What to do when you hear ‘allahu akbar’
Thoughts on defending liberal values in the global cacophony
Earlier this year my two friends and I drove up to the Bronx to catch a little-known alt-indie band play. Some kids at Fordham University had transformed the student cafe into a standing-room-only concert space. Behind us, a collection of dilapidated beige sofas — you know the kind that feel permanently damp — had been smushed together to make space for 100, maybe 150 people. Alcohol was not allowed because: America; but they served watery espressos in grandmotherly drinkware for fifty cents, bargain prices for us thirty-year-old Brooklynites.
Around 8pm a spunky MC thanked everyone for coming and introduced the opening act, “Emperor X.” Expecting a motley crew of Star Wars aficionados, I was surprised to see a bespectacled, and rather befuddled chap with nothing more than an acoustic guitar in hand — no lightsaber. By all appearances he should’ve been meek and insecure, but he brimmed with the confidence of a man at-home in his talents. His mere existence had a way of revealing your inner prejudice.
Emperor X sang song after song in a folky shrill and chatted to the crowd like to old friends he hadn’t seen in years. At one point he wiped the sweat from his forehead and asked in all sincerity, “Hey, is Dave here? Dave! Shout if you’re here!” There was a long pause. “I’m legally blind so can’t actually see you if you are.” He won over a skeptical crowd like one of those overweight bank clerks who unassumingly shows up on America’s Got Talent and belts out an epic rendition of Nessun Dorma.
After four songs he solicited suggestions on what to play next, and to my confusion a blonde chick from the crowd shouted “Allahu akbar!” He seemed surprised himself, and after a moment said, “Wow, alright, yeah we can do that.” And he started to strum his guitar and sing:
Chalk in the riverbed
Was deposited by the ocean as it boiled off
Encased in calcium carbonate
We could drown or we could solder
I climbed the ranks of militiamen
And the Sadrites
And my parents felt a cautious pride
And disregarded Shari’a law
And put the Tigris in a trench now
I’d been impressed with Emperor X’s liberal arts lyrics, but this one seemed particularly provocative. Singing from the perspective of an Iraqi youth, he continued in crescendo:
Give us rain give us rain give us rain give us rain give us rain give us rain
Send us water
Send us trucks send us trucks send us trucks send us trucks send us trucks send us tanks
Send us IEDs
Send us planes send us planes send us planes send us planes send us planes
Is the sky clear enough?
Send us dust storms
And then softly he sang,
Allahu akbar
I felt my phone in my pocket and thought, no joke, “I hope the NSA isn’t listening.” They don’t do nuance very well. I looked around at the crowd surrounding me, but they didn’t seem to be worried. In fact they stood there rocking back and forth with their eyes narrow and mouths open like they were ready to sing Kumbaya. And after some more strumming the singer sang the chorus once again, this time with a few zealots — I mean zealous audience members joining him. Allahu akbar.
Yet for some reason, I couldn’t open my mouth.
I thought about 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, the tragedies all in rhyme. Allahu akbar. I thought of Iraq. Libya, Syria. Pakistan, Afghanistan. Of Tariq Ramadan versus Christopher Hitchens. Ben Affleck and Sam Harris. The Egyptian revolution. Submission. Edward Snowden, the NSA, Edward Said, and Sykes-Picot.
I wondered if I was acting Islamophobic. Or just unreligious? I thought about that time I was dragged to an evangelical church with my friend’s family and could only bring myself to mouth the word “Amen,” the prayer feeling too inauthentic for me to pronounce out loud. But something about this felt different.
Why do we get so lost in these semantic debates? Like what it means to say “Islam is a religion of peace,” “Black lives matter,” or “Support our troops.” If football players refuse to sing the Star Spangled Banner in an act of protest against the injustice they believe it represents, why should I sing a refrain most readily associated with Islamic fundamentalism? And if I didn’t sing, would that somehow constitute a shirking of my responsibility to defend an oppressed minority, even if I don’t agree with the views of many of its adherents? It’s all terribly confusing.
Summoning my bachelor’s in philosophy I set off on a short bout of introspection to determine whether or not I would sing along.
I started by unpacking my own experience with the term. Like a giant Snapchat story I ran through my memory reel: A soldier fires a mortar shell into the desert ahead. Allahu akbar. Terrorists murder a French-Arab police officer in a Parisian street. Allahu akbar. A Turkish man kneels in a mosque and murmurs under his breath. Allahu akbar. My Afghan grandmother receives good news about my aunt’s health. Allahu akbar.
How could a single phrase connote so many different things depending on when and how it’s used?
If there’s any hope of communicating in our global cacophony, we need to sort through our dictionaries of mutually misunderstood words. Like between the lovers in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, so much of what we mean is distorted by how we say it. Imagine all of the conflicts, big and small, that derive from a failure to grasp the root cause and historical context of our speech? Meanwhile we’re reluctant to use terms like“radical Islamic terrorist” while “moderate” imams are professing that this deviant ideology has everything to do with religion and must be rooted out. In a bid to “balance out” right-wing misinformation we spew out left-wing misinformation, so that rather than getting closer to the truth we’re all just stuck on an intellectual seesaw.
How do you overcome the duality of us versus them, to a space where black lives, blue lives, and Muslim lives all matter? Who has a mind sharp enough to cut through the bullshit of partisanship, 24-hour news cycles, and Twitter trolls? It’s always easiest to say nothing when we’ve been taught to worry about political correctness or how our words may be misinterpreted in others’ dictionaries. Especially when it comes to controversial topics like Islam, America, or Kanye West, we know we’ll have to defend our views in front of the faceless jury we all carry on our shoulders.
Perhaps the answer is all around me. To my left an Asian-American hipster is wearing a red blazer with vintage World War II patches, a pristine white taqiyah — the skullcap adorned by Muslims — on his head. Did he know this song was going to be played when he put that on?? To my right is a southern belle with pimples on her face, holding hands with a Pakistani girl in a headscarf. Are these liberal arts kids more assured in their values than I, a global citizen, with my head-start in pluralism? Or are they just more religious? Fordham is a Jesuit school after all…
Maybe it’s a generational thing. These harissa-eating hipsters were too young to remember the attack on the twin towers. While I was raised under “shock and awe,” they came of age under a president who promised to never again be mired in a war with a Muslim-majority country. Are today’s youth even better equipped for the schizophrenia of the social media age than multicultural me? Or is radical inclusion just in-style these days? The Hajj is kind of like a Muslim Burning Man.
It reminded me of a time in the 2000s when I was counseled by the State Department not to broadcast the fact that I was “American” when outside of the country. In Europe it evoked war-mongering, intellectual ineptitude, arrogance. In the Middle East, even worse: Abu Ghraib, imperialism, hypocrisy. That terribly unsettling video of bullets raining down on an Iraqi minivan chk chk chk with live commentary from a young soldier from the heartland.
Then and now I chose to believe that “America” meant good things too. I’ve never been the most outwardly patriotic person, but if I was traveling and felt that a stranger had developed a good opinion of me, I would let slip that I was American in a small bid to bolster U.S. soft power. I was fighting bad perceptions with good ones, promoting peace and understanding. Because when you break down any word, ideology, or religion in isolation, you’ll quickly realize it becomes meaningless. No word we use is meant to be worshiped or condemned in itself; that’s the foundation behind freedom of speech. What matters is the context, the motive, and the action it accompanies.
That’s when Emperor X finished his guitar solo and went off on the following interlude before the final chorus:
Sing that with me when I say allahu akbar, I’ll tell you what it means in a second if you don’t know what it means but you should know, because it’s not a scary phrase. … it’s Arabic… means god is great is god is great is god is SING!
And I thought, chapeau my brother, you did it. Through your art you’ve got me facing up to my prejudices, questioning my values, and pondering society’s big questions. You’re being daring and thought-provoking, and doing it at a free concert in one of NYC’s lesser-known boroughs. So in the end I cleared my throat and out of solidarity — with Muslims, with anyone who wants peace in the world, but mostly with this low-key ballsy dude named Chad Matheny who goes by the name Emperor X — I sang, this time in my projection voice:
