Disney Imam Explains Islam
Wash your hands. Wash your soul. Clean your clothes. Clean your conscience.
I started the last middle school boys’ halaqa of the year with a question. “Why do we do wudu before we pray?” (Wudu are ritual ablutions Muslims perform, like before praying or reading Qur’an.) We’ve spent two months on just saying salam, which is more important and more relevant right now than maybe it was for our generation. Let’s be honest. We’ve created or at least inherited a ridiculous world.
Where people aren’t taught to socialize. We give kids phones at young ages, drown their minds in distraction, make it harder for them to learn, to memorize, to focus, to develop a deep and independent sense of self, even to talk to each other. Then they become isolated, irritable, arguably even really depressed and agitated and anxious, and then we keep doing the thing that causes the problem.
These young men should learn how to stand up straight, look their elders in the eyes, extend (and get) a firm handshake, and say salam. Say “I’m here,” and be part of a community. I was always the shy kid, the one who found it painfully hard to talk to people, and because technology didn’t exist that could allow me to escape the obligations that end up giving life meaning, I had to learn.
They should learn, too. It’s good for them! It’s vital for them. We need to know how to talk to people we aren’t familiar with. To recognize others and to be recognized. In an age with a painful epidemic of loneliness and disconnection, the simple fact of physical connection matters enormously. But just like we need human contact, to converse with, enrich, and be enriched by others, we need to be in touch with God.
That’s literally what we were made to do!
And that begins with wudu. Of course it’s good healthy and appealing when Muslim men take care of themselves, but also to become ourselves—to become who we were meant to be. Through the command to be clean, we learn something essential about what it means to be Muslim. I could take a shot, but the warm and welcoming Sheikh Abdullah from Disney+’s Ms. Marvel series already did it better.
When in one episode Kamala Khan asks Sheikh Abdullah, the Imam of her local Jersey City masjid, if she’s a good person, his response is beautiful. “Good is not a thing you are,” he tells Kamala. “It is a thing you do.”
That’s what Kamala needs to hear. We do, too. First, we’re not somehow magically good just because we tell ourselves we are. We have to do good things (for the right reasons) over and over again, making that our character, and keep up with that for all our lives. The second follows from the first. If we want to become good, we should do good things. For the right reasons.
In Islam, we don’t just decide to become good and then magically become good—action is just as important as attitude. In fact, actions create attitudes and change attitudes. Action precedes attitude in many cases. The doing of good creates the desire to be good, which results in a self-reinforcing spiral, pushing us and propelling us upwards. By doing good things in the world out there, we transform ourselves inside.
And when we change inside, we become more likely to transform our outside. Want to become generous? Give some charity every day, or in some other meaningful way, especially when it’s hard and painful. Want to be less lonely? Do the things that make it easier to be with other people. Want to be less lonely? Know how to talk to God, because once you can talk to God, you’ll never be alone.
Since September, we’ve been talking about the importance of saying salam, of recognizing each other’s humanity, our fraternity (and sorority) as Muslims, the significance of giving one other the respect we deserve as people, the need to make eye contact, shake a hand, and embrace one another—to be part of a spiritual community is to be part of a physical community.
The frankly ridiculous masculine ideal of isolated, autonomous men is not just myth, not just harmful, but foreign to our faith. We pray side-by-side. We hug after Eid. We cry when we read Qur’an or remember our beloved Prophet. This isn’t because we’re weak—in fact, it’s a mark of strength. We are are stronger when they’re interdependent. The more we can do for ourselves, the more we can do for others.
The more we do for God, the more God blesses us with.
When I teach these boys, I try to make the lessons interactive. I go around the room, shaking hands. I make eye contact. We model actions, so that they become second nature. Which is how and why we’re going to move from greeting each other to greeting God. And we start with taharah. Before we pray, we have to be clean. (There’s other requirements too, but we’re going to start with cleanliness.)
To go back to the beginning of this post, why do we do clean up before we greet God through prayer? I asked the boys for their answers. I’d prepared a list to go through with them, and I’ll share that below, but first let me just say—they had really good answers. I cut them down to a few words each (the whiteboard is only so big). But I was so happy and so proud that they got it instinctively.
By coming to God in a way that’s clean, we show respect for God. We also show respect for ourselves. We are taking care of ourselves. We show sincerity. We demonstrate purity. And we establish our commitment. That extends to how we dress. What we wear. And how we carry ourselves. Do we act like we don’t matter, or do we act like we are people here for a purpose?
Why Cleanliness? Or, How I Closed Out This Particular Halaqa
First, cleanliness shows God the respect He deserves. When we go somewhere important, we dress our best, and part of dressing our best is being clean. Of course, because prayer happens across the day, every day, it would be really hard to dress up every time—but there are certain expectations all the same. Are we clean? Are we refreshed? Are we in the right state of mind?
Washing up helps us get there.
Second, it’s healthy. Why would God ask us to do something that wasn’t good for us? In fact wouldn’t God command us to do things that are good for us on many levels? Taking care of our bodies is honoring His gift of life. So when we stand before Him, let’s show that gratitude, that shukr.
Third, being clean puts us in the right frame of mind. Inside and outside are connected, remember? We clean our body before we begin prayers.
Prayers cleanse our heart, focus our mind, calm our spirits, and refresh our faith. Or just think of it this way: Over the day, we get dirty. We need to shower. We need to brush our teeth. We need to change our clothes. And just as our bodies, our garments, our rooms and our houses need to be cleaned, so do we.
Prayer’s a bath for the heart, soul, and mind, washing away the dirt and grime, the pollution that builds up across the day. To make that link, we start with washing our bodies. The outside gets cleaned to prepare for the inside getting cleaned. That’s part of the Muslim dedication to cleanliness (half of faith, after all). Because it’s healthy, yeah. But also because we’re praying as whole people.
We bring together who we are, how we are, where we are, and when we are, and then submit all of that, all of ourselves, to God.
Fourth, since a lot of our prayers are communal, being clean and fastidious about our appearance matters—it’s respectful to God, yes, but respectful to the people we pray next to.
Fifth, we take ourselves seriously. We aren’t just accidents in the world, but Caliphs of God, beings with dignity, value, purpose, and conviction, who move through the world in ways that reflect the status God assigned us, the responsibility He gave us.
Sixth, the “little things” often aren’t as little as we might think. Good isn’t who we are, but what we do and why. That isn’t a pessimistic vision, let alone an arrogant one! After all, if good is about what we do, then anyone can be good (and everyone should).
I’ll close out with two notes.
I made sure to tell the boys that being clean and meticulous in our faith doesn’t demand we dress or appear the same. As long as men meet certain conditions and requirements, we have a lot of room. After all, I can pray wearing a Bengals jersey or a kurta, a suit and a tie or a hoodie. But I can’t be wearing shorts that reveal my knees, I can’t be wearing clothes that are form-fitting, I shouldn’t be wearing gold or silk, vulgar clothes, and that sort of thing.
I also made sure to tell them prayer is a practice—it’s hard, it requires commitment, and it’s a work in progress because all of us, even as adults, are works in progress. We have to pray, but just because we pray doesn’t mean we can walk through the world as if we’re better. That’s one reason we pray, after all. Because we want to do better. The minute we stop wanting to be better, the minute we stop believing there’s room for improvement, we’ve gotten to a very unfortunate place.
And that was about all they could sit for. Then it was time for ‘isha prayers and then it was time for pizza and pick-ups. I love when they have time to go out and play football, but December in Ohio doesn’t always make that easy. We are off for a few weeks, but when the boys come back, we’ll spend more time with prayer—and the high schoolers will shift from Malcolm X to medieval theology.
I’m sure they’re going to really appreciate me for it, too.