Spirit in Action
Nonviolence in the Islamic Traditon Keynote
This is Azhar Usman's keynote address of the 2011 Ways of Peace II Conference on Nonviolence in the Islamic Tradition, sponsored by Friends for a Non-Violent World. Azhar is a comedian, lawyer, activist and writer.
- Broadcast on:
- 11 Jun 2011
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- other
Well, I'll begin in the name of God Bismillah, Hirahman, Hirahim, because I do believe in God, and I think it's important that we focus when we start out talking about these types of things. I'm just actually amazed at this gathering happening in Minneapolis, and people showing such concern and such compassion for this topic. Nonviolence is something that I think for people of the heart is just natural, something that actually transcends religion and transcends specific wisdom traditions, and it's something I think that fundamentally human beings who are in touch with their spirit and in touch with the cosmos and in touch with reality often find themselves inclining toward. It's actually a bit of a paradox when we discuss nonviolence, and at the same time, the restoration of justice, because often we find that sometimes in the establishment of justice, we have to exert force, and the interplay between the use of force and non-violent traditions is something that obviously becomes somewhat paradoxical, somewhat difficult to navigate and weave through, regardless of whether you're a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Jew, or a person of no faith for that matter. So I tread carefully going into these into my remarks. That said, I've put a lot of thought into the topic, and actually I want to begin, first of all, with a beautiful quote from the Quran, again, just to center what I'm here to talk about and hopefully to get us kind of on the same page. It's a verse in the Quran that jumped out at me when I began learning a little bit about the friends for non-violent world and the Quakers and the, of course, religious society of friends, and it's a verse in the Quran that goes like this, "Bismillah, Rahman, Raheem," in the name of God, "Most Gracious, Most Merciful," "Inna mal mu'nun al-Lavina, Ida Dukir al-Lahu, O'Jillatkulubuhum," "O'Jillatkulubuhum," "O'Jillatkulillat al-Alayhiem, Ayatuhu," "Za daktum imayana un wa'alah," "Rabhihim yatah wa'karun," "Sadhak al-Lahadim." This appears in the 8th chapter of the Quran, which is called "Al-Anphal," which means the spoils of war, interestingly, and the second verse of this chapter in which the Quran states, "Indeed, true believers are those whose hearts quake when God is mentioned, and when his revelations are shared with them, their faith increases, and they trust their Lord." Of course, the word "Quaker," as I'm sure most of you are aware, is related to this idea of people who tremble in the way of the Lord. And it's certainly something, I think, that is a harmonic across a lot of wisdom traditions, because people whose hearts are alive in the Muslim tradition, we call them "Ahamul kulub," people of the heart. Their hearts come alive because they get in touch with the Spirit inside them. And that Spirit, which is inside all of us, the ruha, which is called, it's in Arabic, it's called the ruha, is from the Quran, and it forms us "min amridabhi," it is from the command of the Lord of the universe, and it is something which, though it exists, and it's created by God, is different than the physical created world. The soul and the spirit of a human being in the Muslim tradition is created by God, but not in the same way as the physical created world, it's created from what's called "amridabhi," from the command of God, when God simply said "be," and it came into existence. So this special thing inside every human being, the spirit, the soul, is basically the mystery inside all of us. It's the thing that makes us alive, it's the thing that defines who we actually really are, because before we were bodies, we already existed as souls, and even after we die in our bodies and we will continue to live on in some spiritual form, and that thing, that secret, is in our tradition, precisely what we're talking about, what we talk about this thing called the spirit or the ruha, the soul, which makes us human. And the heart is the command center of the ruha, the kalb, the heart in a human being, is the command center of the soul, just as the ego, the nafs, is the command center of the body. And so this duality inside all of us, which is pairing up the physical dimension with the non-physical dimension, that is to say the body with the spirit is precisely what the Muslim tradition is full of in terms of teaching and explaining to human beings the true nature of reality. My remarks are organized basically as follows. I wanted to start at a very meta level, just thinking about the question of non-violence in the Islamic tradition. I know we've already had some remarks earlier today from people much more qualified than myself in fields such as theology and Islamic studies. So I won't, I'll try not to repeat anything that's already been said, but I did want to start with kind of a meta view and then kind of drill down from there. So the birds I view is sort of like, what is the philosophical basis for even thinking about or discussing non-violence in the Islamic tradition? The second part of my presentation is the fact that classical Islam is actually well equipped to deal with its confrontation with other religions, other wisdom traditions, other worldviews. And so I wanted to just remark on a little bit on classical Islam and the way Islam itself as an organized faith, as an organized religion, sees itself and relates to other wisdom traditions. Thirdly, I want to talk, you know, sort of bring it back down to earth and talk a little bit about what's happening in the world today and some of the proto Islamic movements in the Muslim world and specifically touch on the phenomenon of political Islam or Islamism as it's often called. And that'll tie in to, of course, what's happening right now in the modern Middle East and what's unfolding on our television sets every day on Al Jazeera English and on CNN. And then finally, I'll just conclude with a few remarks on the nature of the interconnected world that we're living in today and how all of what I've said hopefully fits together. So herculean task, but let's see if we can do it. First of all, I'd like to begin with a quote from Meg Greenfield. Some of you may be big news junkies may recognize Meg Greenfield was a senior editor at Newsweek for many years. She passed away a few years ago and her memoirs were published. She's a very, very well-respected journalist and she wrote in 1979 at the height of the U.S. Iranian crisis when American hostages were being held in Tehran. She wrote a very interesting thing in Newsweek in 1979. So I just want to frame that as being over, what is that, 79? It's 30 years ago, 30 some odd years ago. She said we are heading into an era of expansion in our relationship with that complex of religion, culture, and geography known as Islam. There are two things to be said about this. One is that no other part of the world is more important to our own well-being now and probably for the foreseeable future. And two is that no other part of the world is more hopelessly and systematically and stubbornly misunderstood by us. That was in 1979. And it reminded me of a quote of Malcolm X, who about a year before he passed away in 1964, after he did a 20-country tour of the Middle East and in the Muslim world, came back to the United States and held a press conference. And instead of a very interesting kind of flippant remark, he said all the Arabs need is a PR firm. All the Arabs need is a PR firm. He said that in the mid-60s and here we are in 2011, where people still across the entire world and the United States in particular continue to, as Meg Greenfield said, stubbornly, systematically misunderstand this religion. With that as a beginning point and a departure point, I just want to ask everybody to perhaps suspend a lot of the judgments or a lot of the preconceived notions or even what they may have read or heard in the press and the media regarding Islam. I want to speak instead from not sources that are alien to the tradition or that are commenting on Muslims, but rather from within the tradition. People often use the mantra nowadays, Islam is a religion of peace. I'm sure you've heard people say this. Islam is a religion of peace. The word Islam comes from the word peace, et cetera, et cetera. And I think there's a bit of a misnomer there, because theologically speaking and ontologically speaking, Islam doesn't really call itself a religion of peace. And in fact, a simple look at Muslim history will show you that it's actually full of war. Islam has always seen itself fundamentally as a religion of mercy. In fact, the defining attribute of the God of Islam, if you will, which is, of course, the same God of all humanity, is that God is merciful. The two most common names that are used in our tradition to refer to God are a Rahman and a Rahim. And anybody who's studied Semitic languages knows that you can immediately recognize that they come from the same root word. Rahman and Rahim. The common trilateral root is Rah-ha-meme, R-H-M, Rahmah. And Rahmah comes from a word Rahmah, all like all Semitic languages, all words in the Arabic and the Hebrew and Aramaic and Syriac languages, they come from triratical root words. So the way you discover new language or new meanings, unlock new meanings in a Semantic field within these languages is that you figure out what the root verb is, the triratical root, and then you find out what the meaning of that is and you can begin to piece it all together. So Rahimah is the root word of Rahman and Rahim. What does Rahimah mean? Rahimah means to be merciful. And the noun or the basic noun that's formed from this word is Rahim which means the womb, the womb. And the womb is seen to symbolically represent mercy more than anything else in creation. Why? Because the mother who holds holding a child in her womb has nothing but absolute mercy. That's the defining attribute of her relationship with that child. So what is the definition of mercy? Mercy is defined in the Muslim tradition as wanting good for others without wanting anything in return, desiring good for others without wanting anything in return. So Rahman and Rahim, we translate that as the merciful, the compassionate, but really it doesn't do justice to the full range of Semantic significance and meaning when we call God by these beautiful names, Rahman and Rahim. God has this relationship with all of creation where, and this has been always the paradox within Muslim philosophy and Muslim mysticism, is that God is both utterly transcendent and at the same time totally imminent. God has neither disconnected from the creation nor is God contained within it. God has neither said to be outside of creation nor is God said to be part of it. So this becomes a paradox and that is precisely the case because God in our tradition is absolutely unique. That very defining attribute of God is that there is nothing else like God. That's actually why there's such an emphasis placed in Islam on odd numbers because everything that exists exists in duality except God. God has no opposite. So as a recognition of that, we always emphasize things in odd numbers. You'll find in the life of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and keep him, for example, he would always prefer to do things in threes. If he would eat something, he would eat three. If he would do a litany, he would do an odd number. If he would say a prayer, he would often say things in batches of three or multiples of three. Why? Always reminding himself and everyone else that whatever is around us, whatever world we're perceiving, the reality is there's always God and God is absolutely unlike the creation. So the God of Islam is related to mercy, Rahman and Raheem. The Prophet Muhammad is called Rahmatul Lele Alameen. The mercy to all the worlds. Again, why? Because his defining attribute in our tradition is that he wants nothing but good for others without wanting anything in return. So they say about him, for example, to illustrate this in a very human way. They say about him that his heart was full of a gum. He was makamum, which means his heart is full. He's heavy-hearted out of his concern for the affairs of other human beings, and yet they say about him that he always smiled. His companions say there was no one that smiled more than the messenger of God. So here's the duality again. Outwardly he's smiling, he's happy, he's optimistic, he's forever an optimist, and yet at the same time his heart is full of a gum, he's heavy-hearted. Why? Because he understands reality, which is that the affair, the human affair, and the way it will unfold against the expanse of time and the great gathering, the reckoning that all of us are heading towards, that will be after this world is over and it will enter us into a new dimension of reality, or there will be a judgment before the God of the universe, and there will be everlasting bliss and punishment. That's a heavy affair. So he was heavy-hearted. Yet at the same time, he was utterly optimistic and he was this title he's given in the Quran is "Rahma tulillah alameen", the mercy to all the worlds, and also the religion of Islam is called "Din arahma", the religion of mercy. So I mentioned all this to say cosmologically, theologically, the defining attribute of this religion has always been as far as the way it sees itself has been about mercy, wanting good for others without wanting anything in return, and this obviously one can see is intimately related to non-violence. How can you want good for others without wanting anything in return if you're going to engage in violence? Now we have to then make sense of the violent tradition, the use of force, of martial combat in the history of Islam, dating back to the earliest community as well as throughout its expansionist history. And this is definitely a topic which is outside the scope of what I can talk about and the time of constraints that we have, but I will simply mention that one way to think about this is sort of to square the circle by realizing that everything I said about Islam being a tradition and a religion that is about mercy, and at the same time has a space for basically just war to borrow a phrase, if you will, from the Christian tradition. And it's sort of like Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize while sitting as a president overseeing two ongoing wars. How do you get your mind around that? Well, a thinking person, if you bother to listen to his remarks at his acceptance speech and you actually listen to what he said, he makes the case for exactly what we're talking about. The fact that you can be a man of peace, you can be a person who is about promotion of peace, who is about promoting non-violence, and yet at the same time find yourself in situations where sometimes your hand is forced. And I realize that it's a debate and reasonable minds can disagree and not everybody will be convinced that a president, presiding president, overseeing two ongoing wars and God knows how many undisclosed CIA covert operations around the world should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. I get that that's a debatable outcome in the first place. But for those who acknowledge that that obviously did happen and there's certainly a case that can be made for why that was so, I would simply say that there is something that we can take from that from that same analysis and realize that a very similar interplay is going on in the history of Islam between its personality as a religion of mercy and sometimes its need to engage in martial combat. This brings me to my remarks on classical Islam. One thing that I think is very important for us as modern human beings to realize and I like the fact that I'm speaking to friends, I mean that word both lowercase f and capital f because I think that we all get something that a lot of people don't get anymore in the modern world. And that is the fact that you know I think there's a modern error that a lot of people make, a lot of contemporary human beings make which is that somehow ancient wisdom traditions have nothing valuable to offer the modern world simply due to the mere passage of time. Just because centuries have gone by somehow the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, the Vedas, the Upanishads, somehow the wisdom that they contain are no longer valuable or useful to us. This is a modern error and I think those who embrace it embrace it to their own peril. They embrace this fallacious line of reasoning to their own detriment because actually when you really study these wisdom traditions and we study organized religion and I'm sure many of you have, you begin to see that the essential truths that you boil down from all of them are basically the same. They're basically the same. And one thing about Islam that I think was very unique and very interesting is that classical Islam found itself very uniquely equipped to deal with its confrontation with other wisdom traditions precisely because it is the youngest of the world's faiths. It's the youngest of the world's largest faith communities and so it has always seen itself as the logical culmination and the continuation of our prophetic teaching going back to time immemorial. In the Muslim tradition we say according to one tradition of the Prophet Muhammad he said there were 124,000 prophets sent by God the creator of the universe to humanity. In one verse in the Quran it says every single nation and tribe on earth received a prophet from God and those prophets came and taught basically the same teaching and that teaching had basically two aspects. One is human beings. They would go to their people and say yeah come with me. Oh my people do not associate partners with God. God is one and absolutely unique. God is the creator of everything. Everything other than God is a creation. That's the first part of the message. Absolute unity of the divine. And the second part of the message was always people listen to what I have to say and follow me. Why? Because there will be a reckoning. One day all of us will be resurrected and we will answer for the way we lived our lives. If you live a good life, a godly life, a saintly life you will be forever rewarded and be in the presence of God forever and ever and ever. And if you neglect this and you become heedless and you worry about nothing but satisfying your own desires and your own cravings and you indulge the evil appetites inside of you then you will find that you will be punished by God. Those two aspects of the absolute unity of the divine and the reckoning, the accountability before God, that was in the Muslim tradition the same exact teaching that all 124,000 prophets taught wherever they were on the planet. And then the Muslim tradition continues in the Quran. There are 25 prophets that are biblical prophets mentioned by name in the Quran. So Muslims believe in Abraham and Jesus and Moses and David and Jonah and Joseph and all these beautiful stories, biblical stories are actually reiterated and confirmed and told yet again in the Quran but in a different language and in a way that never had been told before because the Quran is both a book of stories but is also a meta text that does not follow a linear format. It's not a book of stories that begins like in the beginning and then the middle and then the end. It's a very elliptical text and it's actually very difficult for people to read and understand in Arabic especially but even in translation. So it's actually a book that often people find very difficult to unlock and very difficult to access. I mentioned all this to say that because Islam is the youngest of the world's faiths and because it sees itself as a culmination of prophetic teaching going back to time immemorial and it regards Adam the first man as actually being a prophet of God. It actually sees all of the organized religions whether it's Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism or the proto religions before them or whether it's the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and of course Islam. It sees them as perfectly valid and coming from the same source and this has been beautifully articulated in the English language and if anybody's interested in among the writings of those who espouse a philosophical school known as integral traditionalism. If you don't take anything else away from anything I say today you can write down that term Google it and do your own further reading. The philosophical school of integral traditionalism or rather traditionalism with a capital T as opposed to modernism is a philosophical school that precisely concerns itself with the critique of the modern error and the modern error in the language of the traditionalists is that contemporary human beings have disconnected reality from the divine. They have started to think that physical existence somehow doesn't have meaning that is connected to its divine origin and traditionalism stands in opposition to modernism saying no this is an error all of being has meaning everything has meaning why because all of it is a manifestation what we say in Arabic itadjali these are theophanes that are manifesting through the divine prism the will and the command of the uncreated lord and creator of the universe. Now as one focal point in classical Islam a towering intellectual figure and a towering spiritual figure who embodies everything i'm talking about is a man called al-gazali who is known in western philosophy as al-gazal a-l-g-a-z-e-l al-gazali died in the year 1111 when he came into the mix and he came onto the scene he was a master both of the outward sciences of Islam that is to say the academic sciences of the religion the karan exegesis of the karan the life of the prophet the history of the karan the interpretation of the karan based on the exact moments and time when specific verses had been revealed to the prophet Muhammad the sciences of the statements of the prophet Muhammad the law of Islam etc etc but he was also a master of the inward sciences of Islam Islam spirituality or mysticism if you will and during his life in the milieu of Baghdad where he was raised and lived and taught there were basically five dominant trends that began to emerge and these really became the defining trends of medieval or classical Islam and there were number one legal formalism number two rational theology number three balthani shi'ism which is a specific branch of the shi'a tradition number four metaphysical philosophy and number five mystical sufism or mystical spirituality and kazali becomes the master who is regarded and remembered by all muslims and revered universally basically by muslims precisely because he becomes a master of all five of these trends and he writes an exhaustive set of books and his magnum opus is a collection of 40 books that he wrote at the end of his life which is called he'a alumudin the revival of the religious sciences in which he discusses all of these topics with such precision such depth and such detail that scholars to this day are absolutely baffled how could a person have written these books in one lifetime when there are scholars who devote their entire lifetime to studying them and they cannot even unlock the mysteries and the depths of meaning containing these books after a lifetime of study how could somebody have written them i know one of my friends is actually a translator of gazali and he says i can't imagine if i spent every single waking moment of the rest of my life i couldn't translate all of gazali's books how did he write that this guy is absolutely incredible and gazali really is a figure for our time he really is a figure for our time because he absolutely gets the interconnectivity between reason and revelation the fact that the intellectual faculties of man are perhaps man's most prized gift and yet at the same time the human mind the rationality and the intellect are incapable of when left completely alone to their own devices they are incapable of utterly penetrating the intrinsic reality of the nature of things reason needs revelation in order to fully penetrate into the inner reality of the meaning of things and so it is actually reason that must submit to revelation not the other way around and this is why i i would return to the the point i made at the beginning that we have this duality inside of us we are both physical creatures we have bodies and egos and minds but we are also spiritual creatures who have this ruha and this seer the secret inside of a human being which connects us utterly to our divine origin and unraveling that mystery and understanding the interplay between the ego the body the heart the soul and the spirit is precisely the domain of these five fields legal formalism how does that play into the way these five dimensions relate to one another rational theology what does that have to say about it how do we understand things intellectually when it comes to realities which are utterly beyond the scope of the intellect botany shea that is to say the hidden dimensions of reality metaphysical philosophy and of course mystical sufism so interconnected in these trends was unlocking the mystery of what it means to be a human being and i say all this again to say that classical islam was was especially well equipped to then deal as islam was expanding and growing and going into very diverse human civilizations and cultures suddenly it finds itself in spain where muslims are are in the middle of europe ruling spain for over 700 years where sisily italy was became a basically a garrison capital city of the muslim empire where the ottomans in turkey are a whole different vast global civilization where they're inventing just incredible things muslims are in under the turks are credited with inventing commercial paper where a thousand years ago you could go from one end of the muslim empire with a written document basically without without having a release a central global banking system and yet you could cash that piece of commercial paper in let's say let's say west africa in moritania for example incredible you find that islam is in purgia islam is in the moguls in in south asia islam is going to southeast asia the javanese people the indonesians so islam found itself growing rapidly whether it was through military conquest through business and trade or through spirituality and sufism islam was becoming a very global very diverse and very internally cultured textured and internally diverse people and so it naturally had to deal with its confrontation with non muslim peoples whether it was hindu's buddhist's christians jews what have you so there's a lot more to say on the topic but i'll simply say that again integral traditionalism and the writings that have been formulated and espoused and published both in the academia and in popular literature by traditionalists and i say that with the capital t are definitely worth reading for anybody who's interested in understanding the way islam sees itself and relates to prior dispensations of religion all of which we believe come from the same source so when you boil down and tend to integral traditionalism it's basically teaching us that the essential esoteric reality of all religion can be boiled down to the same set of inner core transcendent principles and those are as i said earlier the same teachings that all prophets taught humanity so now we've gone over a bit of the macro level of islam seeing itself as a as a religion of mercy connecting that to the divine origin of it all connecting that to the wisdom traditions that came before islam and and looking at gazali and and some of what classical islam was up to about a thousand years ago and i want to just drill down and talk a little bit about the world that we're actually living in now we find ourselves in 21st century america in a very globalized world in a very interconnected world and i think that it's fair to say in my view and i i think that others in the academia i've argued this as well that really all of the movements in the muslim world whatever flavor they've taken on they're actually all trying to solve the same riddle they're all trying to square the same circle and that is how do we live as muslims who are faithful to this set of principles i mentioned a moment ago that are timeless that are pre-modern that are coming from the same divine origin that are firmly rooted in the tradition and that are the timeless teachings and principles of our faith tradition and yet at the same time do so in a way that is utterly and completely fluid and comfortable in the world that we find ourselves in a world that is utterly interconnected that is utterly based on and operating on technology and global communication one that is totally globalized in a corporate way and a world that is utterly given itself up to modernity or perhaps post modernity or if you will in academia post post modernity which is what they're talking about now how do you do that and islamism political islam is really just one manifestation for those who are who basically see themselves as proponents of liberation theology within the muslim faith that's just one expression of that and islamists sadly today they've gotten a very ugly and dirty name it's a dirty word now to be called an islamist but not all of them are violent in fact you'll find a lot of very non-violent islamists in the world turkey today it's basically being run and they're now in there what is it uh seventh or sixth term of of running that country they're basically a political party that's based on very islamist ideological understanding of islam why because they're all former marxists basically in that part of the world who have all become reformed now and have basically taken basic principles of governance and politics put islamic wrappers on them and try to figure out a way to govern themselves in a way as i said a moment ago that is both in their view faithful to these timeless traditions and yet at the same time totally comfortable in the modern world and what we're fighting today in places like egypt and tunisia and even those places where violence is now erupted such as libya syria baharan yemen we're still we're finding basically people trying to still wrestle with the same problem you know we're living in a world that's post-colonial we're living in a world that's become rapidly interconnected you're dealing with populations that are very young most of whom are on the internet they have cell phones they're very connected and suddenly facebook has erupted into the world in a way that nobody saw coming and so you have this incredible incredible passion and this incredible amount of energy among young people who are again wrestling with the same problem they're finding themselves if you're a young egyptian for example and i actually lived in egypt for four months as a law student when i was at a going to law school at the university in the soda during the my summer after my first year that was 1997 i spent four months in egypt and got a chance to talk to a lot of people who were involved in these so-called liberation theology movements and i did a human rights internship while i was there as well and it was amazing just to get such a broad spectrum of views from people who outwardly look exactly the same and yet inwardly they're informed by various sets of of data points or they're influenced by different philosophical traditions you know one guy's a Marxist one guy's a communist one guy's a vowed american exceptionalist one guy's you know considers himself an american a democrat basically a citizen of the world and renounces his notion any notions of statehood and consider himself a cosmopolitanist et cetera et cetera i found all these interesting people in coffee shops and and hook-a-bars in Cairo these were the young people who now i'm sure are part of the brains behind everything that's happening so i think that the way to think about it as americans when we're looking at that part of the world is to realize that they're all wrestling with the same question how do we as Muslims in the modern world live our islam in a way that is going to be faithful to traditions that we believe are true and real and authentic and yet at the same time be completely confluent with the modern world the contemporary world and it's a world as i said a moment ago that is not only interconnected and globalized but also has this corporate dimension and corporatism suddenly becomes a problem in some ways because it's seen as furthering western hegemony and american brands and i just returned from a trip with my family to mecca i went on a religious pilgrimage to mecca stayed across the street from the kaba the most holy site in islam and found it utterly bizarre that i would pray in front of this house that in muslim tradition goes back to adam himself having been rebuilt by the prophet abraham and his son ishmael and then re-established during the lifetime of the prophet Muhammad as the house on earth for the worship of one god this utterly pristine if you will this utterly ancient this house of god and i would literally walk out of that place and walk into the hotel i was thinking which is connected to a mall and in the mall i swear to you there was a clairs on the first floor and all my kids wanted to eat for for lunch breakfast lunch and dinner was burger king it's very bizarre it's very bizarre and so you can start to get your mind now even by just a few examples i just mentioned with some of the angst and some of the energy that people are feeling in that part of the world finally you know i've said a lot about a lot of things and i'd like to just try to connect some of them up with the larger theme of non-violence in the in the islamic traditions and the the political reality going on in the world today and i would simply submit to you that you know because the world has become so interconnected and because you know as as a poet once said everyone everywhere wants to be american and because america does rule and lead the world whether that's culturally militarily politically financially what have you the simple fact of the matter is everyone does look to what's happening in america for leadership and i would submit to you that what we find happening in the world today you know we we have to really never divorce what happens quote unquote overseas from what's happening right here in our back in our own back yards there is no doubt in my mind that anti-muslim hysteria anti-muslim hate anti-muslim propaganda that goes on the in the united states today is utterly connected to anti-americanism abroad it's a no-brainer every time somebody does anything crazy hating muslims in america it has a ripple effect and it has a direct consequence in the muslim world and in muslim communities all around the planet whether in the muslim world proper or even in the muslim diaspora in places like europe and in places like parts of africa south africa for example comes to mind utterly interconnected the world if anybody is still under the delusion that we are not utterly connected i mean really uh we have to embrace the reality that we're not living under the world of facebook and twitter and cell phones and texting and the immediacy of something happening and everybody knowing about it is just a world that we are all inextricably linked and trapped in now and that is a Pandora's box that is never going to close i believe from now until the end of time we have to figure intelligently figure out what's going on and then understand as people who are working for non-violence and working to uh wage peace if you will we must figure out how to operate in that world and promote peace in a way that is going to be intelligent in the way that's not going to deny these realities and the leaders of these movements for example again egypt comes to mind they are obviously committed to non-violence their preferred path of resistance and of change and resisting oppression is through non-violence and i humbly submit to you that we as americans and people of non-violence and non-violent protest must become champions of everybody who in that part of the world is fighting injustice and promoting resistance and doing so in a peaceful manner we have to we have no other choice and i would say to you further and these are part of my final final remarks you know one of my favorite quotes two of my favorite quotes are from a guy called sir Peter Eustonov who's a british humorist one of them i actually intended to open with and i forgot because i know a lot of people expected me to be funny today since i'm a comedian and sir Peter Eustonov said comedy is just a funny way of being serious but he also said as one of my favorite quotes he said terrorism is the war of the poor he said terrorism is the war of the poor and war is terrorism of the rich and i think there's a very profound truth in what he's talking about and i think that we as americans have to be honest about what our country what our government and what our military does around the world we cannot out of one side of the mouth talk about condemning terrorism and political violence and yet at the same time out of the other side of the mouth remains silent about atrocities that are committed by our troops by our government in our name with our tax dollars and i said this when bush was in office i think it's still relevant even though obama is now president you'll see why it doesn't quite work anymore but i said this when bush was in office which is that you know we have to become people of principle who condemn the taking of innocent human life no matter who does it no matter who does it whether it's done whether it whether it's done by a man with dark skin wearing white robes in a dark cave or it's done by a man with white skin wearing a dark suit in a white house and i know that sometimes it's politically unpopular to speak about these things because uh we've been brainwashed with this uh what i believe is is a very Nazi type of logic where you know you have to quote unquote support the troops support the troops i'm not exactly sure i'm sorry yeah bring them exactly yeah how about if we support them by sparing their lives how about that taking them out of out of harm's way but i but i think that uh we as americans have to be honest about this as well and unfortunately the voices of courage and the voices of leadership that are courageously speaking about these things are very very few as you all know so in conclusion we end where we began which is that thinking people must wage peace and who are thinking people in the muslim tradition they are a little collub people of the heart people of the heart people who understand that physical existence and the labels that we put on one another only have a meaning to an extent but fundamental truth and eternal truth transcends physical being what connects us all is the spirit and what connects us all is the secret and the soul within the current state of affairs in america in my view is just a passing chapter in american history when i watched those peter king hearings i actually felt like he was filming the highlight reel of you know the hysteria in in 30 or 40 years the way we watch footage from dr king's era and and marvel and our shock at the utter intolerance and backwardness of people in the 60s is the way i think in 20 and 30 years people will be watching the peter king tapes wondering that there was actually a time in american history where this was happening so i don't lose sleep over that the world is continuing to shrink everything and everyone is getting closer and closer together and so i think people of the heart it's time we all come together put our differences aside and realize we have to share this planet we're all going on a journey to the same destination and so i pray that god gives us strength and brings the people of the heart together thank you very much thank you any of you have questions for us or if you want to line up at the microphones i'm wondering how non-muslims can detect unwelcome attempts to genetically modify islam to make it politically acceptable or how we can try to preserve space for people who might have unrealistic political goals but are committed to non-violence we had a speaker earlier who used that phrase which i think was really beautiful genetically modified that genetically modified islam is going to cause cancer we did hear some panelists at the king hearings apparently seeking funding or support for an effort to moderate islam in some fashion so how do non-muslims detect these attempts by neocons and others to modify the source code of islam to make it acceptable for the political elites in washington or the corporations okay and then how do we preserve space for people who might have unrealistic political goals like the restoration the clefate but it might be determined to use non-violent means only how do we create groups for radical groups that are non-violent like his but career and preserve freedom of speech in this country and in our debates when people are going to have the impulse to say because they want something so backwards or different it has to be taken out of the conversation man both of those questions are way beyond my pay grade the second one i'll start with the second one because that one's easy for me to answer which is that the honest answer is i have no idea and i think the real i mean the reality is that that's been a conundrum in american politics throughout the nation's history you know the tension between balancing security and freedom right and this is a quote on the founding fathers and they debated this even in the in the in the federalist papers how do you create a republic that allows for political dissent and dissidents and dissidents and even the right to bear arms and yet at the same time ensure security and safety so the honest answer to that one is i i don't know how to how to create that space for politically unpopular viewpoints particularly those that are Islamist in nature who want to organize on the basis of political Islamist agenda espousing ostensibly non-violence and yet finding a lot of fiery rhetoric and a lot of you know overlap with with violent groups etc etc i i really don't know how to navigate that and that's why i started out by saying i hate politics because i think it's just i actually think it's at some point it almost becomes impossible to maintain both of those in an ideal state something's got to give and and often it's going to be the freedom that's going to give when the security is being decided by political elites who don't share obviously those dissident views the other question is more interesting one to me which is you know how can people who are not muslims try to help if you will or stop you know the the genetic mutation of islam and i think it's related to a phenomenon that i often hear people saying people say things like you know you know what islam needs is a reformation because you know and then they want to analogize you know this is what you know the Arabs have a beautiful proverb they say alma materu yakisu alanafse which means a person analogizes based on himself everybody thinks everybody else is like them so people who come from a quote unquote judeo christian you know european background they tend to look at what happened there and they say oh that's all the muslims need is you know they're just going through the same and i think that's a really uh um apples and oranges problem you know that the honest answer is um on that one is you know genetic mutation unfortunately i would argue has already begun to take place and it's actually not been in my view by people outside the faith but rather by people inside the faith there has already been in the modern time literally in the past 100 to 200 years a lot of internal genetic mutation of islam such that things that for you know 1200 1300 years of most of islamic history were considered mainstream orthodoxy have now suddenly begun to be seen as suspicious or problematic or whatever and actually open up a whole another huge can of worms but there is a need i think i love classical islam i think classical islam has so many of the tools that it was just ahead of its time you know the world that we're living in now a totally interconnected global world was in many ways that classical islam and medieval islam was a precursor to this to the world we find ourselves in and there's so many lessons that we can draw from in that pre-modern world where we can obviously make them relevant and appropriate for our time but unfortunately most muslims themselves are very ill informed about their own history so i would say that you know a lot of education is needed and supporting those movements within muslim communities and the muslim world that are interested in reviving and being authentic to something that's already been part of our faith from the beginning rather than embracing those ideas that have been alien and have found their way into the tradition in the last 100 to 200 years sort of a related question coming out of quicker traditions of continuing revelation the old saws you know mohammed was the last profit but yet the individuals have their own search and sometimes it leads them into divergent or improvements upon a standard let's say and from my bag remembrance of muslim history there was a wonderful time back to people that I whose names I can't pronounce such as the guy in bagdan where it was an immense growth as far as the theology and the inner spirituality of muslims and then it seemed like there was one event things became codified and that individual spiritual search if you will kind of if you diverged you weren't you know and then all of a sudden but I mean it's that's common to most religions today once somebody seems to diverge they're either expelled or worse so how would you respond to what is happening today especially with the youth in the Middle East and that inter-search if you will and if we're into a new awakening if you will within Islam it's a beautiful question thank you for asking that so two two quick comments one is you know in the in the tradition there's a distinction made between the type of prophecy that prophets receive prophets are considered a special category of human beings and so among that category the prophet Muhammad has seen as being the final prophet and the revelation that he is that he receives is called why why he is like revelation from god through communication delivered through a specific methodology which is through the medium of an archangel in this case Gabriel and delivering the eternal unspoken uncreated speech of the divine that's the Muslim belief about the Quran the Quran is the recorded it's both created and uncreated the words of it and the sounds and the letters are created they exist in creation but the realities that they encode are believed to be uncreated eternal speech of the divine and that revelation is called why which is different than inspiration which is called ill ham also coming from god which human beings can continue to receive after the prophet Muhammad so to answer the first part of your question about individual search for spirituality individual mystical connection with the divine that has absolutely been part of Muslim tradition and even the prophet Muhammad's companions themselves would receive this ill ham this type of revelatory inspiration which is different than the other revelation i mentioned a moment ago in the Muslim mystical tradition you have also what's called kash or unveiling having realizations about the nature of reality also coming from god so you have ill ham you have kash you have foot to heart a fat is like an opening in truth so you have all these notions and these realities which are part of the orthodox tradition of Islam and they're all perfectly valid they continue to exist they're part of every individual's individual search for truth and connectivity with the divine and none of that necessarily rubs against or goes against the orthodox theological belief in the finality of the problem Muhammad the last thing i'll mention is this problem you also touched on about orthodoxy and heterodoxy which has always been a part of you know as you say all all religious traditions it is something that of course Muslims have wrestled with and the boundaries of of orthodoxy and in each of its disciplines whether it's theology or law or koranic interpretation or or spirituality those boundaries have been defined by the schools that emerge and the various articulations and formulations of orthodoxy but on the periphery of Islam there's always been antinomian and heterodox groups they've always been people organizing around those and it's very interesting the way Muslim history kind of unfolds because it ends up going through these periods of mass orthodoxification if you will and then on the fringes in the periphery these antinomian heterodox ideas begin to emerge they eventually kind of overwhelmed the middle of muslims and they become orthodoxy themselves and that process reinvented itself and this has been the history of Islam so in my view just nothing more than a creative process that continues to unfold and that creative tension that always exists between those who are orthodox and those who are heterodox is part of actually the thing that has kept Islam so vibrant and so global and so cosmopolitan for all these years so i think it's it's kind of a wonderful creative tension and an often welcome it although sometimes it does produce undesirable consequences