Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

Have you ever noticed how it is when you are most in need of God (whatever you call/define as such) is when you are least likely to go to Him? I certainly notice that for me!

When I am struggling the most, it seems that would be when I most need Allah, when I should increase my worship and going to Him Alone for my needs. Certainly, we can cry our hearts out with no shame or embarrassment that we might (or perhaps, should) feel when we complain to other people. He already knows what we are struggling with and what is in our hearts anyway. There is nothing we can hide from Him, so we might just as well pour it all out in prayer.

But that isn’t what I do sometimes. When I most need Him is also when I am the most distracted. When I am more likely to rush through worship and not even bother with dhikr (remembrance) or du’a. Because emotional turmoil and stress lead to physical illness for me (not just the shingles either; I am prone to migraines, nausea and fatigue as well when stressed), I take it as an excuse to skip fasting.

When it comes down to it, it is easier to go to Allah when we are happy, healthy, and comfortable. I can’t honestly say that I thank Him enough in those times, however. But when life seems hard, when I should be turning to Him first and asking for patience for the trials, I don’t even get around to it. I wallow in self-pity and pain, and whine to anyone who will listen even though there is nothing they can do to improve my situation. I don’t go to Allah.

There are no excuses to be made for this; I know my duties and I know I need Him and He is free of any need from me. Do others find that they also do this? What makes us avoid or ignore the cure?

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

Every week I write my post first in a Word document and then paste it into a post on the blog. This week I had no idea what to write, so it is only at the last minute (practically… Thursday evening after returning home from work) that I began writing something but my heart wasn’t in it. It’s a good piece, the bit that I got written, but I didn’t feel any urgency to it. Perhaps it will be next week’s post.

This evening I received a message from a friend that made me reflect on something else. I don’t even know how much longer I can sit at the computer to write this, which sorta gets to the heart of the issue.

This week I’ve been in excrutiating physical pain. Actually, the pain was building all last week as well but I didn’t know what was going on. I have shingles. I’m not going to waste your time with the medical breakdown of what shingles is. Suffice to say that it is a horrible physical reaction to stress. The funny thing is that I could imagine having shingles at numerous other times of my life, but it seems odd that I would have it right now, when so much doesn’t seem quite as stressful as usual. I think I have a pretty decent grasp on my life. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. So why this sudden stress-related illness?

There is one thing in particular that has caused me stress. In fact, it occurred a week ago last Sunday, and though I did not associate these two things, the pain began that Monday. Why would I connect these two pains, the emotional and the physical? I thought I’d perhaps pulled a muscle shoveling snow. The literal ache in my heart I connected to the emotional ache, but the pain in my back and shoulder that grew day by day did not seem related. As the pain in my back grew, the literal pain in my heart eased. Still, I saw no connection.

By the end of the week, my back itched. By the end of the weekend, my skin burned. I didn’t see anything to explain what I was feeling, but I had realized it was not a pulled muscle. I realized it was something in my skin, though it felt deeper. But I couldn’t see anything unusual on my skin to clue me in. And I did not connect it to anything else. It was different than any other type of pain I’ve ever had. And it was still increasing.

This Monday I finally couldn’t take the pain silently anymore. I went to the doctor and was told I have a classic case of shingles. My Muslim doctor smiled at me and told me that it is a reaction to stress, and recommended that I lower my stress levels. The minute she said that, I knew what my stress was, what pain was the root of my problem. I immediately wished I had the means to call the person who had hurt me and tell them how far-reaching their action had been. That not only had it hurt my heart, but it had coursed through my nerves and brought out a dormant virus, that I felt like it was killing me.

Of course I immediately realized not only how manipulative and mean-spirited that was of me, but also that I would rather take this pain the rest of my life than to pass it on to that person who I clearly love even more than I had previously known. How much love must I have that the thought of being apart had caused my body to erupt in sores?

So, here I sit, in front of the computer… typing for much longer than I care to, as my back aches and my muscles grow tense against the pain in the nerves that stretch across my back, up to my neck, and also around down my arm and around onto my belly. I thought this post was going to be about patience. That’s what I said in reply to my friend. I said:

It’s silly for me to still be hoping for anything, and super silly for me to be so upset that I have a physical reaction! But you know how it is… the heart leans where it leans no matter what you try to tell yourself. I just have to trust in Allah that He has not answered years of du’a to take him completely away from me and take him out of my heart if he isn’t meant for me… I need to be patient. I’m guessing that’s a lesson many of us need.

I thought this post was about patience, about acceptance of Allah’s plan over our own. I thought it was about patience through the emotional and physical pain. And perhaps it still is about that.

But really, I think it’s about the power of love. How love can be a force for wonder and change and bliss. But it can also be a force of great loss and pain and suffering. I have always known this; it’s not the first time my heart has been broken. But I had never before felt the full force of the downside of love’s physical manifestations.

Four days into a seven day treatment for an illness that was diagnosed early, I am still in utter misery. The pain has not yet decreased. The burning and itching remain, and what was one small sore on Monday has increased to about 20. Even with the appropriate treatment, the body needs to release all of the poison before it can begin to heal. This is the power of love.

I have a new respect for what love can do, the trauma it can cause. And if it can cause this much pain, how much more good, life-altering, blessed joy can it also cause? It is all about how you turn it, how you allow it to flow through yourself. You can allow it to burn and make your writhe in misery. Or you can turn it into beautiful deeds on behalf of others.

Either way, it is also a lesson in patience.

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

It’s not like oppression issues aren’t at the forefront of my mind all the time, but of course I am watching the oppression of Palestine along with the rest of the world. I’m not concerned about just Palestine, either. It’s almost as if the war in Iraq is forgotten right now, and never mind that we still have troops in Afghanistan too. Have you even heard about the recent renewal of violence in Uganda? Probably you’re familiar with the recent Oscar Grant killing in California, but did you know about a killing of another Black man in New Orleans that same day? And all along, the rape and murder of women in Juarez, Mexico continues… the mistreatment of Filipino maids in some Arab countries goes on… and young women in Eastern Europe, India and elsewhere are being lured into prostitution just like they were last month, last year, for the last five years. There’s plenty of oppression going around.

These days are dark. So dark. It can appear hopeless; we can feel helpless. Many of us remain in our safe cocoon of privilege, avoiding anything stressful that might make us reflect on the suffering of others, consider for a moment how blessed we truly are, or look for ways to make a difference to the collective insanity currently happening around us. Thank God for American Idol, right: a chance to laugh at others and avoid the news channels. Inauguration of the first Black President is next week: yippee for our post-racial world!

I think a lot about oppression. I think a lot about how others are being oppressed, and I wonder what I can do to lessen their suffering. I think a lot about how I have been oppressed, but usually I realize that my pain is relatively minimal compared to what so many others go through. I think a lot about oppression, from the standpoint of worldly suffering, what we Muslims call the “dunya“, meaning this life here on Earth.

I don’t think as frequently about the oppression I commit upon myself and how it relates to the Akira, or Afterlife. I don’t think about that sort of oppression often enough because it would require me to take responsibility, to make changes, to look at myself and recognize myself for what I really am.

I am my own greatest oppressor.

I oppress myself every time I roll over and sleep in on the weekend, instead of getting up for the morning salat. I oppress myself every time I think, “I should fast tomorrow” and then don’t even try. I oppress myself every time I slide my debit card to buy something unnecessary and then say I can’t afford to send something to an aid organization or the masjid. I oppress myself at least 1,000 times a day just by opening my mouth. Even more times by typing away on-line or in email.

The greatest oppressor is not Israel, not Bush, not even poverty or lack of education. The greatest oppressor is my self. Because when I oppress my own soul by doing what I should not do and failing to do what I should do, I unleash an oppressor upon the world. If I do not love Allah enough to obey him, love myself enough to guard against the hellfire, how much more damage might I do to others?

I am a self-inflicting oppressor. And oppression must be fought, by any means necessary. AlhamdulAllah – all praise be to Allah – that I have a guidebook to show me how. The means is the Qur’an, and the Sunnah (tradition exemplified by the Prophet, peace be upon him), and guidance of a Murshid (teacher of inner sciences). May Allah protect me from my greatest oppressor and turn her heart towards kindness and justice, ameen.

Once a month I have the opportunity to staff a soup kitchen in a nearby church. I will go there in the morning and make two large cauldrons of beef stew, which at noontime are ladled out to the (mostly) homeless people who come there for lunch. There used to be a hundred or so at lunch; nowadays there are about twice that number, and more all the time.

I always wonder about myself if I expect a change in the behavior of these people as a kind of recompense for the effort we are all putting in to feed them. For those of you who haven’t seen the play or movie of the Shaw work, “Major Barbara,” there is a lot of discussion of what the Salvation Army or do-gooders generally expect in return when they ladle out the stew.

In reflecting on this question, I began to realize that the real opportunity for transformation does not apply to the relationship between the dispenser of sustenance and the person standing there with an empty plate. The real change came for me when I looked to one side or another of myself, standing there at the long table, and I realized that I had entered into a new kind of bond with the other people that were trying to do good work.

Aaminah’s recent article in the Crescent Times presents a simple and varied template for actions that we might take to help people in need. If people from different faith backgrounds can stand side by side, obeying the more comprehensive imperative to feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the lonely, comfort the afflicted, perhaps the apparent distinctions between the religions will blur, and evaporate like a mist. I certainly hope so.

One of the most distressing things to me about the conflict in Gaza is the way that all the power appears to be in one set of hands. The owners of these hands say: “We have the right to build walls. You may not leave the enclosure of these walls without our permission. Now that some of your number have lobbed weapons over the walls at us, we will lob more weapons (a lot more) back. We know some bystanders will be hit. So be it. When the time comes we will stop with the lobbing and let some relief agencies come to you. We are so compassionate, we will allow our own relief agencies to come and relieve you. We are compassionately conservative.”

In their assertion of control over who, and what, and when the relief will be extended, they harm their own souls, and prevent themselves from standing side by side with others who obey the higher imperative, the imperative of mercy.

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

Although I usually post on Friday, I will be away from the computer and didn’t want to post late, so I am just going to post a little early.

The following post is actually something I wrote in my journal over a two-day span. I decided that it was a pretty good example of my taking of a “spiritual reckoning” and I hope it is worthy of posting here.

Narrated Buraydah ibn al-Hasib:
I heard the Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) say:

In eloquence there is magic, in knowledge ignorance, in poetry wisdom, and in speech heaviness.

Sunaan Abu Dawud Book 41, Number 4994

(thanks to Yursil for posting this hadith, as it was quite timely for the post I had in mind)

Another that comes to mind:

Speech is like a medicine, a small dose of which cures but an excess of which kills.

Hadrat Ali (may Allah be pleased with him)

For a few years in a row, each spring when my allergies began I would lose my voice for about a week. My husband joked how that was his annual Week of Peace, but the truth was that it worried him. A week of no speech was so out of character for me, and not only was I silent, but it had a profound effect on my demeanor as well.

The last two or three years I haven’t lost my voice, and I missed the reprieve. I never thought much about the blessings in that week, but I’m thinking about them now. I suspect that my current laptop lifestyle would erode some of the value of such silence. My ability to speak through typing would undo whatever good deeds I may earn from a quiet tongue.

Once upon a time nuns, monks, and other ascetics from different religious traditions would take a vow of silence. I wonder if they wrote journals and what they wrote. Did they write what they could not say, or did they write highly spiritual things because their minds were freed up for deeper contemplation? How were their spiritual states changed during prolonged silence? And, it being a conscious choice, did they ever mistakenly blurt something out?

Sometimes now I wish I could lose my voice. I wish my internet connection would go out. I don’t have the strength to make the conscious choice. I do not exert proper control.

Last evening, after having written the above already, I was yet again given a perfect example of why I need a vow of silence. There is no need to go into details but suffice to say I let my fingers say things that didn’t really need to be said, in ways that were not necessary.

I hate it when I look back on something I have said or written and wish I’d kept it to myself. Or that I had simply said my piece once and been done with it. I cannot control how others respond to something I felt needed to be said, but I could choose to not continue trying to explain myself.

I recently watched Sarah Jessica Parker in The Family Stone. There is a scene around the dinner table where her character asks a question and the response from the family should serve as a warning but she continues to press her opinion. Even after everything falls to pieces, she continues to say “what I meant was…” and the damage just continues to pile up. Actually, I watched the film three times in a two-week span and every time I thought, “how stupid she is!” Every time, I wondered why she didn’t just shut up once she realized her point was antagonizing the family. (I also wondered how she could be so apparently unaware of what she was stepping into when visiting her fiancé’s family, but that’s another issue, perhaps for another discussion.) Watching it I thought the character was so terrible to press the issue so far.

But I do the same thing! I just did it last night. I dislike conflict and arguing. Truly, it makes me physically ill and afterwards I feel terribly guilty. Even trying to make amends, I feel bad and often like I don’t deserve forgiveness. All this because of my tongue and fingers. If I cannot stop myself from hurting others, perhaps the best thing is a vow of silence. Realistically though, I cannot take such a vow. I have to work and be available to family.

And does such a vow actually cure the sickness, or merely mute it while it festers deeper inside?

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

This is, perhaps, a departure from what you are used to from me. Today I am thinking about friends. Today it is cold and dreary, and all the local schools are closed but I must still go into work, but I’d rather stay at home in bed and am wishing someone I love could be here with me.

My best friend is out of the country for the next month-and-a-half, and I am lonely. It isn’t that I don’t have friends, though it is fact that my “closest” friendships are with people who live nowhere near me. What a blessing to have friendships with people you can call, email or chat with, and indeed it is special to find someone you can connect and be “real” with at all. But there is something to be said too for the friendship where you can feel the healing touch of a hand on your shoulder, a hug, or a shared look across a crowd.

One issue that comes up is “what are we expecting?” Several times I have felt that I put myself out for friendship and not had it reciprocated. On other occasions people have told me that they felt that way; they had tried to build a friendship with me and didn’t feel that I was responding as they had hoped. I’ve long ago learned to not expect anything. It isn’t really friendship anyway if one side is looking for response to it. Friendship is give and take, but it also selfless, without those expectations. Not having preconceived hope means I am pleasantly surprised when a friendship grows, and not quite so hurt when it does not.

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

This week Muslims celebrated the Eid ul-Adha, or Festival of the Sacrifice. The sacrifice referred to is the final ritual of the Hajj (annual pilgrimage to Mecca, that all able-bodied Muslims are supposed to make at least once in a lifetime), and relates to the prophet Ibrahim’s (peace be upon him) near-sacrifice of his son, Ismael (peace be upon him).

The story of the sacrifice is thus: Ibrahim was told by Allah to sacrifice his first-born son, Ismael, and was troubled. Ismael was just a boy, but he told his father that he must do as he was commanded and obey Allah. The boy asked his father to take him away from his home, so his mother would not know of what was happening, and asked that the knife be sharp so that Ibrahim would not hesitate due to his love. At the time that the preparations were made and Ibrahim was about to do as commanded, Allah intervened and a sheep was provided instead.

The significance of the story is often spoken of as being with both Ibrahim and Ismael. In other traditions, all attention is given to Ibrahim as the one who was willing to do as Allah commanded, no matter what. In Islamic tradition, equal attention is given to Ismael’s response and willingness to be sacrificed for the pleasure of Allah. Both Ibrahim and Ismael were prophets (peace be upon them) and the story is pointed to as an example of true submission to Allah.

Each year when this holiday comes, I ask myself “what have I sacrificed for the pleasure of Allah?”

Each year I am disappointed with my answer. There is nothing of any consequence that I can honestly say I have done, given up, or changed significantly to show growth from the previous year. Certainly, if I look back over a number of years I can finally recognize the improvements I have made, but even so I see little self-sacrifice.

This year I am pondering this again, as the Eid ul-Adha has just passed. What have I sacrificed? Nothing. What can I sacrifice this next year? As a student of the Sufi way, I know that I must continually sacrifice my ego, so that is a start. There are numerous ways to do this and each year at this time, I recommit myself to doing so.

Unlike many others who make “new year” resolutions, it is the Holy Month of Ramadan (the month in which we fast) and the Festival of the Sacrifice that cause me the most pause and consideration. In both these times I tell myself that I will do better, be better, work harder, and give more. I make du’a (prayer) that I will live to see another Ramadan, another Eid ul-Adha (and that I might ever make the Hajj) so that I still have a year to “fix” my wayward habits.

Allah is Merciful and gives me many chances to do what is right; the door is ever open to take advantage of opportunities.

Today, as every day, is yet another chance of renewal.

I believe that all of our religions have descended in their various complexities from shamanistic traditions, where the shaman functions in many ways as the “story” of his or her people. The explanation of how the shaman does this is complicated. When healing, or showing the path to the spirit world, the shaman is both the map of the universe and the guide of the spirit as it travels. As healer, the shaman both disassembles the life we live, and reassembles it. And the shaman is the repository for all of the stories that have ever been, however they choose to be told at the time of telling. This is my quick summary of the seminal work, Shamanism, by the Rumanian literary theorist Mircea Eliade, which is the foundational work for studying shamans.

Our “western culture” retained a repository of its own stories which were reiterated on an annual cycle in community festivals and events until these practices mostly died out during and after the protestant reformation. Even in English we find traces of an oral tradition in the forms of ballad poems which are derived from earlier forms: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the poems of Longfellow, even “The Night Before Christmas.” Many of the original stories and poems in England, Ireland and Scandinavia were systematically banished and expunged by the Roman Catholic Church.

My work is meant to revive the storytelling tradition in a kind of crosscultural, ecumenical mode. I start with texts from many different religious traditions, ranging from the Navajo Creation to al-Ghazzali to the Christian Gospels, and I retell every one of these stories in the poetic form that seems suitable to giving it the most beautiful expression in English. The first result is only a written manuscript. I then take the poem I have written and record it in mp3 “tracks” and post these on Gcast, and iTunes, so people can listen to them, free. Then I publish the manuscript as a paperback on-demand book, then I reformat it and publish it as a kindle book. You can see more at www.sustainyourspirit.com.

It’s kind of like comparative religion, except without a trace of the footnoting, nitpicking and “scholarship” issues that have basically sucked the life out of the stories that ages human experience had accumulated and passed down to us.

I am looking for people who want to do the same thing I am doing, only from their own point of view. I want to build a community of storytellers. If you are interested in this, as with all storytelling, the first consideration is the relationship you choose to have with your own voice. Can you be confident that all of the details of characterization in a story with several characters will be revealed by the infinitely subtle variations in your own voice? Can you compress the sense that your voice is speaking for the entire history of consciousness into the flow of your words? Can you be sincere to yourself and the integral values of the story at the same time? The second big issue is: What do you want to say? Whatever existing story you may choose to tell, your own self and your experience will color it, so you have a responsibility to know yourself and know the purpose of your influence. The third issue I have discovered is a sort of practical humility: the mechanics of storytelling only works for me if I regard myself as a sort of non-being with capabilities that permit a sort of eternal energy to flow through and express itself. In other words, my job is to get out of the way of the story and let it tell itself. In doing this it is very helpful to regard the words as if they were notes and signs in music.

Yesterday I had a long conversation about this with my friend Jane. She recently moved to this area from Toronto. She used to be a radio journalist and has recently won a contest with a short story she wrote for an online literary site – in Malayalam. She grew up as a Roman Catholic in India, where the oral traditions are much more prevalent than here. I suggested that she make a podcast of her story where she tells the story, first in Malayalam, then in English, so that people from either culture could extract the meaning in the other language whether they actually knew it or not. This kind of cross-cultural work, where I can sense what somebody means when they speak a language I don’t understand, seems like the voice of the moon calling to my finger…

Storytelling is a nagging theme that keeps reappearing in my life, yelling at me, demanding attention. I didn’t grow up in a household where oral storytelling was common; I read books from a very early age and still haven’t managed to get my nose out of them, however. The more I learn of the art of storytelling, the more I want to learn, and I know so very little.

For some inexplicable reason, storytelling is, in my mind, linked with faith. This is something that’s come up in a course on religion and fantasy literature I am finishing up this semester; we’ve mostly focused on Christianity, contrasting the views of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien with those of J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, but something that seems to me to transcend the trappings of any particular religion is storytelling, and this comes out most heavily in Pullman’s work. Tolkien, in an essay called “On Fairy Stories,” discusses the centrality of storytelling to faith. For him, the story must be true in the sense that it leads the reader to the Gospel. For Pullman, the story must only be true to who we are, our experiences, literally or figuratively; the final part of Amber Spyglass is so incredibly poignant because of the emphasis on truth-telling.

For me, no matter the religious or cultural origin of the story, good storytelling is such a profound lived experience of truth. I have never been good at philosophy, and I prefer to do abstract reasoning only when absolutely necessary. I love studying religion, but I love living it more, and living it, for me, is often contained in stories. When I read something that speaks to me, I cannot even say how or why; it just does. This is the way I felt when I first picked up the Qur’an, before I had ever considered converting to Islam, and especially the lyrical, poetic translations evoke this best. It is, to borrow a Buddhist phrase, like the finger pointing at the moon, except one is not sure whether there is a finger and a moon and which is which, and it is all fleetingly glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

Sometimes things happen that jolt us out of passivity. Terror has become so commonplace in our world that many of us are not jolted by it anymore. Do not mistakenly think that I am only speaking of so-called “Islamic” terrorism. There are many kinds of terror perpetrated across our globe. Sometimes it is done in the name of religion, and that is hardly unique to Islam though you wouldn’t know it from the way the media talks. In most cases where religion is referenced as the “cause” or root of the problem, it is really just the pretty curtain put up to hide the true problem. More often the real issue comes down to greed; whether for land, resources, money, power, or other things.

Like others, I was horrified by the recent murders in Mumbai. I refuse to apologize for something I had nothing to do with. Even if the perpetrators were Muslim, and even if it was in any corrupted way related to religion (and again I say, if it was about rights to Kashmir, that really has nothing to do with religion), I am not responsible for their behavior and neither are your Muslim neighbors.

 
For whatever reason that I fail to understand yet, people have used this opportunity to again claim that Muslims don’t denounce terror. I don’t know what Muslim blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines they are reading where they haven’t seen Muslims denouncing terror over and over. I often want to ask people when they say these things “how many Muslims do you speak to?” Sadly, even my own parents have asked me this before. So, let’s be very clear, I as a Muslim denounce terror, no matter who is perpetrating it or what self-serving reason they are claiming it to be acceptable. Let me also be clear in reiterating that there is nothing inherent in Islam that creates terrorists or murderous impulses.

Where I have been jolted by the situation in Mumbai is that it left me feeling rather hopeless for the state of humanity. We don’t seem to be learning from our poor choices and the overall negative state of our affairs proves it. But rather than wallow in our sorry state I decided this is a time for action. But what can I do?

I can change myself. I cannot force others to change, but by changing myself, Allah willing, others are affected for the positive, and that may encourage them to change as well. By working to be just, patient, kind, giving, and aware, I make my world a better place and in turn this makes those who have to deal with me feel better. If many people were taking personal stock of the ways that we support injustice, bitterness, and other negative matters, and committed to change those things in ourselves, it would have a large ripple effect on the world. So that is what I intend to do: take stock of myself and make the (many) necessary changes.