I Am Curious (Green)

The intriguing premise of Loren Rhoads' now-defunct annual magazine Morbid Curiosity and , more specifically, my attendance at the Friday reading of the magazine story collection Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues at the Castro Books, Inc. inspired to write up this incident, since it would have been both suitable and has never been told in a well-composed style.

I had taken a course at Carleton called Introduction to Islam with Professor Khalid, on the theory that I should know more about the Abrahamic faiths I was likely to encounter during my earthly sojourn: since I already belonged to one, I decided that I would take both Introduction to Judaism and Introduction to Islam. I greatly enjoyed Khalid's course, and still have the textbooks on a top shelf for reference. I am afraid that certain people in this post-9/11 environment do not appreciate my attempts to refine their distinctions between Muslim groups, clothing, and principles. I don't do it as a bleeding liberal, either, but as an academic who requires some degree of accuracy - I am not knowledgeable enough to make the finest distinctions of Islamic doctrine.

Khalid's course had created in me a thirst for knowledge about Islam. I must stress, again, that my interest in non-Christian religions arises not from a desire to convert, but rather a determination to acquire accurate and relatively unbiased information about each faith tradition. So I signed up for a e-mail list about Islam - this was in the late nineties, so I do mean e-mail list, nothing more. It had no profile section, and certainly no place for identifying pictures (although that last feature would have caused some problems for certain Muslims).

After a short time on the list, I received some spam from the Nation of Islam. I had not (yet) visited the University of Chicago and therefore been near the Nation of Islam headquarters, but I had seen Malcolm X (where I shouldn't have bought a large soda because of the long run time) and I had gone to high school with a Muslim girl.

I was a bit baffled and bemused by the spam. I find that there are two kinds of spam: that which is spam in the truest sense, and that which rises above spam by virtue of the recipient's expectation of it. I was not surprised that a list dedicated to Islam would receive such spam, and I was amused at the (necessary) assumption that the members of the list were African-American. Here I feel I must remind those much younger than I that effective google-stalking did not exist at this point and Friendster happened post-millenium (I should have taken up the jobbing erotic maid's offer to get in on that trend). I did google my name, however, and discovered that the only people who shared my name and appeared in the news were African-American petty criminals; this onomastic statistic (which is by no means a commentary on race and law) suggested to me that it was not unreasonable to assume someone with my name who was interested in Islam had West African ancestry. It also seemed to me that if I had been African-American and they had asked my race, I would have been more offended. I briefly considered signing on their list, but quickly came to my senses and refrained. As a last note, I have to say that even an organization that boasts Louis Farrakhan scares me less than the "Church" of Happyology, whose test I once took from a public computer where I did not have to sign in.