Nine
days after the trauma and the tragedy of Nine Eleven,
President George W. Bush declared in his address to Congress
and the American people and to the whole world: “I also
want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world:
We respect your faith. …Its teachings are good and
peaceful…” I am sure if he were literate enough
about his own country, his own culture, his own American
civilization, his own American literature, he would have most
definitely concluded the whole matter with this clincher that
Islam is as American as America’s very own greatest poet,
Walt Whitman, who sang
Of
every hue and caste am I,
Of
every rank and religion…
And
most importantly
Allah
Is
all, all, all—
Is
immanent in every life and object…
And
then the whole Muslim world would not have believed as it does
now that Dubya is just as bigoted and just as mean to Muslims
as his Attorney General, John Ashcroft. It would have been
most extraordinary, as extraordinary as that “most
extraordinary letter from Muhammad, slave and messenger of
God” that Heraclius, Caesar of the Byzantium Empire,
received in 628 C. E. that proclaimed this challenging call to
Christendom: “People of the Book, come to a Word common
to both of us, that we may worship only God.” This same
God says to all his creatures, “I was a Hidden Treasure,
so I loved to be known. Hence I created creatures that I might
be known.” As Christians & Muslims try to share
their knowledge of God with each other in the current clannish
zeitgeist in the wake of the tragedy of September11, it
behooves them both to eschew the zealotry & the fanaticism
of the tiresome, dog-tired, doggone dogmas dictated by what
Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences”
and the evil and provocative power politics of vainglory &
hegemony, of mosque & church. Always bearing in mind that
“philosophy consists in asking questions,
sophistry in answering them, and fanaticism in enforcing the
answers.” In the place of fanaticism, may the God we all
try to know and worship in Spirit and in Truth imbue us with
His Spirit whose fruit is “love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
temperance: against such there is no law.” In a time
similar to ours and “in the midst of the crusades and
violent sectarian conflict”, this same Spirit led Sufi
Jalaluddeen Rumi to testify: “I go into the Muslim mosque
and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see
one altar.” This very same Spirit also led Sri Lankan
saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen to teach that “Love is the
religion, and the universe is the book.” The only place
where one often beholds such Spirit in action is neither in
the church nor in the mosque but in the fellowship of
Alcoholics Anonymous, “the miracle of the century,”
where Jews, Moslems, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics,
and atheists gather together in the name of God as they
understand Him; seeking and receiving “a daily reprieve”
from the satanic bondage of booze. The spiritual glue that
binds them together as sisters and brothers is the grace of
God which enables each lush in recovery to remember that “Belief
in God is autobiographical; it has to come from [one’s own]
experience.” The mantra, “God as I understand
Him”, is the magic that cures every alky in recovery
from the mania of trying to inflict, to enforce, to impose his
own particular and peculiar brand of God, his own
autobiographical knowledge of God upon all the others. O
Father, Lord of heaven & earth, would that you grant such
Spirit of forbearance and love unto Christian & Muslim
bigots and pious bores and zealots and pontificating pundits
and professors and the wise and prudent as you do continually
grant daily unto babes & boozers in recovery. Would that
Christians & Moslems were more like recovering rummies
aspiring only “to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with …God.”
Mahamud
Siad Togane
