My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I recently learned about ’secret shirk’. Shirk, the Islamic term for polytheism or idolatry, is the vice opposite the virtue of tawhid, declaring that which is One, or monotheism. As I understand it, ’secret shirk’ is when you behave as if you’re in the midst of tawhid, for example by performing ritual prayer, but your intention is idolatrous because you strive to beautify those prayers for the sake of other people who are watching.

I like Islam because it is not simply a belief structure, but a way of life. Actions give form to intentions. Actions make belief — in itself an esoteric and intangible thing — a concrete thing.

That concreteness, of course, can also be dangerous. The structure can, over time, take the place of the thing it is supposed to merely contain and give form to. The actions take the place of beliefs, the rituals the place of the intentions, and you have become a hollow shell. That is when we find ourselves engaged in secret shirk — striving to appear holy to other people, rather than striving to be close to God.

On Judgment Day, it is said that God will ask us, “For whom did you pray? Not for me. So go and ask them for your reward.”

It’s so typically Jen, but I’ve always been the type that if I can’t do something perfectly, I throw it aside with great force, and go around telling everyone how unnecessary it is. But I can’t do that with salat. I know ritual prayer is one of the five pillars of Islam, one of, if not the, most important action of being Muslim. I could never tell other people it isn’t necessary. Especially when I can feel the difference in myself… my conscience isn’t pricked as easily, my tongue isn’t as guarded, my hands don’t move as quickly to help others, and, worst of all, my motivations aren’t as pure.

Nevertheless, I have been taking a hiatus from salat because my heart wasn’t in it. Though I prayed to God earnestly to make my heart soft and good, though I asked repeatedly for humility and wisdom, salat wasn’t making me closer to God. I performed the prescribed prayers quickly, out of duty, and my mind rushed on to other things, and I began to hate myself. I, and the prayers I performed, seemed hollow and empty.

Of course, not performing them hasn’t made me feel better or more fulfilled. That’s the big lie. First, the prayers go. Then other things go. Someone I used to know called this ‘the nose of the camel in the tent’. I’m not an expert on the personality of camels, but apparently if you even let their nose in, ultimately they eventually shove their whole body inside. You have to be on guard against the initial intrusion.

So taking this break has been damaging. Now I am without protective armor, more vulnerable than ever to devious whispering. Unbidden, the most vile thoughts come into my head: What a hypocrite you are, why do you wear a scarf on your head? You show everyone you are Muslim, but inside there is nothing. So then what? Take off the scarf? Then: You are so immodest, you don’t even wear a scarf. You’re not really Muslim at all. How absurd of you to talk about Islam. Why do you think about religion at all? And so on and so on, until I am stripped clean of this identity, picked down to nothing.

It is recorded that the Prophet Muhammad said, “Ruined are those who insist on hardship in matters of faith.” He said this three times. He also said, “The religion (of Islam) is easy, and whoever makes the religion a rigor, it will overpower him. So follow a middle course (in worship); if you can’t do this, do something near to it and give glad tidings and seek help (of Allah) at morning and at dusk and some part of the night.”

I feel myself being moved to pray what I can, when I can. To push myself slightly, but not too much. Like Turkish mothers, who always say to their children, Yavaş, yavaş: Slowly, slowly. For an adult, maybe it’s like: Don’t change so fast. Real change takes time.

The author Leila Aboulela wrote these words, which moved me to tears: The mercy of Allah is an ocean. Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean. It only has to open its beak.

I hate politics. I particularly hate voting on a weekday, scattered primaries and the electoral college. Everything is designed to ensure that a) no one votes; and b) that those who do vote will be old, white and bigoted.

Lately I’ve been reading about the candidates. This is unbelievable self-discipline on my part, because I don’t hate anything as much as the verbal diarrhea that is shat around election time. I’m a registered Democrat. This is because Florida hates independent thought and bars non-affiliated voters from the primaries. I should have changed my party affiliation to Republican, so I could put my vote toward weeding out John ‘Islamofascist’ McCain and Rudy ‘9/11′ Giuliani.

I went to the CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) website to see if there was a candidate who didn’t think America should keep taking a dump on the Middle East. Just for fun, read anti-Muslim rhetoric from the candidates.

This is *the* topic of late: To have any chance at the presidency, you must have said at least one disparaging thing about Islam or Muslims, and you must have emphasized your own rock-solid, preferably evangelical, Christian faith. Otherwise, you’re soft on terrorism. I’m serious. Here, William Fisher writes about candidates competing to be more ‘Christian’.

If you’re like me, in that you find it hard to listen to jingoistic types who, with broad brushstrokes, paint entire civilizations as backward or evil, you’ll understand why my heart stopped when I read these chilling comments from a Giuliani supporter: “[Giuliani]’s got I believe the knowledge and the judgment to attack one of the most difficult problems in current history and that is the rise of the Muslims, and make no mistake about it, this hasn’t happened for a thousand years. These people are very dedicated and they’re also very, very smart in their own way. We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them.’ When asked if he was referring to all Muslims, he told the [Monitor], ‘I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims.’”

The man who said those things, John Deady, co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy group, had to resign.

This is why I hate George W. Bush & Co. His war in Iraq is a war on Islam for many people of many backgrounds. His thirst for oil and wealth, and his use of born-again Christianity as a political tool, have made the huddled masses think the current situation in the Middle East is a holy war, a war to rid ‘Jesus’ country’, Israel, of all the black-chador-clad ‘Moslem’ heathens. These huddled masses don’t know the difference between an Muslim and a Sikh, forget about the differences between a Sunni and a Shi’a, or an Arab and a Persian. If they don’t care about these distinctions, how can they support wars with a religious group, whose ethnicities, customs and yes, beliefs and practices, are as diverse and multifaceted as their own?

But like the other Crusades of the Middle Ages, we know the current Crusade isn’t really about religion: religion is just how you get poor folks to fight for you. It’s really about money, land and its natural resources, and power.

There is a great article in the Boston Globe, Islamofascism’s ill political wind. Linguistically, this word is a disaster and an affront to the English language. And the people who use it are belligerent, right-wing nationalists; that’s ironic but not surprising. Every major politician in America and Europe hails from the authoritarian right, the fascist part of the political compass. It makes sense they would take the focus off their own mistaken ideas by disparaging ‘Izlam’.

As a Muslim, I do wonder who to vote for — who would bother me the least? Who would be least likely to tap my phone or read my e-mail? Who would be least likely to further profile my co-religionists? Who would be the least likely to attack yet another Muslim-majority country?

It goes without saying that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee, with their ongoing talk about ‘radical Islamic militants’, are hoping to sail into the White House on the ‘fear’ factor. I doubt any of them have any idea what Islam actually is.

Former basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar endorses Barack Obama, but I’m annoyed by Obama’s positions on the Armenian ‘genocide’ and a possible invasion of Pakistan. It seems like he’s trying to vehemently disprove those Internet rumors about his being Muslim by annoying the Muslim countries that dislike America the least. Or something.

Science teacher Hussein Ali calls on all American Muslims to vote for Ron Paul. From what I read so far, Ron Paul seems to be kind of libertarian and isolationist, and I mean that in a good way. In Dr. Paul’s favor he a) voted against going to war with the nations of Afghanistan or Iraq; b) voted against the Patriot Act; c) opposes going to war with Iran; d) favors withdrawing military and financial aid to all nations in the Middle East.

Dr. Paul also supports abolishing several government agencies, from the Department of Education to FEMA to the IRS, because they’re ‘unnecessary bureaucracies’, which sounds cool. But I have to wonder what would happen to the U.S. unemployment rate?

Mysticism is the discarding of the false self — the nafs — in order to ‘meet’ God, which must be the ultimate déjà vu. I apologize for the link-dependent article, but this is the most wonderful thing: Alan Watts writes what to tell your children about God. It’s the story of how God plays hide-and-seek with Himself by pretending that there are people and animals and plants and rocks and stars. I wish someone had told *me* this when I was a little kid.

Each of us actually is God.

The Sufi poet Rumi said ‘People imagine that it is a presumptive claim, whereas it is really a presumptive claim to say “I am the slave of God”; and “I am God” is an expression of great humility. The man who says “I am the slave of God” affirms two existences, his own and God’s, but he that says “I am God” has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and says “I am God”, that is, “I am naught, He is all; there is no being but God’s.” This is the extreme of humility and self-abasement.’ That’s originally from Wikipedia, but I got it here.

Recently I learned about Huston Smith’s argument for a spiritual hierarchy of one-way mirrors. At the bottom is atheism, which sees material existence but nothing else. The next level is polytheism, which looks through the mirror to the world of the atheist but adds to it demons, sprites, angels, gods and every kind of superstition. The third level, which can also see down into the other worlds, is monotheism, where it is possible to understand God as a benevolent Creator. The top level is that of mysticism, which sees the other levels, but also experiences the transcendence of the Divine Reality. I got it here.

“Namaste,” Indians say, as they bow to the divinity within each other. Persian mystic Mansur al-Hallaj said, “I am the Truth”; Persian mystic Bayazid Bistami said, “There is no God but Me” and Jesus Christ said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” These humble mystics were explaining, in as few words as possible, that there is no separation — there logically cannot be — between God and anything else.