Unitarian responses to terror
The following item was taken from the July 30th 2005 edition of The Inquirer.
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UNDERSTANDING ISLAM
by
Rev David S Blanchard
A man asked Muhammad how to tell
when one is truly faithful, and he replied:
"If you derive pleasure from the good which you do
and are grieved by the evil which you commit,
then you are a true believer."
An American convert to Islam, faced with the incredulous expressions of disbelief of family and
friends, wrote this of her embrace of the Muslim faith: "Like having a baby, taking an acid trip, or
riding a bicycle, Islam is difficult to describe to someone who hasn't tried it."
Because the context from which these reflections emerge is so complex, I want to use the time I have to open the windows of understanding about this faith, which has remained so foreign to most of us.
I want to expose the differences within the Islamic world, which are as great, if not greater, than the differences within the other monotheistic traditions. And, perhaps most importantly, I want to consider the social, political and spiritual roots which have given fundamentalism such a foothold throughout the Islamic world and fueled this caldron of rage toward the West, which we blissfully ignored 9/11.
The Quarn's origins
As good a place as any to begin is with the celebration of Ramadan, the most significant
and sacred Muslim holiday. Ramadan is one of the 12 lunar months in the Islamic calendar,
allowing it to float throughout the year, and to fall in every season. For 30 days,
observant Muslims will not eat, drink, smoke, or engage in sexual behaviour from dawn to dusk. It
was during the month of Ramadan in 610 CE that an Arab businessman - Muhammad ibn
Abdallah - awoke in the night to find himself overpowered by a disturbing and mysterious
presence which squeezed him tightly until he heard the first words of a new Arab scripture
emerging from his lips. Thus began the Quran, the sacred scriptures of Islam. But unlike the
Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Quran was understood as the first person, direct word of
God, or Allah. The Arabic word `qur'an' literally means recitation. The words and verses of the
Quran were revealed to Mohammed over the course of 23 years, and as Islamic
tradition has it, they were revealed in perfect grammatical form and without poetic peer.
Mohammed had no control over when these revelations would come to him, and he often said
that the words came to him as if they were immense weights bearing him down. Once they
arrived while he was riding a camel, and by the time they were finished, the camel's belly was
pressed against the sand, with its legs splayed out in four directions.
Before long, others in the Arab world were convinced that Mohammed was the prophet their
people had long been denied. They were well aware of the special revelations that had come to
Jews and the Christians, and suffered from a form of an inferiority complex that Arabs had
been somehow overlooked in the divine plan. Up that point, the Arab people had a wide range of
competing gods in their pagan pantheon and felt the reality of the absence of a unifying religious
force in tribal violence. Mohammed did not believe that he was bringing a new religion into
being, but rather that he was bringing the old faith in the One God to the Arabs. It was wrong,
he taught, to accumulate great personal wealth, but essential for the well being of the society itself,
that wealth be shared and that the weak and vulnerable be treated with compassion and respect.
Justice and equity were the basis of human community. This was the core teaching of the new
scripture.
It is a clear message of the Quran that its teachings are simply reminders of truths that everybody
already knew. As Karen Armstrong wrote, "God had not left human beings in ignorance about
the way they should live: he had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth ... All
had brought their people a divinely inspired scripture; they might express the truths of God's
religion differently, but essentially the message was the same ... Constantly the Quran points out
that Mohammed had not come to cancel the older religions, to contradict their prophets or to start
a new faith. His message is the same as that of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or Jesus. The
Quran mentions only those prophets who were known to the Arabs, but today Muslim scholars
argue that had Muhammad known about the Buddhist, or the Hindus, the Australian Aborigines
or the Native Americans, the Quran would have endorsed their sages too, because all rightly
guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man made deities, and preached
justice and equality came from the same source." (Islam: A Short History, pg. 9-10)
'Islam' means surrender
The word `Islam', is derived from the same root as `peace', and means surrender. It's a
spiritual concept - surrendering - that is not integrated into the Protestant ethic that so many have absorbed. We would prefer to be the `captains of our souls', the shapers of our own destiny.
We want to earn our "salvation" through our good works and hard efforts. It is a struggle for us
to grasp what it means to Muslims to `surrender', through their strenuous rituals of prayer,
alms-giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Their surrender is a submission of their entire being to Allah
and to his demand that human beings behave toward one another with justice, equity and
compassion. This `surrender' was not to a life of passivity, but to a life of commitment, sacrifice,
and action. The rituals we observe are not themselves the faith, but are daily reminders
of the Muslims commitment to the spiritual and social order intended by God. There is nothing
like praying five times a day, prostrate to the floor, to maintain ones humility in the great scheme
of creation. They proclaim, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." This
being the creed, or confession of faith, of all Muslims.
Like most faiths, there is no singular, authoritative tradition within Islam. With over a billion adherents around the world, about one of every six human beings, the variations within Islam are determined by nationality, race, geography, politics, history, and theological development. The two major branches of Islam are the Sunni and the Shiite, each descendants of rival disciples of Mohammed. There is a mystical branch, called the Sufis. The Royal Family of Saudi Arabia adhere to Wahhabism, which is akin to Puritanism
within Christianity. Osama bin Laden, being Saudi, was shaped by this strict form of the Islamic
faith. The Taliban share this fundamentalist impulse.
Extremists have taught the West
Most of what we in the West know about Islam, has been taught us in the past dozen years by the most radical extreme elements of the faith. The Quran itself is explicit in its exhortations for peace. Even where there are conditions which permit aggression, the greater good is declared to be found in the spirit of charity and peace. In the Quran, the only permissible war is one of self-defense, and even then, Islamic law forbids harm to non-combatants, and even to property. Yet it is the assumption of many that Islam is a faith driven by conquest and violence.
Jihad is misinterpreted
How often have we heard of `jihad' proclaimed against the West? We have come to think of
`jihad' as synonymous with terrorism. Incorrectly translated as "holy war", the term actually
means "struggle", and is grounded in the human struggle to put God's will into practice at every
level of one's life. A significant and much quoted tradition has Mohammed telling his companions
as they were returning home from a battle, "We are returning from the lesser jihad (the battle) to
the greater jihad," the far more urgent and momentous task of extirpating wrongdoing from one's
own society and one's own heart.
It would be somewhat disingenuous of us to act surprised that a peaceful,
compassionate faith could be perverted to such violent ends. All we have to do is consider the
Crusades, the Inquisition, and the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries
to be reminded that Islam is not the only faith that has been used to exercise extreme repression
and terror.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote, "Given how expressly non-violent the teachings of the
Gospels are the perversion of Christianity in this respect was arguably greater than bin Laden's
selective use of Islam. But there it is. It seems almost as if there is something inherent in religious
monotheism that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation. And our bland attempts to ignore
this - to speak of this violence as if it did not have religious roots - is some kind of denial. We
don't want to denigrate religion as such, and so we deny that religion is at the heart of this. But
we would understand this conflict better, perhaps, if we first acknowledged that religion is
responsible in some way, and then figured out how and why."
(New York Times Magazine, pg. 45-46, October 7, 2001)
Islam is not alone in terror
The `how and why' can be traced not to a flaw in Islam, but a reflex in almost every faith when it
feels its continuity and influence threatened. Through the course of the 20th century, Christianity,
Judaism, and Islam have all been affected by the phenomenon of fundamentalism. And though the
expression of the fundamentalist impulse has differed between these traditions, the impetus
toward fundamentalism has been the same for each. They are motivated by their ardent
opposition to modernity. They are horrified by the secularization of society. They are resentful
of their own shrinking spheres of influence. They feel sure that the goal of secular society is to
eliminate religion. And since they feel they are fighting for their very survival, fundamentalists of
every faith feel justified in overlooking the more compassionate teachings of their tradition in
favour of those which could be interpreted to condone aggression in the name of the faith.
Typically, these fundamentalist movements develop only after the influences of modernity have
taken strong hold in a culture. And accordingly, that has meant fundamentalism came late
to the Muslim world. Christians and Jews had a longer exposure to the modern experience.
Modern culture only spread to the Muslim world in the `60s and `70s. Fundamentalism only
blooms after a period of attempted accommodation has failed; only after the promise of modernity
is clearly not fulfilled. In the Arab world, the factors that provoked this fundamentalism are many:
resentments over colonialism, economic decline, material inequities and pervasive western
influences. They don't feel they have benefited from the promise of modernity, and if anything,
feel they have been exploited in the process, and so they look back in time to an idealized "golden
age" before the forces of modernity tarnished their "true faith".
I am indebted to the work of Karen Armstrong in these reflections on fundamentalism. Her
scholarship in this field is without peer. She wrote extensively on this subject in her book, The
Battle For God, and in response to the events of 9/11, has contributed many excellent
commentaries to the national forum on the role and relationship of Islam to the crisis.
She makes the following points about fundamentalism in general and Islamic fundamentalism in
particular.
Modernity can not be repealed. It can not be dismantled. It can not be destroyed. Not by Muslim, Jew, or Christian. War is likely to reinforce the rage of others who feel resigned to the very margins of power, and fear and despair of remaining always at the bottom of the heap. I concede that war will persist until we win, whatever that means. What concerns me more is what will happen when the war does end? What will we have learned as a country about Islam? What will we have learned about the sources of fundamentalist rage? What will we have learned about our own ignorance, as well as our own occasional arrogance, when it comes to knowing how others ought to live, which includes how others choose to believe?
Islam's core is justice and equality
For centuries, Islam held at its core the notions of social justice, equality, tolerance and practical
compassion. These spiritual values, not too different from our own, have been the essence of how
Muslims have sought to live their lives. Of course, Muslims have not always lived up to their own
ideals, and over time have been challenged to integrate these private religious practices into their
social and political institutions. Yet the struggle, the jihad, to achieve that coherence has, for
centuries, been the inspiration for Islamic spirituality.
Those are all worthy starting points, but only that. The more I have studied the subject, the more
time I have spent in parts of the world that are Muslim, the more I have listened to American
Muslims, the more I have come to grasp the reality that before I can understand "them", I have to understand myself. I know that sounds sort of elementary, but in my own experience at least, I have had to find what it is in me that resists - even rebels - against being open to their reality.
For instance, I have been shaped by notions of freedom which focus on my rights to engage
without limits in the world. So I look to the experience of covered Muslim women and cringe. But then, I
wonder, what might they know about the inner freedom which comes with liberation from the
external, outward life. Whether you or I would choose it for ourselves or not is not the issue.
The issue is can we listen long enough to imagine why someone else would choose to live in a
way so radically differently than we.
It is hard to do this work when we know that to so many,
we are the enemy.
It is hard to do this work when so much of our own rage and pain is now associated,
displaced as it is, with those mysterious, foreign `others'.
It is hard to do this work when we are so consumed by our own security and our own survival.
It would be easier if these concerns were ours alone.
But they are, of course, also the concerns of much of the Muslim world.
And until we understand why that is so,
we will understand little.
The Rev David S Blanchard is pastor of First Unitarian Universalist Society of Syracuse, New York. He wrote and delivered this sermon two months after the 9/11 attacks. He is the author of 'A Temporary State of Grace', published by Skinner House Books.
A Prayer After Violence
Holy Spirit, Allah, God, known by many names and none; At this time we stand in shock at our human capacity to embrace evil.
We pray for compassion toward those who grieve and comfort and healing for those in pain. How can we make sense of this, how can we know the truth?
How can we forgive?
Humanity twists your inspired words to our own ends ... to justify the unjustifiable.
Forgive them for they know not what they do.
The words you spoke to Muhammed (Peace be Upon Him) calls for justice and kindness, Quran 16.90, how can they have got itso wrong? How can killing and maiming be seen as justice and kindness? How can they not understand?
Forgive them for they know not what they do.
We ask why, for we do not understand how these things can happen.
Open their eyes that they might see the wrong they do.
But open, too, our eyes that we might see.
Open our minds that we might understand.
Open our hearts that we might forgive.
Isaiah extols your call to justice and equity, have we failed to hear?
Have we sown the seeds that now we reap?
Forgive us for we know not what we do.
Jesus taught us to pray for forgiveness as we too forgive.
Therefore, we pray for the ability to forgive those who perpetrate such acts of violence, as we too seek to be forgiven for creating a world out-of-balance;
Help us to create a new world, a true Kingdom of God, help us to loosen the bonds of injustice. Help us, Christian, Muslim, members of all faiths, of all humanity, to plant the seeds of equity and justice that all may reap the haivest of love and peace, and violence be no more. Amen
By The Rev Chris Goacher,
written following the 7th July bombings