But I feared the wrath of Allah. Singing along to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” I always fell silent when it came to the line “imagine no religion”—too scared even to hum it, lest I apostate myself. Being an apostate, a kafir (nonbeliever), is the worst possible sin in Islam. Punishable by death. I remember wondering, how could I love 99 percent of this song so strongly but be so completely avoidant of this one line? So avoidant I couldn’t even lip-sync it. Could it be that if Lennon was right about the rest of it, maybe he was right about that line, too?
