My (earnest, irate) thoughts

If you are American and you speak English, it is doubtless that you, even without being totally aware of it, harbor a vague sense that Islam is a religion of few gods (One, to be precise) and much violence.

Ever wonder if A World Without Islam would be a rather benign, peaceful sort of place? Turns out, not really. Reading this article by professor Graham Fuller will make you feel like you just read an unusually succinct and sharp world history text that covered the last thousand years. An excerpt:

In the face of these tensions between East and West, Islam unquestionably adds yet one more emotive element, one more layer of complications to finding solutions. Islam is not the cause of such problems. It may seem sophisticated to seek out passages in the Koran that seem to explain “why they hate us.” But that blindly misses the nature of the phenomenon. How comfortable to identify Islam as the source of “the problem”; it’s certainly much easier than exploring the impact of the massive global footprint of the world’s sole superpower.

Since you now know quite a bit about world history, let’s have a real dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First off, is anyone who disagrees with zionism an anti-Semite? Not necessarily. Read what a former Israeli citizen thinks at A Change Needs to Come. An excerpt:

This idea that Israel is the only safe place for Jews is critical to understanding the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Israel’s policies and perspective in the present. The majority of Jewish people do not trust non-Jews as life-long compatriots. Experience and cultural narrative have been telling them that since antiquity, rulers and governments as well as populations have become hostile to Jews without warning. This means that no matter how long Jews have lived anywhere, no matter how unobtrusive and well integrated they have been, or how much they contributed to their society, things could turn against them overnight.

What an amazing feeling to read articles by non-Muslims that don’t paint Muslims with the same ugly broad brush — articles that actually point to political and historical ’seeds’ for the branches of evil that cover us today! Praise be to the infinitely Compassionate, indescribably Merciful.

“Martin Luther wasn’t a model of tolerance but even he took the position that, ‘I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.’ In this presidential campaign, we should at least aspire to be as open-minded as 16th-century Germans.” These words were shamelessly stolen from a New York Times op-ed titled Obama and the Bigots. It’s funny because it’s true, folks, it’s funny because it’s true.

The whispers about Obama, and whether he is a closet Muslim ready to implement Sharia on an unsuspecting populace or simply the Antichrist, continue. Of course it pisses me off that ‘Muslim’ is the new ‘Jew’. But then, it’s not really new, is it, for Westerners to take issue with Islam, mostly on proven falsehoods like Islam being spread by the sword, or a vague sense of superiority over the East for not sharing the West’s particular sensibilities at any given moment of history.

What I don’t get are the Christians out there who still believe their values are reflected in the ultraconservative militaristic agenda of the Right. It’s OK to use your brains, folks, God gave ‘em to you: Here we have BARACK OBAMA, who with his man-of-the-world persona would give America a needed dose of good PR, being slandered by everyone to the right of Genghis Khan. And there we have JOHN McCAIN, a madman who sings about wanting to bomb Iran, scooping up endorsements from evangelical Christians like The Rev. John Hagee, the ignorant author of Jerusalem Countdown.

And this, when the latest estimates put the Iraq War at costing $3 trillion when all is said and done, our economy is in the toilet, and it’s no fun to travel because everyone in the entire world hates us. And with John McCain, it’s going to more of the same. How can you not know that?

Further reading:
Islam was not spread by the sword any more than Christianity was spread by guns.
But why isn’t the East just like the West — are they stupid or something?
Even conservatives think John McCain is nuts.
The Rev. John Hagee is crazy, that’s why he likes McCain.
The Iraq War will cost $3 trillion, and much, much more.

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?

“If one person is harmed it is an unpardonable sin, but a whole people’s destruction is something to debate.”

Like most Americans, I was aghast when a British schoolteacher was jailed in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear ‘Muhammad’. Jailed? Seriously? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. And, without my being fully conscious of it, Sudan was added to my ever-growing private list of places I’m unlikely to visit.

As usual, it feels impossible to be American and Muslim simultaneously. I feel emotions stirring within myself, warring against each other, and it’s hard to know which voices to listen to, let alone sift fact from fiction like grain from chaff. Which is why I’m (usually) curiously silent on the atrocities that happen in the Muslim world. Many native-born Muslims just dump the blame on the zionist bent of our media and government. They point out the wars America starts there, and the empty consumerist culture America exports there. And they demand, “What are we talking about? One teacher? What about Iraq? What about Palestine?” It’s politics, not religion. Then they go on with their day, justice served in their own minds.

But it’s not that simple for me. How can I fit comfortably in the position of Muslim apologist? Though I may, unlike most Americans, actually know where Sudan is, I, too, know very little about the lifestyle of the Sudanese: their culture, their history, their politics, their language, their families, their hearts. It hurts when an American says to me, ‘What’s up with this teddy bear nonsense? Your religion is crazy.’

That’s why I like reading the thoughts of Hamza Yusuf Hanson, born in Walla Walla, Wash., a convert to Islam of Jewish descent who lived in the Middle East for a decade or more. He is thoroughly American, but fervently Muslim, and he articulates the opinions that I think could bridge this gap, real or imagined, that exists between the warring worlds, that of political Islam and that of the secular West. Maybe there is no gap… or maybe the gap is being erased by folks like yours truly, wouldn’t that be sumfin’… but no lie, this world doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense to me.

Here, he writes poignantly about ‘The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy‘.

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.

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?

When I used to watch my brother play Grand Theft Auto III, I remember an SUV commercial on one of the radio stations. It ends with a woman saying, “So what if it gets 3 miles to the gallon? I’m a mom, not a conservationist!” Here is the commercial in its entirety:

“Phil and I just had another kid. So of course we need a bigger SUV. Being a mom is hard, with soccer, football and lacrosse practice, so we bought the new Maibatsu Monstrosity. It’s so big we lost little Joey in the back and couldn’t find him for and hour! When I’m rushing to the mall, or talking on my cell phone, I know me and my family are safe. The Maibatsu Monstrosity has 4-wheel drive, and in amphibious mode, it can cross rivers. So far I’ve only hit a few puddles, but it’s good to know it’s there. With the time I save taking shortcuts through the strip-mall parking lot I can focus on the important things. Like gazing longingly at the pool boy or buying more exercise equipment off the TV. So what if it gets 3 miles to the gallon!? I’m a mom, not a conservationist!”

I haven’t seen my brother play that game in ages, but the memory of that woman’s breezy dismissal of everything real still kills me. I used to die laughing at those commercials. And I would wonder about the people writing them, and wish I had a job like that, where I could tell the truth but make it palatable with absurdity — a la Jon Stewart — and people would laugh, and then recognize themselves, and possibly one day change.

Gasoline is $3 a gallon where I live, which is still way cheaper than most anyplace on earth. On my 10-mile trek to and from work on two- and four-lane roads, there are SUVs, Hummers, trucks and minivans — at least as many of these as there are of regular cars. These behemoths are usually holding exactly one person. And because I live in the outlying asphalt sprawl of a large metropolitan area in a totally mountainless state, that person is hardly ever doing weekend off-roading in a scenic red-rock vista.

To make it clear, I’m not one of these people who wants more rules and regulations. Recently my editor wrote a story about how our county is doing a pilot program for red-light cameras. He asked five people if they supported cameras at traffic lights that would be able to photograph cars running red lights, and then warnings and ultimately tickets would be sent to the drivers. I was stunned — stunned — that four out of five thought the cameras were “a good idea”. People want nonstop cops. They want Big Brother watching them and keeping them safe. Personal liberty be damned!

So I’m not one of these people who’s calling for our government to step in and “fix” this problem with a large gas tax. I want people to fix themselves. Why does our government have to tax a short-sighted behavior before we’ll change it? Why do we have to hit peak oil before we reform the way we use fuel? Why does the government have to set emissions standards before we desire more clean, fuel-efficient vehicles? Why are we relying on our government to head off the ecological and fiscal crises that we are incurring with our choices? Why do we have to trap enough greenhouse gasses to spur another ice age before we change our lifestyle? Why do we have to create instability and kill people in the Middle East to ensure we have enough fuel for our country’s infrastructure?

My husband says I’m vaguely ridiculous for going on and on about these sorts of problems. I have to agree, particularly right now because I’m battling a case of bronchitis. (That must be quite a sight: me, my neck slathered with Vicks VapoRub and wrapped in a bathtowel, drinking hot tea with honey, pontificating about the inherent wrongness of driving a Hummer.) Of course I agree theoretically with the words of Jesus, recorded in the Bible: one ought to remove the splinter from one’s own eye, in order to see more clearly, before trying to take out the beam from a neighbor’s eye. Islamic scholar Said Nursi said something along the same lines, that there are concentric circles in one’s life — the inner circle of self, then family, city, country and so on — and that the inner circles have to be faultless and complete before making a meaningful difference in the outer circles is possible.

But seriously (even though it rhymes): What reason could there possibly be for a person to drive an SUV?