Haroon Moghul

A gut-punch of a memoir that begins with loneliness, rejection, and suicidal ideation, Haroon Moghul's book is alternately cerebral and heartfelt, visceral and allusive. Moghul proudly displays his immersion in Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, his adolescent fervor for the music of Green Day, and the deep admiration for the language of the Qur'an which shapes both his personal and professional lives. The memoir takes the reader through the cultural encounters of a child of immigrants growing up in white suburbia, struggling to fit in and struggling to love and respect himself. Religion provides no refuge for him, but its familiarity and cultural resonance make it the space where he comes of age. In spite of his religious doubts (which have both broad emotional resonance and deep doctrinal specificity), he becomes a "professional Muslim" at NYU as a way to build the kind of community space where he, and others like him, might feel welcome. He doubts, yet he preaches. He builds both a community and a brand, yet struggles to "find" himself. The 9/11 attacks deepen his commitment to public speaking on Islam and for Muslim students; "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is the greatest chapter title I've yet seen, and its callback to the music of his adolescence speaks to the distance between the piety he performs and the emptiness he describes feeling. No brief summary could do justice to Moghul's personal prose (revealing and concealing in ways that occasionally remind one of a certain memoir-writing former President named Obama) nor to his jet-setting on a shoestring from Seattle to New York to Cordoba to Dubai. His religious experiences climax in Dubai in some of the book's concluding chapters, but a rather hasty denouement (meeting, proposal, marriage, fin) seems almost tacked on to reassure the reader that the author is, somehow, in spite of all you've read, ok. Okay, but nevertheless unresolved, because Moghul is a writer and thinker who seems above all to revel in the existential wallop of a good aporia. (If you're inclined to follow his reading list, you'll find yourself wanting to spend the summer with Iqbal and Rumi, among other classics of Islamic tradition.) Moghul's subject, ultimately, is the struggle of self in society before God, in a way that connects with some of the great writers of religious experience from the past. Highly recommended!… (más)

his is a memoir of Haroon Moghul's coming of age in America. He struggled with an unnamed birth problem which plagued his childhood. Later he also struggled with bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation. Throughout it all, he struggled with fitting into a mostly non-Muslim America.

The descriptions of his struggles, however, seem somewhat distant.

I didn't feel what he was feeling and his experiences seemed more like reporting than bringing me into what was happening to him.

There was one vividly described incident that did stand out for me, though in Chapter 23. Here Moghul describes hearing Imam Idrees Abkar, substituted at the last moment for a more famous imam that Moghul came specifically to hear. But Idrees Abkar, touched Mogul's soul and as he described this, I was also touched:

”Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God and we happened to behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly find place for our foreheads on flawless plush carpet. We were realizing what he was realizing, in the course of his supplicating, that he was talking to Him, and this nearly did him in.” p. 203

If other chapters had had this sort of heartfelt writing this would have been a much more interesting book.… (más)

Haroon Moghul rose to national prominence in the wake of 9/11, as an undergrad leader at NYU's Islamic Center. His memoirs promise a look at what it's like to be an American-born Muslim, pulled between personal faith and public identity. Sadly, this book doesn't quite deliver. Partly this is because the book is marketed around Moghul's prominence as what he terms a "professional Muslim", and yet steadfastly refuses to get into any kind of detail about his career beyond the fact that he's mostly made miserable by it and that he's dropped out of grad school twice because of that.

But mostly it's because as the book progresses, it becomes ever more an exercise in navel-gazing, religious guilt, and tortured-MFA-style writing. Moghul undeniably had a tough time in his twenties—marital breakdown, mental illness, heart problems—but reading How to Be a Muslim feels less like discovering the insights that Moghul gained because of this than it does being asked to play the part of the therapist. I was increasingly uncomfortable with that, even before I reached the part where he talks about something that happened while separated from his (now ex) wife. He and another woman (whom he describes as "coy" and "scandalous") watch a movie about Hitler as some kind of weird foreplay, before she declares that she wants to bite his cheek and they have sex.

Who knew there could be a version of "we were on a break" even more jarring than Ross Geller's?

A disappointment.… (más)