Theorizations on Western Muslim identity that are multi-layered and grounded in actual Western Muslim experiences are hard to find. Two exceptions to this are "The Road to Mecca" by Muhammad Asad (1954/2005), and "Islam is a Foreign Country" by Zareena Grewal (2014), rich texts that span across six decades. Asad's classic account of a European convert's nested journeys and Grewal's historical ethnography of American Muslim student-travelers offer readers an opportunity to examine how theorizing Western Muslim identity has changed and to ask: How does theorizing Western Muslim identity construct itself? What does it construct itself against? What are some of the assumptions and contradictions that it tells us? In this essay review, I look at how travel, particularly travel as a quest for knowledge, has served as a way of becoming a sovereign human subject at home in the West through travel to the East. I argue that, paradoxically, Western Muslims may retrieve sovereignty through a process of becoming Western constructed against an Eastern Other. Juxtaposing Asad's and Grewal's writings shows conceptually similar blind spots that reveal the paradox of this pursuit of subjecthood. I argue that the strategies illustrated by the protagonists in the two texts utilize an Orientalist gaze within a framework of a Western human subject that entrenches the eternal Otherness of Western Muslims, even as it secures a Western selfhood for its individual subjects. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a broader debate in curriculum studies on anti-racism, decolonization and racialized minorities by complicating the frame of inclusion for equality.