Jab, Cross, Infidel

On October 7 I’ve been boxing for two years. My phone wallpaper is a picture of Muhammad Ali with his hands cupping his face, performing salah. It’s the June 1, 1966 issue of Akher Saʿah. “A week in Cairo with Muhammad Ali Clay,” the main title reads. In Arabic, Clay is always appended to the name to distinguish him from the Ottoman general who founded modern Egypt once he took charge in 1805. Akher Saʿah—the Last Hour—is our answer to Life magazine, kind of. It’s existed since 1934, but its heyday was the Sixties, when it became a soft-power generator for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolutionary dictatorship, which took over the press in 1960. Its covers feature incredibly iconic figures, both local and international. But what I can’t get over is the face of American racial pride performing Islam for the benefit of that still triumphal regime. Boxing, Islam, Egypt, America, the Sixties—all in one magazine cover. The image is my mascot. I try to forget what happened almost exactly a year later while Ali was banned from the ring for conscientiously objecting to Vietnam. On June 5, 1967, Israel knocked out Nasser’s army in the first round, occupying not just Gaza but Sinai. It was the biggest upset in Arab nationalist history. The rematch wouldn’t happen until October 1973, three years after Nasser’s death. And by then, Egypt would no longer be the postcolonial liberation beacon it was.

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Boxing is not a blood sport yet a lot of people warn me it’s too violent. In 2016, near Zurich, the millionaire amateur philosopher who hosted my Swiss writer friend and me for lunch said I looked like a retired boxer. I’d only just stopped smoking, at thirty-nine. I was heavier than I am now. I felt older. I felt old. And I didn’t know if this was a compliment. On seeing my tooth gap­ a lifetime before, an American student in England said I looked like Mike Tyson. That almost certainly hadn’t been one. Could retired boxer really mean geriatric gorilla? That was the start of my midlife crisis. The following year, I lost nearly fifteen kilos. I ran. I tried to meditate. Then I learned to swim laps. I didn’t think of boxing again until after COVID-19, when my six-year-old son Murad joined the children’s team at our local sporting club. He would leave soon after, taking up basketball, then fencing. But I’d seen the adults training. I’d taken to YouTube to watch fights. And, even if I would never actually compete, I wanted to feel like an active boxer. One day I asked the coach, falteringly, whether you could join at forty-six. The first time I went, the twenty-minute warm-up was so punishing, I thought that was the whole session and left. But the next time I stayed for the full hour. No workout had ever tested or thrilled me that way.

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On October 7 I’ve known S for two and a half years, almost. He’s the only teammate my age. My wife says he looks like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. He has the same head shape, the same psychotic look. ADHD, apparently. But he’s more harmless than most people. Half English, though he tells me it’s from his Egyptian dad that he gets his white skin. S’s son was Murad’s teammate before I beat S to the adults’ team. We never meet outside of boxing. But we’ve felt closer since it turned out he was a year below me at the same school. He too is an only child. He too joined the January Revolution, ecstatic, only to be alienated by its aftermath. And he’s a lawyer, so he studied Islamic history. S is liberal, the way I used to be. Not in an obnoxious way, he has money. S is more liberal than I ever could be. In matters of identity as much as economics, totally laissez-faire. Still, he’s atypical. Like Arab nationalists, he hates the Ottomans. Like Islamists, he hates the Sufis. But I just nod and smile when he shits on either—glorious—category. Knowing he hates the nationalists and Islamists I object to even more than he does Ottomans and Sufis. It is said that mixed-race South Africans were more racist than the whites under apartheid. I pretend I don’t notice when, in the course of defending “Islam,” the half Muslim in S froths over with prejudice against all kinds of Muslims.

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Boxing is not a blood sport though boxers talk about hunting, being hungry. I want your heart. I want to eat his children. Praise be to Allah! ^# Mike Tyson’s parataxis, moving from second to third person and then from animal to divine, turns that idea into poetry. It’s more powerful when you realize this is a ringside interview. Glasgow, 2000. And it has just taken him thirty-eight seconds to dispatch Lou Savarese. With Allah’s help? Theologians differ on professional boxing, it’s true. But theologians differ on far more fundamental things. To my mind, discipline and a fair fight sound like solid Islam. Not cannibalism, though. It is said that, at the 625 CE Battle of Uhud, Hind bint ʿUtba—the mother of the first Ummayad caliph, Muʿawiya ibn Abi Sufyan—was seen bent over the open gut of the Prophet Muhammad’s Muslim uncle, Hamza. Muhammad’s call for equality was dispossessing her clan, and on the battlefront, Hamza had killed an uncle she loved. Tyson says that, when he converted while doing time, Islam seemed like a way to express his—presumably anti-white, anti-Christian—violence. Until he understood it better. “Islam is not about war,” he says. “Islam is all love, peace, and submission.” ^# Makes sense. When she bit into Hamza’s liver, Hind had not yet embraced the faith.

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On October 7 my midlife crisis is over. I no longer obsess over my weight, my skin, my teeth. I no longer seek out new friends, because I no longer suffer from undirected limerence. An ache so bad it could be debilitating, this longing for a connection, a discovery, a person. A gift that, were it to manifest for real, would destroy everything I lived for. That was the hardest part. For maybe two years, swimming and reading the tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi every day, I longed for a gift I could never have. Not because the world was incapable of conjuring it, but because I was old enough to be living for things. I would never allow myself to have it. But that made me ache for it all the more. Until I’d molted enough times for a chrysalis to form around me and I could gobble myself up in peace. By now, all that is over, though. I’ve emerged with more muscle in my arms and legs than I’d ever had in my life. But questions about being me, being an Arab Muslim in 2023, stalk my every breath. An astonishing amount of grief is involved, not just over horrors going down, but for all the triumphs that could’ve been. And, jumping rope, shadowboxing, it occurs to me this might be all my limerence was about. Dumb grief demanding not so much a voice but meaning. A haymaker’s hatred sublimated.

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Boxing is not a blood sport but an endurance test, an anger modulator. More than chin, it needs wind. But more than wind, a solid psyche. Hence the stare downs, hence the blowhard bravado. Nerves count when you’re enervated. I’ve opened another image on my phone screen now. It’s the first thing that comes up when you google Oliver McCall. The pugilist stands bare-chested, arms by his sides, floodlights overhead. But instead of smiling or looking ferocious, he’s making a sad face at the camera. A childlike, classic, emoji-grade sad face. Completely out of place in the ring. “I thought he was playing possum,” Mills Lane, the referee who declared McCall unable to continue, later said, “but then I saw his lips started to quiver…” ^# The expression is what Roland Barthes calls a photograph’s punctum: that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). ^# Everything else about the picture is normal. This is McCall’s 1997 rematch with Lennox Lewis, from whom he’d wrested the WBC heavyweight title in 1994. He could be beating him again now. But he’s been circling the ring like a dervish, barely defending himself. Refusing to go to his corner when the bell rings. The term is technical knockout. But McCall loses this fight by nervous breakdown.

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On October 7 S is away in England. And, not sure whether it came up in my conversations with him, I find myself reviewing the story of Jaʿd ibn Dirham. On Eid al Adha of 742 CE, in the mosque of Kufa—so it goes—the Umayyad governor of Iraq Khaled al Qasri replaced the sacrificial sheep with the celebrated theologian, cutting his throat on the minbar where he—Khaled—had just been imam. Jaʿd had tutored the man who became the last Umayyad caliph two years later, Marwan ibn Muhammad. But he argued that, since God is essentially other than anything conceivable or manifest—Naught is as His likeness, says the Qurʾan ^#—His attributes are unique to Him. No quality that applies to anything human or otherwise can ever be attributed to God. Not form, not movement, not perception. Not speech. This was considered heresy. It still is, kind of. And it’s the reason the canon gives for Jaʿd’s execution. But the truth is Jaʿd also argued that God’s omnipotence does not absolve people of the will to do evil. This was contrary to the rudimentary determinism that was Umayyad state creed. Whatever happens, whatever the caliph and his governors do, is the incontestable will of the All-Powerful. The Umayyads ruled the greatest Islamic state ever but they stood the Prophet’s legacy on its head. They made the caliphate hereditary, discriminated against non-Arabs, committed massacres. People with integrity made them twitch.

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Boxing is not a blood sport, it’s a therapeutic dance form. Oliver McCall is the only one known to have broken down in the ring. But—aside from S’s resemblance to Jack Torrance, my own history of anxiety and drug abuse, and the many and various symptoms of our much younger coach and teammates—at least four high-profile professionals have complained of broken psyches: Adrien Broner, Tyson Fury, Ryan Garcia, and Anthony Joshua. Sometimes they say it’s the stress of boxing for a living. I’ve sparred but I can’t imagine how it would feel to be famous for it. A celebrity, a billionaire. For there to be nothing else in life. More often those boxers say the sweet science puts their psyche back together. Gives them purpose, a routine. Either way, as I now know firsthand, it’s all about footwork and rhythm. The body in motion. The body in pain. The body in flight. The dhikr involves swaying or leaping to a beat, right? The Rifaʿi dervishes pierce and stab themselves with spikes. The Mevlevis whirl till their souls exit their bodies, like white birds flapping out of black dovecotes. Between 1881 and 1899, the Mahdists of Sudan were warriors. They fought Egypt’s Khedive Ismail and then the khedive’s British overlords. Real-life mortal-combat dervishes. Maybe people box for the same reasons they join Sufi orders. To transcend their mortal bodies’ smallness. Find discipline, community, purpose. And surrender their will to something greater, something absolutely unlike anything. A foreverness.

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On October 7 I try to remember how Jaʿd came up in my debates with S. All I know is the Muʿtazila are the core of our quarrel. The Muʿtazila were Greek philosophy-guided rationalists who lived in the eighth to the tenth centuries. From 833 to 851 CE under the Abbasid caliph al Maʾmoun, their version of the faith was to be officially imposed. People—the great theologian Ahmad ibn Hanbal, for example—were persecuted for rejecting it. Modern humanists like me appreciate the Muʿtazila for their moral rigor and intellectual lucidity. But S feels they’re overrated. The Muʿtazila differed from the Khawarij and the Murjiʾa—the two other schools of their time—on what to make of a Muslim who commits a grave sin. Like present-day jihadis, the Khawarij thought faith depended on its outward manifestation and judged sinners to be unbelievers who must be killed. Like present-day liberals, the Murjiʾa thought faith was a secret of the heart and deferred judgement to God. The Muʿtazila thought it stood to reason that behavior and utterance should be part of faith, but they did not feel grave sin made you an unbeliever. A sinner, they posited, is in an intermediate position. To be cursed, ignored but not counted an infidel. And that’s what S finds so offensive about them. Khawarij minus the courage to go ahead and kill people, he calls them. “If you’re going to question people’s faith,” he wheezes, while we alternate push-ups with squats, “you might as well be a terrorist.”

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Boxing is not a blood sport, according to Steve Gluck, it’s the symbolic quintessence of Western civilization. Fair, civil, dignified. Humane. In boxing you do not hit a man while he’s down. You do not throw sucker punches or low blows. You fight only in your weight class. Gluck contrasts this with both wrestling and martial arts. A wrestler aims to force his opponent to submit. A martial artist subscribes to an “Eastern Philosophy” that denies “human rights, personal freedom, and individuality.” ^# Both are products of premodern dictatorship. Since the first London Prize [Fighting] Rules were drafted in 1743, by contrast, boxing has coevolved with liberal democracy. Its ethos reflects the same uniquely European “passion for freedom” that produced the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions… And I’m thinking here’s one more narcissistic bastard extolling European “freedom” as if it wasn’t always predicated on psychopathy. Leaving out occupation, dispossession, genocide—everything that’s been done to non-Europeans in pursuit of it. Because “the Age of Enlightenment” and “the American Experiment” were fair fights against enemies of freedom. All my life I’ve had to take this self-congratulatory bullshit while watching and learning about Westerners committing the gravest sins. Still, I’m reminded that boxing is one more part of me that didn’t originate in Muslim civilization. That is most parts of me, like it or not. It is most parts of me because it is most of the world now.

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On October 7 I haven’t yet connected the theologian who was publicly sacrificed for Eid to the better-known figure he coached: Jahm ibn Safwan. That must be how Jaʿd came up. Jahm is one of the Murjiʾa S cited in his trash talk on the Muʿtazila. Evidently unaware that he was Muʿtazili in the most important respect. He did not think the Qurʾan uncreated and eternal. He thought only God uncreated and eternal. Whatever else it is, he argued, the Qurʾan is text, words, language. Subject to historical and cognitive limitations. But the whole point of Islam—the absolute monotheism called tawhid—is that God is beyond those. Even an uber promoter-manager with the power of life and death over every fighter on Earth is still not essentially different from those fighters. When you say God spoke, either you mean “Archangels and prophets conveyed God’s message” or you are mistaking God for something He is not. Jahm wasn’t falling for such blasphemy. He thought the Qurʾan just like everything else that is not God. A repository and rule book, but language. He was not mauled for it. Jahm became number two to al Harith ibn Surayj, the leader of the Greater Khorasan revolt against the Umayyads. This was the move that facilitated the Abbasid takeover in 750 CE. Except for a 929–1017 reincarnation in Córdoba, the end of Islam’s first dynastic caliphate. Jahm died in 746 during al Harith’s first attempt to take the city of Merv.

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Boxing is not a blood sport, it is glorified barbarism. Its intellectual appeal is precisely the way it exposes civilization’s savagery. In its professional format, at least. It prettifies thuggery. It perpetrates inequality. It promotes egomania. Amour propre. What could be more barbarous than two machos getting paid to fuck each other up, dignified by rules? What were the English prizefighters if not modern-day gladiators forced into violence by material need? One of the earliest recorded bare-knuckles bouts took place in 1681, between the butler and the butcher of Christopher Monck, Second Duke of Albemarle and Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. Rather than fighting himself—he was young enough!—the colonial blueblood availed himself of two dispensable and, to this day, nameless members of the working class. Amour propre. And even when it transforms an underprivileged athlete’s life, what does boxing tell us about liberal democracy now? Floyd Mayweather Jr. walking around with obscene amounts of cash says less about reasonable accomplishment than absurd misdistribution of wealth. And the inability to get over extreme poverty in childhood. Amour propre. “He’s 40-years-old and he don’t fight for money,” the welterweight said of his 2010 opponent Shane Mosley. “Well brother, I’m 33 and I don’t fight for legacy, I don't fight for none of that. I fight for the check. I’m in the check cashing business.” ^#

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On October 7 I haven’t connected Jaʿd to Jahm. But, more importantly, I haven’t traced the causal chain that ends with two middle-aged Cairo dwellers sweating and panting while they shout at each other in English. Debating Murjiʾa and Muʿtazila in a combat sports hall, in 2023. Just like professional boxing’s root motivation, the question of Muslims who commit grave sins can be traced all the way back, through politics, to money. It was because he gave positions of power to members of his clan, the Umayyads, siphoning money away from army leaders, that the Khawarij declared the third caliph, ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan, an infidel in 656 CE. They besieged his house, then, outrageously, killed him. ʿUthman wasn’t any old head of state. The first aristocratic convert, he had helped hugely with the spread of Islam. He was among the ten Companions promised paradise. And he married not one but two of the Prophet’s daughters. None of this mattered to the Khawarij, who had disputed the Prophet’s own financial decision-making. They cited the Qurʾan enjoining Muhammad to say, I am only a mortal like you. ^# Not, in other words, infallible. But surely not an infidel! By killing ʿUthman for alleged nepotism, the Khawarij set off the first in a cycle of civil wars that haunts the Umma to this day. Theological schools-stroke-sects—including, eventually, the Shiʿa—arose in response to this violent ouster.

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Boxing is not a blood sport, but it is. I don’t mean pulped faces, dangerous punishment leaving bodies in the hospital or dead. I mean boxing is not so much a display of sporting prowess but a reminder. Underneath what humans claim for themselves—meaningful morals or knowledge of God, a civilization based on justice, reason, or freedom—two men beating the shit out of each other for money is actually all there is. One calls the other inferior or infidel, to justify it. One suggests the other is ignorant or absurd. And, with whatever skill or power at his disposal, the other tries to counter effectively. Boxing is a midlife crisis—deflected limerence. It is a spiritual routine. An aesthetic discipline. Self-care. In S, it is an encounter with a kind of double, a bicultural Cairo-dweller who has found his own roundabout way to Muslimness since the Nineties. Physical turns into philosophical exercise, making me think again of early theology. The connection between faith and politics. And my feeling that, grave sins notwithstanding, with so much consciousness of injustice and idolatry in the modern world, no one can really be deemed a believer or an infidel anymore. We are all in an intermediate position. During a buildup combo on the bag, the wannabe mystic in me meets the rationalist. The secularist meets the Muslim. The liberal pays obeisance to the decolonial theorist. A much younger fighter eyes my layered, scarred personhood. I am in the fighting stance.