My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I just found an article that explains, with a better vocabulary, how I feel about television.

Historically, I’ve tended to see TV as a morally neutral entity; its good (necessity) or evil (uselessness) depended on what a person decides to watch. PBS = good, Lifetime Television for Women = bad, for example.

But I recall that sometimes (in sporadic, enlightened moments) I had no patience even for “educational” television. I looked at the television and saw only a talking box, and it seemed eerily insane to look into it at the fantasy being sold inside. A fantasy of glorified romance or violence amidst buy-this-truck-to-feel-better-about-your-place-in-the-world reminders. In those moments, it seemed spooky and crazy that with two people in a room, we preferred to look forward and be entertained by a machine rather than talk with each other.

In this world people sit transfixed by what is essentially an electronic box emanating coloured lights, at the cost of living in the reality around them, face to face with other people. In short, television fosters a consumerist society and creates a society of people detached from their own real world.

For millennia people told each other stories, in their own languages, that reflected their own cultural mores and values. Now, even in remote corners of the world, the stories people are hearing reinforce solely Western notions of death and sexuality… as if the hands behind the media are trying to create a streamlined, homogenous culture. As our detachment and disillusionment grows, so rise the suicide rates in America and Europe. And everywhere, there is a desire for American consumer goods that, like a thirst for sea water, increases steadily until you die, still thirsty.

When I was working as a freelance writer in Colorado and living right at at the poverty line, I learned how to entertain myself cheaply. That’s when I learned to appreciate my computer, long walks and the many wonders of a public library. And partly because it’s so expensive and partly because it’s so unnecessary, my husband and I have never gotten the cable hooked up. To be fair, I’ve heard DVR and TiVo lessen the effects of commercials, and therefore, on someone being driven unheeding toward mindless consumerism. But that’s more money, and I remain unconvinced that there’s anything I could learn from television that I can’t learn on the (much cheaper) Internet.

Out of everyone at my office, I am the only one who has never seen “that commercial with the…” or “that episode of…” and who isn’t trying to engage others in meaningless dialogues about our shared “culture” of television. And I like that. I even like that I am not as well-informed about current events. The truly important sound bytes make it into my brain via my co-workers — the mental QB who tortures dogs, for example — and all the zionist infotainment and/or celebrity news is pretty much avoided.

But the problem lies in how to replace the gaping hole left by the lack of “input” from the television. It’s not hard… one just has to have someone knowledgeable to talk with. Yusuf and I sometimes talk all night about Islam. One day, I asked if he knows what happens when we die.

There are two questions that secular Western civilization is unable to answer. And these two questions are on all our minds… whether we spend our lives trying to avoid them, or answer them. One, what is the meaning of life; and two, what happens to us when we die? Islam answers both questions.

The meaning of life is a test, a trial from Allah. How we react to the things that happen to us determines the nature of afterlife for each individual. Do we seek the permanence of God, or do we seek the transient nature of the joys of this world? Both poverty and affluence are tests, the latter arguably being the greater one. Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Muhammad said, “Two wolves entering a flock of sheep will do less harm than greed and wealth will do to a man’s religion.” Peace and blessings of Allah be upon them both.

“Every soul shall have a taste of death: and We test you by evil and by good by way of trial. To Us must ye return.” Qur’an 21:35

Death is the separation of the soul from the body, but it is not the annihilation of either. When death comes, the angel Azrael seizes your soul and each of us goes to our grave alone. The soul is returned after we are inside the grave, when two angels, Munkar and Nakir, ask us several questions: Who is your Creator? What is your religion? Who is your prophet? What is your book? Then they will ask your age and what caused your death, and about your property: how you earned it and on what did you spend it. As Muslims, we feel hopeful when we think of death; we believe we will be able to answer the questions, and we believe in the all-encompassing compassion of Allah to forgive us for our shortcomings.

“And among His signs is this: you see the earth barren and desolate, but when We send down rain to it, it is stirred to life and yields increase. Truly, He who gives life to the (dead) earth can surely give life to (men) who are dead. For He has power over all things.” Qur’an 41:39

A minor fiasco erupted at my house when our neighbor’s boarder decided to tinker with his Harley-Davidson on Sunday afternoon, while Yusuf and I were watching a movie, Blood and Oil: The Middle East During World War I. (Spoiler alert: the British and French succeed in colonizing the Middle East.) Just as we were learning that Sir Winston Churchill was in fact the devil, vroom vroom went the bike next door. My heart started to beat a bit faster, because my husband, Yusuf, believes fervently that his right not to be bothered by someone else supercedes the right of someone else to bother him, and he is not known for his mild manners.

Aside: Westerners tend to regard the rights of the individual as most important. The right of a person to seek his happiness, in whatever way he sees fit, is paramount. No other individual, group or government has a right to stop him, unless he’s trying to harm himself or someone else. Easterners, however, tend to regard the rights of the group as more important than that of its individual members. The right of a group not to be burdened by ill-behaved individuals is paramount. The group has the duty to correct the individual’s behavior or remove him from the group, in order for its members’ happiness to continue uninterrupted. Maybe this is why Western governments have had to create laws for countless situations, and why Western laws in general are incredibly ineffectual for deterring crime or “deviant” behaviors. Maybe this is why Eastern societies often have a strong “shame” culture, and the unspoken punishment for acting out (the disapproval of others) is the real deterrent. In Islam, there is a strong bent toward the Eastern view.

For example, the harshness of some of the punishments in Sharia (the comprehensive code of Islamic law that evolved from the Qur’an over the centuries). One of the most famous is that theft is punished by the amputation of the thief’s hands. Never mind the fact that this punishment was actually carried out only twice during the 700-year reign of the Ottomans. (And never was anyone punished for stealing food, like Disney movies would have you believe. Rather, the existence of poverty was a source of shame for the wealthy, who are obligated by Islam to give alms to the indigent.) For most people, the mere thought of losing one’s hands was so frightening that stealing ceased to be an option. Thus, the punishment acted as a deterrant, and stealing was rare.

Aside for an aside: Islam and democracy are completely compatible. Islamic states like Iran interest me as a curiosity, something I would like to see and judge for myself without the veil of criticism from narrow-minded journalists. Still, political Islam is a concern — not because of Islam, but because of the shortcomings of the people who would be responsible for interpreting Islamic law. Of course they should forcibly strip away hundreds of years of misogyny, patriarchy and cultural appendages, and go to the very heart of the Qur’an and the spirit of any law derived from it, before they ever hear a case… but what if they don’t? And though I don’t idealize European penal codes or modern Western society’s many social ills, modern “Islamic” states where men abuse their wives, women bear all the punishment of adultery or aren’t granted divorces, are also abhorrent. And all in “the name of” Islam — the religion that actually grants more rights and protections to women than any other society, culture or religion. Muslim women are often ignorant about the rights granted to them by God 1,400 years ago. So it’s particularly annoying that the subjugation of women is something that even some Muslim men strive for.

Over the course of an hour, I watched Yusuf become incensed. I admit, I couldn’t really feel his frustration. Though I certainly don’t like the sound of loud mufflers — especially since I happen to know that the noise Harleys make is a) for show; b) usually increased purposely by the rider; and c) totally unnecessary for bike operation — I accept the eccentricities of my neighbors completely and without reservation. Since it was daytime, I said all we could was ask the guy to stop, and not hold out much hope for that. The conversation started out something like this:

Yusuf: My friend, what is this noise?
Harley: I’m workin’ on my bike, man.
Yusuf: I am trying to watch a movie, but I can’t hear over your noise.

Now see, in Turkey, that statement would really mean something. The person making the noise would feel embarrassed for having bothered someone else, apologize for it, and stop. Actually, Yusuf informed me, no one in Turkey would ever have such a stupid, noisy hobby.

Harley: Look, man. I’m workin’ on my bike. And if you have a problem with that, I really don’t care.
Yusuf: So everyone here has to listen to your noise?
Harley: I work six days a week. This is my only day to work on my bike. So that’s what I’m gonna do.
Yusuf: So how long I have to listen to your noise?
Harley: How long? However long it takes, man.

And so on. The two of them were completely unable to understand where the other was coming from. For Harley, it was a matter of personal enjoyment and rights. For Yusuf, it was a matter of neighborhood etiquette and community rights.

What ultimately happened was actually hilarious, if I only could have stopped the heart palpitations I got from the shouting match in my front yard (I’m a sensitive, easily flustered person). First Yusuf threatened to call the cops. Harley told him to go ahead, shouting that Yusuf needed to learn the rules of America. Yusuf then grabbed his new Nikon camera to snap photos of him working on his bike. Harley offered to pose for more shots. Yusuf shouted that the pictures would be part of his evidence in court. Harley paused, suddenly uncertain. Then Yusuf did a very American thing… he opened the windows of his Honda and cranked a CD of Turkish pop to top volume. Harley demanded that he turn that garbage off. Yusuf said, “You like your noise. I like mine.” Then Lucille, the owner of the house, came barreling out and screamed at Yusuf to turn off the music. He screamed back that he was going to invite five hundred Turkish guys for a barbecue in the street. Lucille shrieked that he wasn’t American and should go back to Turkey. So Yusuf yelled, “What are you talking about? Your husband is Chinese.”

(Background: There is a sad, strange history between Yusuf and Lucille. We were here two weeks when Yusuf hurriedly parked in the street one day, with a few inches of his bumper protruding into the neighbor’s driveway. He hadn’t been inside five minutes when Lucille was shouting and banging on the door with her fists and feet. He opened the door, stunned. Red-faced, she yelled at him for parking there and demanded that he move it immediately. When he started to protest that it would only be a few more minutes — he’d stopped at home to pray before going back out — she shrieked that he couldn’t speak English and should go back to his country. Since he’d been in a praying mindset, he got his keys, moved the car, and went back inside to pray. Ten minutes later, a timid knock at the door. A meek Lucille offering her humblest apologies… her husband had commanded her to apologize, she’s normally not like this, she’d just gotten bad news from the doctor. When Yusuf told me this story, I pronounced her a lunatic and wrote her off. He was more forgiving.

A few months later, her dogs were regularly barking for hours every night in their backyard. This was driving us both slowly mad. Finally, he went over there at 10 o’clock one night, apologized for the late-hour disruption, but asked if they could please do something about their dogs, because it was keeping us awake. She apologized profusely. After that, a few yaps and the dogs were attended to. And in the year we’ve lived here, Lucille has sought Yusuf out on several occasions… when the three-doors-down neighbors were racing their souped-up trucks up and down our cul-de-sac, and when our two-doors-down neighbor was letting his dogs roam unattended in the wee hours of the morning, she ran over to tell Yusuf she agreed with him. On several occasions, she has cornered him to share chapters in her decidedly strange life story… 30 years of marriage to a weak Chinese man who hardly speaks, a transsexual son who doesn’t visit.)

So then Lucille actually called the cops, because Yusuf’s music was bothering her. O, the irony. When two sheriff’s deputies showed up, she ran toward them with the gratitude of a war-torn refugee. They said, “Hey, ma’am, slow down there. Hey, stop. Stop. What are you doing? Stop.” Then she said, “Thank God you’re here. I’ve been scared to death.” Yusuf smirked. The deputies looked her up and down, and looked at Yusuf up and down, and said to Yusuf, “So why did you call us?” O, the hilarity of snap judgments honed from years of dealing with miscreants.

The deputies listened to both of them tell their stories. Yusuf said, “She told me I’m not American. I am citizen, I pay taxes. How I am not American?” From my post at the window, I heard Lucille tell bald-faced lies in her defense: “What are you talking about? I never said that! I don’t know what you’re talking about right now!” One of the deputies remembered Yusuf from the last time he came to our street for a noise ordinance violation — where we live, amidst the redneck pastimes of engine-meddling and drag-racing, this is a weekly occurrence — and pulled him aside to say, “Next time, don’t crank them up. Just call us. You can’t reason with people like this.” He gave Yusuf a card with his name and number, and we went inside. As we did, I heard Lucille say, “I want to make a formal complaint about what he said about my husband.” I heard the deputy say, “Well, ma’am, he didn’t really say anything…”

After all was said and done and the deputies were gone… what struck me was the contrast between Yusuf and me. He felt relaxed, peaceful, calm. I felt tense. He said he wishes we could have a good relationship with our neighbors, as Islam requires, but he wonders how it is possible with people who don’t have “human” qualities like shame, with people who only see as far as their own personal freedom to do as they please.

He said, “What I can do? Let them bother me and not say anything? That’s what’s wrong with Americans. Americans pretend nothing bothers them. And it kills them slowly inside.” (When Yusuf says “Americans” what he actually means are Americans with good manners who pretend not to notice other people’s bad manners. I don’t know if possessing these dual qualities is rare or common. I just know that me, my family and most of my friends are like this.)

He said, “I want to be a good example, and be nice to them. But I have been a good example for a year, not bothering anyone on this street, only saying something if they bother me first. But they don’t understand. They think I am bothering them. They think, because no one says anything, that no one is bothered by their noise. They think they are alone in the world. But I think the other people are happy I say something.” I’m sure the 90 percent of our neighbors who never make excessive noise are relieved. I know I am. But all this has made me curious… how do other Easterners living in the West deal with the bizarre ways that some people behave in a culture “with no shame”?

The fight to tame one’s nafs, an Arabic word meaning self or ego, is the lifelong struggle for the Mumin.

This is a distinction I only recently learned: a Muslim is a submitter, but a Mumin is a believer. If a Muslim is someone who submits her will to God by professing Islam and its book; a Mumin is someone whose faith is firmly established in her heart, whose every thought and action strives toward God.

The Arabs of the desert say, ‘We believe.’ Say: “You have not yet truly believed, but rather say, ‘We have submitted,’ for true faith has not yet entered into your hearts. But if you obey God and His messenger, God will not detract anything from your deeds. Surely, God is oft-forgiving, most merciful.” Qur’an 49:14

I like that there’s different levels to being Muslim. It is a path for the conscientious sloughing off of harmful or useless things, and the mindful gaining of vital attributes. The destination is God.

Back to the nafs. Here is some background about each human’s own personal deterrent from the divine. The nafs — what Christians may call the wayward “flesh” as opposed to the more saintly “spirit” — is that little voice that spurs you to take the easy way, the road more traveled, the path toward self-destruction. When I first converted to Islam, I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was either a hopelessly evil person, or it was the early stages of schizophrenia.

You know it’s your nafs talking when either a) you want to do something good (helpful, kind or necessary) and a voice in your own head tells you not to bother; or b) you want to avoid doing something bad (harmful, unkind or useless) and a voice in your own head encourages you to go ahead and do it.

I have found it very helpful, this Islamic tendency to think of the nafs as an entity separate from but connected to my (better) self, my conscience. The nafs would rather do anything than pray, for example. If I should work, it wants to play. If I’ve eaten my fill, it wants more. It always wants just one more cookie, just five more minutes.

But excessive leisure is sheer cruelty for the human mind, just like Huxley said. It reminds me of the Epsilon experiment in Brave New World, where they put all the lower-caste people on a four-hour workday to see if it would make them any happier. As Mustapha Mond recalls, “What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them.”

The bad news is, the nafs is never satisfied. Each time you give it what it wants, it thinks of new and different things to want, and it gets bigger. Nafs *is* wanting. And it has no answer to the guilt that quietly invades the playing or overeating, no answer except…”more.” Listening to the voice and doing what it wants seems to lead to self-destruction… one becomes a shell of a human being, seeking only comfort or distraction. The good news is, not listening makes the nafs smaller and, eventually, easier to ignore. In Turkey, I met dozens of elderly people who have been praying and fasting their whole lives. With their humility, dignity and all-encompassing love for others, they proved by example that a human can best his nafs.

Combatting the nafs
Some Muslims don’t think anything bad should ever be shared. I don’t agree. If you should only share good things, there’s going to be an awful lot of silence, or an awful lot of phoniness.

My husband and I have spent many hours discussing the wily ways of the nafs. This is one of the ways I’ve found to combat it — talking openly and honestly to a trusted friend about what’s going on. It’s a relief when your thoughts turn out to be identical to your friend’s; then the thoughts are easily, logically dispelled as coming from a secondary source.

According to a short but great Wikipedia article, the nafs has seven stages. In its primitive stage, Nafs-i-ammara, the Commanding Self has seven heads that must be chopped off — false pride, greed, jealousy, lust, backbiting, stinginess and malice. Five of the seven deadly sins of the Roman Catholic Church are in here.

After awakening, the Regretful Self is repentant but falls back into destructive behaviors. But after repenting, the Inspired Self wants to do more than just “not-bad” and aspires to actually do good. Sufis say there are three qualities for the truly good deed: doing it immediately and without laziness; looking at it with contempt to avoid self-righteousness; and doing it in secret to avoid self-aggrandizing.

The article goes on to explain the other stages: the Contented Self, the Pleased Self, the Pleasing Self, and finally, the Pure Self — which is the perfected human, completely surrendered to and inspired by God, a soul that is in full agreement with the will of God.

Like any office, occasionally my co-workers get together outside of work. But even if my life were the opposite of what it is, I wouldn’t want to go. Truth is, I hate forced social gatherings, where people stare at each other awkwardly, or greet each other with false cheer, pretending they wouldn’t rather be somewhere else. But because these gatherings always involve alcohol, I’ve excused myself from attending.

I would never have made a thing out of the Islamic prohibition on intoxicants with my colleagues if they hadn’t harangued me repeatedly to come to the Christmas party at the publisher’s house, which would have an open bar and a “Vegas” theme (the invitation literally had a picture of a martini and a set of dice). At first, I tried to be funny about it. “Hmm…alcohol and gambling. That’s not exactly, like, my scene.” They just laughed and begged me to come. One, a Christian, said, “Just come, and don’t drink.”

Remember how Jesus said he came to fulfill the (Musan) law? How he took away its cold legality by explaining that wrong intentions led to wrong actions — looking at a woman with lust was like committing adultery in one’s heart, holding a grudge was like committing murder, etc. and that a true follower of God doesn’t just avoid sin, but even the ways that lead to sin? The idea of a non-drinker going to a drinking party reminded me of that. I would be setting myself up for failure. I’m a person, not a saint. And even if I weren’t tempted to actually drink, what exactly would be the appeal in watching, sober, as my co-workers let go of their inhibitions, and thus, their character?

Finally, I got annoyed and responded by e-mail to my boss. “My religion doesn’t permit me to attend gatherings where there will be alcohol or gambling. Thank you for the invitation, but my husband and I really, really cannot come.” Which sounded very stuffy. I was embarrassed to play the part of the scandalized Victorian, but I couldn’t seem to make them drop it. Then of course she felt as if I were judging her, which I really wasn’t — how could I? — and I heard later that the powers-that-be were talking amongst themselves: “Well, I wish she could come, but honestly, when we get together, we drink. How can we not?” Which made me sadder than ever. People see alcohol as a social lubricant, a “medicine” for shyness or uptightness.

“They ask you (Muhammad) concerning alcoholic drink and gambling. Say: ‘In them is a great sin, and (some) benefit for men, but the sin of them is greater than their benefit.’” Qur’an 2:219

Various hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, further indicate that alcohol is actually a disease, not a cure.

Though I accepted fairly immediately the logic behind alcohol being forbidden in Islam, it took a long time for me to submit to it on an emotional level. In Christianity, different sects take different views — alcohol actually being part of the religious rites in Roman Catholicism, to alcohol being strongly discouraged in the Southern Baptist view. Since I grew up non-denominational, I had been permitted to make up my own mind.

When I was a teenager, I would have proudly marched in a temperance parade. It was not a choice stemming from my religion or culture, rather it was personal. My own biological father had, when drunk, insulted his older brother. He died three days later, before Dad ever got a chance to apologize. Tortured by grief, my then 15-year-old father began a 15-year descent into the madness of alcoholism. He quit drinking soon after my birth, but it was almost as if he’d been in an emotional coma for 15 years. I caught up to him in maturity by the time I turned 12.

By the time I was 21, my pride had deluded me into thinking I was far too self-disciplined to end up like him. And I got lucky, mostly. I turned out to be someone who could take it or leave it. Though for the most part I took it, because of a lifelong tendency to overdo things. By the time I was 26, I was a lost — though still searching — soul. My worst memories of that time involve alcohol. Three in the morning, maudlin and alone, and wondering what could possibly be the point of this unjust, terrifying universe.

This was when I met Yusuf, and began my path to Islam.

A prohibition on all intoxicants seemed very harsh to me, a product of the 21st century West. I had to admit, there were countless horrors that result from the use of alcohol: broken families, abusive parents, rape, unwanted pregnancies, birth defects, painful diseases, car wrecks… and yet, I wanted to tell myself it was mostly harmless. I thought of myself as “moderate” in my consumption. How many alcoholics begin that way, I wonder. And how many social drinkers — even if they never cross the line into drunkenness once in their whole lives, which is doubtful — can say that alcohol has some benefit that can’t be found any other way?

When I told one friend, a nurse, that my new husband did not want me to drink even though I was still a Christian, she said, “But a glass of red wine is good for you.” So I looked into it. I don’t know who started this rumor, but it’s a lie. To gain any benefit from the antioxidants in red wine, one would have to drink several quarts. At which point, the harms obviously outweigh that benefit. The antioxidants in blueberries are healthier to obtain. Reflecting upon her statement further, I realized I had met one or two people in my entire life who literally limited themselves to one occasional drink. The vast majority of people are highly susceptible to that little whisper, “have one more” — thus, why the Islamically acceptable limit is zero. The trouble with intoxicants is they take away your ability to reason, and they quiet or even silence your conscience; the removal of inhibitions is the chipping away at one’s own moral compass. Drinking begets more drinking. How many times have I heard people say, “I couldn’t help it, I was drunk.” And that excuse works; people accept it. Because people know how not yourself you are when you’ve been drinking.

How many women find themselves in embarrassing or even dangerous situations because of the impaired judgment alcohol brings, even in small doses? How many men say and do ugly things they would normally never do? Of the tiny (nonexistent?) group of people who have never felt any negative effects from the use of alcohol — whether it’s their own or someone else’s — who can honestly say that the fun is worth the risk?

Muslims do not have wills of steel or hearts of stone; we are very much human, flawed and susceptible to harmful or useless things. I am grateful my husband never succumbed to the temptation to drink alcohol. He is one of those rare folks who has no real desire to leave consciousness, or even alter his state of mind. Prayer and zakir (remembering God’s attributes) are his preferred methods of escaping from material reality. Mashallah, can you imagine it? God has made such wonderful things.

I am reading Jesus, Prophet of Islam by Muhammad ‘Ata ur-Rahim. The real Isa, a Hebrew prophet and one of God’s beloved, came to fulfill the Musan law and spread God’s message to non-Hebrews. His original followers believed in one merciful, just Alaha (God, in Aramaic, the dialect of Arabic that Isa spoke).

As the trinitarians curried favor with Roman emperors and spread a distorted message in Europe, unitarian Christians kept faithful to Isa’s prophecy, spreading it throughout the Middle East and North Africa. They remained true to the original words, and did not flout the Musan law (which Isa had come to fulfill), nor embrace additional dogma like Isa’s divinity (which was considered heresy until 325 CE). They performed ritual ablutions, prayed several times a day, and dressed modestly.

So when an Arabian prophet who spoke the same words came 600 years later, they could feel its divine origin. Unencumbered by a highly political church, irrational dogma or nationalist notions like “only Hebrews can be prophets,” they embraced Muhammad’s message quickly.

This is the best book ever.