What It Means - Day 79

As I've said several times, this year-long (inshallah) reflection on Islam and the life of a Muslim will take several forms, mainly depending upon what I'm thinking about that day. Sometimes I'll focus on a passage from the Quran or a specific hadith, but other times I'll talking about experiences I've had or people I've met or articles I've read. And sometimes I'll show pictures of mosques I've visited, whether I've prayed in them or not. To me this is a way to express the extraordinary diversity of Islam and the Muslim world. Here are pictures of an old mosque on the island of Pemba in Zanzibar, which we visited a couple days into our student visit in January. The brothers and sisters treated us very kindly prepared a lengthy presentation on the faith. At the end we were given a tour of the entire mosque and the surrounding buildings, including some repairs that were paid for by the US government.

Oh, and as I say every so often, please keep in mind that these are my highly idiosyncratic musings. I speak for no one but myself. My goal is to discuss what one utterly ordinary and unimportant person thinks about when he thinks about his faith.

This is the mihrab, the semi-circular niche, which represents the qibla, or the direction of Mecca. Muslims face in this direction when they prey. If the mosque was designed as mosque then it will have an actual niche, but if the building has been re-purposed (such as our mosque) then it probably just has an outline on the wall. 

The brothers giving a series of talks about the faith itself and its history on Pemba. In the distance you can see kids looking in the window. Since the entire village showed up I had this feeling that the talk actually had several intended audiences.

For some reason I really like this picture. Muslims will come to a mosque at all hours to pray and to sit quietly. This picture reflects that, but also works as a fitting metaphor for the highly individualistic nature of the faith.

You can see some of the male students sitting and listening.  The women, both Pemban and Champlain students, were behind the orange curtain in the back. As you know, I have reservations about the separation of the sexes during the sermons, and I think the need for equality before God trumps questions of modesty. At the end I made it very clear to our friend Kombo and the Imam that our students had to have exactly the same tour of the grounds and time to walk around and explore inside the mosque. Kombo could tell that I was getting impatient. At the same time, our female students did get a sense of what a sermon was like inside that particular mosque, and, good or bad, I'd prefer that had an authentic experience and not one scripted for the visitors.

I was able to sneak off before it got started to pray. Mr. Mohammed, one of our friends, spirited me outside to make wudu (ablution) and then I prayed in a quiet corner. The students were in their own universe and none of them saw it (which was my hope; again, I don't hide my faith, but the point of the trip is not my faith).

What It Means - Day 78

"And We have sent down unto thee the Book in truth, confirming the Book that came before it, and as a protector over it. So judge between them in accordance with what God has sent down, and follow not their caprices away from the truth that has come unto thee. For each among you We have appointed a law and a way. And had God willed, He would have made you one community, but [He willed otherwise], that He might try you in that which He has given you. So vie with one another in good deeds.Unto God shall be your return all together, and He will inform you of that wherein you differ."
Quran 5:48

Yes, we're now on the other side of another Ramadan, but my goal is to continue to write on Islam and issues, big and small, local and more global, related to being a Muslim. I am done fasting, so hopefully I'll begin to start writing (and thinking) in complete sentences again (although I rarely did before, truthfully; insert joke of man talking to a doctor about playing the piano).

Anyway, here's one of my favorite passage, drawn from the fifth surah, which is sometimes rendered as "The Table Spread." It's one of the longest, and also richest, surahs, so I'll end up having a lot to say about it down the road.

This passage starts off by confirming that the Quran was sent down to confirm both the Torah and the Gospels, and, from an Islamic perspective, also protect them. That doesn't mean that Islam agrees with entirely with Judaism and Christianity, of course, but that has much less to do with the message than what Jews and Christians eventually did with the message. The Islamic perspective would be that the earlier messages were incomplete, which doesn't mean they were incorrect. As the centuries progressed Jews and Christians moved farther and farther away from the message (which, obviously, is essentially what Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers said in the sixteenth century). Now, could you make a similar argument that as the centuries progressed Muslims moved farther and farther away from the message? The official line would be no (as it would be inside of every religion) but I would argue yes, but that will doubtless be a number of blog discussions down the road.

More importantly, at least to me in this moment in regards to this blog post (well, truthfully, I'd say more importantly generally) it also speaks to the importance of religious diversity. As Nasr explains in the commentary from the Study Quran:

"Although vv. 41-47 taken together suggest the validity of Jews and Christians judging by their own scriptures and thus the continuing spiritual guidance to be found in those scriptures, this verse goes farther by asserting the providential nature of different religious communities and their distinct laws and practices. Indeed, the verse does not pertain only to Jews and Christians, but rather makes a universal statement about all religions. For each among you We have appointed a law and a way indicates that different religious communities may have different ritual and legal formulations specifically 'appointed' for them by God, and that each religious community is independent of the laws of other such communities, even if the essential truths and principles of the religions are the same." Nasr p. 301

The popular perception is that Islam doesn't respect or even recognize other religions, but nothing is further from the truth. Are there intolerant Muslims? Of course. That's like asking if there are human Muslims?  But in the Quran we are reminded again and again to be tolerant and respectful of other traditions. What I like about Nasr's comment is that he's not simply stopping at the Peoples of the Book, and taking it to more general issues of faith. Now, is Nasr more ecumenical than most Muslims? Sadly, that is doubtless true, but I read the Quran the same way he does on this issue.

Nasr continues his commentary:

"The subsequent command vie with one another in good deeds (cf. 2:148; 3:114), however, seems most plausibly addressed to human beings as a whole and thus supposes not a process of supersession among religious forms, but rather a contemporaneous existence of different religious communities competing in virtue. The competition is in good deeds and thus on the practical rather than theological level.  Resolving the intractable theological differences between the religions may not be a vocation for religious adherents in this world; rather, these may be matters only resolved by God in the Hereafter, when He will inform you of that wherein you differ. This verse carries enormous importance for the question of religious pluralism from an Islamic perspective. Since it is one of the key verses confirming the essential truth of different religious forms and indicating that the formal differences between religions have been Divinely ordained, it has played a central role in contemporary Islamic discussions of religious pluralism."

I know I quote Nasr an awful lot, but, seriously, I'm going to state it better than that? Devoting time to arguing about whether your view of God is better than another person's is some combination of counterproductive, onanistic and potentially dangerous. Rather, compete with them in good deeds. As I've often proposed, we can't understand and control the divine, but we can, hopefully, understand and control what we're doing on a daily basis. If I devote my time to being the best Muslim I can be, then any competition with someone else trying to be the best Hindu or Christian or Sikh or Jew or Buddhist they can be will only benefit ourselves and others.

What It Means - Day 77

"Nay, whosoever submits his face to God, while being virtuous, shall have his reward with his Lord. No fear shall come upon them; nor shall they grieve."
Quran 2:112

When we break our fast tonight we will have reached the end of another Ramadan. I can't believe this is already my fourth. My initial plan was that I would reserve either this specific blog post or the one from the following day to reflect upon what I've learned this year, but, as usual, my plans went awry. Well, I guess sort of went awry, because as I consider this passage it does say something about the experience of Ramadan, and especially this Ramadan. This is drawn from the second surah, usually rendered as "The Cow," which is by far the longest surah in the entire Quran. It comprises something like a a twelfth of the entire Quran. As we've discussed, with the exception of "al-Fatihah," the first surah, the Quran generally runs from longest to shortest, with "The Cow" (technically, al-Baqarah) featuring 286 verses and the 114th having only 6 verses (and short ones at that).

I chose this particular verse because I found myself growing quite emotional as I reread it. Partially, of course, that related to the beauty of the underlying message. To me this is another of those wonderful Quranic verses that speaks to the universality of God and faith, that is, that there are a thousand paths to God. However, I suspect that this is a minority opinion, at least according to the commentary associated with it in the Study Quran.  I reread my notes (often difficult because my hand writing is uniformly bad, especially true in the wee small hours of the morning during Ramadan) and I had written: "g - to me this just seems to be about sincere belief, and should therefore be universal." I often start a note with "g" if I'm mainly talking to myself; not certain why I do it, but I have for as long as I can remember. Some commentators, however, suggested that in this case "submits his face to God" speaks to the act of touching your forehead to the ground during prostration, and that would make it more specific to Islam. Undeniably this is true, but, per usual, I'm reading it more metaphorically and thus a more general call for submitting to God. Clearly, an Islamic scholar is better positioned to make that call, but the Quran enjoins us to "think" not "regurgitate" so I don't feel that bad about going further afield. Either way you read it, I would still argue that the call to sincere submission and the leading of a virtuous life are universal.

This reason why this, at least in my small, tired brain, related to Ramadan is that it's exactly the sort of passage that makes me emotional at the end of Ramadan. It could be something as simple as I'm so exhausted that I'm more emotional (as we all tend to be when we're at the end of our tether), and maybe that's part of the whole "plan" for Ramadan. If we're supposed to overcome our own greedy ego then maybe one way to do it is just to wear it out. More specifically to this Ramadan, I think this particular verse spoke to me in that more and more I see the message of toleration and universality throughout the Quran and the faith. Are there clunkers in both which allow for the opposite to occur, but I think you have to actively search for them and foreground them, and to do that it reflects your own prejudices.

The Misery Diet

My most excellent friend Kerry sent along this picture today as part of another discussion, and I shamelessly swiped it.  Actually, I don't know if I ever saw it before now. She snapped it, now ten years ago, when we were in China together. A group of Champlain professors took advantage of Dave Finney's (or Champlain president then) Faculty Internationalization Initiative (FII), of distant memory, to travel to China on CIEE tours. I had actually arrived a couple days earlier because I presenting at a conference. It was shortly after I had left my ex-wife and I was living on the floor of my office and eating a lot of ramen noodles. Since I had Global Modules business to do, and because I had no place else to go, I embarked on a seven week, seven country trip from the Middle East to China to Central Europe to Western Europe. I spent some amazing days with a friend in Barcelona at the end of the trip, but mainly I just hung out by myself for almost two months, with the exception of my time in China. It was great to see China with Kerry and Craig before they took off for southern China on their CIEE tour, whereas I headed west in my Journey to the West-themed tour, making it as far west as Kasgar. Anyway, Kerry snapped this picture of me in the Forbidden City on our day there. I'm sure I must have some posts associated with it somewhere (as I close in on 2000 posts I'm, not surprisingly I guess, sometimes surprised by posts I don't remember writing about places that I only vaguely remember visiting).

Yes, the Misery Diet. I think I was down to less than 200 pounds, which, on my frame, is pretty skeletal. This was also after I had my infamous bike wreck and wrapped my face around a guardrail, so I was a bit of a mess. But, somehow, I made it through. I never complained about it at the time because, as my father always told me, "You were born a free, white man in America, so you can never complain about the consequences of your decisions." Essentially, he was saying that I was born with a ton of privilege and thus could actually make decisions, so I needed to keep my mouth shut if they didn't turn out the way I hoped. I was miserable because I had left my wife - and failed her and my son - so I probably deserved a hell of a lot more unhappiness than I found.

What It Means - Day 76

"Be easy, do not be difficult."
Muhammad, Hadith

One of the many advantages of Ramadan is being free to read and re-read portions of the Quran and the hadith and other related writings. Often this is absolutely necessary because the material is so complex that it requires multiple readings. For instance, the other day I was reconsidering the extraordinary metaphoric complexity of surah 18 (much, much more on that later when I'm operating on more sleep) and it really hit me how much better I understand the meaning and purpose of the surah now, and how much more I'll understand five years from now. In the pre-dawn hour this morning I was struggling with Nasr's commentary on the pre-temporal covenant between God and humans and its implications, and I feel that I'm slowly getting my brain around it and maybe in ten years I'll finally nod my head and think, doubtlessly incorrectly, "yeah, OK, got it." At other times I stumble across a section that I overlooked or read previously and it didn't stick. This often happens with the ahadith that are embedded in the Study Quran. It's not that they aren't important, obviously, but they're buried in the massive, small-print commentary that are take up half or two-third or sometimes entire pages of the Study Quran. Nasr is focusing on the Quran itself, but in the process of dissecting bigger themes he'll, naturally, incorporate ahadith, that is the sayings of the Prophet, into his answer. Anyway, "Be easy, do not be difficult" jumped out at me this morning. In was in the midst of a lengthy complex discussion buried in the commentary and maybe that's why it never clicked with me before. It's sad, because I would argue that it may be one of the most important concepts in the Quran. Granted, I'm wired to like a statement like this because I'm a simple man, but also because it cycles back to my belief that what really matters, what we can really learn, is how to treat each other on a day to day basis. Seriously, how many of our problems would be solved it we simply decided to avoid being difficult? I think I have a new mantra.

A Pensive CB and the Concept of Air

I don't know why I haven't posted this picture before, at least on my blog; I'm certain it popped up on Facebook at one time or another. I snapped this on last March's trip to Jordan as were waiting for lunch to arrive. On the surface it appears to show a decidedly pensive Cyndi Brandenburg. However, I think if you look closer you see something else, and this brings me back to COR 110 and Cynthia Freeland's Portraits & Persons (a book the students hate, and which I won't allow to be dropped from the course, and not simply because the students hate it - at least not entirely). Freeland discusses  Roland Barthes (who seems to be the unofficial philosopher of the Core division) and his concept of "air", which I know I've discussed previously. Essentially, air is the almost indefinable something that makes up an individual, and that you have to know the person to identify the air. Barthes used the example of a picture of his mother that he beautifully described, but never shared, because he said no one else would ever see her indefinable quality. To me, this picture captures Cyndi's air in that there's always the deep thinker, but also always the mischievous soul lurking beneath the surface. Of course, if you take that to be true then it's also possible that you're filling in a picture with your own scripted meaning, I suppose.

A penny for your thoughts, Mei Mei.

What It Means - Day 75

"In the West today there is a tendency toward what one might call 'the absolutization of the transient.' Each decades absolutizes its own fashions of thought and action without the least pause and consideration of the fact that a decade later those very fashions and ideas will be buried in the dustbin of history as one turns to a new decade."
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam, p. 189

This passage from Nasr relates to a conversation we were having the other day about traditional beliefs inside of Islam. Nasr's point, in this particular instance discussing the status of women in the Muslim world, is that it's very unfair for any culture, especially for the West, to judge fairly what it happening inside of other cultures. What makes it so tough for the West to do that is that no one in history changes as rapidly and consistently as the West does. In fact, as I often point out to the students, for us it would be monumental change if we weren't changing. I'll talk more about several issues relating to women later, so I'll hold off on that for now. Nasr's point is that the Muslim world is changing, but fitfully and much more slowly than the West, so that by comparison it seems that it isn't changing at all. His point is obviously valid, but I would argue that it's also true that we're more averse to change than we should be. We are told repeatedly that innovation is a path to the Hellfire, a term I never use, but am this time just because that's how it often comes up in a sermon. This brings us back to the internal vs external aspects of the faith that I find myself talking about so much. To me there's a profound difference between saying, "you know, I think we were wrong on that one God thing, so we're adding a few more" and being more open to issues related to women or the LGBT community. The admonition against associating anything with God rests at the heart of the faith, whereas many of our views on women and LGBT issues are much more culturally and historically generated. So, an innovation, I would suggest natural evolution, on the latter is not nearly the same as an assault on the former.

As we've also discussed, the unique structure of Islam almost insures that change has to be organic and piecemeal. There is no Islamic equivalent of the Pope or the Patriarch, which means there is no one who could convene a broader Muslim counsel to discuss a changing world. For example, the other day we discussed the fact that mathematically the Hajj is now impossible for every Muslim, so you have a requirement of the faith which can't be met. If, systematically, we have no way to address that issue, then how do we ever tackle other topics? Plus, so many areas that are pre-dominantly Muslim are more traditional, further makes tackling change difficult. And then, conversely, does our aversion to change stand in the way of broader societal change?

Plus, well, I love the phrase "the absolutization of the transient," and I tend to drop it whenever I can; although, to be fair, I do cite Nasr in the process.