Tag: reflections

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same troublous storms that toss the private state and render life unsweet. These vices are the causes of those storms. Religions, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occassional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.

a) Salafi mosque that I used to regularly attend, which eight years ago prohibited Muslims from voting in the "kafir" system, concludes at khutbah two weeks ago "to pay your taxes is the obey the Will of God." Also cites to all sorts of islamic scholars, not merely the Salaf as Salihoon. Provides historical proof that even when the distinction between Land of War and Land of Islam was accepted, Muslims engaged in peaceful trade with the residents of the Land of War. In other words, commerce trumps war.

b) Black mosque that I've never attended drops facts -- yes, actual historical facts -- on me that I had never heard before. Such as: the number of apostates that the Prophet had put to death after his return to Mecca was less than 10. I. did. not. know. that. Not only that, but I heard of a great story about the sister of Ali RA giving sanctuary to some of these apostates and the Prophet granting them sanctuary because she hid them in her house even though he had initially demanded that they be put to death. I. did. not. know. that. either. Can you imagine? Learning facts? At a Friday sermon? Makes one stay awake.

I'm also convinced that I like black mosques more than immigrant ones.

Finally, I just watched Monty Python's Spamalot theatrical production.

There was nothing relevant to Muslim legislative reform in it.

It gets hot in hurr.

The literature that I read as an eight year old – even popular literature – contained exhortations to choose death over life. I rejected it then and I reject it now, yet when I reveal that fact to today’s Westerner, he immediately jumps back and says “Gotcha! Islam does extol murder!” This, in turn, leads to the need to conduct massive analyses of the entire history of Islam, its Prophets, and of the source texts which have been interpreted ceaselessly by others. Fact is: Understanding the scripture read by a criminal is a good but ultimately inadequate way of understanding him. Understanding the scripture read by what is only a potential criminal is limiting to the point of irrelevance.

The fact of the matter is that when I read those exhortations I did not appreciate them in light of my religion. There were other “forces” that pushed young men to volunteer, or, be volunteered, for the ways of violence. Money certainly undergird a lot of these decisions, but it was not the exclusive one. Other social ills played into the mix. A boy running away from the specter of his rape; a father who through his ineptitude had lost control of his family; sexual repression; the search for glory; a civic system in which the ideological participants are purchased by the bulk at public auctions by the highest bidding politician; a class of women who due to gender apartheid and social disenfranchisement are incapable of offering a critique of the discourse in which their men are drowned; and perhaps most damning of all, the complete and sheer ignorance on the part of the elites of the world who do not look beyond the shaded green domes of their “modern” mosques and “postmodern” theories and deconstructive scriptural analysis.

The world is not a global village. That is a lie. The world is, at best, a fiefdom. Perhaps the analogy is inapt but only because in the real world the castles are actually in the sky. Inside these castles sit not Gulliverean Laputans engaged in yoga, but men with guns, their sites gleefully trained downwards. From these great heights stone and mortar tumbles from the castles and crushes without concern, creating the conditions for each man below to aspire to be Prometheus, to be Spartacus, to be Toussant L’Overture. Some wish to steal the fire from Olympus; some wish to put Olympus to it.

Yet let it not be understood that the palpitating and wailing herd is an impotent, or that its poverty renders it innocent. It is dehumanizing to tell the poverty stricken that “they cannot be otherwise” because the simple fact is that as humans, with the freedom to choose (which exists even when the body is bound), they can be. There are moments in each life which are beyond how much money is in the wallet and dependent solely on the constitution of one’s character. There are many among the have not’s who do not choose the right course of action. It isn’t on account of genetic infirmity, or lack of education, or a lower IQ. How can people who (if Hernando de Soto’s study of the extra-legal capital in the third world is to be believed) are worth 9 trillion dollars, and have the brains to paralyze the global music and fashion scene (and now resist the armies of multiple superpowers), and who can fabricate every single American and Soviet weapon in mud huts, be shorn of their accountability at the altar of conscience?

I submit they cannot. 

A: Why is it that we invoke God?

B: For inner peace and salvation in the after life.

A: Then why invoke Him in politics? 

I know that I previously said that there was no such thing as Islamic Humanism. I said that the Eteraz vision of "humanist Islam" was, really, an effort to combine the best of humanism with the best of Islam, especially in the arena of social justice.

So, it might at first strike some as odd that I do think there is such a thing as Islamic Existentialism. However, that term does not -- I repeat, does not -- denote that I am talking about a merging of the religion of Islam with a merging of Sartrean or Kierkegardian Existentialism. That is not what I mean at all. When I say "Islamic Existentialism" I'm talking about an altogether independent tradition that is as Muslim as it is not; as existentialist as it is not. I call it Islamic Existentialism because there is nothing else to call it. 

The fundamental premise of this tradition is this: no one asked me.

No one asked me if I wanted to be an I. No one asked me if I wanted to exist. No one asked me if I was OK with a corporeal body attached to my spirit. No one asked me for my consent in my creation. I became because I had to. I had no way of resisting. God wanted it. Be, he said, and I was.

This view simultaneously affirms the power of God to create, while providing a sheepish but ultimately powerful way of questioning God as well. Yes God, you can make everything, but you made me without bothering to consult me. That is at once both a heartfelt affirmation of how worthless man is in relation to God and a strident rebuke to a God who does -- does anything He wants -- irrespective of others. No one asked me is as much a view of God as it is a view about man. Beautiful, no?

It is no surprise that this view has been the favorite of the poets of the past -- Ghalib and Khayyam notably -- and of the poets of today (no one really comes to mind). Most people, including Muslims, have taken this view as the equivalent of fatalism. Others have called it world weariness. Forester called it pathos. It is none of those things.

Yes, its true that no one asked me, but nevertheless here I am. Since I am here, and here comes the most important unstated conclusion: I might as well embrace it all. That is how the poets have characterized it, as did Zauq:

Life brought me so I came; Death takes me so I go
I came not willfully; nor willfully I go.

Most people upon encountering this Islamic Existentialism cannot break out of the duality set up: life and death. They think that coming into being non-consensually and dying non-consensually is all we have. So they say, well, why not kill myself? Better yet, why not kill my enemy? Why not just abstain? Why not do nothing? Why not just recite the Quran and wither away?

I will tell you why. Because between coming into being and going out of being, there is this.

Life. 

This morning I consumed a cup of water from a spring that has provided water for men since the time of Abraham the Patriarch. I am speaking of the Water from ZamZam. I took the first sip and wondered whether I should feel touched by novelty. I didn't. However, by the second, and then the third, it was no longer I, Ali Eteraz, drinking the water. I was everyone who had preceded me, the old man from Persia whose pilgrimage to Mecca was two long years; I was my great grandfather who used to call me Ala'uddin and thus provided a precedent for when Southerners called me Aladdin; the woman brought to the Kaba upon the shoulders of her two sons. I was all the billions of men who had pilgrimaged to Mecca, and I drank with their mouth, and saw with their eyes, and I smelled of all them, and it was not disgusting, or filthy, or bacterial, to be composed of so many colored people, and broken people, and poor people, and old people. It was a moment in which the primordial memory -- of the period before existence -- percolated inside me, shrieked with the authority of a dragon and then receded. Who are you, Ali? It looked down upon me. You are just one of the children. You are just one sip of water in a spring that does not cease.

Who knows whether Zamzam was dug by the tip of an angel's wing. Or if it was discovered by the kicking of the babe Ismail, son of Abraham, as his mother went running to Saffa and Marwa looking for water leaving him in the shade. Who knows whether the power of Zamzam is that it has fed a thousand caravans and a thousand and one pilgrims and a hundred and twenty four thousand prophets and a million angels and a billion Muslims and an infinite number of the heretofore uncreated humans. Who knows whether the power of Zamzam lies in the fact that it is tied to the story of a woman who happened to have the misfortune of marrying a man whose ambitions were too big for his marriage. Who knows whether the power of Zamzam lies in the natural filtration system that the angels of God, turning aquatic, placed below the desert. Who knows if there is a sea of natural water below the Kaba. Who knows whether Zamzam are the tears of God. Who knows whether Zamzam is supplied by the milk from the stream of Kawthar in Paradise. Who knows if its expiration will mark the end of the earth. No one knows. I do not care.

This morning I consumed a cup of water from a spring that provided water for men since the time of Abraham the Patriarch. It ressurrected inside me the hesitatant but always present stream that is freedom. It shattered the tyranny of existence (which was given to me without consultation with me and without consent). It restored my innocence.