October 17, 2004
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
Be with those who help your being.
Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don’t try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it’s too late for all you could become.Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots
and makes them green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?
Our topic this morning is Islam, one of major faiths of the world. For the past several years it has been almost impossible to watch a news broadcast for half an hour without hearing some reference to Islam, whether it is oil prices in Saudi Arabia, the attack on mosques in India or Islamic extremists using mosques to store weapons.
Today is a good day to consider Islam. This is the first Sunday since the beginning of Ramadan, the most sacred time in the Muslim calender, a month of fasting. It was during the month of Ramadan that the Prophet Mohammad received the Koran.
What will I say about Islam?
Some of you may know. Others may not. This reminds me of a story about Mulla
Nasreddin. Nasreddin is an old Persian folk hero, sometimes a Sufi teacher,
other times village idiot. One gathers that we are not supposed to be able to
figure out which. Consider this story.
Mulla Nasreddin had a reputation, not unspotted, as a preacher. So one day a
village needed a preacher for a few weeks but was short on cash. Why not Mulla
Nasreddin?
The man who brought him the invitation to speak apparently told him he was selected as the village was short on cash.
On his first holy day in the pulpit, he spoke to the congregation, “Those who know what I am going to say to day, put your hands up.” Well, that seemed an odd question to them and none put there hand up. “What!?” shouted Mulla. “Do you expect me to cast pearls before swine? If you can’t grasp my thinking, why bother talking to you?” And he left the pulpit.
The next week, he began again, “Those who know what I am going to say, put your hands up.” Wise to him now, they all put their hands up. Looking about, Nasreddin said, “Since you all know, why should I bother!” And left the pulpit.
The third week the congregation had been out talking in the camel pen about how to handle this fellow. Sure enough, he started with the same remark. Half put their hands up and half kept them down. Nasreddin responded, “Those of you who know tell those of you who don’t know.” And headed home.
For those of you who do not know what I will be saying today, permit me to reassure you that I am preaching an old time Unitarian Universalist sermon, affirming respect for all religions. Islam is a major world religion with about one and a half billion practitioners. Those of you who attended last Sunday’s Celebration 2004 with Bill Schulz of Amnesty International will recall that he affirmed our liberal values: respect for the dignity and worth of each person. We, as practitioners of liberal religion, do not construct enemies, but reach out in hope to all peoples, of all faiths. Our liberal, Unitarian roots encourage us to dialogue with those who differ from us, enriched in diversity. Our Universalist roots speak of love, of a love so great that none can be cast beyond its embrace. In the words of the founder of the Transylvanian branch of Unitarians, Francs David, “you need not think alike to love alike.” (# 566)
To speak of human rights and liberal values such as human dignity, may, today, in the present culture of fear, raise objections. There are those who argue Islam is a religion of violence, a faith that cannot cohabit with liberal, Western democratic values. I think the clearest way to respond to such objections is to point out that a great many Muslims already live in democracies. The democracy with the largest number of Muslims is Indonesia, with 194 million Muslims of a total population of 220.5 million.
What country has the second largest Muslim population? I will give you a clue, 149 million Muslims live in that country? .......... India. The country with the next largest Muslim population, with 144 million, the CIA calls a federal republic, Pakistan. In Bangladesh there are 129 million Muslims; in Turkey there are 71 million. Over 51 million Muslims live in Europe and six million in North America. If most Muslims live in democracies, how can Islam be hostile to democracy? It may have different shapes, but ours here is not perfect either. [LINK]
No woman has yet been elected as president of the United States, and many people think the country is not ready for a female president. Yet the largest Muslim country, Indonesia, has had a woman president, Megawati Sukarnoputri. India was led by Indira Gandhi. On December 2, 1988 Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, becoming the first woman to head the government of an Islamic country. While women may not have the right to vote in a number of countries with Muslim majorities, unless we are too carried away by American exceptionalism we might keep in mind that women have had the vote in our country for just over eighty years.
I offer you this broader perspective for I fear that there is a campaign in our country against Muslims. It takes the form of saying Muslims are ... all like Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden is dangerous, but the tyrant Saddam Hussein wasn’t even a Muslim however cynically manipulated Islam.
If we conflate all Muslims, we will never understand the world we live in. Today in Iraq there is growing tension between the two major aspects of Islam, Sunni and Shia. The head of the Iraqi secret police, Brig. Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shawani, is a Sunni Muslim as are most of the neo-Baathists. Shawani is claiming that a group close to the leading Shite scholar in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has been an agent for the Iranian government.
We loose our grip on events in confusing all Muslims. Would you think that Christian Identity members such as Timothy McVeigh who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, or David Koresh of the Branch Dravidians, were representatives of Christianity? The Jewish law student Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the name of a truer Judaism. Does he represent all Jews? Our value of the respect for each individual calls upon us not to prejudge faiths, but to enquire; not to confuse propaganda with reality.
Yet there is campaign against Muslims. Most recently in the news was the story about Yusuf Islam. Islam, the former pop star known as Cat Stevens, said he had begun legal action over what he called the "baseless slur" of the refusal to grant him entry to the United States. He wants to "find out exactly what is going on, and to take all necessary steps to undo the very serious, and wholly unfounded, injustice which I have suffered". [LINK]
Yusuf Islam was not the
first Muslim refused entry to the United States. At the end of August, Tariq
Ramadan was about to leave his teaching position in Switzerland to become Luce
professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding at Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc
Institute for International Peace Studies, when suddenly his visa was revoked.
Everything had been set, and then out of the blue, without explanation! Ramadan
is, it seems to me the kind of thinker we require, promoting a dialogue between
the West and Islam. A leading modern interpreter of Islam who has condemned
terrorism, he has written, "Nothing in Islam can legitimize xenophobia
or the rejection of a human being due to his/her religious creed or ethnicity.”
[LINK]
These things are not just happening far away to people we do not know. During
the Wheel of Life, Ron shared about his best friend’s father. I was recently
meeting with other Unitarian Universalist ministers. One UU minister is of Iranian
descent with an Iranian name. She recently received a call from someone identifying
themselves as from the CIA and just wanted her to know that they were available
if she wanted to talk with anyone.
African Americans are concerned
and paying close attention to what is happening to Muslim Americans. This past
week Michigan congressional representative John Conyers held a hearing into
the use of preventative detention to deny Muslims their civil rights and liberties.
Rev. Walter Fauntroy of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington D.C., who
struggled for civil rights with Martin Luther King, made it clear that Muslim
Americans are now the front line of the erosion of civil rights in our country.
You can watch the hearing on the C-Span.org website. [Go to www.C-Span.org,
search on ‘Muslim American Society,’ and select the hearing with
Rep. Conyers of 10/13/2004.]
Recently the Foundation
for Defense of Democracies held a symposium, titled "World War IV:
Why We're Fighting, Whom We're Fighting, How We're Fighting." Speakers
were by an large neoconservatives. They included former CIA director, James
Woolsey, who has long spoken of the fight against "Islamo-fascism"
- defined as including "the mullahs of Iran", the Ba'athist parties
of Iraq and Syria, and "the Wahhabis", of which the al-Qaeda terrorist
group is a part - as the equivalent of a world war.
Neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, who has also used "World War IV" as his favored description for the challenges Washington faces in the Near East, spoke. He called Israeli tactics in the occupied territories a "model for how to fight this kind of war", and asserted that "Iran is unquestionably on the agenda." [LINK]
Among the neoconservatives is the most popular author on Islam, Bernard Lewis. Juan Cole, a UU and professor at the University of Michigan reviews Lewis’s What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response,
[Lewis] is not writing analytical history here, with a view to explaining particular problems by isolating independent variables. He is writing moral history, which is tautological. He seems to insist on erasing any successes they have had, and to imply that the Muslims have failed because they are failures.
Neoconservatives have called for the United States to enter into World War IV. World War III being the Cold War against communism, and WW IV, against Islam. One of the great scholars of Islam, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, once remarked that there is no such thing as Islam, there are only Muslims. The Islam we hear about today is more the ideological opponent required by neoconservatism. The Neoconservatives argue that, “A policy of perpetual war against a threatening enemy is the best way to ward off political decay. And if the enemy cannot be found, then it must be invented.” However dangerous Osama bin Laden is, making him the face of Islam will prevent us from working on our real problems.
Those who fear Islam, forgetting the violence of Christian history of Crusades, may point to the Islamic concept of jihad. The word jihad has come to mean a holy war. Yet the word means much the same as the English word struggle. If I spoke of the struggle of the American colonialists against the British, you would know what I meant.
Last Sunday at Celebration 2004 we used a responsive reading by Desmond Tutu, the first line of which speaks directly to our concern, “Liberation is costly.” What shall we make of responsive reading number 579 in our hymnal from the writings of Stephen Douglas:
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground ... This struggle may be a moral struggle or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
And so we must ask, what is the struggle, what is the struggle that Douglas calls us to? What is the struggle Muslims tell us their Prophet has called them to? A closer reflection on the meaning of jihad shows that the Prophet spoke of two kinds of jihad.
The word Jihad,
has come to mean holy war in American terminology. But in Islam, there is the
interpretation of the lesser Jihad and the higher Jihad. The
lesser Jihad is holy war and the higher jihad, the more important,
is the struggle of the self, the relationship with God and to resist the tendency
toward evil. That is the primary struggle of the human being. The lesser Jihad,
which is war, is sanctioned only in conditions when Muslims are subjected to
persecution.
http://www.islamweb.net/php/php_arabic/readArt.php?lang=E&id=12224
The higher jihad, the moral – spiritual – struggle, is the struggle to exist. Not existing as grubbing around, but to exist as we some how strangely know ourselves to be. We are often confused by who we are, by what we do. We know that often our words and deeds to not represent not just the best in ourselves, but who we know ourselves to be. This struggle to be not just a need driven spasm, but an emotional, spiritual whole is our spiritual quest. We sense ourselves fragmented, broken. That which we would do, we do not; and that which we would not do, we do. This is the struggle, our spiritual quest, our path to wholeness: we seek reconciliation with ourselves, with our community and the cosmic order. The path calls us to address the pain within ourselves, not seek to make others suffer as a solution to our suffering.
As a description of this struggle to exist, I would recite for you a poem by the great Muslim poet, Rumi:
The Story of My Life
1. I was ready to tell
the story of my life
but the ripple of tears
and the agony of my heart
wouldn't let meI began to stutter
saying a word here and there
and all along I felt
as tender as a crystal
ready to be shatteredin this stormy sea
we call life
all the big ships
come apart
board by boardhow can I survive
riding a lonely
little boat
with no oars
and no armsmy boat did finally break
by the waves
and I broke free
as I tied myself
to a single boardthough the panic is gone
I am now offended
why should I be so helpless
rising with one wave
and falling with the nextI don't know
if I am
nonexistence
while I exist
but I know for sure
when I am
I am not
but
when I am not
then I am
now how can Ibe
a skeptic
about the
resurrection and
coming to life again
since in this world
I have many times
like my own imagination
died and
been born againthat is why
after a long agonizing life
as a hunter
I finally let go and got
hunted down and became free
[LINK]
As Unitarian Universalists we honor the struggle to exist in all faiths. We believe that as long as this struggle is violent, a spiritual quest remains unfulfilled. The quest for us all, Muslims, Christians, Jews and UU’s is for wholeness, reconciliation. In a word, the eternal embrace of the greatest love. May nothing human be alien to us!
Rumi: “There is a field out there beyond right and wrong, beyond good and evil; meet me there.”