My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I just received an e-mail forward about why, if Americans are not going to post the Ten Commandments in government buildings, or keep “in God we trust” on U.S. currency, government officials should work on Christmas and Easter, and mail should be delivered on Sundays. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek attempt to “keep the Lord in our country,” according to the bottom of the e-mail. Though it was clearly written without a whole lot of thought, it got me thinking.

When exactly was the Lord part of American public policy? I’d be very curious to hear an example of when religion went more than lip-deep for politicians hoping to court a faithful public.

A little refresher in U.S. government/history: the U.S. is a constitutional republic, a government founded with a rather thick wall between personal religion and public policy. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution actually prohibits the U.S. government from establishing a state religion. This is what makes the U.S. different from a theocratic state like Iran (since 1979), which has established Shi’a Islam as its state religion.

When it comes to U.S. currency, we’ve got to admit that the god worshipped by the vast majority of citizens is actually Mammon (e.g. Christmas, on sale now!). So to stamp our god “in God we trust” is dripping with irony and symbolism — and is hypocritical enough to be adorably American.

Though I agree with the Ten Commandments, why should we spend taxpayer dollars to post them in public buildings? Maybe if they were already posted in the buildings, we could leave them up as a tribute to a more pious past, and not waste money erasing them. Money shouldn’t be spent unnecessarily, either way. There are plenty of children to feed and educate, and that’s got to come first. Especially for religious folks (one would think).

Evangelical Christians are fond of saying America is a Christian nation, a rather dubious claim. The majority of Americans do identify personally with Christianity, but that does not equate to Americans expecting Christian theology to inform public policy. Biographies of the lives of the Founding Fathers prove they were Deists and agnostics who feared theocratic regimes, fled Europe, and created a government that was decidedly separate from faith. Some say it was so a man’s faith would always be a personal choice, so that government would be powerless to control a man’s religion. Others say it was so government would be free of the tyranny of religious fanaticism.

I cannot think of one compelling reason to spend public dollars posting religious instructions, especially ones that most people have no intention of following. Like “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Though I’m sure most people find adultery morally troublesome, adultery is also incredibly common. There is a disconnect here: people may know it’s wrong in some vague cosmic sense, but they’re not going to necessarily restrain themselves if they meet someone they like. Americans seem to have a shape-shifting, incredibly adaptable sense of morality. As a people, we must look incredibly lost: we say one thing and do something else. We go to the club on Saturday and church on Sunday. A nation of puritanical hypocrites — do as I say, not as I do. This is just another example: let’s post the Ten Commandments where everyone can see ‘em, but let’s not actually follow ‘em. It looks nice, but it rings hollow.

I suppose it is exactly this perceived moral laxity that causes a certain sect of the Christian faithful to want to “bring God back” into the public sphere. Why do they assume God is so fragile — that God has left? God is closer to you than your jugular vein. God is in the stomach of every person who hungers, in the skin of every person who shivers. How do they imagine that God requires our outward appearances, but not our internal passion? It all sounds like so much nonsense to my ears. In the name of God, they scream, while they criminalize the homeless or militarize the borders.

A certain sect of evangelical Christians seem to want to force religion on the masses as a matter of law, rather than enlighten the masses as a matter of cultural awakening. But religion cannot be pushed upon others, nor virtue obtained through compulsion. It is a matter of the heart. People must compel themselves to believe and follow a faith. It is self-discipline, the only form of law that has ever worked in the history of the world.

Language is not enough, but it’s all we have. Because I don’t want my experience of God to be a solely emotional one, I feel the need to talk, to write, to otherwise recount what’s going on inside.

When the prophet Muhammad brought the message of one God to the Arabs, beginning in 610 CE, he called the Divine “Allah” … ilah means little-g god or one that is worshipped, so saying Allah is like saying The God or The One Who is worshipped. Though the Arabic language has a lot of lovely features — a rich vocabulary, genderless pronouns and an unchanged alphabet — it is not the only language that God hears.

See, sometimes Arabic is to Muslims what Latin was to medieval Christians and English is to American evangelicals. Well-meaning folks tend to feel so close to God that they begin to think they know the only way to God. Some Muslims even protest calling Allah “God” because in English, the word can be easily pluralized with an “s” or undercut with a small g. But how these native Muslims expect English-speakers to feel the word “Allah” the way they feel Lord or God is a mystery.

God is infinite. And God painted people in different hues, speaking different tongues and finding peace in different rituals, so that in knowing each other, we could begin to grasp the bigness of ‘infinite’. To imagine that God is more ‘pleased’ by the sound of Arabic is absurd, like saying God is more pleased by the sight of blond hair.

Because language is so important to me, I am skeptical when non-Arabic speaking Muslims recite duas in Arabic, when those personal conversations with God might be more meaningful in the language that speaks to one’s heart. (To be fair, many non-Arabic Muslims do grow up with many Arabic words. Like my husband, Yusuf, a Turk who feels the word Allah the way I feel the word God and who feels elhamdulillah the way I feel praise the Lord.) I suppose it irks me because I was a non-Catholic Christian before, and I vehemently protested the fact that it took the Catholics so long to realize that performing mass in a dead language was elitist and pointless.

But sometimes I think American evangelicals try to do the same thing with English, saying this “Muslim Allah” is not their God. They seem ethnocentric, which seems slightly more outrageous than Muslims with Arabic, since the Qur’an was at least revealed in that tongue. Though the Bible wasn’t even translated into English until 1382, many English-speakers who call the Divine “God” seem to reject any other word for Him/Her/It. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that Jesus spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that he called the Divine “Alaha.”

I find these scandals of particularity very disheartening on both sides. I love English, with its habit of absorbing words from other languages, its ever-evolving vocabulary. And I love Islam, with its breadth and depth and light. It’s sad that the two don’t “meet” more often.

Who are the people behind the MPAA? I picture them as being old, lecherous white men with no souls. Of course, that’s pretty much the same way I picture the richest producers in Hollywood.

Most people seem to hate the MPAA for ‘prudishly’ equating sex with violence by giving films with a little of either the same R rating. More on that in a minute. But here’s a survey, because I’m curious. One: which R-rated movie is more harmful to an impressionable 17-year-old teen: the bloody Gladiator starring Russell Crowe or the sexy Unfaithful starring Diane Lane, and why? Two: what exactly in the big-screen graphic novel Sin City is more damaging to the same kid — its gory forcefulness or its take on female sexuality, and why?

On the other hand, *I* hate the MPAA for demonizing coarse language and drug use, which are nowhere near either sex/nudity or gore/violence. What bothers me is that R-rated films are so diverse in their offerings that the rating itself has become meaningless. Important films like North Country and The Joy Luck Club get the same rating as bloodbaths like Kill Bill and 300. Even worse, charming ‘people’ movies like Love for Rent and Billy Elliott get the same rating as lewd nonsense like American Pie.

How can curse words (which, looking at the etymology of the English language, are often the original English words that were made ‘low-class’ and then ‘dirty’ by the Norman French aristocrats) be in the same class as watching people kill each other? How can drug use, which doesn’t make the viewer actually use mind-altering substances, be in the same class as nudity, which does make the viewer actually partake in a woman’s objectification?

When my hilarious Turkish husband accidentally rented some pretty bawdy comedies, he started to avoid R ratings. But at the library, he felt cornered into bringing home boring, dated ‘family’ films that feature talking pets (as though all people who shy away from sex and death simulation are, by definition, stupid). So he started checking why the films were R, searching for the tiny box that said it all (R-Language or R-Nudity or R-Graphic War Violence). But of course it doesn’t explain the context. So the nudity and violence of Schindler’s List or Braveheart is ‘equivalent’ to the nudity and violence of a Rob Zombie flick.

Basically, there’s no way to see a movie without seeing a movie. (Though we try to fast-forward through the sexy bits.) But if we’ve seen it, we’ve already bothered ourselves. Wild scenes that I saw literally years ago still pop into my head sometimes and I doubt that I learned anything from the film that made the lasting visceral imagery ‘worth it’.

I think it’s obvious that the gore and violence in films is harmful psychologically, slowly desensitizing us to forceful death and war and making human life utterly expendable, and allowing us to find the evening news totally bland compared to a Martin Scorsese film. And I’ve read many comparisons between American and Roman bloodlust (the Romans had the coliseum, we have the action movie). It’s interesting how the more heinous American films get, so goes American foreign policy, as we look on disinterestedly.

But I, too, used to parrot oh-so-chic idea that the sex and nudity in films is harmless, though I was annoyed that the nudity in question is 99 percent female. How hypocritical to say ‘we’re equal’ and then turn women into sex objects. But when we’re all being honest, and not trying to sound more enlightened and modern than our parents, we can admit that watching people writhe around with feigned passion, sans clothing, is embarrassing — deep inside in that old-fashioned place we like to pretend we’ve conquered. I’m not talking about the more utilitarian nudity in a National Geographic special, but the gratuitous nudity in a film. Maybe it’s just human to be a little embarrassed by that kind of nudity, not because it’s dirty but because it’s lovely — and none of our business.

Even before I was Muslim, I began to hate the panopticon of the male gaze. After converting, I began to cover my body to privatize the public sphere. Now that I feel more at home in feminism than ever before — because I have dropped out of the society that deems that my assets are in my ass, and because male strangers don’t harrass me anymore, which always made me feel worthless — the film industry seems more blatantly misogynistic than ever before. Pretending to ‘liberate’ women from ‘patriarchal’ ideas about sexuality, pretending to embrace a woman’s ‘freedom’ to bare all, they have effectively imprisoned them — their bodies are currency, their attractiveness is their worth. They are their bodies, and that is all.

I’m sure most Hollywood actresses think Muslim women are oppressed. I wonder if they know that Muslim women think Hollywood actresses are oppressed. Think about it. Who is held to an impossible standard of beauty? Who spends hours grooming? Who is gossiped about and judged for gaining or losing a few pounds? Who is discarded the minute she becomes old or ugly or fat?

The Qur’an, like the Bible, has a lot to say about money, and the rich. Jesus’ famous answer to a rich man’s love for his money (”It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven”) also finds complementary phrases in prophet Muhammad’s hadiths (”Two wolves among sheep do less damage than greed and wealth do to a man’s religion”).

An Islamic attitude (and I believe, a Christian one) toward money falls smack between hedonism and asceticism. In fact, the Muslim view of money is simple:

1) Give generously, because everything you have is from God.
2) Never waste anything, because everything you have is from God.
3) Give generously, but not so much that you require alms yourself.
4) If one year passes and you continue to own wealth in any form — a house, a horse, a car, a piece of land, a gold bracelet, you *must* pay a 2.5 percent tax on that wealth, called zakat, to the poor. This money is viewed as already being owned by the poor; keeping it is equal to thievery.
5) Feeding the hungry is equivalent to freeing someone from slavery, an act that prompts God to forgive your sins.

Boiled down, the Muslim view of money is: “what’s mine is God’s, what’s yours is yours.” It’s a far cry from the cut-throat capitalism and nationalism sweeping through the world, and the searing hatred of brown-skinned poverty, all of which makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

What gets under my skin is when people try to wed religion with things that are totally antithetical to religion, like greed. Prosperity theology is a newish trend, an American attempt to rationalize wealth as a sign of God’s favor (which reminds me of other stupid notions like ‘manifest destiny’). This September 2006 article in Time Magazine — Does God want you to be rich? A Holy Controversy — talks all about it.

Though I think predestination is a logical fallacy — it would maintain that God, too, is inside of and is limited by the human perception of time, and from within that limitation, can see the future — I do believe in fate. Muslim tradition says that 40 days after conception, as God sends angels to breathe into humans their ruh, or spirit, He sends other angels to write down in the Book of Life a few facts about this particular human: one is the length of her life, another is the amount of money she will make.

Along with fate, I believe in free will. What’s interesting here is that we are still completely responsible for our wealth and how we earned it. Here it is: one would have earned the same amount, down to the penny, even if one had not resorted to thievery or trickery. If one is ‘fated’ to be poor, stealing won’t change that. If one is ‘fated’ to be rich, stealing isn’t necessary. There is a sense of inevitability that is rather liberating.

I read once that stealing is the most reprehensible of all sins, and that all sins, in a way, are a form of theft — if you lie, you have stolen someone’s right to the truth; if you commit adultery, you have stolen someone’s right to intimacy with his or her spouse. (I think that was in The Kite Runner, too. I love that book.)

Anyway, there is this sense that all things, including money, come from God and not through any power of our own. Which sort of falsifies this silly American notion that poor people are subhuman, and rich people are blessed. Wealth is a mixed blessing, at the least.

But wealth itself is not inherently evil in Islam (or, I believe, in Christianity). It is the love of money that is the root of all sorts of sins. Riches are actually a test, and a rather hard one to pass. Materialism and spiritualism are like two sides of a coin — too much stuff can distract us from our true mission, to connect with the Divine; a lack of possessions can help us refocus. But the comfortable man who overcomes the spiritual challenge and keeps his thoughts centered on Allah — who showers gifts on the poor and sets up institutions like schools or mosques — that rich man can experience prosperity in both worlds.

I love this story: Prophet Abraham used to walk a mile or more every day, searching for a poor person to feed. One day he happened upon some kind of shaman, who asked for alms. Because he was not a believer, Abraham said firmly, ‘I won’t feed you unless you change your religion.’ So the shaman left, downcast. And God spoke to Abraham, saying, ‘Who are you to turn him away? He is an unbeliever, but I have been feeding him for 70 years. What do you think will happen if you feed him?’ Properly chastized, Abraham ran back and invited to his home the man, (who later embraced monotheism).

This blog entry was inspired (as are others) by Umm Yasmin’s Dervish, a wonderful blog that I can’t get enough of.

I had a lovely conversation with a wonderful Christian lady yesterday. Though I was supposed to be the journalist, she was more talented at digging for information… she got me to tell my whole life story, including how I met my Turkish husband, Yusuf, in an ESL class and my journey into Islam. Tragically, I turned a heart-wrenching, difficult process into one long anecdote: “Yeah, my dad said ‘OK, you’re looking a little Arabicized’” and “Sometimes I wish I could tell people, ‘I’m not oppressed, I swear!’” She burst out laughing.

But it was nice, to joke around about stereotypes with someone I felt an immediate kinship with. She was such a good-hearted person, and so interested in what would cause a sunny-haired feminist of Irish ancestry to say La ilahe ill’Allah, Muhammad’ur rasul’Allah. I was embarrassed to be standing in her territory (a Christian indoor attraction for families), so I summed up my decision with an offhand, “It’s all basically the same, with one more book, one more prophet.” And I said, “The stuff we see on TV… it’s politics, not religion.” She looked overawed. I could almost see the veil falling from her eyes. We chatted about the sacrifice of Ibrahim (Abraham), the Torah of Musa (Moses), the Psalms of Dawud (David), the Gospel of Isa (Jesus), Yunus (Jonah) and the Whale, Nuh (Noah) and the Flood. After that, I was high as a kite, hopeful she would one day pick up a Qur’an and read it out of curiosity.

I was very moved by the Christians there. They were kind and good and curious. I could see the shining white light of God in their faces. And they were the well-traveled sort, discontent to stay put when others suffer, who have been missionaries in far-flung lands like Papua New Guinea, and who have translated the New Testament into little-known languages like Hawaiian Pidgin [if you’ve never seen Da Jesus Book, you have not truly lived. ‘Jesus chose his twelve apostles’ becomes ‘Jesus ben pick his 12 spesho guys.’]

Speaking of inter-faith dialogue, I watched a show on DVD last night, NOW with Bill Moyers on religious fundamentalism. His guest was religious scholar Karen Armstrong, a former nun who calls herself a “freelance monotheist” (I love that) because she draws from all three of the traditions of Abraham, her native Christianity, as well as Judaism and Islam. In fact, after her devastating experience in a convent, it was a trip to Jerusalem, and the uneasy, vibrant jostling of the faiths there, that renewed her interest in religion.

Armstrong is my hero. This woman is so well-read, so bright, so articulate, so brilliant in describing what the real issues are. I haven’t seen anyone of any faith, including Islam, describe the Muslim heart so well. She talks about good religion and bad religion (and she doesn’t let American Christian fundies off the hook). She explains the Muslim heart and mind as if she were a Palestinian refugee herself.

And the whole time Moyers has this pinched look on his face, saying ignorant things (”I keep hearing Islam is a religion of peace, but what about 9/11?!™”). And she’s so polite, she doesn’t even roll her eyes, she just shifts it back to how there is a religion [here], and there are 20th-century reactionary politics springing from fear of Western foreign policies toward the Middle East [there].

She explained that before the 20th century, the top intellectuals in the Muslim world were completely enamored of the West — and were calling for their own societies to embrace technology and democracy. Then Britain and France began carving up the Ottoman Empire and displacing Palestinians. Then America began funding Israel’s brand of state-sponsored terrorism. Before the 1960s, there was no such thing as Islamic fundamentalism, which is ‘bad religion’ springing from ‘bad politics’. I have seen the enemy, and he is me. Fundamentalism is everywhere, poisoning everything. It is not us versus them. It is us versus us.

The prophet Muhammad said, “The ultimate jihad (struggle) is to win our nafs (soul).” It’s like Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “I see that the real enemy of man is not man. The real enemy is our ignorance, discrimination, fear, craving and violence.”

Another one of my favorite hadiths is this: “Spread peace, feed people and do some devotional practice, and you will enter Paradise without any trouble.” Karen Armstrong is truly a spreader of light and peace. May God uplift her spirit and shower radiant blessings upon her.