Opening Our Hearts to a New Andalusia

Transcription

1 The Role of the Theologian in Times of Terror Unitarian Universalist member of the Graduate Theological Union Opening Our Hearts to a New Andalusia Mark Evens Evens, a SKSM student, preached this sermon at a special chapel service entitled, Gifts of Al-Andalus -- in furtherance of the Educating to Counter Oppressions and Build Just Community priority emphasis of Starr King School for the Ministry. As a Unitarian Universalist seminarian, I will be required by our national ministerial credential ling body to demonstrate substantial engagement with, and knowledge of, major world religions. You might think that this, and the fact that of the 6 billion humans on planet earth, 2 billion are Muslim, would be enough to draw my attention to Islam. Well, it sort of was, but it also, most definitely, sort of wasn t. I had engaged Islam. I did read two small books on Islam written from a Western perspective and skimmed, very briefly, a few pages of the Koran around the time of the Gulf War. I went to a Sufi participatory dance event once and knew of Rumi s poetry, so, of course, I maintained a separate category for Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, with its beautiful, inclusive-sounding poetry, rich musical tradition and ecstatic dancing. I felt pretty turned off by Islam. My experiences up until last year made me think Islam was, on the whole, sexist, anti-intellectual and violent. I thought I knew the extent of my ignorance and that it was of reasonable, manageable proportions. But then there was 9/11, and there were those conflicts within the Muslim world that baffled me. For these and other reasons I took a class on Islam last spring specifically, a class on how the West understands Islam. Like the best kind of book or movie or conversation, it changed me. It opened me to both the depth of my ignorance and to new possibilities. It opened my heart and gave me hope. I would like to share this hope with you this evening. From the academic perspective I bring back to you two powerful words: Islamaphobia and Orientalism. They overlap somewhat in meaning. Between the two, they summarize much of what prevents us, in the West, from getting Islam, Islamic cultures and Muslim identities.

2 Islamophobia is unfounded fear of, and hostility towards, Islam. Orientalism is a bit more complicated. Orientialism is the practice of assuming that Islam, Arab countries, India, China, all of Asia can be understood objectively only by Western experts who base their understanding of these cultures on comparisons to Western norms, ideals and desires, and within boundaries defined by Western cultural myths. Further, Orientalism assumes and asserts that it is the role of the West to control these Eastern cultures because they cannot control themselves. Orientalism ignores the diversities and changes over time within Islam and hides its own agenda under a myth of objectivity. Islamophobia denies the legacy of Christian and Jewish violence to keep a single historic era of relatively humane Islamic conquest spotlighted and center stage. I believe most of us cannot help but experience Islamophobia and Orientalism in ourselves. We grow up swimming in it like water. I remember listening to a radio show on KPFA Sunday afternoons for a month or so early last winter. It was a locally-produced effort with Muslim hosts. The focus was on interviewing a diverse range of Bay Area Muslims about their past experiences and current perspectives on being Muslim. Sometimes I listened in a calm, interested, open mood. However, at other times I found myself feeling suspicious, angry and cynical. I was suspicious that guests were being chosen or coached to present only positive experiences of Islam which I somehow knew to be a deeply flawed religion. Women wanting to wear head scarves all the time?! Islam a religion of peace?! I was sure I knew better and was not about to be fooled. Except, when I paused to reflect, I had to admit I could not identify a solid basis for my feelings. So how, then, did my heart open? In class, conceptual tools like the words Islamaphobia and Orientalism were a start. There was also the anxiety provoking requirement that each student in the class participate in Muslim worship in some local community. I was not sure. Would I be asked to believe something I did not agree with? There was also content information. For me the center of the content became learning about Al Andalus and the connections between Islam, Al Andalus and my Unitarian Universalist heritage. Al Andalus or Andalusia was both a place and a precious historic time in that place. Connections weave between Unitarian Universalism and Islam in a tenuous network of mutual influence, similarity, understanding and, at times, support. From Al-Andalus I followed the connections forward and backward in time. In 712 of what we now call the Common Era, Muslims continued their relatively non-violent expansion through North Africa by capturing most of Spain. I say it was relatively non-violent because once their opponents surrendered, the Muslims were merciful and tolerant to the conquered. The

3 Koran requires that when your opponent surrenders and asks for mercy you must grant it. Jews, Christians and other monotheists were permitted to continue practicing their religions, also as stipulated in the Koran. While they were usually not allowed in the highest positions of power, Jews and Christians were accepted in civil service and were very active in trade and academic pursuits. Tracing connections backwards in time several hundred years, when the Roman Empire fell to the Germanic tribes, scholars fled with manuscripts into Muslim controlled territory. They were welcomed. The Koran places a high value on free, rational inquiry and, in that time, this emphasis was not yet hidden under layers of conservative interpretation. Scholars congregated in two main centers in the Muslim world: Iraq and the area called Al Andalus in southern Spain. As Europe entered the Dark Ages, the Muslim world forged ahead, making strides in mathematics, medicine and astronomy. Under Muslim rule, Al-Andalus became a center renowned for its academic collaborations between Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars. They worked together translating the classics from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Because of the texts produced by this work, Medieval Europe could resume critical, engaged intellectual life, which had almost completely died out. They lived together in peace, in Al-Andalus. Gradually, factional infighting weakened the Muslim world. Trinitarian Christians gradually reconquered Spain, gaining complete control in In the process, 800,000 Muslims and Jews were driven from the country, leaving only a remnant and a fading memory of the former multi-cultural vibrancy. Tracing the connections of Al Andalus forward in time, in northern Spain, sometime around 1511, Michael Servetus was born. As a youth, Servetus learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as well as mathematics and philosophy. Given the tradition of scholarship across religious lines in Spain in the preceding centuries, it s obvious that Servetus, through his teachers, touched and benefited from the legacy of scholarship and religious tolerance in Al-Andalus. While young Servetus was learning his languages, some 20,000 members of the remnant Muslim and Jewish communities were burned at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition. 1 They refused to convert. The main obstacle to their conversion: refusal to give up their radical monotheism and accept the Trinity: the doctrine that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

4 Thus Servetus came of age in a time and place where people were dying for their belief in a radically unitary God. Later, having used his Latin skills to study the Bible for himself and finding no basis for the Trinity there, he wrote a book, On the Errors of the Trinity. He was willing to die for his beliefs and was burned at the stake outside Geneva on Oct. 28, 1553 by Calvin, with the book he refused to renounce tied to his leg. Perhaps the resolve he witnessed among the Muslims and Jews in his post Andalusian homeland strengthened his determination to stand by his truth to the end. His martyrdom for his Unitarian beliefs was a turning point in the Protestant reformation. The barbarity of the execution and the courage and eloquence of the victim provoked a backlash which checked the power of the conservative Protestants and opened up space for free thinkers. Tracing the threads forward 15 years to Transylvania in 1568, we find religious tolerance expressed in the Edict of Torda embodying both influence of Michael Servetus and the tradition and practice of religious tolerance spreading north from Turkey under the leadership of the Muslim Ottoman Emperor Sultan Suleyman. 2 Tracing the threads further forward we find the Unitarian Emerson quoting Sufi poets and the Koran as significant sources of religious truth. Tracing the threads yet farther forward we find Starr King School including Islamic studies in its curricula since the school s inception in It s March 2003 of the Common Era in an upper room at the library of the Graduate Theological Union, the GTU, in Berkeley, Calif. An excited assembly gathers. Behind the podium, between nearly-closed blinds and past palm trees, the San Francisco Bay sparkles in the sun. It s framed by lush green hills and under a deepening-blue, end-of the-day sky. The buzz of conversation settles; people take their seats. The rows fill with university students, seminarians, professors, local religious leaders and curious others. There are head scarves, turbans, Sufi and Jewish scullcaps in various styles, uncovered heads with hair of many shades: dark, blond, brown, red and grey. The faces assume an expectant air. The event is an opening keynote address. The conference focus: pluralism and diversity within the Muslim tradition. The president of the GTU welcomes the distinguished speaker. The room is named in honor of a major Jewish donor. The speaker is a famous Catholic, Italian-American scholar. The lead conference organizer is an African-American Sufi Muslim on the faculty of the Unitarian Universalist seminary, a member institution of the GTU.

5 It was this conference that finished the job of opening my heart. I love the peace, harmony and egalitarianism at the core of the Koran s message. I love the way Muhammad loved his people, the way the message he delivered shaped them into a people with dignity and an understanding of the individual s responsibility to the community and the community s responsibility to the individual. While I remain a Unitarian Universalist and my understanding of Arabic is quite limited, I love praying with my body, shoulder to shoulder with Muslims, because my body is a social body. I find that Islamic metaphors for God spaciously accommodate what I, with my science-centric attitudes, currently believe. I know an Islam as wonderful and flawed and diverse in its attempts to get it right as any other world religion, an Islam that is owed a lot more credit than it is given for its contributions to the world s cultural, scientific and moral heritage. I m excited for those reformers in Islam, like Dr. Amina Wadud, another keynote speaker at the GTU Islam conference. Dr. Wadud, an African American woman, courageously engages this tradition from within as a Muslim feminist. She argues from the deepest roots of Islamic scripture and tradition to renew this tradition, reapplying its most fundamental, egalitarian, liberating truths for our time. I love knowing that there are scholars and religious leaders within Islam who want to radically reform and renew their religion and get it back to basic egalitarian principals, making them come alive for today s world. A challenge these reformers face is that there are very few places where a diverse group of Muslims can get together and discuss, and argue and learn from each other. There are also few places where Muslims, Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists can meet. The Graduate Theological Union is becoming such a place. Now, in a GTU-wide effort with significant leadership provided by our own Prof. Ibrahim Farajaje, himself a practicing Sufi Muslim, the availability and visibility of Islamic studies is increasing. Let us support this project. Let s have a New Andalusia. In a new Andalusia, the West can learn to acknowledge its cultural debt to Islam for preserving and expanding classical knowledge. In a new Andalusia Islam can support the West in questioning its blind faith in free market economics and global capitalism. In a new Andalusia, Islam can find inspiration and support for building a place for dialogue and debate within itself about its true core teachings and cultural practices. In a new Andalusia we can build together a house of Peace for all nations, within which conflict and struggle is valued but mediated by means other than war and terrorism.

6 We need a new Al-Andalus, a renewal of the legacy of Al-Andalus not just here at the GTU, but also in our own hearts and our own congregations. Let us build together houses of prayer and study and conversation for all peoples that we may open our hearts and see God everywhere. May it be so. Resources: Goldstone, Lawrence and Nancy, Out of the Flames. New York: Broadway Books, Ritchie, Susan, The Pasha of Buda and the Edict of Torda: Transylvanian Unitarian/Islamic Cultural Enmeshment and the Development of Religious Tolerance. Winner of the Best new scholarship in Unitarian Universalism Award by Collegium, the Association of Liberal Religious Scholars in /25/2004. Said, Edward W., Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See The Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books, Wadud, Amina, Qur an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman s Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 Wilbur, Earl Morse, A History of Unitarianism. (c) Mark Evens 2004 STARR KING SCHOOL for the MINISTRY Educating Unitarian Universalist ministers and progressive religious leaders since 1904