Sherry Jones Has The Right To Offend Me

August 14

By now those of you with your ears to the ground will have heard the following: publication of The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel by Sherry Jones, has been indefinitely postponed by its publisher, Random House. The reason? The novel, which chronicles the life of Aisha, a wife of the Prophet Muhammad, could provoke violent backlash from conservative Muslims. One excerpt, in which Aisha recalls her first sexual encounter with Muhammad, has been making its way around the internet, and has become the subject of much debate.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding between secular people and people of faith about religious figures. It boils down to this: to a person of faith, reading about the private lives of religious figures is like reading about the private lives of your parents. Even if there’s only one sex scene, done in the most tasteful manner imaginable, it’s still a sex scene about your parents. No one in their right mind wants to see that. True to form, I read the excerpt and wanted to call my therapist. Faith is irrational. That is part of its beauty, but also part of what makes it dangerous.

Yes, I was offended. By a single paragraph of an unpublished book. Even though it was clear the author did not intend to be offensive, and had in fact attempted to handle the subject in a delicate manner. (Albeit with some rather purple language.) But that doesn’t matter. Sherry Jones has the right to speak her mind whether I am offended or not. She has the right to be published whether I am offended or not. The true measure of our moral courage is whether we defend the art we can’t stand with the same vigor with which we defend the art we love. So I am willing to go to bat for this.

There is another reason I feel this particular book is worth fighting for: The Jewel might be purple, but it is not hate speech. That much is also immediately clear. During the Danish cartoon fiasco I said I refused to defend hate speech as free speech, even though I realize the two cannot be uncoupled. I said I wished someone would write a provocative but genuinely exploratory book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, so we could at least have a conversation about real ideas. Well, here we are.

The refusal to publish The Jewel of Medina cedes valuable ground to the fundamentalists. Is there a danger of violence if it is published? Yes, I’m afraid there probably is. But Sherry Jones wants her rights back, and I want my religion back. We’ve all got skin in the game now. At some point, we’re going to have to act like it.

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.