Driving through New Mexico, the view through the windshield of my Avis rental car is far more expansive. As I drive down Highway 84 outside Santa Fe, I am part of a landscape straight out of the American Dream. With a cobalt sky suspended over scrubby juniper-studded hills, this is the country of Thelma and Louise, of John Ford Westerns and lantern-jawed Marlboro men. And, of course, of Muslims.
I’m en route to visit one of America’s most famous Islamic landmarks: Dar al Islam, a religious center started 20 years ago outside the town of Abiquiu by a group of American Muslims. Arriving at the Abiquiu Inn around sundown, I wander into the hotel’s gift shop. Afghan lapis and Pakistani weavings are for sale, alongside souvenirs of Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted in a nearby studio until the age of 98. The cafe menu offers both tacos and Middle Eastern mezes. Soft-talking Muslim men, and groovy-looking graybeards on quests out West, sit next to tourists in no-press cottons. These are the latest waves of freedom-seekers to pass through these parts.
The next morning, I head out on County Road 155 to the buttermilk-colored adobe mosque and madrasa, or Islamic educational center, designed by Egypt’s most famous architect, Hassan Fathi, and built by Latino craftsmen. Some 130 young Muslims–Texas professionals, Connecticut doctors and their families, Midwestern high-school students–have gathered for a three-week course in Islamic studies. Many of the men wear robes and skullcaps; the women don hijabs, or head coverings. By day they parse teachings of the Prophet Muhammad or discuss early Islamic theologians. By night there’s singing, moonlight rambles in the hills and laser-pen-guided tours of the Southwestern night sky by Hamza Yusuf, a California sheik and an amateur astronomer. The evening I visit there’s a surprise party. One young woman has decided to start wearing the hijab, and her friends celebrate by singing traditional Arab songs. We stand in a circle and clap–some of the women even ululate in a sort of joyous yodel. Prosperous and progressive as they are, with resources and freedoms most Muslims in the traditional Islamic world don’t have, it’s small wonder that they are carried away by a spirit of sleep-away-camp levity.
It’s at lunch, when a bunch of us go into the tiny town of El Rito for Tex-Mex food at the El Farolito cantina, that I realize how fully the people of this mythic America have accepted these latest pioneers. Fellow diners don’t bat an eye at us: two tables of hijabbed women, a male sheik and me, all sitting in front of a mural of a Technicolor Southwestern sunset, crunching tortilla chips and salsa and chatting about everything from Hollywood actor Sean Penn to New York literary agents. The waitress mentions that the red salsa doesn’t have pork, which Muslims can’t eat, but that the faithful at the table might want to steer clear of the green salsa, which does. My companions worry that even the laid-back friendliness of Northern New Mexico could chill with a second major terrorist attack in the United States. Many are thinking of other places they might go if that happens–Morocco, Britain. For now, those are only worries. We finish our beans and enchiladas, leave a generous tip and drive back through the bright, hot hills.
