Feasting in Ramadan

Like many Westerners who try to be charitable towards other people's religion while also abhorring violence done in the name of religion, I have a troubled relationship with Islam. As I mentioned in an earlier post there are many aspects of Islam that I admire deeply. I love Islam's radical monotheism, their unwavering devotion to the doctrine that God is one. I love the way in which the ritualized prayers, prayers which use the entire body, in which every movement is significant, help blur the line between the sacred and the profane. Prayer for a devout Muslim is not an intellectual exercise, but rather an act which comes from the depths of one's being, and incorporates that whole being, as a profane body is used for a sacred purpose. And I love the season of Ramadan, a season which challenges one's commitment to religious life.

I used to go to a Middle Eastern restaurant, Babylon, owned and operated by an Iraqi immigrant seeking refuge from the regime of Saddam Hussein. He had been a history professor, and had a rule for his restaurant: if you could ask him a question about Middle Eastern culture, history or politics that he couldn't answer to your satisfaction, you got your meal for free. While I was never able to threaten his knowledge sufficiently to earn a free meal, I did once get my tea and baklava for free, after paying for my salad and main course.

One knock on Islam is that in areas where it is most prevalent, it is imposed on the population. People are observant because there are serious consequences for a lack of observance. Reading Azar Nafisi's popular memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran helped bring that point home to me. In it she laments the imposition of the veil on all women, because it calls into question the devotion of her grandmother, who wore the veil long before the government enforced it. In fact, she says, when her grandmother wore the veil, Iran was such a Westernized nation that that was an act of defiance, rather than the other way around.

But sitting in Babylon for lunch on any day during Ramadan shows you that Islamic observance does not die without a tyrannical government to impose it. In fact, during Ramadan Babylon's owner was most happy to see a Western face, because all of his regulars observed the fast, and so could not eat from sunrise to sunset, really cutting into his lunch business.

I remembered my long-forgotten meals at Babylon (I stopped eating meat, and they went out of business, though I doubt the two are linked) after reading this article in the Christian Science Monitor, about charity feasts in Cairo in the Ramadan dusk. Included in it is this telling passage:

Plates and glasses clink and inky-glasses of sugary tamarind juice are drained. The stringy pulp of dates are sucked from their pits, then the 2,000-odd diners turn to the business of a meal.

There are hundreds of locations similar to the ad hoc charity dinners on Hoda Sharawi throughout Cairo this month. Neighborhood merchants, mosques, film stars, and even belly dancers set up tables on streets, under overpasses, and along the Nile where all are invited to eat. But the convention is that only those that really need it should avail themselves.

Not too many years ago, signs alongside the tables would ostentatiously announce the identity of the benefactors, but that has since gone out of fashion, largely because of the impression that seeking public approval for charity isn't charity at all. No one knows how many free meals are dished out nightly, but it clearly runs into the hundreds of thousands.

I am particularly impressed with the notion "that seeking public approval for charity isn't charity at all," which reminds me of the famous teaching from chapter four of the Diamond Sutra about giving gifts without attachment:

Moreover, Subhuti, when bodhisattvas give a gift, they should not be attached to a thing. When they give a gift, they should not be attached to anything at all. They should not be attached to a sight when they give a gift. Nor should they be attached to a sound, a smell a taste, a touch, or a dharma when they give a gift. Thus, Subhuti, fearless bodhisattvas should give a gift without being attached to the perception of an object. And why? Subhuti, the body of merit of those bodhisattvas is not easy to measure.

In a little commentary on that passage from the Diamond Sutra, I wrote:

We give gifts for many reasons. Sometimes we give gifts out of love for a person. Sometimes we give gifts because we wish to be seen giving gifts. Often we give gifts because it is socially acceptable, or somehow required of us. But, whatever our motive, we often have expectations for the person who receives our gift. If and when they fail to meet our expectations for them, we manufacture suffering, both in ourselves and in others. Therefore, when we give a gift (as in all situations) we should not be attached to anything, but simply give our gift, for the sake of giving our gift.

That, in Cairo, Muslims reject the giving of charity with the attachment of building social merit speaks to the wisdom of that religion, a wisdom which we - who often focus on the many levels of foolishness in certain manifestations of Islams - generally fail to recognize. I have written often here on the culture wars, by which I generally mean a war within our own society between (at least) two competing visions for our collective culture. But as Western leaders ramp up their anti-Muslim rhetoric, and as jihadists lash out against us (and I could just as easily put those two in the opposite order, since it is not so much a matter of one coming first and being followed by the other as it is a matter of the two together creating an endless spiral) it is becoming increasingly clear that the most dangerous culture war may be one that is sometimes called the clash of civilizations. That is, a war between two cultures which apparently have a great deal less in common than red staters have in common with blue staters.

In this war we are often hesitant to see Islam in a charitable light. And, given the prevalence of violence in the Muslim world - violence which includes rival factions blowing up each other's sacred houses of worship on holy days - it is admittedly difficult to look at Islam charitably. But any religion with such a rich history of charity - and charity of the best kind, which bridges social and economic gaps authenticating the basic humanity of all who come to the table to feast - deserves to be treated with at least a little bit of charity. And anyone who wishes to somehow defuse the growing war between Islam and the West had better learn how to see the points where Islamic values overlap with our own, so that we can focus on those points of commonality and learn how to build on them.

A Victory for Moderate Islam?

I don't often comment on Islam for a variety of reasons. I don't have much to say about the (chronologically) third great Monotheistic religion, and much of what I could say would only inflame either Muslims who don't need someone from outside their religion to criticize it, or conservative Christians or Jews who find my criticisms far too charitable. But, when I read this article in the Christian Science Monitor I felt I had to say something.

There are many aspects of Islam that have always appealed to me: the radical monotheism, which at its best uses the unity of God to attempt to unify humanity; the blending of the secular and sacred in daily life; the public and highly ritualized prayers; the fact that one prays with one's whole body, and not just one's mouth; Sufi mystical poetry; the emphasis on submission to God; the majesty of the hajj, the pilgrimage that so powerfully speaks to human unity before God that it forever changed the life of Malcolm X.

But for all of the good that I see in Islam, all in that great religion which appeals to me (and the previous paragraph is but a hastily prepared list which barely touches the surface), like all reasonable people I am deeply troubled by the propensity towards violence that I see in Islam.

Islam, to be sure, does not own a monopoly on religious violence. The Tanakh, called by many Christians the "Old Testament," is littered with divinely ordained violence. For instance, while the book of Numbers intimidates many causal readers of the Bible with long sections devoted to census taking and law making, it also contains horrific stories of religious/political warfare. In Numbers 31, for instance, God ordains the Israelites to take vengeance against the Midianites, which they faithfully do killing all of the men and taking the women and children hostage. However, Moses, who here acts as the mouthpiece of God, rebukes his own army for being too lenient, commanding them in what is for me the most troubling passage in the Bible:

Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man. (Numbers 31: 17-18, JPS)

Likewise Christian history is filled with violence done in the name of a righteous God. While Islam was still a relatively peaceful and tolerant religion the Roman Catholic Church propagated a series of Crusades against it, an event which still scars the collective memories of Muslims. After the Muslim Seljuk Turks captured much of the Near East in the 11th Century, including parts of the Byzantine Empire, Pope Urban II, in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, called for what has since been named the First Crusade; a holy war against Muslims who had been accused of defiling sacred Christian sites.

The Crusades eventually spanned such a broad expanse of time, killing such a vast and senseless number of people, that it is easy to become emotionally numb studying is from a broad view. Stories from individual battles and sieges in individual Crusades, however, tell a much more compelling human story which truly depicts how violence done in the name of the Prince of Peace (to use a Jewish image appropriated by Christians for Jesus) defiles the history of Christianity. Donald Spoto's magnificent biography of Francis of Assisi (my bedtime reading last week, as you can see here) contains some powerful images from battles that Francis witnessed as he was preaching peace during the Fifth Crusade. Summing up the carnage, Spoto writes:

The Fifth Crusade continued on its disastrous course. After another siege, Damietta was taken on November 5 [1219 - CB] by the Crusaders, who found houses and streets filled with corpses half devoured by ravenous dogs while weeping children clung to their dead and dying parents, begging for food. Of the 80,000 people in the city at the beginning of the siege, only 3,000 survived, and of these only 100 were not ill with fatal diseases.

When a religion believes that it alone represents God, and that all who oppose it oppose God, and especially when a religion believes that it has been ordained by God to wipe out all of God's enemies; that religion has reached such a height of moral arrogance that it can justify dishonoring all of its principles in its quest to rid the world forever of the identified enemies of God. While I do not believe that such morally arrogant violence is essential to monotheism, I must admit that each monotheistic religion has tended from time to time toward such righteous violence. Islam is no exception to this.

What troubles me about Islam, however, is that, as a Jewish religious studies professor of mine once lamented, it seems like no moderate Muslims are willing to call Islam's violent extremists to task for their maniacal methods. Reading the above-linked article simultaneously gave me some faith in the collective moral conscience of moderate Muslims (after all, a cleric helped lead authorities to 17 suspected terrorists) and a great deal of fear for those moderate Muslims who are willing to stand up to the violence being done in their name (after all, while the cleric is being hailed by the secular world as a hero, he is seen by many Muslims as a traitor).

Will the real Islam please stand up?