Second and Third Thoughts

A Muslim friend called within minutes of my last posting in which I declared I would not end my Ramadan fast as a gesture of solidarity with Palestine. He began the conversation by asking, "Are you the Prophet? Have you assumed the mantle of prophethood? I beg of you to break the fast and celebrate Eid today. You can resume your fast tomorrow." I asked, slightly inflamed, if he was reading me the Riot Act in terms of the shariy'at of Islam. He answered, "You know I am not some rigid-minded member of the Taliban seeking to impose the shariy'at on you. But as a Muslim I believe God decreed the Ramadan fast and decreed the breaking of it. If you seek to continue Ramadan on this day set aside to end the fast, then you are putting yourself above Allah."

I calmed down, and thanked him for his concern. I said I would think about his request.

I have decided to partake of the Eid and resume my fast tomorrow as a private, non-aligned act rather than one hijacked from Islam. I have decided to do so because I think my friend meant that resumption of normal life is an affirmation that we must make in the face of institutionalized inhumanity. I affirm normalcy today as a prophecy that is kept here and will some day be kept in Palestine (and Darfur, Iraq, etc.). I partake of normal life to cleanse my good intentions of a dominant half-empty strain of thought which has ruled me my whole life. I break, rather than brake, bread with my community as a gesture of defiant, triumphant fullness. I celebrate Eid as a ritualized dispensation of God's wealth (his truest will) to all in a blessed diffusion of giving. Eid is a celebration of God's grace--a heightened resumption of normal life consecrated by a month of focus on Him.

I will call my resumed vigil-fast Operation Ramadan so as not to offend Muslims who think my continuation of the fast is arrogance--no matter how well-intended. I write this because I asked you to join me in prolongation of the Ramadan fast and it is wrong for me to rescind it for myself and not you. I love you all. Join me in any way you can tomorrow for the beginning of Operation Ramadan. Or, better yet, call it Operation True Yom Kippur. Give up a part of normal plentitude so that you can give your attention to those who suffer needlessly and endlessly. But celebrate with me today the first of many eids to be.

And now as I sign off, I tell you what another friend just said who called just as I was putting the finishing touches on this email. "You can do whatever you want since you are a serving your conscience and the conscience is a servant of God. I give you permission to continue the fast." And there you have your daily dose of Zen.

My Extra Innings Ramadan

Ramadan ended yesterday. Today the Muslim world celebrates its equivalent of Christmas, Eid, and self-imposed famine becomes unrestrained feasting. Well, I've still got a bad case of the Ramadan Blues and I'm not in any hurry to join the festivities.

Maybe it is the fact that nearly 300 Palestinians, all of them presumably Muslims, died during this holy month from the kind of violence I expect in North Philidelphia but not in an occupied land supposedly governed by the brutality-tempering Geneva Conventions. Those laws require occupier to treat the occupied with dignity and respect. Hah! Don't make me laugh--or cry. Why, I ask myself, are the Israelis behaving so shamefully?

I asked that question to Uncle Ramadan this morning. He was packing to leave my house and I suddenly didn't want him to go. He paused in his packing and told me the following:

"They say that the extreme misery and poverty of the refugee camps in which they grew up shaped the Taliban ethos and moral code. Because they only knew extreme want as children, they reduced Afghanistan to the cultural equivalent of a refugee camp. Home unsweet home.

"Well, Israel is similar. As occupiers, they are trapped in freeze frames and playbacks of the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz and can extend nothing more to the Palestinians than what was refused them during the Holocaust. They are acting like their occupiers. So they are capable only of a governance based on torment. Thye cannot, or will not, break the cycle of trauma that is the only remembrance they know. Thye have no Ramadan. Nor, I'm afraid, Yom Kippur."

Could you stay a little longer? I asked Uncle Ramadan. "There are others, you know," he quoted from "Field of Dreams." What kind of others? "Gandhi types who want to continue the fast as if it will sap strength from oppressors as well as starve those who fast from their own rage at iniquity," Uncle Ramadan answered. "There are millions of homes where I have been asked to linger."

While Uncle Ramadan unpacks, I thought I'd tell you I'm postponging Eid and continuing a personal vigil-fast for those in Palestine who cannot resume a normal fullness of life today. And I am going to pray that God's mercy and compassion (what Muslims call His Rahmat) become a contagion among mankind, an Avian flu of goodness dropping from every Golgotha sky in the world. I want every free man to be stricken with pity for those who live in bondage, for those who live in brutal thrall to regimes based on religion, ideology, ethnicity, tribalism, unforiven pasts--or whatever fear and arrogance makes men think of themselves as masters over others.

Second, I am continuing the Ramadan fast because I also want to prevent myself from doing mental harm to those who treat others inhumanely. I am now what AIPAC members would call "hostile to Israel." That hostility must cease if I am to hope for, let alone preach, peace. But I am also pledging myself to witness and sharing of that witness with others to awaken conscience among Jews and Chrisitians as well as awareness of the intolerable suffering that has been inflicted on Palestine. This circle--one of injustice and karmic relay from Nazis to Jews to Arabs--cannot go unbroken.

Ramadan offers both a weakening and strengthening emptiness in which those chains cannot be forged, in which the habits of thought that sustain cruelty cannot continue--so that the sustaining resonance of God's love is all there is: our primal residue rediscovered in sharing. Ramadan is the only hope I have of starving my own demons and beasts to death and surviving that old uncontrolled composite of habits called David Federman. The God in me asks the God in you to pause before the resumption of normal life today to pray for those who are not allowed the lifting of the brute, blanket Ramadan of imposed deprivation.

In the name of this private Ramadan I ask you to consider conducting the fast one more day or longer outside the pale of a religious observance and in the name of the instinctive kindness that is the lasting gift of Ramadan. I ask you to stand on Sinai and be fed only by the light of God and the wisdom into which it metabolizes. I ask the fast to proclaim Allhamdulilah!

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.

The Self-Destruction of U.S. Foreign Policy

" . . . the threat the United States now faces is vastly less grave but much more ill-defined than that we faced during the Cold War. That era, which most here lived through, was one in which decisions by our president and his Soviet counterpart could result in the death, within hours, of over a hundred million Americans and a comparable number of Soviet citizens. That threat was existential. The threat we now face is not. Muslim extremists seek to drive us from their lands by hurting us. They neither seek to destroy nor to convert nor to conquer us. They can in fact do none of these things. The threat we now face does not in any way justify the sacrifice of the civil liberties and related values we defended against the far greater threats posed b y fascism or Soviet communism. Terrorists win if they terrorize; to defeat them, we must reject inordinate fear and the self-destructive things it may make us do." --Chas Freeman

In my never-ending quest to find cogent commentary about Iraq from people with credentials acceptable to both Left & Right, I submit the following speech, available at No Quarter, by Chas Freeman "who served," blog owner Larry Johnson writes, "as Deputy Secretary of Defense and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Desert Storm. He was also a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs when Namibian independence and the Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola were negotiated. Still unimpressed? He was also the primary American interpreter during the late President Nixon's path-breaking visit to China in 1972. He earned a certificate in Latin American studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, certificates in both the national and Taiwan dialects of Chinese from the former Foreign Service Institute field school in Taiwan, a BA from Yale University and a JD from the Harvard Law School." May we therefore conclude that this is a seasoned man of the Center? If so read on, and please, please heed his analysis.

Why Not Let Them Hate Us, as long as They Fear Us?
BY CHAS FREEMAN ::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Why Not Let Them Hate Us, as long as They Fear Us?Remarks to the United States Information Agency Alumni AssociationOctober 4, 2006 in Washington, DCChas W. Freeman, Jr.Ambassador (Ret.)

We are gathered together to reflect upon our country's adoption of Caligula's motto for effective foreign policy, ODERINT DUM MET UANT, "let them hate us, as long as they fear us." As we do so, let us observe a brief moment of silence for the United States Information Agency and also for our republic, both of which long stood for a different approach.

Most of you devoted your many years of public service to USIA. I served with the agency twice, once abroad and once at home. I am proud to have been able to join you in making the case for America. I wish to honor and thank you for your service to our country in a time of great peril. Although most of my career was associated with the Department of State, I confess to sadness when the agency was subjected to euthanasia in 1999.

Americans began our independence with an act of public diplomacy, an appeal for international support, based upon a "decent regard to the opinion of mankind." But, 243 years later, we convinced ourselves that, inasmuch as we had won decisive victories over totalitarianism and tyranny and democracy and the rule of law faced no serious counter arguments anywhere, our history had been fulfilled, and the requirement to explain ourselves to others had ended.
I guess we forgot Dean Rusk's famous insight that "at any moment of the day or night, two thirds of the world's people are awake, and some of them are up to no good." Still, the notion that there was a lessened need for public diplomacy wasn't as foolish as you and other veteran public servants judged at the time. Nor was it as obvious as many others now agree it was.

No country was then more widely admired or emulated than ours. The superior features of our society – our insistence on individual liberty under law; the equality of opportunity we had finally extended to all; the egalitarianism of our prosperity; our openness to ideas, change, and
visito rs; our generous attention to the development of other nations; our sacrifices to defend small states against larger predators both in the Cold War and, most recently, in the war to liberate Kuwait; our championship of international order and the institutions we had created to maintain it after World War II; the vigor of our democracy and our dedication to untrammeled debate – were recognized throughout the world. Critics of our past misadventures, as in Vietnam, had been silenced by the spectacle of our demonstrable success. This, our political betters judged, made the effort to explain ourselves, our purposes, and our policies through public diplomacy an unnecessary anachronism. The spread of global media and the internet, many believed, made official information and cultural programs irrelevant.

Our values were everywhere accepted and advancing, albeit with some lingering resistance in a few out-of-the-way places. Our policies would speak for themselves through the White House and State Department spokesmen. Why not save the money, while simplifying the organization chart?

That was, of course, before we suffered the trauma of 9/11 and underwent the equivalent of a national nervous breakdown. It was before we panicked and decided to construct a national-security state that would protect us from the risks posed by foreign visitors or evil-minded Americans armed with toenail clippers or liquid cosmetics. It was before we decided that policy debate is unpatriotic and realized that the only thing foreigners understand is the use of force. It was before we replaced the dispassionate judgments of our intelligence community with the faith-based analyses of our political leaders. It was before we embraced the spin-driven strategies that have stranded our armed forces in Afghani stan, marched them off to die in the terrorist ambush of Iraq, and multiplied and united our Muslim enemies rather than diminishing and dividing them. It was before we began to throw our values overboard in order to stay on course while evading attack. It was before, in a mere five years, we transformed ourselves from 9/11's object of almost universal sympathy and support into the planet's most despised nation, with its most hateful policies.

You can verify this deplorable reality with polling data or you can experience it firsthand by traveling abroad. Neither is anything a thoughtful patriot can enjoy. In most Arab and Muslim lands (which include many in Africa and Asia) the percentage of those who now wish us ill is statistically indistinguishable from unanimity. In many formerly friendly countries in Euro pe and Latin America, those with a favorable opinion of us are in the low double digits. Polls show that China is almost everywhere more admired than the United States. We used to attract 9 percent of tourists internationally; now we're down to 6. The best and the brightest from around the world came to our universities; now, very often, they go elsewhere. We are steadily losing market share in the global economy.

I will not go on. It is too depressing to do so. Suffice it to say that the atmosphere is such that men like Hugo Chávez Frías and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad felt confident of a warm response to their unprecedentedly anti-American diatribes at the UN. And that's what they received. Clearly, we are now more than "misunderestimated," to employ a useful word coined by our p resident; we are badly misevaluated and misunderstood abroad.

Here, in our country, there seem to be three reactions to the collapse of our international
reputation and the rise in global antipathy to the United States.

Some, many of whom seem to inhabit the bubble universe created by our media as an alternative to the real world, agree with Caligula and the cult of his followers in the Administration and on the Hill. They think it's just fine for foreigners hate us as long as we've got the drop on them and are in a position to string 'em up. They're surprised that "shock and awe" has so far proven to be an inadequate substitute for strategy, but they're eager to try it again and again on the theory that, if force doesn't work the first time, the answer is to apply more force.

Others seem to be in denial. That's the only way I can explain the notion of "transformational diplomacy" coming up at this time. Look, I'm all for the missionary position. But, let's face it, it's hard to get it on with foreigners when you've lost your sex appeal. A democracy that stifles debate at home, that picks and chooses which laws it will ignore or respect, and whose opposition party whines but does not oppose, is, I'm sorry to say, not one with much standing to promote democracy abroad. A government that responds to unwelcome election results by supporting efforts to correct them with political assassinations and cluster bombs has even less credibility in this regard. (If democracies don't fight democracies, by the way, what are Gaza and Lebanon all about? But that's another discussion.)

The third reaction is to call for a return to public diplomacy, this time on steroids. This sounds like a good idea but there are at least a couple of difficulties with it.

The first is that, if there is no private diplomacy, there can be no public diplomacy. And as we all know, Americans no longer do diplomacy ourselves. We are very concerned that, by talking to foreigners with whom we disagree, we might inadvertently suggest that we respect them and are prepared to work with them rather than preparing to bomb them into peaceful coexistence. Both at home and abroad, we respond to critics by stigmatizing and ostracizing them. To avoid sending a signal of reasonableness or willingness to engage in dialogue, we do threats, not diplomacy. That's something we outsource to whomever we can find to take on the morally reprehensible task of conducting it.

Usually, this means entrusting our interests to people we manifestly distrust. Thus, I note, we've outsourced Korea to Beijing even as we arm ourselves against the Ch inese; we've outsourced Iran to the French and other fuddy-duddies in the officially cowardly and passé "Old Europe;" and we've outsourced the UN to that outspoken international scofflaw, John Bolton, who, despite representing us in Turtle Bay, remains unconfirmable, as well as indescribable in polite company. We can't find anyone dumb enough to take on the Sisyphean task of rolling the Israeli rock up the hill of peace or to step in for us in Iraq so we try to pretend, with respect to both, that the absence of a peace process equates to the absence of a problem. Everything is under control and going just fine.

This brings me to the second difficulty. As our founding fathers understood so well, for public diplomacy to persuade foreigners even to give us and our policies the benefit of the doubt, let alone to support us, we must put on at least the appearance of a dece nt respect for their opinion. Persuasiveness begins with a reputation for wisdom, probity and effectiveness, but succeeds by showing empathy and concern for the interests of allies and friends. Finally, it's easier to make the case for judgments that have some grounding in reality, and for policies that have a plausible prospect of mutually beneficial results, than for those that don't.

I will not dwell on how poorly our current approaches measure up to these standards. Americans are now famous internationally for our ignorance and indifference to the world beyond our borders. We are becoming infamous for our disregard for the fate of foreigners who perish at our hands or from our munitions. Some of our military officers sincerely mourn the civilian Arab deaths their operations and those with whom we have allied ourselves cause; there is no evidence that many other Americans are the least bit disturbed by them.

Not content just to let f oreigners, Arabs and Muslims, in particular, hate us, we often seem to go out of our way to speak and act in such a way as to compel them to do so. Consider Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the practice of kidnapping and "rendition," our public defense of torture, or the spectacle a month or so ago of American officials fending off peace while urging the further maiming of Lebanon and its people. Catastrophically mistaken policies based on intelligence cooked to fit the policy recipe have combined with the debacle of Iraq reconstruction and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina to discredit American competence with foreign governments and publics alike. It's hard to find anybody out there who believes we know what we're doing or that we have a sound grasp of our own interests, let alone any understanding or concern for theirs. We have given the terrorists what they cannot have dared dream we would – policies and practices that recruit new terrorists but that leave no space for our friends and former admirers to make their case for us or for our values or policies.

This is not, I judge, a propitious atmosphere for public diplomacy. The atmosphere will not improve until the policies do. And what is the prospect of that?

Normally, of course, one would look to elections and the natural alternation of power in a two-party system to produce a change of course. Republicans should be held accountable for what they have done and failed to do, of course. But there is no evidence that bringing the Democrats to power would cure the post-9/11 loss of contact with reality and dysfunctional behavior that account for the fix we are in.

Judging by its record, the so-called opposition party has suffered from the same hallucinations that made us so sure that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there was an urgent need to eliminate them; the same delusional beliefs that foreign occupation, because it was by Americans – would be seen as liberation, that regime removal in Afghanistan and Iraq would result in democratization, and that inside every Arab there is an American struggling to come out; the same disorganized thinking that equates elections to democracy, and the same ruthless impulse to reject and punish the results of democracy when – as in the case of the Palestinian elections this past January – Americans find them uncongenial.

Neither party is in the least introspective. Both are happy to attribute all our problems to the irrationality of foreigners and to reject consideration of whether our attitudes, concepts, and policies might not have contributed to them. Both are xenophobic, Islamophobic, Arabophobic, and anti-immigrant. The two parties vie to see whic h can be more sycophantic toward whoever's in charge in Israel and to be most supportive of whatever Israel and its American lobby wish us to do. Neither has a responsible or credible solution to the mess we have created in Iraq, a plan for war termination in Afghanistan, an answer for how to deal with Korean issues, a vision for relations with China or other rising powers, or a promising approach to Iran or the challenge of post-Fidel Cuba, among other issues. (I'll spare you my observations in this regard on the default of both parties on addressing the challenges of our budget and balance of payments deficits, decaying pension systems, collapsi ng health insurance and delivery systems, overcompensation of corporate executives at the expense of both their shareholders and the public interest, and other relevant issues that bear on our nationa l wellbeing.) Neither party displays any willingness to learn from the successes and errors of allies, and both are unjustifiably complacent about our international competitiveness.

Both Republicans and Democrats seem to consider that statecraft boils down to two options: appeasement, or sanctions followed by military assault. Both behave as though national security and grand strategy require no more than a military component and as though feeding the military-industrial complex is the only way to secure our nation. Both praise our armed forces, ignore their cavils about excessive reliance on the use of force, count on them to attempt forlorn tasks, lament their sacrifices, and blithely propose still more feckless tasks and ill-considered deployments for them. Together, our two parties are well along in destroying the finest military the world has ever seen.

I fear that, by mincing words as I have, I may have failed to make my high regard for our political parties and their leaders clear. So I will conclude with two brief observations.

The first is that the threat the United States now faces is vastly less grave but much more ill-defined than that we faced during the Cold War. That era, which most here lived through, was one in which decisions by our president and his Soviet counterpart could result in the death, within hours, of over a hundred million Americans and a comparable number of Soviet citizens. That threat was existential. The threat we now face is not. Muslim extremists seek to drive us from their lands by hurting us. They neither seek to destroy nor to convert nor to conquer us. They can in fact do none of these things. The threat we now face does not in any way justify the sacrifice of the civil liberties and related values we defended against the far greater threats posed b y fascism or Soviet communism. Terrorists win if they terrorize; to defeat them, we must reject inordinate fear and the self-destructive things it may make us do.

The second observation is that the answer to the question of whether we can defend ourselves and persuade others to support us as we do so lies first and foremost in our own thoughts and deeds. Muslim extremists cannot destroy us and what we have stood for, but we can surely forfeit our moral convictions and so discredit our values that we destroy ourselves. We have lost international support not because foreigners hate our values but because they believe we are repudiating them and behaving contrary to them. To prevail, we must remember who we are and what we stand for. If we can rediscover and reaffirm the identity and values that made our republic so great, we will find much support abroad, including among those in the Muslim world we now wrongly dismiss as enemies rather than frie nds.

To rediscover public diplomacy and to practice it successfully, in other words, we must repudiate Caligula's maxim and replace it with our traditional respect for the opinion of mankind. I do not think it is beyond us to do so. We are a far better and more courageous people than we currently appear. But when we do restore ourselves to mental balance, we will, I fear, find that decades are required – it will take decades – to rebuild the appeal and influence our post-9/11 psychoses took a mere five years to destroy. In the process of reaffirming our traditions, as I am confident we shall, Americans may well find a renewed role for an independent agency that can facilitate the projection of our democracy and its values abroad.

Save your Charlie Wick wristwatches. USIA or a reasonable facsimile of it will rise again!

And, in the interim before it does, I look forward to an active debate, not just here but ult imately in the country at large, about how we can more effectively relate to the world beyond our borders. Let the discussion begin!

Thank you.

(PS: Wick was head of USIA, the last one, I believe.)
-- BY CHAS FREEMAN

Some Intervention from Wendell Berry

There is a point during Ramadan where the fast becomes an uncle who has stayed so long you take him for granted. And the original joy and beuaty of his presence is dulled, often forgotten. Habits manage to conduct themselves despite ragged, rationed senses. The worst in you is slowed to fox trot but agile in its persistence, in its ability to live as long as you have. For once, the man in the mirror knows less than you. And the miracles are now ones of habit's obstinacy in the face of determined non-allegiance. Reading Wendell Berry in the back of what seemed an ambulance this morning, after awakening from hit-and-run dreams about past loves, I came to my heightened, yet quieted senses. Today I must once again talk to this visitor named Ramadan as an honored guest, ask him the questions he came to answer, treat him with renewed respect before politics eats me alive. I want to thank Wendell for teaching me good manners this morning. And I want to thank my soul for its ceasless prayer and praise.

Here's some of what Wendell said:

I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth from my self and be free.

* * * * *

1
We follow the dead to their graves,
and our love follows on
beyond, crying to them, not
"Come back!" but merely "Wait!"
In waking thoughts, or dreams
we follow after, calling, "Wait!
Listen! I am older now. I know
now how it was with you
when you were old and I
was only young. I am ready
now to accompany you
in your lonely fear." And they
go on, one by one, as one
by one we go as they have gone.

2
And yet we are all gathered
in this leftover love,
this longing beyong the measure
of a joy all mounrers know.
An old man's mind is a graveyard
where the dead arise

* * * * *

The incarnate Word is with us,
is still speaking, is present
always, yet leaves no sign
but everything that is.

--Wendell Berry, from the "Sabbath Poems" found in his latest book of poems, "Given," Shoemaker & Hoard, Emeryville, California, 2006

One last thought: so much of the fear of Muslims that I see boil up and over in many of my friends is simply lack of contact. As a Sufi, most of the people I know live in Muslim households and communities. And not one of them bears arms or grudges against Jews and Christians; all are people you would welcome in your homes. The only healing henceforth will be trust--trust developed through contact. When the president of Iran came here, Bush should have broke Ramadan bread with him. Synagogues should have invited him to prayers and dedicated the Yom Kipur fast to their Muslim brothers observing Ramadan. If Carter or Clinton had been in office, I believe there would have been greeting and meeting, conversation and exchange. Too many chances for commonality, communication and--dare I wish for it?--communion have been missed. America, I fear, has lost its reputation for and saving grace of hospital-ity. My beloved country, please prove me wrong soon.

Fatal Foresight That is Now Even More Fatal Hindsight

Just in case some of you are trawling in cyberspace and happen to fish the depths that surround this blog, here is an op-ed piece by James Webb, an undersecretary of the Navy during the Reagan Administration, which predicts everything disastrous thing that has happened since March 2003. Read it and turn your tears into a solemn vow to vote out the Republicans on November 7th, so they can push for immediate impeachment of our oafish commandant-in-chief.

HEADING FOR TROUBLE
by James Webb
The Washington Post
September 4, 2002

Country music's most popular song this summer is a defiantly nationalistic tune by Toby Keith, in which he warns potential adversaries that if they mess with us, "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." Last week the Chinese government showed us its way. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had brought a conciliatory gesture from the Bush administration, agreeing to recognize a separatist group in China's Xinjiang province as a terrorist entity. This diplomatic contortion was so appeasing that the Economist magazine labeled its logic "astonishing." And yet the day after Armitage left, the Chinese government sent its own political signal by "test-firing" a DF-4 missile, which has a range of more than 4,000 miles and was designed to attack U.S. military bases on Guam.

The implied disrespect of this incident did not occur in a vacuum, either militarily or diplomatically. As our country remains obsessed with Saddam Hussein, other nations have begun positioning themselves for an American war with Iraq and, most important, for its aftermath. China, which has pursued a strategic axis with key Islamic nations for nearly 20 years, received the Iraqi foreign minister just after Armitage's departure, condemning in advance an American attack on that country. Russia has been assiduously courting -- both diplomatically and economically -- all three nations identified by President Bush as the "axis of evil." Iran -- the number one state sponsor of international terrorism, according to our own State Department -- has conducted at least four flight tests of the nuclear-capable Shahab-3 missile, whose range of 800 miles is enough to hit U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, Turkey and Central Asia.

Meanwhile, American military leaders have been trying to bring a wider focus to the band of neoconservatives that began beating the war drums on Iraq before the dust had even settled on the World Trade Center. Despite the efforts of the neocons to shut them up or to dismiss them as unqualified to deal in policy issues, these leaders, both active-duty and retired, have been nearly unanimous in their concerns. Is there an absolutely vital national interest that should lead us from containment to unilateral war and a long-term occupation of Iraq? And would such a war and its aftermath actually increase our ability to win the war against international terrorism? On this second point, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman, mentioned in a news conference last week that the scope for potential anti-terrorist action included -- at a minimum -- Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Colombia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea.

America's best military leaders know that they are accountable to history not only for how they fight wars, but also for how they prevent them. The greatest military victory of our time -- bringing an expansionist Soviet Union in from the cold while averting a nuclear holocaust -- was accomplished not by an invasion but through decades of intense maneuvering and continuous operations. With respect to the situation in Iraq, they are conscious of two realities that seem to have been lost in the narrow debate about Saddam Hussein himself. The first reality is that wars often have unintended consequences -- ask the Germans, who in World War I were convinced that they would defeat the French in exactly 42 days. The second is that a long-term occupation of Iraq would beyond dou bt require an adjustment of force levels elsewhere, and could eventually diminish American influence in other parts of the world.

Other than the flippant criticisms of our "failure" to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of Iraq, but it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay. This reality was the genesis of a rift that goes back to the Gulf War itself, when neoconservatives were vocal in their calls for "a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad." Their expectation is that the United States would not only change Iraq's regime but also remain as a long-term occupation force in an a ttempt to reconstruct Iraqi society itself.

The connotations of "a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad" show how inapt the comparison is. Our occupation forces never set foot inside Japan until the emperor had formally surrendered and prepared Japanese citizens for our arrival. Nor did MacArthur destroy the Japanese government when he took over as proconsul after World War II. Instead, he was careful to work his changes through it, and took pains to preserve the integrity of Japan's imperial family. Nor is Japanese culture in any way similar to Iraq's. The Japanese are a homogeneous people who place a high premium on respect, and they fully cooperated with MacArthur's forces after having been ordered to do so by the emperor. The Iraqis are a multiethnic people filled with competing factions who in many cases would view a U.S. occupation as infidels invading the cradle of Islam. Indeed, this very bitterness provided Osama bin Laden the grist for his recruitment efforts in Saudi Arabia when the United States kept bases on Saudi soil after the Gulf War.

In Japan, American occupation forces quickly became 50,000 friends. In Iraq, they would quickly become 50,000 terrorist targets.

Nations such as China can only view the prospect of an American military consumed for the next generation by the turmoil of the Middle East as a glorious windfall. Indeed, if one gives the Chinese credit for having a long-term strategy -- and those who love to quote Sun Tzu might consider his nationality -- it lends credence to their insistent cultivation of the Muslim world. One should not take lightly the fact that China previously supported Libya, that Pakistan developed its nuclear capability with China's unrelenting assistance and that the Chinese sponsored a coup attempt in Indonesia in 1965. An "American war" with the Muslims, occu pying the very seat of their civilization, would allow the Chinese to isolate the United States diplomatically as they furthered their own ambitions in South and Southeast Asia.These concerns, and others like them, are the reasons that many with long experience in U.S. national security issues remain unconvinced by the arguments for a unilateral invasion of Iraq.

Unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake. It is true that Saddam Hussein might try to assist international terrorist organizations in their desire to attack America. It is also true that if we invade and occupy Iraq without broad-based international support, others in the Muslim world might be encouraged to intensify the same sort of efforts. And it is crucial that our national leaders consider the impact of this proposed action on our long-term ability to deter aggression elsewhere.

How The Ramadan Fast is Teaching Me To Take Things Slow

If there was a sound of one hand clapping, or the primal pulse, it would probably go, 'I am,' and maybe in time, 'I think therefore I am.' This bee-hum of 'I am' is certainly the bedrock of breath upon which we construct the thought-grid of this life. That's why Zikr, the central Islamic practice of meditation taught by my teacher Bawa Muhiayaddeen, starts with the fundamental 'I am' and answers the natural question embedded in it, "I am what?'

Zikr, as Bawa, taught it, is a two-stage process of de/re-construction. You breath out everything remaining within you through the left nostril on the out breath and say to or serenade yourself with, 'La illahah,' There is only God. That thought, or reminder, subordinates everything to the activity at hand. It is a kind of thunderclap, conch call or a commandment like Dad yelling, 'Shut up,' years and years ago. In this case, the sky empties or lightens from the peremptory friction (two clapping hands becoming one) of the command. Even the thought of God or Lola or the 10 chores facing you before day is done hide from sight or sound or incantation. Attenshun!

You immediately feel a reprieve from the constant onslaught of thought. You turn, or are tuned, to the reviewing stand (in this metaphoric case, a mountain) and begin to breathe back in through the right nostril, murmuring, 'Il allahu,' only God is Real. Both breaths are long, deep draughts of air, sucked in as if consciousness were a milkshake straw of concentration deep into your being. T'ai Chi, which I also practice, is a kind of moving Zikr.

Okay, that's the Zikr cycle. Bawa asked his students to practice it ten minutes a days. He promised it would make all the difference. I have only taken him at his word intermittently.

This Ramadan, however, when fasting is conjoined to the most important midterm elections of my lifetime, and my mind is constantly agitated, the Ramadan fast is wedded to a metabolic slowdown. As the fast and Zikr continue, I feel like I am trying to conduct my life at a Himalayan base camp. To maintain normal mental thrust and weave in and out of the constant rush-hour traffic-flow of thinking, I will have to abandon the mountain. And since I may be in the midst of delivering what I am sure is another Sermon on the Mount or the greatest acceptance speech ever given at a political convention, I may very well start to turn around and head back down to 'the world,' now reduced to an enticing, if not inviting, glow below.

Thankfully, I bump into the next breath of Zikr, and resume the trek. A trick ventriloquist's voice will often applaud this decision with something like, 'Jolly Good,' and add, 'Well, then, shall I tell the sherpas that it's onward as planned?'

To steady myself, as well as this metaphor, I try to listen to the soft crunching sound of footsteps in the snow, and the slightly louder syllables of 'La illaha il allahu.' But it isn't long before I transform my Himalayan heights into a book depository window where I take aim at the brazen skulls of our fearful leaders driving by in open-topped stretch Cadillac and become entangled in a demented fantasy that allows me to become a psycho-bodhisattva willing to sacrifice my soul to rid the world of evil's most effective current incarnations.

Suddenly, I snap to my true present circumstance, and resume Zikr accompaniment of breathing. 'You dropped your sun goggles,' a sherpa-like thought says, handing me either a ''La illaha' or an 'Il Allahu' to use for protection. 'Watch out. The glare can make you crazy.'

This morning on the mountain, when I once again professed shock at finding an elephant rifle in my back pack, I called for a time out from the never-ending sequels to lifelong anger. I made a pantomime of throwing my weapons into a ravine, said a bisman (bismallah irrachman irrahim) and vowed to frame the mountain in a peace from myself equal to the one it brought to me--when I let it.

Suddenly, I thought of Jonah Wilson, a Fellowship peer of my son Jesse who has been dropping in at the house these last few weeks to listen to Zikr tapes and practice meditation with me. I have begun to relish these meetings and have vowed to leave their continuation up to Jonah and never ever let them become an obligation to either of us like class or taking out the trash.

I began to compose a letter to Jonah and felt he was my son. In my mind, I imagined him away at college or out in LA like Jesse. He had written to ask me how did he get beyond the impacted separation of the 'I' using the primal 'I am,' a question I have been pondering ever since high school. I didn't have an immediate answer. I just knew, for the first time, that the 'I am' leads beyond the isolate self, and that Zikr was a key for us in pursuit of that beyond. 'Breathe out a little fuller and breathe in a little deeper,' I told Jonah and myself. The Ramadan fast has loosened and lessened your burdens. Let them go, and let the mountain give your more than you've ever taken in on the in-breath. It was then the following Robert Creeley poem, rediscovered last week at LAX while waiting for a plane to Philly, came to mind as brushstroked annotation of our shared Cartesian dilemma. This time, thankfully, it also served as first stirring of a solution:

SOME PLACE

I resolved it, I
found in my life a
center and secured it.

It is the house,
trees beyond, a term
of view encasing it.

The weather
reaches only as some
wind, a little

deadened sighing. And
if the life weren't?
when was something to

happen, had I secured
that--had I, had
I, insistent.

There is nothing I am,
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am

more than thought, less
than thought. A house
with winds, but a distance

--something loose in the wind,
feeling weather as that life,
walks toward the lights he left.

--Robert Creeley, Words, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1967

I began to see within and without this quietude as a light and life, and like Creeley, began to walk toward them as something I left and found again. 'What are you thinking?" I imagined Jonah asking me. 'I am that I am,' I answered with solid sincerity. 'All this time the 'I am' was connected to Him, not ever to be thought of as separate. To say He is not is to simply remind yourself of the insubstantiality of all thought.'

I will not lie. I felt a 'me' but, for once, it was as delicate and fragile and translucent as a moth's wing, "something loose in the wind, / feeling weather as that life, / walks toward the lights he left."

Jonah, when are you coming over next?

Some Ramadan Reckonings

The following lesson from history, reproduced below and courtesy of The New York Times, is worth pondering. It has to do with a war on terrorism that sowed the seeds of destruction for the Roman republic.

And while listening to the unheeded voices of history, here's a relevant lament from much closer in time: from Baron de Montesquieu, the Frenchman who was one of the inspirations for the Declaration of Independence:

"France will be ruined by soldiers. A new plague is spreading throughout Europe. It attacks sovereigns and forces them to maintain an incredible number of armed men. This plague is infectious and spreads, because directly one government increases its armament, all the others do likewise. So that nothing is gained by it but general ruin.

"Every government maintains as great an army as it possibly could maintain if its people were threatened with extermination, and people call peace this state of tension of all against all. And therefore Europe is so ruined that if private persons were in the position of the governments of our continent, the richest of them would not have enough to live on. We are poor though we have the wealth and trade of the whole world."

Sound familiar? It's called the Arms Race, and it is still going strong, especially in America and Israel--thanks to a generalized state of fear, called the War on Terrorism. With Iraq war spending now at $330 billion, we can understand how the wealthiest nation in the world is in a state of ruin.

I kept thinking of men like Montesquiei when we declared war on French Fries in 2003 and started spitting at the French every chance we could get. "Montesquieu," writes Isaiah Berlin, "advocated constitutionalism, the preservation of civil liberties, the abolition of slavery, gradualism, moderation, peace, internationalism, social and economic justice with due respect to national and local tradition. He believed in justice and the rule of law; detested all forms of extremism and fanaticism; put his faith in the balance of power and the division of authority as a weapon against despotic rule by individuals or groups or majorities."

Montesquieu believed, wisely, that the greatest protection of freedom is the rule of law, not as it has become in America, the law of rule. The Declaration of Independence, which to me is the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment, is being torn to tatters. And the Constitution, which also gives great importance to treaties and international law, is also being shredded.

I fear America is becoming a Fourth Reich and it is, ironically, due, in significant part, to fanatically pro-Israeli Jews and Christians. For those of you who think my fears of a Fourth Reich are fueled by Ramadan deprivation, let me assure you that fasting brings with it incredible clarity and detachment.

Here's why I am deeply worried. Pro-Israeli friends of mine now suggest that it is worth repealing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to pass laws that give our president unparalleled power to ready us to face Iran and other 'enemies' of freedom (read: Israel and America).

Maybe, as some friends suggest and others accuse, I've got issues about my Jewish upbringing. But the emphasis is on upbringing not Jewish. I once saw a press conference conducted by a group of Jesuits who had converted to Islam. They said they had gone as far as they could go as Catholics and Islam was taking them on the next leg of the journey. Well, I feel the same about Judaism as a tradition in which I was raised. I went as far as I could go, and moved into a Hindu ashram, followed by membership in a Sufi lodge. As far as I am concerned, these are all tabs at the top of the screen marked 'David Federman: Son of God.'

God is to me the only thing whole and absolute, the unity encoded into us so that we are suited to inhabitance. All the religions that pretend to honor Him but fight one another are, to me, hypocritical, hollow, myopic and not worth any further attention on my part.

An anlogy based on my life experience as a jewelry journalist: God is a perfect diamond. Where and when Christianity is a facet on the diamond of humanity that is perfectly aligned with the other facets of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Bahai, you name it, and all the facets contribute to the sum of splendor, then I am a member of that faith ("I contain multitudes"). When all religions act as relays of light (i.e., truth and wisdom), one to the other, then all religions are one (as William Blake said). Humanity, too, is, or is supposed to be, a perfect diamond.

I am not a member of any faith that can become an ethnic or political prison. To worry about Muslim or Christian or Jewish threats to my well-being is to place fear above faith and to suspend judgment, reason and sanity.

The bottom line: I am not, as the neocons would have me do, about to give up my freedom to try to sate Israel's insatiable insecurity. I have lived with that insecurity all my life and it has only deepened.

Worry, my Zionist friends, all you want about Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah. But, this Yom Kippur, when you are committed to self-reflection and all fingers point at your own behavior, I beg you to entertain the possibly just consensus across the globe that the world has much greater cuase these days to worry about that dangerous 2-man league of nations that is American and Israel than any other alliance.

This Yom Kippur I ask my Zionist friends to fast from paranoia about Muslims and Iran and face sins of the country to which they give greatest allegiance--namely, Israel--against Palestine and Lebanon, committed in the name of "nameless, unreasoning fear."

Believe me, I am doing the same this Ramadan by trying to cut all ties to anything but God. Like Arjuna, asked to fight jihad by Krishna, I am having trouble with the thought that I have to slay half the people in my home town. But, of course, this is not literal--anymore than the sacrifice of Ishmael is literal. We are dealing with blood ties, the millions of thoughts, habits, possessions, co-dependencies that keep us polytheists instead of monotheists.

For me, Jerusalem and Washington both live in a state of rampaging fear and denial. Put Yom Kippur to good use this year, please. Look at the sins of the 'us' and 'we' rather than the 'they' and 'them.' You'll have 364 other days to point the finger at the goyem.

David


Pirates of the Mediterranean
By ROBERT HARRISKintbury, EnglandI

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what am ounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, t hey could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain informati on; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces bega n to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended conseq uences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”

Why I Am Observing the Ramadan Fast

Why do I fast this Ramadan?

First, I fast because Ramadan is a sacred segment of time for me--30 days of fasting and the accompanying stringency of habit and thought that it brings with it. I don't practice the Ramadan fast because I'm a Muslim but because I'm a member of the world's freest-wheeling Sufi community. In that community, Ramadan is a communal act of voluntary want among people who otherwise would not go without food during the sunlit hours of the day. Our teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said almost every time he ever spoke that we should make the hunger of others our own. So I fast as an act of contrived, finite starvation to signify solidarity with those for whom this aspect of Ramadan is a daily, unrelenting, infinite reality.

Second, I fast because it brings an almost peyote-like awareness of life and a glorious spiritual intimacy. One feels as if one lives in a kiva of consciousness--praying, working, even sinning, with a kind of heightened, granular understanding. It is like a closeness between worlds that can be forecast on an annual basis.

Third, I fast because it induces suspension of addictive thought and desire. It is amazing to me how I use food and consumption as repetitive reliefs from tension and fear. I buy things as a vain macho defense against money worries. Usually, they are habitual things like books and CDs. Junkie Dave says he will someday give them to his children. It sounds plausibly noble until I wonder if they'll keep the CDs free of scuffs and threaten in my mind to assign these holdings to other heirs. Suddenly, I have made another Ramadan joke of myself.

Fourth, I fast because fasting sustains me. Ramadan is an exercise in non-duality, the most precious point of this birth for me. I used to think of the search for God in terms of frequent flier miles, vast acreage of rough terrain I had to traverse to find HIM. But as I have aged, a tropism has kicked in that makes God closer than my own breath. By God, I do not mean deity or anything particulate. By God, I do not mean anything separate from or other than me or the creation. The constant thought I have of God, now almost as constant as the howling Cartesian 'I am,' is like what geologists searching for diamonds call an "indicator mineral"--e.g., a garnet on an ant hill that confirms the existence of diamond country right where you stand. The word 'God' is the gleam of garnet that promises the resplendance of diamond. During Ramadan, God is the most constant thought and root of all reverie. By going without this creation and focusing on the Creator, there is a shrinkage of alienating distance and a freedom from the want you have vowed to live with. The 'I' becomes an abode, a sanctuary, where lives a cognizance of which all men and women are capable. This cognizance is a manifestation of unity that can be betrayed by distraction or worship of a pressing need but never broken. Why? Because all it needs to exist in this world is one true human heart.

Fifth, I fast as a way to pray without ceasing, to honor salvation as a chief mechanism--or constituent--of the human condition. During Ramadan, I have asked for a job and I have also asked for the view to never end. My prayers are like Ramadan itself, a holiday that drifts across the calendar, intersecting at shifting times of the year. This year Ramadan intersects with Yom Kippur, a kind of one-day condensation of the Ramadan fast that Jews practice and which also falls on variable dates. I like this variability because it means, as much as any holiday that can be marked on a bank calendar, that the day cannot be contained, that its presence lurks and haunts. Both Jews and Muslims practice understandable victimizatiion. So Ramadan and Yom Kippur allow fasting from such thoughts and the fury of blame and self-righteousness that they breed. I think, as a gesture of hostage exchange, Jews and Muslims ought to practice both Yom Kippur and Ramadan as if both were sacred to their own traditions.

Sixth, I fast to weaken and disarm my own demons. Unfed armies are ill-equipped for invasion and occupany of the mind. The fast is, at best and worst, a truce with the elements. Not that they can't take me hostage. But fasting leaves gaps in the wall, tunnels from this cell, and I can slip through the slats undetected.

Seventh, I fast because it is a gift from God, because Islam is not a religion you convert to but a state of conversion--not a Jewish or an Arab state, but a heaven on earth discovered by shrinkage of appetite for anything other than God. It isn't so much that "nothing is real," but that 'nothing is real apart from God.' Heaven on earth is non-duality. Ramadan is an affirmation of the unity of God and Man as well as Man and God. This unity makes men proofs of God--the One, the All. And whether you use the word God or Yahweh (have it Yahwah) or All (as in All! Ah!) as an indicator of this unity, or other indicators such as Buddha mind, or the Alone, or the Force, or whatever, this unity is our deepest self, our highest and best use as beings and our truest and most comprehensive heritage.

At this point, let me present an enactment of the Ramadan state of mind as I most frequently know it. It is not an ecstatic state like that you'll find in a Rumi poem. And the manifestation of unity/union is not as mannered as in Emily Dickinson or turbulent as in Rilke. My state is as much the byproduct of Samuel Beckett and the eternal way of negation, as Walt Whitman and the eternal way of affirmation. I still carry a portable bed of nails and wear Van Heusen hair shirts. I still treat this enclosure of consciousness as a ball of Saran wrap affixed Mafia-style to my face and making breathing frantic, if not impossible. I still have self-imposed waterboarding moments of hysterical drowning in fear for my life. Fasting, thankfully, slows my breathing for me so I can exit the illusion of suffocation.

What awaits in that cessation of obdurate soleness is what Robert Creeley, the poet I have read most the last two Ramadans, calls "relief" from the sufferance of separation. In the following poem, "The Mountains in the Desert," Creeley prays for a stay of this exisitential sense of aloneness (with a small but diamond-hard 'a') and implcit flight to the Alone. This is a poem that I often import into my prayers like a sura or a psalm. This is a poem I used to recite under my breath to my teacher to place before him an accurate picture of my struggle. This year, Ramadan has provided answers to Creeley's beautiful prayer. This poem will tell you why I became a Sufi. I hope to type out poems that show what it is like to be one in the upcoming days.

THE MOUNTAINS IN THE DESERT

The mountains blue now
at the back of my head,
such geography of self and soul
brought to such limit of sight,

I cannot relieve it
nor leave it, my mind locked
in seeing it
as the light fades.

Tonight let me go
at last out of whatever
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.

--Robert Creeley, "Words," Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1967