The Burning Bridge

The idea of America is often symbolized in a statue- the famous Statue of Liberty, with Emma Lazarus’ famed poetry etched into bronze, a bold rebuke to pompous lands of ancient times that had failed their poor and downtrodden, welcoming them to new shores with the promise of freedom. But, when I was on my way to this country, I did not have a statue in mind, or liberty, for that matter. I came bearing an image of a burning bridge. Long ago, I had been told the story of a king who took his army to battle after burning the bridge that they would need for a quick retreat. The only choice before them was to win or die. My battle was with my own story. There was no going back. My mind reeled with the problems that I had faced, as a student doing a Bachelors degree in Architecture, unwittingly in a long-distance marriage because of an immature mind that did not really know what it wants, and a culture that sees burden in unmarried girls. The same culture would not have  been kind to a girl who did not make a marriage work. No, liberty was not on my mind then. It was a bridge that burned down,  that brought me to America.

Durham, North Carolina was beautiful. The sky was crimson, and the tall pine trees silhouetted against them looked tremendous, and it was wonderful to be among those trees that looked like they had come out of rendering books. There is something about nature that is medicinal, like a spiritual balm. The husband besides me was kind, and familiar. In a different setting, far away from the homes we had left behind, we slipped slowly into a web of living. We made a home, and even though I had not come looking for it, there was a kind of freedom. After all, many social pressures were left behind. I had to make a marriage work, but what it would look like was left entirely to us. There was freedom from expectations that society puts upon you. In this new land, it was just us. And the absence of a battery of concerned observers, commentators, and experts helped us ease into the demands of marriage.

America was still strange, and would be for many years. My introverted nature would always be an impediment to assimilation. My heart was open to new people and ideas even though I also had strong convictions on many matters. It is strange, but when we rant against cultures that brought us up,  we forget that it has left indelible marks on our personality and attitude. I would look down upon certain American ways, but then simply could not resist the awe many other things inspired. One of them was the English language, and TV became my window into language. I spent hours catching up on culture through the screen. Black and white movies on TNT, and old family oriented sitcoms like Full House and Bill Cosby show opened my mind to new kinds of fun and puns. Humor is big in America. The thing about humor is that it requires a level of familiarity to produce the immediate impact that is intended. To laugh like an American would require many forays into the culture and close interactions with the people. Being a stay at home wife, I did not have real-life interactions, but the screen brought a familiarity with the culture. And when I was out in the real world, i watched it like a sitcom, reluctant to participate beyond what was absolutely necessary. I told myself that I enjoyed the anonymity. I was lying to myself. The truth is that I was self-conscious, afraid, nervous. Yes, America was strange and would continue to be so for many years to come.

 

photo credit: TahoeSunsets <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64149699@N00/148000609″>Sunset in the Pines</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;

Thank You, Mr. Trump

“O Sacred One, Teach us love, compassion and honour, that we may heal the earth and heal each other,” – An Ojibway Prayer.

It was another evening at Red Bench, the interfaith conversation meet conducted by Interfaith Action of Central Texas, or iACT in short. This one was at the First United Methodist Church in downtown Austin. I was in a mixed group that included two Catholics, two Methodists, a Jew, a non-believer and myself, a Muslim. The topic was “Religious Intolerance”. We talked about our faith journeys in the initial round, and it was interesting to note that most of us had taken our own personal, independent routes to our present beliefs. I brought up politics and religion to the discussion, and cited the mixing of the two as a reason for intolerance. There wasn’t any disagreement to the idea, and two in my group actively endorsed the separation of church and state. The lady sitting next to me expressed her concern for Muslims, and said that that was the first thing that occurred to her mind when she heard about the topic.

I told my group that I had never been a target of any Islamophobic attacks, and my children were also spared from it, possibly because of the fact that we live in a mixed neighborhood in Austin, which in itself is a very liberal hub in a predominantly red state. But, I reminded them, this isn’t just about Muslims. More than anything, it is about the very nature of America and what it stands for. It is about all the real problems out there, which the politicians are seeking to take our attention away from with such fear tactics. As people, we must not fall for it.

It is always a good experience to be at Red Bench, with people who are concerned for the world and who seek an understanding of people different from oneself. And I have to thank Mr. Trump for making Islamophobia understood. There was a time when the word “Islamophobia” stood for an overreaction from Muslims, and we had to look into ourselves and wonder if we were indeed overreacting. But not anymore. Whatever be Mr.Trump’s intention (there are many who think he is fooling with America, that his campaign is a big prank), the support he garners with his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric, brings to the fore what is ugly under the veneer of America. Let it ooze out, and then the veneer can sink deeper, closer to the heart of America. Like all lands, if this belongs to anything, it can belong only to what is true, what is right, and what is just. I have always walked on this land with a feeling of reverence for its ancient self, the one that the native Americans must have known, when land was a spiritual presence that is honored, not mastered and like a mother, when it nurtured all.

For me, Islam is nothing but a recognition of a timeless truth that transcends earth and our earthly existence, a bowing down to that bigger truth in reverence. There are others who call that reverence by other names, with the aid of different texts and different teachers. Let us bow in harmony, know and be known.

The Parking Dispute

Parking Disputes, haven’t we seen a lot of them?
On nine eleven , Al Qaeda tried to settle one,
Army bases parked in the wrong places,
In Iraq, United States tried to settle one
Imaginary WMDs parked in the wrong country,
Around the world, wrong skins parked in the wrong spaces,
Wrong religions in the wrong minds,
Arabs parked in Jewish lands,
People parked on wrong self-identifications,
Daring to call themselves of certain faith,
Without the right dogmas.
Daring to call themselves citizens,
Without the right skin or the right blood.
Parking permits are more than paper bits!
Women parked in the wrong places,
At wrong times, in wrong clothes,
Parked.
Yes, Parking disputes,
Don’t we have many of those.
Long ago, those red skinned ones,
Parked in the wrong lands,
On Gold mines and future railroad tracks.
Parking dispute, yes.
That is why we have guns, arms,
So nobody parks in the wrong spots,
Equal opportunity anger,
Shots fly once too often,
That’s OK.
Second amendment rights
For guns in the right hands.
Ah, not in the wrong holsters, mind you.
Be it even a toy gun!
Compassion, trust, forgiveness, innocence..
We have shot you, but please don’t die on us.

This poem is dedicated to the beautiful souls we lost to madness, Deah, Yusor and Razan. May the life and energy they show in their pictures and in the memories they leave of themselves, and the service mindedness they showed at a young age, inspire many who have known them in life, and who now know of them following their death. We belong to Allah, and our lives are only as good and as worthy as our deeds.

Kane and Abel, and Yoga

Do you know an eight year old who rules his house? Lets call him K. He is a straightforward young man, a king in demeanor, but plagued by the tyranny of an older brother, whose taunts and flaunts throw him off the edge all too often. Let us be fair to him. Life is hard and messy. Sometimes he has to resort to what can only be called bawls. It brings into the picture a mother who was musing her way to nirvana just before the bawl shook her to action. As she enters the scene of the turmoil, she finds K in charge of a laptop, his hands shaking, as if he had just retrieved it from an enemy. There is no sight of an enemy. There is only his older brother in the room, who is engrossed in a book that he has on his lap, as he reposes on his bed, like a silent bystander. Lets be fair to him. Little brothers can be pesky. “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” wrote Mr Shakespeare. But when he listed all the roles a man plays, he missed one. That of a brother. It may not be crucial in Shakespeare’s world, but it is in the world of this mother. How do we forget the earliest of brothers, Mr Kane and Mr Abel?

So, there the mother finds them. One melting to tears, and the other, frozen in quietude. She sees that the scene had resolved itself, and a wrong move would spin things to wrong turns. A wrong admonition could inflame self-righteousness and bring reactions that she had seen repeated, in loud frequencies that visit the house consistently. After all, it is a world of brothers, and a mother who is not the epitome of self-control. But not this day. This day is meant for peace.

She sits quietly on the bed, and speaks,

“You know, I heard somebody talk about a boy called K. not the one who is playing his video game right now, not the one whom his brother irritated, nor the one who was crying. This K is peaceful, calm, satisfied, happy and loving,”

K is already calm, and occupied, punching his way at timeless battles in a boy’s world of endless video games. It is a place of retreat. A world he understands better than the real one.

“That’s not the talk you heard, I am sure,” says our young K, of course, disinterested.

“Do you know where that K lives? Inside you. So when you are angry, sad or mad, tell yourself, I am not this K who is angry, sad or mad. I am a peaceful K, a loving K, a happy K,”

“The talk was not about me, right?” says K, to set things straightened, once and for all. People are not to be confused with. A Kane is not the same as an Abel.

” Dear K, even though you are called K, and I have my name and your brother his, aren’t we all the same inside? All the same creation, who want love, happiness, contentment, peace…? Its all inside us and we don’t realize it all the time.”

As K keeps punching at the keyboard, it is the older brother who raises his head from his book,steals a glance at his mother and shakes his head.

Then, the brothers go back to their pastimes. Silence follows, except for the click-clacking of the keyboard. Life has found a new rhythm with the invention of these machines. As if humanity is on a kind of life support. It is not very different in the house that K rules. But in the midst of all the clicking and clacking, timeless teachings do find its way to envelope and soothe. It is possible that one day, K will rule over his own personality too, Raja Yoga they call it in Hindu philosophy. Never easy with a brother around, K will attest, so would have Kane.

Is this not a world of brothers? Of shooting egos and flaming jealousies? Don’t mark your Kanes and Abels yet, please.The world is shifting and turning, each moment. Look within and you would find the two inside too. What lifts us out and up, is yoga, remembrance.

In a world of brothers, mess is always around the corner. The brawls and the bawls will also go on. 🙂

Ma’aruf

Ma’aruf is a quranic term for “good deeds” and it means “that which is known”. When the Quran exhorts one to “good deeds”, it is as if one would naturally understand what it means, as if it is something already known. But,living in this world where language has become so complex, we are left wondering if such a simple phrase is enough to guide such a complicated creation.

Sohaib Sultan, in his explanation of a Quranic chapter, in the book “Quran in Conversation” (by Michael Birkel), writes:

“Sometimes we can make religion so much more complicated than it needs to be. Moral philosophy and related fields have their place, but we need to have a good heart, good intentions, and do some good to those in need. Don’t be morally paralyzed. People know by their nature what good is.”

“There are some things that need more reasoning, or more scriptural guidance, but there are many things in the moral universe that people know. In the Quranic language, that is known as fitra.”

It is to this good nature that Pope Francis appeals to. He has an ability to reach out to people regardless of their identity. I saw this again in his statement about the Charlie Hebdo incident. In very simple terms, he explained that one cannot justify such horrific acts in the name of God and that it can only be considered an aberration. But, he stressed that it is wrong to provoke in the name of free speech. He gave a quick example to illustrate his point:

“If my good friend Doctor Gasparri [who organises the Pope’s trips] speaks badly of my mother, he can expect to get punched,” he said, throwing a pretend punch at the doctor, who was standing beside him.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30835625

Yes, the incident has to be seen in the light of the systemic oppression and injustice that muslims have to face in the present world as a continuation of colonialism and the racism that existed as an undercurrent then as well as now. When looked at with our simple good nature, we see that there are many aberrations in what we call “civilization”. We have to find a way not to get so caught up in its politics of identity that our good nature becomes alien to us.

Hutchinson, Penn and Puritan Islam

 

There, sometimes inspiration comes from the most unlikely places. Had I not gone and checked what my son was up to, which is rather unusual for a mother who thinks her job done if she yells out instructions from another room, my mind wouldn’t have been refreshed of two great personalities that I had learned about in my own American History class recently. My son had to re-do a classwork where he had to write a short paragraph each about Anne Hutchinson and William Penn.

These two personalities were engaged in the tedious process of freeing Christianity from religious intolerance during the 17^th century. While Hutchinson challenged the puritanical beliefs held by the clergy and converted people away from it, thereby earning the ire of the church and subsequent punishments, William Penn was a Quaker, known for their belief in the “inner light” that makes everyone free to look for God within oneself. He went on to found Pennsylvania and drafted a Frame of Government (constitution) for his colony that enshrined principles of religious tolerance and civil liberties. This later became known as the Charter of Privileges.

As my son looked bored and uninterested in what he was doing, I reminded him that if we live in a country where we can be Muslims, even in the present day climate of hatred and suspicion, it is because of people like them.

But there were certain other things that I did not tell him. I thought to myself that if there is a community that is in much need of people like Anne Hutchinson and William Penn, it is the Muslim community.

Puritanism exists in Islam today, and seemingly, it is widespread and powerful. It exists in the notion that there is a pure form of Islam that can be brought back and that all who think otherwise are misguided. There are scholars giving lectures on it and non-scholars trying to live up to those ideals. There is a constant reference to “bida” or innovation – anything that is deemed a later addition in religion from the times of the rightly guided, a period of about 400 years after the Prophet (pbuh). Once a practice is classified as “bida”, nothing more needs to be said in argument against the practice. In the overemphasis on rooting out innovation, the more basic ideals of Islam, like kindness and charitable behavior, are diminished. Empathy for the other becomes immaterial. There is only an urgency to establish an idealistic, utopian Islam.

Then, there are Qur’an translations on a “do not read” list, even though those books may never have been read by the people who make those lists. Though the reasons cited for making them taboo are many, it is basically a restriction on any interpretation of Islam that differs from a literal and rigid reading of the Quran.  And the puritans also seem to control mosques. If there are Quranic verses that uphold the rights of all to worship, then of course, there are interpretations that will deny those rights to some of your choosing. Let me add that these are not realities that I have imagined, but realities that I have experienced firsthand.

In a country like United States, which still maintains law and order, intolerant ideologies seem harmless, except to the occasional  Ahmedi Muslim (yes, Muslim) woman (and yes, she is my friend) who is asked to leave unceremoniously from a mosque she frequents. But in a country like Pakistan, it means the religious persecution of Ahmediyyas, their branding as kafirs and a ban on a free expression of their faith. It means a life of uncertainty and fear for a large group of people including Shias and other religious minorities, Islamic and non-Islamic.

It is true that there are good scholars out there who teach a more tolerant and richer form of Islam. After all, it is a religion that gave rise to very diverse civilizations in the past. But Islam wouldn’t have come of age until, in keeping with the enlightened nature of being that modernity calls for, each Muslim feels confident enough to engage his own intellect in all questions of faith. When that happens, will we stand mute when a wrong is committed? Wouldn’t we speak for the rights of other fellow beings whose religious freedom is enshrined in the words of the Quran, namely, that there is no coercion in religion? Would we let puritans mangle our faith to a point where its message of mercy and kindness is lost on its followers and it becomes merely an oppression armed with knowledge?

Yes, we need more than scholars to bring change. We need courageous citizens and wealthy visionaries. We need more of those who say, in the words of William Penn, “I owe my conscience to no mortal man!”

 

 

 

 

Call of Duty

“Its exactly 8 hrs and 45 minutes since  Black Ops 2 has been released!” raved the 6th graders in their gym locker room on Nov 13, 2012 . I am not a 6th grader. But I know one. He sits for dinner with me every night.

He may very well be the only one in his class who is a boy and who doesn’t own Black Op 1. Many are getting the second one soon. A close friend gets his copy on his birthday. My husband shook his head in disbelief, “Its an M rated game! Not for kids like you!” I looked at him (my husband) and asked, “How do you know about these games?” My kids, the older two, shot back at me, “You may be the only one not to have heard about it!”

True. I live in a very secluded space. I had never heard about Black Op before that day.

But yes, I knew that there were all these violent games that boys are allowed to play. Our 6th grader has friends from many religious, ethnic backgrounds. Regardless of all differences in their backgrounds, Black Cop wins its way to their homes.

We asked our son if he feels peer pressure. “And now whats that?” he asked. “Do you feel left out when they talk about the games and you cannot join them?” “Kind of, yes and no.” “Well, this is just the beginning. There is a lot more coming your way.”
“This is where you hold on to your connection to Allah,” we told him.

We did give him a short lesson on the principles of Islam, and God as we understand Him in Islam. I look upon religion as an aide to finding inner peace. How else do we live in such a complicated world? I told him that there is in each one of us a yearning for what is good, what is peaceful. When each one of us realize we are on a path to God, whom muslims know from His attributes, we look at each other in an entirely new way. I told him that we have been given choices in life. We do make mistakes as we sometimes choose the wrong things. So, when others make mistakes we know that they are having trouble with those choices just like sometimes we ourselves do. And that brings tolerance and patience into our lives. And that is where peace sets in.

“Just sit silently and listen, when your friends talk about the games. You could even ask questions,” we suggested. “I did that once. And I was laughed at.I asked them what the purpose of the whole game was. They told me that its obviously to kill the bad guy.”

“If you feel like you are being taunted, just keep quiet,” I suggested.

Our kids are so dear to us. I am sure all parents feel this way. And yet, I wonder what makes parents buy an M rated game for their 11 yr old kid? Here is a review of the game,www.commonsensemedia.org/game-reviews/call-of-duty-black-ops. And here is the ESRB rating guide.

Are we being over cautious as parents? Are kids really unaffected by the violence on screen that they are actively participating in? If so, why do we have rating guidelines?

We lament about wars and violence. And yet, here we are, while taking pride in our civilized ways, finding immense pleasure in these combat related games, with its bloody action scenes. Wars are portrayed as a pursuit of bad guys. Oversimplified. Glossed over. The reality is so different. If there was a game that showed modern warfare in its real glory, with the innocents killed callously in the name of collateral damage, would the game still find players? I hope not. I try to inculcate in my kids an awareness for the real meaning of war, in all my conversations about it. I do not oversimplify its morality. I do remind them wars will always be, it is a necessary evil. What we can try to do is ensure that we are on the right side of it. There is an immense moral pressure one feels before going on war, or even firing a bullet. Wars are NOT fought to eradicate evil! That battle is best fought in the minds of men and women, not with the power that technological might equips you with. I keep this conversation alive on an everyday basis, because I know that it is not just the games that give them this skewed sense of war, but movies and books also do.
Anyway, call of duty keeps me on guard as a mom. I hope there are other moms listening, or thinking the same thoughts in their line of duty.

Life and Liberty

“Its not just the economy, stupid!”

Americans, won’t you talk for the Palestinians? Obama called  up Mahmoud Abbas asking him to delay his bid for recognition of Palestine  in UN general assembly as a non-member state, a few days back. Why? Why did the US veto their effort to become a member of the UN last year?

Is it really possible to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians without giving the Palestinians the dignity they are asking for?

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence states:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Will you not then recognize this right that the Creator gives also to non-Americans? And when you do it, wouldn’t you find a way to cut your defense spending, and balance your budget? Wouldn’t you rest without nightmares of the “fiscal cliff”?

What is happiness really? Isn’t that what should keep us awake at this point in history? To find the true shades of happiness from the junkyards of wanton consumption?

When I talk to you, Americans, I remind you that I am the mother to three (American citizens). And If you ask me where I am from, you will find my eyes brim with tears..for I do not know! Do I belong to the land that I tread upon as a toddler, where I dreamed my most primitive dreams, or to the land that listens to the laughter of my kids, most intimately?

Now as another cycle of violence begins in Gaza, I wonder what the Americans will leave unsaid. The politics of money will continue, but I do hope there will be a stir, a movement, a cry for upholding the values that they so proudly call their own.