Oct. 21, 2021

Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas, by Omar Mouallem.

Simon & Schuster, 365 pp.

By Rayyan Al-Shawaf

The subtitle of Omar Mouallem’s Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas gets it backwards; this book is about how the Americas shaped their Muslim communities. And that’s a good thing. The story is historically important yet generally unremarked upon.

Stories, in fact. How and to what extent this or that Muslim community adapted to its surroundings and proceeded to fine-tune its mores has much to do with where and when it took root. Mouallem, a Canadian of Lebanese origin who was himself brought up in a Muslim household in a small town near Edmonton, Alberta, relates several of those stories – seasoned with his own gloss and interspersed with personal anecdotes – in creating a book that oscillates between the fascinating and the mundane.

The mundanity is a logical consequence of the author’s fervent desire to lay bare Muslim communal life as…well…pretty mundane. Here is how he puts it:

There’s [a] false assumption, one perpetuated entirely by paranoid Americans: there’s something insidious going on inside the mosque next door. True, there’s tension aplenty in many mosques small and mega, but they’re irrelevant to these deplorables’ worst fears. They’re clashes over cultural and generational values, gender roles, theological preferences – things that would appear as minutiae to all but the congregation.

Mouallem is right. And if his “pull back the veil to reveal nothing” approach wins over some of the conspiracy-mongers who believe mosques are places where Muslims gather to plot world domination, so much the better. But would this retroactively mitigate the boredom the rest of us felt at reading what we’ve long considered obvious? Difficult to say. Even time might not tell.

As for the fascinating stuff, much of it has to do with the formation of early Muslim communities in various parts of the Americas. Before international travel became both relatively easy and affordable in the mid-20th century, and before the Internet made it possible for people to remain in near-constant contact and colloquy without traveling, Muslim immigrants and converts in the Americas had to fend for themselves. Oftentimes, this meant that their Islam assumed a distinctly local character that drew more from the community’s ethno-cultural identity and the social pressures of its new surroundings than from any established school of Islamic jurisprudence or contemporaneous religious notions holding sway in a far-away country of origin. For the most part, this is no longer the case.

Mouallem has discovered as much and more, what with his dive into the matter of how and why certain communities have evolved. Between the spring of 2017 and the summer of 2019, he made the difficult decision to leave his wife and infant child for stretches at a time in order to journey through the Americas and explore the western reaches of Islam. Notably, in the resulting book, Muslim communities do not receive short shrift just because they are located outside the US or Canada.

Indeed, the most interesting chapters see Mouallem mingling with Muslims or descendants thereof in other countries: Brazil, where he scrutinizes the faint vestiges of the Islam practiced in Bahia by enslaved Africans, formerly potent enough to serve as a rallying cry for the slaves’ famed Malê Revolt of 1835; Mexico, where he untangles the various strands of competing Islams that have recently made significant inroads among the indigenous Mayan groups of Chiapas; and Trinidad and Tobago, which is home to the Americas’ oldest mosque (established in 1863), and which had a Muslim head of state from 1987 until 1997.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Mouallem’s writing, which at times suffers from poor word choice and syntactical confusion, acquires a literary flourish when he sketches these places. “Even from the view of a gas station parking lot,” the author observes, “the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas is gorgeous. Perched atop a plateau in the dead center of the Chiapas Highlands, the Mayan power capital is surrounded by forested hill peaks resembling the heads of prostrating green-haired giants.”

That’s in Mexico, of course. The author’s description of a locality in Trinidad populated by the descendants of indentured servants from the Indian subcontinent is no less evocative: “We arrived in Iere Village, one of the oldest Indian settlements, and awaited our hosts in the shade of a small mosque topped by three domes, like unstemmed red onions.”

Woven into the narrative is the story of Mouallem’s personal struggle with his Muslimness. This aspect of the book proves only moderately engaging, in large part because it is devoid of tension. Mouallem is neither a believer racked by doubt nor one tragically near-obliged to dissemble with a view to staving off persecution. In fact, he’s not a believer – period. His reasons for reclaiming the religion in which he was raised by his parents are a newly insistent desire to remain connected to his heritage and a noble urge to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the despised of our era. Left unsaid is the fact that he can do both these things without re-embracing Islam, all the more so if he does not espouse those of its tenets having to do with divinity and prophethood.

Every now and again, however, the author’s repeated folding of his personal travails into the larger narrative makes for a snug fit. The most salient example is his discussion of the ongoing and diffuse phenomenon through which certain Muslims are attempting to expand Islam’s inclusiveness, and to do so in several directions. Why this would facilitate self-affirmation on the part of LGBTQ Muslims who do not wish to spend a lifetime immured in the closet is obvious, and the author discusses the point at length in the course of a chapter on Toronto’s gay-friendly Unity Mosque. But it is also of special import to Mouallem himself, given his quest to make acceptable the contention that “having a Muslim background – based not in spirituality but history, politics, culture, family – [is] legitimate enough for Muslim identity.”

To be sure, there’s a downside to such an endeavor, one that seems to escape Mouallem; it cannot but reinforce the smug “once a Muslim, always a Muslim” assumption already common among Islamophobes the world over. Yet however quixotic Mouallem’s mission to carve out a niche for himself as a nonbelieving Muslim, it is sincere in nature and unpretentious in approach. Moreover, he’s not the only one trying to do this, particularly in the West. There have long been non-practicing Muslims, as well as those who identify as culturally Muslim but are rather coy when it comes to divulging their beliefs. The difference today is that we also have, for example, Mouallem’s compatriot Ali Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason.

And now, of course, there’s Mouallem himself. “No doubt, Islam has a place within me,” he says. “But do I have a place within it? Is there a seat in the ummah for nonbelievers?” The author seems intent on playing his part in guaranteeing the addition to the Muslim table of just such a seat. Something intriguing is afoot, and it’s worth watching how it unfolds.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Malta. His debut novel, When All Else Fails, was published by Interlink Books.