My (earnest, irate) thoughts

A couple of years ago, when I was a lapsed Protestant considering anarcho-communism as a worldview, I wrote a rant deriding the neocon geniuses who say, ‘The terrorists hate freedom, democracy and truth’™. Since converting to Islam has not meant abandoning liberalism, feminism or any of my other dear -isms, I’m going to write another one.

Author William Dalrymple writes what I wish I had. He smacks down this underlying belief that all good ideas (freedom, etc.) were first created by, have seen the greatest expansion in, and are held the most dear by the West. He writes about our sense of superiority — our smugness — that is not only false, but dangerous.

The complaints change — a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right.

Yeah!

What a contrast to columnists like Suzanne Fields, who picks and chooses which parts of history serve her agenda:

The strength of democracy rests not only on tolerance for many beliefs but a tolerance for no belief. It’s precisely this tolerance that radical Islam detests. For radical Muslims there is no separation of religion from anything else. They use intolerance to dominate and destroy everything that deviates from oppressive religious law.

Can’t you just picture the look on her face: pinched, scornful, frowning as her editor adds the ‘radical’ before Islam and Muslim. ‘But all Muslims are nuts,’ she complains to her editor. ‘Do we really have to add the ‘radical’?’

To say ‘radical Muslim’ is a contradiction in terms — kind of like ‘warlike Buddhist’. Islam is a religion that is decidedly un-radical, striving to find truth between the extremes of asceticism and hedonism, and carve out a place where people can be fulfilled. The ‘radicals’ she speaks of have about as much to do with Islam as Opus Dei extremists have to do with mainstream Catholicism.

As we ought to know from looking at history, political radicals spring forth in places where regimes are oppressive, and religious fundamentalists erupt in places where rulers prevent people from practicing religion normally. It is not scholarship to glance at the crazies on the fringes and denounce mainstream participants. In The Kite Runner, a novel by Afghani immigrant Khaled Hosseini, we Westerners got a glimpse of the real Taliban — and exactly how un-Islamic its leadership was.

But no, it’s not enough for Fields to say the radical Muslims are the thorn in the fragrant bloom of the secular West. Now she must make an offering to the atheist scholars — how about these ‘Islamists’?

For their part, atheists would do better to dissect the Islamist rationale than to pick on the religious folk whose faith guarantees not only freedom of religion, but the freedom from religion enjoyed by atheists, skeptics and other nonbelievers. This is the freedom the Founding Fathers regarded the ultimate secular gift of God.

Christianity guarantees freedom of religion? Really? But I could name hundreds of atrocities committed against non-Christians ‘in the name of Christ’. And yet, I would never play that game… Because any idiot can find an example in history where leaders used religion for political gain. Any idiot can write an argument around an out-of-context verse from the Bible to say “God commands us to destroy [insert group here].” These arguments are ultimately full of treachery, and do not invalidate the faith of normal people. But I like how she encourages the atheists to start attacking the Muslims, rather than the Christians. Pay attention. The underlying idea here is that Christians have more in common with atheists than with Muslims. Now there’s a divider if I ever saw one.

It’s all Us vs. Them, West vs. East, we-evolved-into-the-best-civilization-on-earth-without-any-of-their-help-thank-you-very-much. Many are convinced of the dichotomy, and try to convert us to their belief in the secular West’s superiority. And you want to know why? Because if Muslims and Christians were to actually speak to one another, one-half of the world might actually get along. That’s terrifying if you’re hell-bent on trying to divide (and conquer) the globe.

I have grown weary of the rhetoric that gives the West all the credit for its current dominance. In college, a history professor pointed out that the Renaissance was the result of European exposure to the brilliance of the Middle East. Then a polisci professor showed us how the British industrial revolution (and all its results) was practically an accident. Reading these pundits’ nonsense, you’d almost believe God Himself said, ‘The English are the most perfect race on earth. To ensure their ultimate success in the Western world, I will make their Navy defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588.’ Holy cow.

And let us not forget the dark side of Western history, the embarrassing part we don’t like to talk about: ideologies based on social Darwinism that cultivate indifference and even hatred for poor people with dark skin; colonialism and imperialism; dictatorships and genocide, right into the 1970s and ’80s in Western Europe, the Perfect Civilization®; and the neoconservative messiah, George W. Bush. Why do we act like we have all the answers?

As Ramadan comes to a close, I am reflecting on hunger and poverty.

I have always loved the Beatitudes. They are the verses in which, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus described the qualities of those who would be in heaven. Hunger, poverty, simplicity: these are the characteristics of the soul that is with God.

Blessed are the poor [in spirit], for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger [for righteousness], for they shall be filled.

The parts in brackets are recorded in Matthew, without brackets are recorded in Luke. That’s interesting, because perhaps Jesus described these archetypes more than once, and in slightly different ways to cover a multitude of meanings.

In the first Beatitude, maybe poverty is both literal and figurative. The impoverished people of the world must surely be rewarded with heaven, but so must those who take, eat and possess only what is vital, as long as they are poor in spirit — that is, humble.

In the fourth, maybe hunger is both a physical and a spiritual state. The starving people of Africa and southeast Asia must certainly be heaven-bound, but so most those people who fast to remember God, as well as those who hunger metaphorically to possess divine qualities.

I’ve read that Sufi ascetics follow the example of prophet Isa (Jesus). Both the Christian and Muslim literature indicate his advocacy for the ascetic life. When Jesus was taken to heaven, according to eighth-century Arab sources, he possessed only a woolen garment, two sandals and a slingshot.

Some eighth-century Arab sources have hadiths, or quotes, from the prophet Isa that are phrased exactly like Beatitudes. I read these in The Muslim Jesus.

Blessed is he who guards his tongue, whose house is sufficient for his needs, and who weeps for his sins.
Blessed is he who sees with his heart, but whose heart is not in what he sees.

“Weeping for sins” sounds like the second Beatitude… “Those who mourn” could be those who weep for their shortcomings and cry out for God’s mercy.

And if one’s heart is not in what one sees, it implies being in the world, but not of it. A heart that is not in this world is a heart that remembers the other world constantly — a meek heart? In the third Beatitude, though “meekness” implies a gentle, quiet person who submits to the wishes of others, and the exhortation to be meek seems to encourage obedience to other humans… what if “the meek” are those who are obedient to God? In the movie Kingdom of Heaven, the Christian wife of Guy de Lusignan is quoted as saying, “Their prophet [Muhammad] says ’submit’; Jesus says, ‘decide’.” But it’s right in the Beatitudes: Jesus encouraged submission, too.

May God bless our fast, and replace our physical thirst with a spiritual thirst for Him, and replace our physical discomfort with a spiritual jihad — which does not translate as “holy war” — the soul’s struggle to possess divine qualities. May we remember that one square foot of Paradise is better than this entire world and all that it contains.

The Christians in my family range from true believers who devote their lives to Bible study and social obligations that revolve around a church community, to folks who follow an odd hybrid religion that seems to wed neoconservative values with the worship of Bill O’Reilly and the celebrations of Christmas and Easter. This is a letter to the first group, in my family and beyond.

So I have been like, devouring these these scholarly books: what is known about the life of Jesus, the earliest parts of the Gospels, the nature of the books that were not included in the New Testament, the early Christians and their beliefs, the Church’s role in narrowing the definition of “Christian” and the role of Roman emperors in defining the religion. And I’ve learned a lot. For example, why, as a 15-year-old girl, thumbing through my New King James Version of the Holy Bible, the words of Jesus in red had the ability to bring tears to my eyes, but the rest of the narrative often left me cold. (Sometimes I would just skip through and read the verses in red. Then I would feel guilty.)

This is a free online book I found called Beyond Mere Christianity. The author refers to C.S. Lewis’ seminal work throughout. And reading its 141 pages, it does feel like a sequel, in many ways, to what was my favorite book as a teenager. It is an answer to some logical fallacies in that book, yes, but more than that, it encourages the reader, who should be a thoughtful Christian, to look beyond church dogma to the revealed word of God that is found in the Gospels. The author is a Catholic-turned-Presbyterian-turned-Muslim who clearly has a great love for Jesus, and a great thirst to search for his authentic words. And I dig that, because I do, too.

It seems like a major change, Christianity to Islam. Jesus as son of God to Jesus as Prophet, salvation through Jesus’ death to salvation through submission to God. It’s not, not really… but several family members have reached out to me with phone calls and handwritten letters (or gossiped about what a weirdo I am). And though they haven’t expressed much interest in hearing about my journey to Islam, they did tell me about their Christian faith and quote the Bible extensively.

What this did was deepen my understanding of Islam. Any religion that is the worship of one God and puts the onus of salvation on the believer is Islam. There is a thread of Divine Unity and Divine Truth inside every religious tradition… Christianity is Islam. Buddhism is Islam. Hinduism is Islam. I feel a kinship to all believers, though of course I hope they will include Islamic beliefs in their understanding of the universe and its interconnectedness. Muslims see God in everything, and it’s a pleasant way to look at the world.

Most of us in the West see Islam as “other” — it is not a part of our history, and it is certainly not in sync with the present geopolitical climate. Some view Islam as a militaristic, misogynistic, spread-by-the-sword faith. Some view Islam as a grave, legalistic religion for nomadic desert dwellers. They are not interested in hearing what is in the Qur’an, or what Muhammad said. To them, even if it is peaceful and unified and coherent and lovely, somehow it’s still not relevant.

But perhaps we can still find a common ground for dialogue, based on the Gospels brought by Jesus.