week on university campuses, Hermensen
observes: non-verbal elements such as costume and gesture function as
much to persuade as do actual verbal utterances; and she adds: ones visible
Mahdi Tourage
212
identity and actions warrant the acceptance of the claims to Islamic authority
that are made through the performance (2004: 392).
The concept of performance noted by Hermensen is a particularly rele-
vant conceptual tool to shed some light on the phenomenon of western
converts as subjects outwardly embodying Islamic belief. Hermensen argues
that the performative aspect of a public Muslim identity is related to the feel-
ing of oppression Muslims living as minority tend to experience; it serves the
purpose of asserting authority over an imagined Muslim space (2004: 392).
Hermensens insights could be extended to the Muslim Revival conventions
where negotiating power and authority through performance is staged on a
larger scale than on campus Islam Awareness Weeks. More importantly, and
much like similar rallies in Christian evangelical circles, in these conventions
the effects of performance go beyond the construct of identity, they include
the performance of belief. We still witness what Hermensen calls collective
empowerment through claiming spatial authority and performing identity. An
e-mail correspondence (dated 8 July 2011) from the Islamic Society of North
America (ISNA) sent to their newsletter subscribers listed number one reason
for people choosing to attend the Annual ISNA Convention as to Be empow-
ered. But that collective empowerment is also about claiming and performing
belief. This is important for immigrant Muslims (this term is used as a syno-
nym of born-Muslim and includes second or third generations as well) who
form the majority of the audience of Revival gatherings and for whom Islam is
particularly important. As Jackson observes, since the 1979 Iranian revolution
immigrant Muslims have increasingly taken Islam as the platform upon which
the formation of new identities, a source of pride, and offsetting of immigrant
Muslims sociocultural alienation in the New World is based (2005: 81).
It is the performance of belief particularly as it is embodied by prominent
American converts and reflected in their conversion narratives that is cele-
brated by the participants in Muslim Revivals. On a social level these perform-
ances express shared values and bonds, rendering a world in which immigrant
Muslims find themselves alienated, marginalized and minoritized, coherent
and viable. Langellier, a scholar of performance, writes:
Identity and experience are symbiosis of performed story and the social
relations in which they are materially embedded: sex, class, race, ethnic-
ity, sexuality, geography, religion, and so on. This is why personal
narrative performance is especially crucial to those communities left out
of the privileges of dominant culture, those bodies without voice in the
political sense.
(1999: 129)
The most prominent and popular among converts, like Hamza Yusuf, in fact
hyper-perform their belief, often flawlessly, after all, they are hyper-capable
of doing so (Hermensen 2004).
The crucial point here is that these performances produce something
greater than the sum total of speeches, pious acts, conversion narratives and
all that goes into a successful performance. These performances, especially the
most successful ones by the prominent speakers, discursively construct and
performatively enact Islamic belief. In this context, the performance of belief
does not merely refer to or name the belief in the principles of Islam, it is the
producer of what can be known of Islamic belief. That is to say, there is not
an a priori belief that is then signified by these performances. Performativity
Performing belief and reviving Islam
213
has the power to effect, enact and produce what is being performed (Butler
1997: 3, quoted in Hermensen 2004: 390). Performative embodiment of Islamic
belief by prominent converts in Revivals are what the theorist of performance
J. L. Austin categorized as perlocutionary, utterances, gestures, items of cloth-
ing, etc. that produce what they are referring to in their representation and
enactment (1975). If performance is the producer of the event, it follows that
the event of performing belief and reviving Islam (performances, speeches,
enacted rituals, gender segregations and racial coordinations, etc.) is itself
a similitude, a repetition of a repetition with no resemblance to an original.
In that case this copy of other copies, which is better conceived as a simu-
lacrum, presents great affirmative powers (Durham 1998: 8). Because it is a
fundamentally unstable event not grounded in any particular point of origin,
simulacrum reproduces difference. Muslim Revivals therefore have the poten-
tial (which seems to be mostly lost) to reproduce themselves along inclusive
egalitarian lines and ethical vision of Islam.
One should not be scandalized at the assertion that performance precludes
belief as a pre-existing subject. As noted above, according to the prophetic
tradition belief is known through the knowledge, voicing and activity of the
believer, and the Quran itself views belief to be ideally expressed in pious
deeds. Murata and Chittick astutely observe that non-bodily realities do
not make much sense to many people. Show me, they say (1994: 9). The
problem with the production of belief through performance could be articu-
lated through the following questions: What is the truth-status of belief if it is
performatively constituted and discursively constructed? Is performance noth-
ing more than pretending and make-belief? Are the Muslim converts no more
than actors onstage at best and perhaps imposters at worst? Accusations of
converts being actors or imposters are easily dismissed, after all we all perform
certain identities (Moosavi 2012: 109). Furthermore, even non-believer and or
atheist clergy who hypocritically perform their religious functions can invoke
belief in others (Dennett and LaScola 2010). Perhaps we should question the
truth-status of performatives themselves. As speech act theorists have argued,
there is a shared pretence in all performatives, otherwise we would not be
able to refer and talk about anything at all: When we communicate, it is
because we are parties to a set of discourse agreements which are in effect
decisions as to what can be stipulated as a fact (Fish 1980: 242). The discourse
is possible because of these agreements and decisions and not because of
the availability of a substance. This will not make all discourses fictional, to the
contrary, it makes all discourses purposeful and serious. Also, on a theoretical
level it is useful to be reminded of the possibility of differentiating perform-
ance from performativity, though in this article they are used interchangeably.
As shown by Butler, the latter is related to the contested ways of meaning
production and multiplicity of interpretations, the former more of a theatri-
cal self-presentation (1993: 95). Performance studies theorists have extended
Butlers insights to include any performance (Hamera 2006: 4664), and elab-
orated on the performers-spectators theatrical relation especially in relation to
rituals and religious belief (Schieffelin 2005: 13135). These assertions suggest
that performatives are circumstantial and relational, they can succeed or fail
depending on conventions and discourse agreements.
Perhaps in an unabashedly post-everything (and neo-something) world it
is hard to find a phenomenon that is not discursively constituted. In that case
the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (whose rele-
vance to theories of performance is explained by Loxley 2007: 83) was correct
Mahdi Tourage
214
to maintain his well-known transcendental idealism, arguing that human
experience can only be possible on the basis of certain conditions that can
be known a priori. Belief, then, is a contextual and relational phenomenon,
formation and justification of which is grounded in prior human experience.
But herein lies the danger of falling into a hyper-Kantian trap, one that has
been thoroughly critiqued before. For example, in his essay Hyper-Kantianism
in recent discussions of mystical experience, Forgie argues that not just the
context but interpretive structures and concepts are needed components of
religious experiences too (1985: 20518). Therefore, Forgie argues, reli- 18). Therefore, Forgie argues, reli- 18). Therefore, Forgie argues, reli-
gious experiences are partially determined or shaped by concepts and beliefs
that are peculiar to the particular religious tradition of the one having that
experience (1985: 208). These interpretive religious traditions vary from
culture to culture and from one religious tradition to another. Indeed within
the same religious tradition we may find a variety of ways in which religious
belief is interpreted and performed. For example as shown by Moosavi (2012)
not all converts experiences are the same as the experiences of those promi-
nent ones discussed here. There may not be a pure and unmediated expres-
sion of religious belief, but it is hard to imagine a belief that is not shaped
by the structural effects of the religious tradition that gave rise to it. Hence,
scholars like Eliade (1975: 110) express a sort of structuralist view, empha- Eliade (1975: 110) express a sort of structuralist view, empha-
sizing the importance of the knowledge of particular religious structure for
understanding the meaning of religious experiences. Belief, therefore, cannot
be a label arbitrarily applied to vastly different religious experiences in order
to make sense of certain commonalities between them. Not only should it
not define the terms of belief and the doctrinal content of creed for other reli-
gions, the history of Christian theology cannot account for all types of religious
beliefs. In the case of Islam for instance mass Revivals uncanny mimicry
of their evangelical counterparts notwithstanding active submission to God
takes precedent over the doctrinal content of belief.
The goal of this article is not to settle the epistemic status of belief (or
peformatives) or delineate the parameters for its typology in the American reli-
gious landscape. The goal is to evaluate the process in which belief is staged
and outwardly signified through performances; to be more specific, the way
it is successfully performed by prominent western converts in mass Revival
conventions. Even as it is the discourse with its conventions and agreements
that allows for the process of production, increase, decrease and expression
of belief, belief ultimately remains independent of all these. This is consist-
ent with the Quranic stance, which does not ask people to understand the
world of the unseen, but only to believe in it and to have faith; as Murata
and Chittick put it: simply to accept that it is there and to act accordingly,
by performing the Five Pillars and the other activities set down in the revealed
guidance (Murata and Chittick 1994: 9, emphasis added). When the promi-
nent Imams and Shaikhs successfully enact Islamic belief in mass conventions
they reference these other activities.
Power and PerforMance
The nexus of performance and power is a relevant one that needs some explo-
ration. One cannot simply perform any act and produce a desired result.
As Moosavi has shown Muslim converts often experience anxiety over the
authenticity of their performances, for example mispronunciation of Islamic
words can threaten their authenticity (2012: 10405). As a broader example,
Performing belief and reviving Islam
215
1. There are better
sources of information
for Knight, but I
believe in this case the
Wikipedia entry best
reflects the popular
take on him.
a city official or a priest can marry a heterosexual couple through the power
vested in him by pronouncing them husband and wife. But he cannot
perform the same for a gay couple unless he is empowered by the law to do
so. Therefore Jacques Derrida in his semiotic take on performativity argues
that signifiers (words, gestures, body language, relationships, clothing, etc.)
that performatively constitute a reality will not succeed unless they reference
a previous performative and repeat a coded or iterable utterance; that is to
say, a performative must be identifiable in some way as a citation (1982:
30730). In other words, it is the citation of specific signifiers that permits
the efficacy of a performance. In the case of American convert Imams and
Shaikhs who are showcased in Reviving the Islamic Spirit conventions it is
the display, that is to say, citation of the particular ideal(ized) Muslim subjec-
tivities that brings about their performative power. Put differently, the ascen-
sion of certain American converts to prominent positions and their assertion
of social and symbolic authority is due to successful citation of ideal(ized)
Muslim subjectivities that include hyper-performing their muslimness and
specific biographical details and their conversion narratives. It is when these
citations are successfully performed and effectively recognized in their perfor-
mative mode that they become signifiers of belief.
Constructed idealized subjectivities of prominent Muslim converts that are
conducive to the production and increase of belief are one side of the coin.
The other side is less desirable or even undesirable convert Muslim subjec-
tivities that are less conducive or subversive to the official process of belief
production. Again the best examples are found among American Muslim
converts. Amina Wadud is a well-known female Muslim convert academic
activist known for her anti-patriarchal egalitarian views on gender in Islam
and the Quran (1999, 2006). Among other academic endeavours she is also
known for her advocacy of female-led prayer rooted in Islamic tradition.
Her well-known leading of a controversial Friday prayer in New York (2005)
instigated much debate and controversy (A Collection of Fatwas 2005; Elewa
and Silvers 20102011: 14171). Another well-known (white, male) convert
is Michael Muhammad Knight, whose prolific edgy writings have inspired
Muslim punk rock groups, while his disrespectful attitude towards the leaders
of the American Muslim Community has earned him ill repute among main-
stream Muslim leaders (Wikipedia n.d.). According to the Wikipedia entry
on Knight he has been a troublemaker at the ISNAs annual conventions
(Michael Muhammad Knight).
1
Giving a stink palm to prominent converts
like Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Cat Stevens may be juvenile behaviour. (Urban
Dictionary not the best source but entirely apt in this case defines stink
palm as a verb meaning: The act of wiping your ass with your hand, prefer-
ably while very sweaty or having recently shat, proceeding to shake anothers
hand.) But demonstrating the inconsistency of ISNAs annual convention
in regard to access to Muslim public spaces has important ramifications. As
recorded in the documentary Taqwacore: Birth of Punk Islam (Majid 2009),
Knight along with Muslim punk rock bands were ejected by police from ISNA
conventions youth talent night because their musical performance included
a female singer and obscenity. It is obvious that converts like Wadud and
Knight will not be found among the invited speakers at Revival conventions
where only particular stylized subjectivities are displayed, and only idealized
models of performance of Islamic belief are celebrated. Wadud, Knight and
other Muslim converts who represent contesting Islamic subjectivities are not
exceptions to the norms. Islamic history provides many evidence of dissent
Mahdi Tourage
216
that it seems Muslims hardly ever agreed on anything but the absolute bare
essentials even though a certain hegemonic status quo was always main-
tained. Even beyond commonplace differences of opinions there were always
groups of Muslim misfits who were denounced by the hegemonizing forces
of the dominant culture for their espousal of alternative epistemologies and
their shocking appearance and behaviour (Karamustafa 2006). Therefore at
the risk of inviting accusations of relativism we can argue that misfit converts
like Wadud and Knight cite alternative subjectivities and perform alternative
models of belief that are at least as Islamic as the idealized normative ones
performed by for example Hamza Yusuf.
Comparing and contrasting these marginalized converts subjectivities
with the normative ones performed in mass Muslim Revivals and conventions
is not the point here. Rather, the focus is the power of performance to claim
Islamic authority and produce Islamic belief (in the case of misfit converts
to subvert hegemonic claims of authority and reified models of belief).
Alternative models of Islamic subjectivities, which interrogate historically
patriarchal, hierarchical, sexist, classist and racist even misogynist expressions
of Islamic authority, are not well suited to the empowerment of a Muslim
immigrant population who, under the scrutiny of the American racist gaze, is
navigating Americas racial and class landscape, striving hard to present itself
as the model minority (even at the expense of alienating other minorities like
black American Muslims) (Karim 2009). It is understandable that the norma-
tive model performed by prominent converts in Muslim Revivals is best suited
to a project of empowerment of Muslims who are experiencing the life of a
disempowered minority in the West. This points to the pressure placed on
converts who are overinvested with special significance to embody the perfect
Sunni Muslim for the sake of the whole community.
If empowerment is a goal of performance, then the race of prominent
converts as it intersects with the constructs of power must also have a bear-
ing here (gender and other constructed markers of identity are also relevant
here, but they will not be discuss in length). Because in the American context
the power is not equally divided along racial lines, immigrant Muslims do
not relate to white and black American converts the same way. Documented
proof for the assertion that immigrant Muslims (who are the majority of the
Revival conventions audience) value white convert speakers more than black
American converts may be hard to come by. We can anecdotally point to
the little or no biographical information provided for the other speakers on
Reviving the Islamic Spirit website. The other lesser-known speakers of the
Long Beach Reviving the Islamic Spirit (Reviving the Islamic Spirit n.d.), for
example, are introduced by their qualifications and their studies. But if there
is a conversion related item in their biography, it is highlighted. For exam-
ple, Imam Suhaib Webb, a young white convert, we are told was raised in
Oklahoma and was a DJ during his teenage years. As another example the
website informs the reader that Junaid Jamshed was a famous Pakistani singer
who renounced music and devoted his life to Islam and active membership in
Tablighi Jamaat (Reviving the Islamic Spirit n.d.).
It is also difficult to measure how aware the converts are of their own racial
and class location, that they are not just adopting a set of ideas, as Sachs
Norris argues (2003: 171), but are also converting to and from an embodied
worldview and identity. We can however, point to a commonly acknowledged
fact pointed out by Sherman Jackson, that a powerful pre-existing predisposi-
tion towards whiteness is a characteristic of immigrant Muslims (2005: 8081).
Performing belief and reviving Islam
217
This predisposition is not peculiar to Muslims. Because constellations of privi-
leges in regimes of power are always produced and maintained as decidedly
unmarked invisible categories (Dyer 1997), this predisposition can be found in
virtually every other disenfranchized group but especially among immigrants
who aspire to be white. There are drawbacks to the characterizing whiteness
as an unmarked category (Frankenberg 2001), nevertheless it is useful here to
be reminded that whiteness is one of those invented organizational frameworks
that functions best when operations of its processes and boundaries of its prac-
tices remain unmarked. Therefore, even the earlier white immigrants to the
United States who were marginalized, like the Dutch or the Irish, displayed
this predisposition towards whiteness. This powerful pre-existing disposi-
tion towards whiteness and its rewards and privileges has brought immigrant
Muslims to value whiteness as an ideal, a model, and a marker of privilege,
while the consequent striving to climb the social and economic ladder has
allowed them to separate whiteness from Westernness (Jackson 2005: 81).
There are many other dynamics involved in this relationship between immi-
grant Muslims and white converts (not to mention the issues particular to
Latino converts, which are beyond the scope of this study). For example, by
celebrating the prominent white converts privileged upper class position prior
to conversion (especially noted in their biographies) immigrant Muslims relieve
themselves from confronting the issues of poverty and political injustices of
American society and focus almost exclusively on the poverty and injustice
abroad (Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, etc.) (Karim 2009: 43). Thus, the American
white convert Imams and Shaikhs are not idealized for their successful perform-
ances and conversion narratives alone, they are also idealized for their white-
ness. In fact the performative power of their idealized Muslim subjectivities
is augmented by the advantages derived from their whiteness. Because they
operate within a patriarchal framework, to the powers accrued to their perfor-
mativity we can add their maleness. And because race is always about bodies
and the reproduction of those bodies through heterosexuality (Dyer 1997: 25),
we must also add compulsory heterosexuality to the list of cluster of privileges
that accompany whiteness of the prominent Muslim converts.
Of course, western white female converts too are prized for their white-
ness. The following sheds some light on the historical background of erotici-
zation of white European women: the eighteenth and nineteenth century
Persianate travellers eroticization of women of Europe, as being like the houris
of Paradise in appearance and like angels in manners, served the purpose of
engendering a desire for Europe as heaven on earth (Tavakoli-Tarqi 2001:
5455). The same internalized racist notions of European/American whites
supremacy and the attending issues of colonized imaginations that bring
about immigrant Muslims predisposition towards whiteness are opera-
tive here as well. This gives some context to interracial marriages between
non-white Muslim men and white European/American women. As early as
1952 Frantz Fanon writes about the man of colours desire to be recognized
as white through the love of the white woman who proves to him that he is
worthy of white love and being loved like a white man ([1952] 2008: 45);
and a more recent study of the subject discusses the violent turn that the issue
of white women saving coloured men has taken (Dabashi 2011: 3032). Imam
Zaid Shakirs observation bears repeating here:
If a panel of Muslim men, whose origins were in the Muslim world, were
to choose Miss World, the title would likely never leave Scandinavia.
Mahdi Tourage
218
No matter how beautiful a woman with a brown, black, or even tan
complexion was, she would never be quite beautiful enough, because of
her skin colour.
(2010)
Female white converts to Islam too could signify belief when they display their
gendered forms of idealized Islamic subjectivities, or when their conversion
narratives are repeated (almost always the main pieces of information about
them other Muslims are interested in is their conversion narratives). In one
instance a white Canadian female convert, Ingrid Mattson, served as the pres-
ident of the ISNA. However, even though there is no shortage of contem-
porary learned Muslim women, no female (convert or born-Muslim for that
matter) occupies the same prominent position that male American Imams and
Shaikhs (like Hamza Yusuf) do. This is understandable because as many stud-
ies have shown white women do not have the same relation to power as white
men. White women do stand for white power but simultaneously are shown
to be unable either to exercise it effectively or to change what they perceive to
be its abuses (Dyer 1997: 30). A blog written by a convert draws attention to
the few, usually white, celebrity converts who are paraded in the media and
at conferences put on by conservative Muslim groups in North America and
UK. The blogger notes the tokenism of choosing a white female convert who
is sometimes given a visible position of power in order to provide a group
with a more North American and woman-friendly image, while female
converts-of-color [are] passed over (A Sober Second Look: Of Whiteness and
Conversion n.d.). As another example, Imam Zaid Shakir reminds us of the
Islamic orthodoxys accepted convention that there is not even one instance
of a female-led mixed-gender congregational prayer in Islamic history (Shakir
n.d.). This should explain why this article focuses only on the function of the
prominent male converts.
feTish and PerforMance
Paul Tillich, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century, suggests
that Freuds formulation of ego and superego is important for the understand-
ing of faith (2001: 6; Bingaman 2003). According to Tillich faith is similar to
the superego, the moral psychic agency that judges, regulates, censures and
inflicts punishment on the ego. He writes: the symbols of faith are consid-
ered to be expressions of the superego or, more concretely, to be an expres-
sion of the father image which gives context to the superego (Tillich 2001: 6).
Tillich also notes that for the superego to not function as a suppressive tyrant
it must be established through valid principles, and linked to real faith based
in principles of truth and justice (2001: 6). If operations of faith are similar to
the moral agency of the superego, what would belief be similar to (assuming
that we can distinguish the latter as sufficiently based on objective evidence
compared to the formers more subjective nature)? Freud answers that belief
is a phenomenon that belongs wholly to the reality-based system of ego with
no counterpart in the unconscious (Britton 1998: 10).
Along the same lines we can formulate the function of western convert
Muslims in mass Revival rallies as a psycho-cultural fetish. The term fetish
first came into widespread use in the eighteenth century in the context of the
inanimate objects invested with supernatural powers by the so-called primi-
tive people. Freud connected fetishism with castration and as a substitute for
Performing belief and reviving Islam
219
the missing maternal phallus, formulating it as a configuration that compen-
sates for an originary absence by affirming the presence of a substitute (i.e.,
a fetish) (1977: 35157). If we read castration as psycho-social disempow-
erment, the fetishistic function of prominent white converts becomes appar-
ent: through discursive repetition of gestures of power they are authorized
to empower the community. More importantly Muslim converts bring about
outward manifestations and proofs of Islamic belief, in effect they believe for
the rest of the Muslims. Put differently, by fetishizing the prominent white
converts, immigrant Muslims believe through them. Of course the latter
recognize that the content of belief is irreducible to any performance, yet that
recognition does not minimize the fetishistic power of the former. In psycho-
analytical terms this simultaneous acknowledgement of power of the fetish
and denial of its intrinsic significance is formulated as disavowal, which
is always preserved in the formation of a fetish (Freud 1977: 35157). A fetish-
ist simultaneously recognizes the illusory nature of his fetish while knowing
full well that it works in spite of its fantasmatic configuration. To paraphrase
Mennoni, They know full well, but nonetheless (1969). Theatricality of the
Revivals (staged in huge halls that accommodate thousands of people seated
towards a raised stage, a full crew of producers and directors and remotely
controlled moving areal cameras with images projected on massive screens,
etc.) adds to this power. Like fetishists, the audience of a movie theatre will-
ingly suspend their disbelief produced by the obvious theatricality of the
event (Metz 1982: 7172). Similarly, the audience are aware that a Revival is a
staged production with its own performatives, but nonetheless they overlook
the obviously staged presence of the speakers and theatrical performance of
their belief in favour of the unrepresentable content of belief.
There are structural reasons for the play of fetishism in mass Revival
rallies: as noted above Islamic belief is not about a specific knowledge, but
an inexplicable knowledge in the heart. The heart is not a place of emotions
but the spiritual organ that separates human beings from nonhuman beings
(Murata and Chittick 1994: 3738). This interiority of Islamic belief is followed
by the utterances of the tongue and is acted out in pious deeds as the Quran
and the prophetic tradition attest to. The interiority of belief makes the precise
knowledge of it irrelevant except when it can be exteriorized. That is to say,
the verification of belief through external procedures is not only possible but
also structurally necessary. To explain this in psychoanalytical terms we must
consider that fetish is invariantly necessary and some degree of it is always
positively present, except when it becomes the sole object of desire therefore
pathologized (Freud 1977: 6667). An example is found in the Quran where
Abraham asks God to show him how He will raise the dead. God, seemingly
surprised at this question, asks Abraham: Do you not believe?! He answers
that he does, but only wants his heart to be reassured. He is then instructed to
cut four birds to pieces and scatter them over the mountains, then call them
back. When he does as he was instructed, the dead birds return to him alive
(Quran 2:260). A similar story is repeated with Jesus and his disciples who
ask him for a table of food to be sent from heaven so that their hearts be
reassured and know that Jesus was truthful (Quran 5:11113). This exterior-
ity of belief leaves it open to the possibility of being displaced onto social/
cultural relations, hence to the danger of reification. In psychoanalytical terms
this reification of symbols, i.e. pathologically taking the fetish as the ultimate
goal, could be characterizes as fetishism; in a religious monotheistic context
it is formulated as idolatry. This explains why Muslims in Revival rallies find
Mahdi Tourage
220
the most salient embodiment and reassuring performance of their belief in
fetishizing the converts. In recent Revivals there are specific segments devoted
to testimonies of the (mostly white) recent converts to Islam and sometimes
even a short talk by their non-Muslim mothers. The display of these converts
turn out to be the pivotal point in the structural function of these gather-
ings where compensating for the absence of an empowered and ideal Muslim
community and interiority of its belief system is part of the focus.
The fetishization of western converts performance of Islamic belief
through display of their knowledge, appearance and actions has some roots
in the racial history of American society, the residues of colonialism and espe-
cially in the displacement trauma experienced by minority immigrants a
phenomenon historically largely unknown to Muslim civilizations. The same
need for empowerment that gives rise to fetishistic attitudes could be observed
in the insistence of highly visible minarets in the design of many Mosques
in the United States and Canada. Some communities spend more funds on
the minarets than they do on the mosques building itself. This is despite the
fact that minarets of the American/Canadian mosques hardly ever have any
function or architectural use other than symbolically compensating for disem-
powerment and invisibility (Kahera et al. 2009: 17). In this context, specifically
constructed conversion narratives of the converts disavowed past, espe-
cially the prominent white and privileged among them, contribute to Muslim
Revival conventions becoming the site of belief production and empowerment.
In the case of prominent Muslim converts it is their selected pre-conversion
religious and cultural activities that are denied while their post-conversion
religious and cultural activities, now Islamic, are celebrated. Empowerment of
immigrant Muslims is enhanced by this disavowal, which, coupled with the
recognition (we can say celebration) of the racial, cultural, class, perhaps even
sediments of colonial subjectivities of white converts that are put on display in
their conversion narratives and accompany their stage performances, become
the precondition for the successful production of belief.
Because the power relations are inevitably present where there is represen-
tation and difference, the performance and display of these carefully selected
differences masks the displacement of other forms of difference. As Homi
Bhabha points out: The question of the representation of difference is
always also a problem of authority (2004: 128). The hegemonic context of the
performance of ideal(ized) Muslim subjectivities and the fetishistic representa-
tion of convert Imams and Shaikhs in these Revivals authorize certain modes
of belief and exclude other ways of believing. For the fetishistic performances
and idealized representations to work, alternative Muslim subjectivities that
cite other interpretations of wholeness and signify other models of practicing
Islamic belief must be overlooked and erased. In fact what brings participants
together is not what is theatrically staged or ritualistically performed. It is by
indentifying and implicitly agreeing with the omission of alternative modes
of performativity that full participation in the successful performance of these
events are made possible. Alternative Muslim subjectivities that cite other
interpretations and signify other models of practicing Islamic belief are simply
erased. For example, Amina Waduds argument, that justification for female-
led prayer is rooted in primary textual sources of Islam and the practice of
Prophet Muhammad, would not find expression in these Revivals. As Imam
Zaid Shakir, a regular at Muslim Revivals, has warned, the divisive nature of
the controversy surrounding the 2005 historic prayer led by Wadud warrants
its categorization in strongest terms as a fitna: Strife breaking out among
Performing belief and reviving Islam
221
various peoples, or as defined by some traditional sources quoted by Shakir:
that which clarifies the state of a person, be that good or evil (Shakir n.d.).
That both Wadud and Shakir are black American converts is worth noting
here. As Jackson has pointed out, the modern Wests stereotype of a hyper-
masculine, patriarchal and violent Islam contrasted against a feminized, soft,
antiviolence and domesticated Christianity of the twentieth century explains
why historically Islam appealed especially to black American men. Hints of
this racialized hypermasculine Islam is found in a talk by Imam Shakir during
the 2009 Toronto Revival where he casually notes that as a new convert to
Islam Shaikh Hamza Yusuf, presumably because he is a white Californian,
was selling incense on the streets of New York City, he was even involved
or witnessed a shootout that drove him back to California . (New Muslim
Presentations n.d). In any event, Islam, Jackson points out, has presented a
haven of sorts for black manhood (2005: 20). Jacksons insight that the patri-
archal slant of this hypermasculinized Islam is at odds with the interests of
educated and socioeconomically advanced black American Muslim women
who favour an antipatriarchal demasculinized Islam, goes a long way to
explain Shakir-Wadud divergent positions on female-lead prayer.
conclusion
When converts perform Islamic belief through their speeches, pious acts and
conversion narratives, i.e. when they function as the signifiers of belief, they
do so in a specific social-cultural context. We can say their performances lack
intrinsic significance until they are signified, that is, until they are endowed
with meaning through the signifiers of a specific culture. Privileging whiteness
as an ideal and a model in personal, social and institutional arrangements of
signification has its roots in the pre-existing predisposition of Muslims towards
specific colonial racial construction of whiteness. Interestingly, the reverse of
this is also true. In his book The Color of Faith, F. Matasuka argues that in
the (white, privileged) Christian context of an increasingly diversified western
society, afflicted with the so-called White Minority Syndrome, it is the non-
whites and their conversion narratives that play a similar fetishistic role (1998:
14). That is why all things being equal a Lebanese-born Muslim for example,
who could more than pass for a white American, cannot signify belief the
same way that a white American convert can (an important factor here is the
latters conversion narrative). This is because the referent for whiteness is not
simply the colour of skin or physical racial features. In the context of the racial
and colonial history of Europe and the Americas, whiteness is about assigned
privilege and cumulative power that while remaining unmarked and invisible
continue to colour the politics of representation something that the ideali-
zation of white converts is evidently not immune to. Whereas whiteness is a
historical and social construct that cannot be treated as an abstract universal,
and whereas specific constructs of whiteness enhance the performative effi-
cacy of white converts in Muslim Revivals, we can properly speak of white-
ness (along with narratives of conversion that go with it) as a commodity, and
of the social relations arranged under its influence as commodity fetishism;
a term used by K. Marx (2000: 5062) to explain the connection of social rela-
tions and relations between things produced in capitalist societies.
The whiteness of converts is fetishized as a commodity that circulates
within the externalized system of the signification of belief. Presumably born-
Muslims could find externalized embodiments of belief in themselves or in
Mahdi Tourage
222
any other pious Muslim, but social and historical factors such as racist and
or colonial attitudes that immigrant Muslims have internalized contribute to
the American converts function of being signifiers of Islamic belief in this
specific context. The structural necessity for the verification of belief leads us
to conclude that the Revival events are simulacrum sites of belief production
and empowerment with no grounding in an origin and no necessity for access
to the doctrinal content of that belief. It follows that what is signified through
the prominent converts superior access to the codes that signify ideal(ized)
Muslim subjectivities and hyper-performativity of the circuits of belief-(re)
production is not belief itself, but the belief in the belief the latter being veri-
fiable and measurable through converts performatives, the former remains
unknown with (mostly) unverifiable content such as God, angels and the Day
of Judgement. This proposition turns the belief-knowledge relation around.
Whereas it is generally established that belief comes before knowledge and
gives rise to external manifestations that then act as verifier of belief, in this
context knowledge is externalized and prioritized as the producer of belief.
Therefore we may ask: Is it not belief itself that is fetishized and commodified
in these Revivals?
As it relates to the presence and rise to prominence of certain white
American male subjects who convert to Islam, we are witnessing the emer-
gence of converts as the signifiers of Muslims belief. The prophetic defini-
tion of iman as knowing, speaking and doing still holds true. Islamic belief
is still a performative act that revolves around the existence of God, proph-
ets, holy books, angels and the Day of Judgement. However, the content of
belief remains objectively insufficient until it is externalized and fetishistically
invoked by converts, especially the white male American converts, as its signi-
fiers. Like the trapped miners who turned to Mario Seplveda, immigrant
Muslims turn to western converts to perform and believe for them. A percep-
tive sociologist like Arlie Hochschild could even argue that displaced and
harried American/Canadian Muslims, outsource the performance of their
belief to these specialized experts (2012). The prominent converts hyper-per-
form their belief when they display a superior knowledge of Islam and Arabic
or when their scripted pre-Islamic background and conversion narratives
along with outward signifiers of their muslimness are routinely rehearsed.
Therefore, Reviving the Islamic Spirit conventions become the site of a
temporal restoration of the imagined wholeness of the community, with its
concomitant belief system outwardly staged and effectively signified by the
prominent converts. These performatively produced events exceed if not (at
least temporarily) surmount the historical fragmentation and the split of modern
Muslim subjects. In this sense these annual Revivals represent similitudes of
reality, simulacrums more real than reality itself; a kind of hyperreality simi-
lar to Disneyland to borrow from Umberto Eco (1986: 44). Eco observes that
if you take a trip aboard the paddle-wheel steamer on Mississippi the captain
would inform you that it is quite possible to see alligators on the banks of the
river even though you will not actually see any. But taking Disneylands wild
river Adventureland you can be sure that there will be lively alligators visible
on the riverbank. Disneyland is even more real than the zoo: A real crocodile
can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland
tells us that fake nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands
(Eco 1986: 44). In the same vein, many Muslims lives include grappling with
real life practicalities that may include, exclude, contest or confirm their beliefs.
However, Revival conferences are performatively produced to correspond to
Performing belief and reviving Islam
223
the specific racial, class, colonial, political, gendered and sexual coordinates in
the life of an immigrant minority. They are the sites where Muslims belief
system is fetishistically invoked and its deficits remedied without bracketing
the fathoming of a temporal creation of a utopian Islamic society with belief as
its defining feature. They are not fictional or hypocritical events, but are more
real with a greater inclusive potential than the reality itself. The potential of
performativity is contingent upon the overdetermined function of the selected
converts, especially the most prominent (white, male, heterosexual) ones
among them like Shaikh Hamza Yusuf. It is through them that the immigrant
Muslim community living as a minority in North America is empowered and
believe insofar as they fulfil their role as the (visibly) perfect Sunni Muslim.
That would explain the bitterness and confusion directed at other converts,
like Michael Muhammad Knight or Amina Wadud, who perform alternative
modes of belief. Thus, mass Revival rallies become a containable setting for
the reproduction of fixed similarities among the audience whose anxieties of
disempowerment are disavowed by fetishizing prominent converts along with
their performative production of belief. All the while the utopian promise of the
simulacrum is foreclosed and alternative (racial, class, gendered, sexual, politi-
cal, theological) subjectivities and contested modes of performing Islamic belief
are collapsed into the pretence of an undifferentiated plenary wholeness.
acKnowledgeMenT
I am thankful for a research grant from Kings University College at the
Western University that made this study possible.
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conTribuTor deTails
Mahdi Tourage is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Social Justice
and Peace Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies,
Kings University College at the Western University, London, ON, Canada.
He is also Book Review Editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
(AJISS). His areas of interest are Islamic religious thought and Sufism, gender
and sexuality, and postmodern theories. His book Rumi and the Hermeneutics
of Eroticism was published in 2007 (Brill) and his publications have appeared
in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Iranian Studies,
and International Journal of Zizek Studies.
Contact: Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Kings University
College at The Western University, 266 Epworth Avenue, London, ON,
Canada N6A 2M3.
E-mail: mtourage@uwo.ca
Mahdi Tourage has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.