Faith and Leavetaking

March 01

Ran across this a couple of days ago and was struck by it. Dave is a great blogger, and had in some ineffable digital way made it on to the list of good-hearted, intelligent Muslims I think about when the other 90% are acting retarded. So losing him--in the theological sense; so far as I know the man is still very much alive--depressed me a little. His reasons for leaving the religion make a lot of sense to me, as I think they would to anyone: the arbitrary rules get exhausting. Part of one longs to simply be ‘a human being experiencing the world’. All the religious people I know, myself included, are fascinated by rules, intellectually stimulated by them, by observing them, dissecting them, reinterpreting them, breaking them, coming back to them. I can’t imagine organized religion is very enriching if you don’t love rules. In fact, it must be agonizing.

No one’s ever asked me why I don’t leave Islam. (I like that I get to talk about this stuff now. When I was working in journalism I didn’t out of principle--when you’re covering ongoing events, you need to be able to turn a critical and impassive eye on religion, your own included. Talking about your spiritual life hampers your ability to do so, along with your reader’s ability to separate you from what you cover.) I’ve miraculously avoided a lot of ‘convert narrative’--the second-guessing, the suspicion of the new community, the absolute turning away from the old--and thank God for that, because I can’t stand identity politics. I didn’t convert to get shuttled into some convenient dress code and retire from meaningful decisions at the age of 20. I’ve had issues with my religion since the day I professed it. But there are two kinds of converts: people who arrive at a religion, and people who simply arrive. I arrived. That’s the lucky category. These are the people who open a holy book and say not “this is what I want to believe” but “this affirms what I have always believed.” This saddles you with issues similar to those faced by people born into the religion: you can get as frustrated as you want, but something about the mess is part of your spiritual DNA, and you will never be able to shed it completely. People who arrive at a religion were probably looking for one, and may have happened on the wrong kind, or may discover what they seek can’t be found in a religion at all. That’s a tough gig, the seeker. The honest ones endure the isolation for the wisdom it brings, and are a delight to know. The dishonest ones become fundamentalists.

This is why I call the people who simply arrive the lucky ones: despite the public turmoil--for people in large numbers are idiots, and your co-religionists are guaranteed to embarrass you or worse--inwardly you’re certain you’ve made the right decision. You wake up every day after that first day a better more whole person. Though you may wrestle with doctrine and polemic, you’ve been spared the crisis of doubt. It’s a gift beyond price.

But only if you like rules.

There’s a rather un-Islamic Egyptian saying I like a lot: ‘Leave with scandal; tomorrow it won’t matter’. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but plenty of people do exactly this when they renounce a religion--it’s the easiest and these days the most profitable way to go about things. So I admire the people who go with dignity, refusing to spread ugliness about a faith they no longer hold, refusing also to justify themselves to the faithful who will resent them for leaving. That takes a kind of courage most of us will never need.

Five Hours in Vegas

December 28

What a week.

Where politics are urgently concerned: I hope all of you are following the unfolding story behind the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. In addition to being scary and tragic, this event is likely to have an enormous impact on the politics of the entire region. With his usual swiftness, Ali Eteraz has compiled information from several sources and written a personal analysis as well. Click over and read.

Our flight from Seattle to Denver last week was delayed (along with hundreds of others), the result of which was that Omar and I spent about five hours held against our will in Las Vegas. We arrived at midnight to find that the rumors are true: there are slot machines at the gates in the airport. Too tired and dirty to hang out in any more terminals, we got a room at a nearby hotel for a few hours so we could shower and pray and get a little sleep. If you’re ever in the mood to permanently alter your perspective, take a cab along the Strip in the middle of the night when you haven’t slept in 24 hours. I think you could probably see those eight blocks from space--they were lit up as bright as the death of some star; metallic and blue and totally without shadow. It was beautiful in the way that anything pushed to an extreme is beautiful--I go back and forth about whether such overreaching is cheap or brilliant. Our hotel was a trumped up version of the one we always stay at in Luxor (the real Luxor), which we simply call “And Horse” because of a strangely aphoristic advertising slogan the management once used to lure people to its New Years Eve party. By which I mean it was beyond tacky...the thing actually contained a tiki lounge. I’d always assumed tiki lounges were a myth invented by Quentin Terantino. I was wrong.

In Boulder, I met up with some old high school friends who are magicians. No, I’m serious. Two are in PhD programs; the third is a deep-sea diver. The most accomplished of these studies ancient religions at Yale and speaks Coptic, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, has full-sleeve tattoos and plays in a metal band. I hadn’t sat down with these three together in eight or nine years. All of us used to look at the world in a very similar way: filtered through a diligently researched, Ecco-esque blend of many forms of paganism. I was always the ascetic and wanted something more stripped-down and abstract; for me monotheism was inevitable. It was interesting, now that we’re all adults, to see how their ideas, which followed the Left Hand much more closely than my own, have developed. I asked at one point--this is the question I ask all polytheists--how they navigate a truth that assimilates the facets of the world separately rather than as a system. In other words, how does one reconcile the existence of (for instance) a sea god and a moon god who are independent of each other, when the moon has been proven to affect the tides? “The alternative is too massive,” said the deep-sea diver. “I’m conscious of the great white light [tongue in cheek], but it’s too big for me to approach directly.”

Food for thought.

Hope everyone has had a merry Christmas, a happy Hannukah, a blessed Eid and a joyful Yule.

Mosqued

December 15

Back in the day when the Progressives were actually saying sensible things, one of their main concerns was the fact that the majority of American Muslims are ”unmosqued”--that is, they don’t regularly visit their local house of worship. The possible reasons were many: the lack of educated imams to lead prayers, ultraconservatism, shoddy arrangements for women. Anywhere in the world, it seems, it’s pretty tricky to find a really good mosque--in Cairo I didn’t regularly attend Friday prayers because it was typically all shouting and overcrowding, and even men went rather wearily. The gleaming exception was Sultan Hassan, a gorgeous, huge medieval mosque in the old quarter, where Sheikh Ali Gomaa has been the khateeb (that’s the person who gives the sermon, for those of you joining us from other walks of life) for years. Even though I got headaches trying to follow the classical Arabic, going there was always an illuminating experience.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never been to an American mosque. I had been told tales of crushing banality by Muslims who had--stories of sheikhs who could barely speak their native languages, let alone Arabic or English; hostility from other mosque-goers; the obsessive quotidian legalism of the clerical elite that has led to spiritual exhaustion all over the Muslim world, compounded in the US by isolation and vulnerability. The American mosque sounded more or less unbearable. Three weeks ago, however, driven by a need for familiarity and a break from the endless jabs at Islam and Arabs on TV (it’s gotten worse, not better, in the years I’ve been away), Omar and I set out for one of the larger Seattle-area mosques. When we got there, I was pleasantly surprised: the building was quite nice, built with a graceful coppery dome, and the space for women reminded me of an old Mamluke-era house: it was a kind of enclosed balcony above the men’s prayer area, fronted by a lattice. The mosque was patronized mainly by first and second-generation Somalis, along with a few Arabs and Bosnians. It was the first time I’d ever met European Muslims who weren’t converts.  In Egypt (and Iran) there was almost always a mini-interrogation before I was allowed into a mosque; people were always afraid I was a tourist looking for A Cultural Experience, who had come to stare at the congregation like it was some kind of open-air zoo. (I don’t plug this enough: it will sound strange, but responsible tourism is one of the silver bullets that will take care of this breach between ‘East’ and ‘West’, because irresponsible tourism is one of the biggest unreported factors creating it.) Here, no; I was accepted without question. The balcony was bustling with women and children; one young mother turned to me smiling and asked me to watch her child, a little boy named Bilal who was three or four years old, while she washed for prayer. He perched in my lap without any shyness, fluently interchanging English and Amharic as I asked him about his favorite colors--he had that confidence in the benevolence of strangers that children raised in tightly-knit communities are blessed with. It was a relief to be in an environment where help is expected, unquestioned and enjoyed. Just a few days earlier I’d been on a bus, and seeing an elderly woman struggling with her grocery bags, asked if she needed help; she turned to me scowling and said “Do you need help?” I almost laughed. I wanted to say yes, I do need help, because you have depressed the hell out of me. But I just smiled and turned up the volume on my iPod.

The khutba (that’s a sermon) was, in contrast to the company, dull. The sheikh, who was Moroccan, talked first in good Arabic and then in poor English about the necessity of dressing nicely, parking well and taking care not to disturb the neighbors when coming to the mosque--all good advice, but hardly worth the 20 minute drive. According to Omar, the men’s section was silent and withdrawn. We left feeling slightly demoralized.

Today, we decided to try another mosque for comparison. This one was markedly different: the sheikh and the main constituency were Pakistani, joined by a few Africans and Arabs and Bosnians. Most people looked as though they had come from work, and were dressed in shirts and ties. Some of the women were wearing pants. Pants! Even jeans! In a mosque! That alone was enough to brighten my day. Then the sheikh started talking, and I forgot all about outerwear: the sermon was good. The sheikh was trilingual. (Urdu, Arabic, English) His understanding of the Quran was nuanced enough to make me feel as though I’d learned something. There was nothing really transcendent about his speech--I want someday to walk away from a khutba with tears running down my face, and it hasn’t happened yet--but his understanding was sound, his words straightforward, and his faith unpretentious. We left feeling more cheerful than we have in many weeks. It seems there’s hope yet for the American mosque.

We’ll be back.