D.U.I on the Night of Power
Have you ever heard those cautionary songs about spending Christmas Eve in jail for drunk driving, brawling, stealing from Salvation Army tin cups--you get the point? Well, Thursday night was Islam's Night of Power, a celebration of Muhammad's stallion-ride to the seventh heaven to meet God face to face--or as face to face as such meetings get. On this night, Muslims believe paradise comes within a ladder's length of earth for all who try to live by the words and example of this prophet.
I spent the Night of Power as a Muslim equivalent of a DUI on Christmas Eve in a drunk tank. Only my alcohol was self-righteous rage at the state of things. I was supposed to be fasting from desolation, but I was sneaking nips every day--until Thursday when I failed the straight-line test in naked sight on the information highway that runs past your computer-screen doors. You saw me driven away in a squad car or ambulance, I don't remember which. So I had to detox from the detox I wanted Ramadan to be.
Ramadan ends on Monday or Tuesday and this year, when I paid it strict attention, it swept by faster than ever before. I think it was graciously timed to intersect with America's midterm elections. Somehow I was supposed to comport myself in a becalmed fashion, starved of the anger that drives me. I'm thinking I owe myself some makeup fast days.
In the mean time, I want to apologize for my behavior this past week when I smashed up Dafed's email forum that some of us had been trying to conduct. I did so because I felt the participants had already decided their feelings about the events they were discussing and it was far too futile and late in the evolution of their viewpoints to pretend there were loose ends or room for course reversal. Some of us were acting like OJ Simpson juries of the Right and Left who had no further need for deliberation and were just making a show of such. I suppose I could say we wanted to catch a gli mpse of opposing mind sets, learn to understand how others could see the same time-lines, face the same accumulations of fact and reach diametrically opposed conclsuions. But I'd be lying--for myself, at least.
I'll be blunt: I just don't see how anyone with conscience and intelligence can look at the actions of the Bush Administration and not be aghast, horrified or enraged. But on Friday while discussing the aftermath of my behavior with a conservative, I learned why there is no budging for those who side with Bush and see him as a hero and protector. They believe that America is under steady, simmering siege and that their safety from threat--whether imaginary or real--outweighs all else. They are willing to do away with Constitutional pillars of liberty and justice such as habeus corpus because they feel the president--any president--must be given extreme powers to deal with extremists.
Character Versus Caricature
In this case, the extremists a re Muslims who my conservative friends believe feel justified in committing violent acts which can still curry favor with Allah because they sacrifice their own lives in the bargain. Forget Quranic strictures against suicide. My conservative friends feel those are counterbalanced and neutered by verses which applaud death in the service of Islam. Since I am not a scriptural Muslim, I don't know how to argue with them.
I am a Muslim because of affiliation with my teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sufi from Sri Lanka. There was not a single day of his 15-year ministry in Philadelphia (1971 to 1986, the year of his death) that he did not preach non-violence and condemn any act based on fanaticism. Once he even chastised me for the violent act of cynicism. So I learned an Islam that made me cherish Christ, Gandhi and King--and see Islam as a force for world peace.
Now the conservatives I know are not dumb. They're highly principled, high-IQ people who do not feel it is racist for them to believe that Osama Bin Laden and his like want to enslave the Judeo-Christian world to fundamentalist Islam. As proof, they cite the embarrassing lack of condemnation for terrorism in the Muslim world. But that may simply be the failure of our media to report news that would contradict Muslim-demonizing propaganda. And when I offer my teacher and his teachings, and tell them he wrote letters to Khomeini condemning his behavior and demanding release of the Embassy hostages, then cite the example of countless other Sufis, that does not calm their fears.
One thing I have learned in the contuinual racist them-vs-us wars: the bad guys on the 'us' side are the exception to the rule while the good guys on the 'them' side are the exception to the rule. 'Them' never stands a chance.
So the 'us' guys feels justified in seeing Jihad everywhere.
Well, I don't buy this Holy War. I think my conservative friends--most of whom are ardent supporter s of Israel--have been brainwashed. Here's how:
Slowly, skillfully, since Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, a ceaseless, careful pro-Israel propaganda campaign has produced homeland internalization of the Israeli mind-set--one which is framed in fear and hatred of Arabs.
Fortunately for me, as a Sufi who was born Jewish, I have been forced to live with a bifocal awareness of Jewish-Muslim tensions. On the one hand, I understand and honor the need for a Jewish homeland. On the other hand, I also understand that Palestinian Arabs have the right to their own nationalistic aspirations. So I support a two-state solution.
Alas, paranoia since 9/11 has turned general sympathy for Israelis into general antipathy towards Arabs. Terrorized by our dread of sequel catastrophes, pro-Israeli indocrination has made Washington a Jerusalem, New York a Tel Aviv. These dangerous superimpositions are as false as they are needless. 9/11 is still an aberration, and can be kept so, if we start to deal humanely, compassionately and wisely with the Arab world. Brute force based on paranoid suspicion won't work. Only skillful diplomacy will. War isn't an option and it hasn't been for decades.
The chimera of terrorism
Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on poverty. It is at best a metaphoric ambition, at worst a meaningless slogan. You can no more declare war on terrorism than you can evil.Nevertheless, we have done so and conducted ourselves exactly the same as if we were fighting the Axis powers in WWII. Alas, this declaration of war on terrorism is like declaring war on delinquent boys clubs or motorcylce gangs.
At this point, I can hear conservatives saying, 'So you don't believe there is a terrorist threat.' And to prove I do, I am expected to condemn Arab terrorism to show my own impartiality in this conflict. But I don't see Arab terorism as a homogeneous, monolithic phenomenon. Hamas and Hezbollah are quite different from each other--and worlds away from al-Queda. I would not characterize either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist groups. Al-Queda is another matter--as are the Sunni and Shiite militias running berserk in Iraq. But my concern here is Palestine.
Terrorism in Palestine is, to me, far different than in Iraq. I guess if I were as oppressed as the Palestinians (and let's not argue whether or not they're oppressed, please), I would be tempted to seek to convert my humiliation and despair into righteous rage and consecrate it with my own blood. While here in America non-violence, like Ramadan fasting, is a free and willing choice for me, it is not for Palestinians living under brutal--yes, brutal--occupation. We have only to remember Algeria and even Vietnam--both French colonial holdings--as antecdents to this behavior. Palestine was occupied for 20 years before the first Intifada. My Zionist friends like to tell me that the Arab world was just as brutal in its behavior toward Palestinians as Israelis. But that's a very crude rationalization that I've never bought.
The Israel Conundrum
Once you adopt the discipline of a bifocal vision toward the Israel-Palestine situation, you have to entertain the notion that the state of Israel is to moderate and liberal Arabs a modern-day annexation imposed by the West. From their standpoint, it is a highly imperfect, colonialist solution to centuries of anti-semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. I believe Arabs can accept the necessity for an Israel in their midst but only an Israel that acts far differently from the Israel they have known for nearly 60 years.
Today Israeli statehood is cloaked in semi-mystical, millennial doctrines of return and dispensation. But the original Zionists, most of whom were secularists, just wanted a homeland and at first they considered places other than Palestine.
Don't get me wrong: I accept the present location of Israel as a legitimate locale for a Jewish state. But the legitimacy of that state is never a foregone conclusion or granted in perpetuity. Because it is a Western transplant, that legitmacy must be earned and validated by a commitment to justice and fairness for Palestinians. Instead, Israel seeks to secure it by use of force. I see Israel's inhuman and unjust occupation of Palestine and its continual aggression toward Palestinians as actions which delegitimize any moral justification for a Jewish state. And without that moral legitimacy, Arabs can never be expected to make the historical leap of fiath to allow a Jewish state in their midst. I believe that Jews and Christians here in America would feel likewise if they allowed themselves to look through Arab eyes at this situation. Lebanon was a wake-up call to Israel's dehumanization for many Americans of conscience, including my Catholic neighbors across the street who launched into tirades against their behavior.
To me, it has always been asking the Arab world a lot to accept Israel after all that has happened. Anwar Sadat was executed by his own army for making peace with Israel. To me, at the time, it was proof that Israel would always be alone--hence it must always remain a garrison state. But senseles, sadisitic state-sanctioned slaughter in Lebanon and criminal pacification of Palestine have convinced me otherwise.
Israel is to be feared, just as America is to be feared. Why? Because both want to be feared. Both use fear as a cornerstone of their foreign policy. Now the oppressed are fighting back in a fearless manner and neither America or Israel want to get the message that the tide is turning and time is running short.
In what is a kind of epilogue to the demise of Western colonialism, Palestine and Lebanon seek to be rightfully free of Israel and, since America is Israel's main sponsor, us. I see what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank as wars of national liberation.
Israel needs to wake up to its own historical status in the midst of these wars and do everything in its power to invite, rather than force, recognition of its otherwise historically and culturally untenable presence in the region. It must forge and follow a redemptive foreign policy. But that will only happen when Americans begin to have a bifocal vision of the situation and allow themselves to see through Arab as well as Israeli eyes. To threaten war with Iran over an A-bomb five years in the future when Israel has hundreds of such weapons ready for use now is hypocritical and disingenuous. I refuse to be a hit-man for Israel's hysteria.
The Meaning of Islam
To be truthful, I have little hope of a solution. Millennialists don't mind dying because they believe their death results in salvation and heaven. Such notions, to me, are an insult to both intelligence and faith. True faith requires no other reward than the goodness, love, compassion and integrity it inspires. Those virtues have always been God's gold. Each of us is a Fort Knox when we see ourselves as self-renewing storehouses of these inexhaustible virtues. That's what my teacher taught me by word and deed every day of his life. That's why I see Islam as a force of non-violence and world peace.
"Your job is to be proofs of God," Bawa told us many times. And that proof, he said, is goodness, affection, understanding, sharing. God's proof of Himself is the manifestation of his virtues in His children. Those virtues, Bawa taught, are His only 'form.' And virtue--that marvellous all-encompassing consciousness of goodness--is His sweetest abode in this world, although He sometimes requests bushes to speak in flame, birds to bring manna and statues to cry like rivers. This is what I have learned about life and living from Islam. And this is what most Muslims I have known have also learned from their religion. The world may fear an Islam of the sword but I have only known an Islam of the ploughshare.
I spent the Night of Power as a Muslim equivalent of a DUI on Christmas Eve in a drunk tank. Only my alcohol was self-righteous rage at the state of things. I was supposed to be fasting from desolation, but I was sneaking nips every day--until Thursday when I failed the straight-line test in naked sight on the information highway that runs past your computer-screen doors. You saw me driven away in a squad car or ambulance, I don't remember which. So I had to detox from the detox I wanted Ramadan to be.
Ramadan ends on Monday or Tuesday and this year, when I paid it strict attention, it swept by faster than ever before. I think it was graciously timed to intersect with America's midterm elections. Somehow I was supposed to comport myself in a becalmed fashion, starved of the anger that drives me. I'm thinking I owe myself some makeup fast days.
In the mean time, I want to apologize for my behavior this past week when I smashed up Dafed's email forum that some of us had been trying to conduct. I did so because I felt the participants had already decided their feelings about the events they were discussing and it was far too futile and late in the evolution of their viewpoints to pretend there were loose ends or room for course reversal. Some of us were acting like OJ Simpson juries of the Right and Left who had no further need for deliberation and were just making a show of such. I suppose I could say we wanted to catch a gli mpse of opposing mind sets, learn to understand how others could see the same time-lines, face the same accumulations of fact and reach diametrically opposed conclsuions. But I'd be lying--for myself, at least.
I'll be blunt: I just don't see how anyone with conscience and intelligence can look at the actions of the Bush Administration and not be aghast, horrified or enraged. But on Friday while discussing the aftermath of my behavior with a conservative, I learned why there is no budging for those who side with Bush and see him as a hero and protector. They believe that America is under steady, simmering siege and that their safety from threat--whether imaginary or real--outweighs all else. They are willing to do away with Constitutional pillars of liberty and justice such as habeus corpus because they feel the president--any president--must be given extreme powers to deal with extremists.
Character Versus Caricature
In this case, the extremists a re Muslims who my conservative friends believe feel justified in committing violent acts which can still curry favor with Allah because they sacrifice their own lives in the bargain. Forget Quranic strictures against suicide. My conservative friends feel those are counterbalanced and neutered by verses which applaud death in the service of Islam. Since I am not a scriptural Muslim, I don't know how to argue with them.
I am a Muslim because of affiliation with my teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sufi from Sri Lanka. There was not a single day of his 15-year ministry in Philadelphia (1971 to 1986, the year of his death) that he did not preach non-violence and condemn any act based on fanaticism. Once he even chastised me for the violent act of cynicism. So I learned an Islam that made me cherish Christ, Gandhi and King--and see Islam as a force for world peace.
Now the conservatives I know are not dumb. They're highly principled, high-IQ people who do not feel it is racist for them to believe that Osama Bin Laden and his like want to enslave the Judeo-Christian world to fundamentalist Islam. As proof, they cite the embarrassing lack of condemnation for terrorism in the Muslim world. But that may simply be the failure of our media to report news that would contradict Muslim-demonizing propaganda. And when I offer my teacher and his teachings, and tell them he wrote letters to Khomeini condemning his behavior and demanding release of the Embassy hostages, then cite the example of countless other Sufis, that does not calm their fears.
One thing I have learned in the contuinual racist them-vs-us wars: the bad guys on the 'us' side are the exception to the rule while the good guys on the 'them' side are the exception to the rule. 'Them' never stands a chance.
So the 'us' guys feels justified in seeing Jihad everywhere.
Well, I don't buy this Holy War. I think my conservative friends--most of whom are ardent supporter s of Israel--have been brainwashed. Here's how:
Slowly, skillfully, since Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, a ceaseless, careful pro-Israel propaganda campaign has produced homeland internalization of the Israeli mind-set--one which is framed in fear and hatred of Arabs.
Fortunately for me, as a Sufi who was born Jewish, I have been forced to live with a bifocal awareness of Jewish-Muslim tensions. On the one hand, I understand and honor the need for a Jewish homeland. On the other hand, I also understand that Palestinian Arabs have the right to their own nationalistic aspirations. So I support a two-state solution.
Alas, paranoia since 9/11 has turned general sympathy for Israelis into general antipathy towards Arabs. Terrorized by our dread of sequel catastrophes, pro-Israeli indocrination has made Washington a Jerusalem, New York a Tel Aviv. These dangerous superimpositions are as false as they are needless. 9/11 is still an aberration, and can be kept so, if we start to deal humanely, compassionately and wisely with the Arab world. Brute force based on paranoid suspicion won't work. Only skillful diplomacy will. War isn't an option and it hasn't been for decades.
The chimera of terrorism
Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on poverty. It is at best a metaphoric ambition, at worst a meaningless slogan. You can no more declare war on terrorism than you can evil.Nevertheless, we have done so and conducted ourselves exactly the same as if we were fighting the Axis powers in WWII. Alas, this declaration of war on terrorism is like declaring war on delinquent boys clubs or motorcylce gangs.
At this point, I can hear conservatives saying, 'So you don't believe there is a terrorist threat.' And to prove I do, I am expected to condemn Arab terrorism to show my own impartiality in this conflict. But I don't see Arab terorism as a homogeneous, monolithic phenomenon. Hamas and Hezbollah are quite different from each other--and worlds away from al-Queda. I would not characterize either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist groups. Al-Queda is another matter--as are the Sunni and Shiite militias running berserk in Iraq. But my concern here is Palestine.
Terrorism in Palestine is, to me, far different than in Iraq. I guess if I were as oppressed as the Palestinians (and let's not argue whether or not they're oppressed, please), I would be tempted to seek to convert my humiliation and despair into righteous rage and consecrate it with my own blood. While here in America non-violence, like Ramadan fasting, is a free and willing choice for me, it is not for Palestinians living under brutal--yes, brutal--occupation. We have only to remember Algeria and even Vietnam--both French colonial holdings--as antecdents to this behavior. Palestine was occupied for 20 years before the first Intifada. My Zionist friends like to tell me that the Arab world was just as brutal in its behavior toward Palestinians as Israelis. But that's a very crude rationalization that I've never bought.
The Israel Conundrum
Once you adopt the discipline of a bifocal vision toward the Israel-Palestine situation, you have to entertain the notion that the state of Israel is to moderate and liberal Arabs a modern-day annexation imposed by the West. From their standpoint, it is a highly imperfect, colonialist solution to centuries of anti-semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. I believe Arabs can accept the necessity for an Israel in their midst but only an Israel that acts far differently from the Israel they have known for nearly 60 years.
Today Israeli statehood is cloaked in semi-mystical, millennial doctrines of return and dispensation. But the original Zionists, most of whom were secularists, just wanted a homeland and at first they considered places other than Palestine.
Don't get me wrong: I accept the present location of Israel as a legitimate locale for a Jewish state. But the legitimacy of that state is never a foregone conclusion or granted in perpetuity. Because it is a Western transplant, that legitmacy must be earned and validated by a commitment to justice and fairness for Palestinians. Instead, Israel seeks to secure it by use of force. I see Israel's inhuman and unjust occupation of Palestine and its continual aggression toward Palestinians as actions which delegitimize any moral justification for a Jewish state. And without that moral legitimacy, Arabs can never be expected to make the historical leap of fiath to allow a Jewish state in their midst. I believe that Jews and Christians here in America would feel likewise if they allowed themselves to look through Arab eyes at this situation. Lebanon was a wake-up call to Israel's dehumanization for many Americans of conscience, including my Catholic neighbors across the street who launched into tirades against their behavior.
To me, it has always been asking the Arab world a lot to accept Israel after all that has happened. Anwar Sadat was executed by his own army for making peace with Israel. To me, at the time, it was proof that Israel would always be alone--hence it must always remain a garrison state. But senseles, sadisitic state-sanctioned slaughter in Lebanon and criminal pacification of Palestine have convinced me otherwise.
Israel is to be feared, just as America is to be feared. Why? Because both want to be feared. Both use fear as a cornerstone of their foreign policy. Now the oppressed are fighting back in a fearless manner and neither America or Israel want to get the message that the tide is turning and time is running short.
In what is a kind of epilogue to the demise of Western colonialism, Palestine and Lebanon seek to be rightfully free of Israel and, since America is Israel's main sponsor, us. I see what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank as wars of national liberation.
Israel needs to wake up to its own historical status in the midst of these wars and do everything in its power to invite, rather than force, recognition of its otherwise historically and culturally untenable presence in the region. It must forge and follow a redemptive foreign policy. But that will only happen when Americans begin to have a bifocal vision of the situation and allow themselves to see through Arab as well as Israeli eyes. To threaten war with Iran over an A-bomb five years in the future when Israel has hundreds of such weapons ready for use now is hypocritical and disingenuous. I refuse to be a hit-man for Israel's hysteria.
The Meaning of Islam
To be truthful, I have little hope of a solution. Millennialists don't mind dying because they believe their death results in salvation and heaven. Such notions, to me, are an insult to both intelligence and faith. True faith requires no other reward than the goodness, love, compassion and integrity it inspires. Those virtues have always been God's gold. Each of us is a Fort Knox when we see ourselves as self-renewing storehouses of these inexhaustible virtues. That's what my teacher taught me by word and deed every day of his life. That's why I see Islam as a force of non-violence and world peace.
"Your job is to be proofs of God," Bawa told us many times. And that proof, he said, is goodness, affection, understanding, sharing. God's proof of Himself is the manifestation of his virtues in His children. Those virtues, Bawa taught, are His only 'form.' And virtue--that marvellous all-encompassing consciousness of goodness--is His sweetest abode in this world, although He sometimes requests bushes to speak in flame, birds to bring manna and statues to cry like rivers. This is what I have learned about life and living from Islam. And this is what most Muslims I have known have also learned from their religion. The world may fear an Islam of the sword but I have only known an Islam of the ploughshare.
posted by David Federman @ 6:43 AM
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