Al-Huda
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
the Message Continues ... 8/103
Newsletter for March 2010
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" To understand the anger in the Muslim world, one must understand the Crusades, the centuries of antagonistic detente, cold war and sometimes hot war, as well as the many betrayals by the colonialists, the broken treaties and promises, burnt libraries and massacres. Indeed, I could also enumerate terrors inflicted by Muslims of the past, but as a Western convert to Islam, a multi-generational American whose father, grandfathers and great grandfathers have worn the uniforms of this country and fought its wars, who has studied the history and traditions of both sides, I can honestly say, I did not convert to Islam for nothing. If I side at all, I side with truth not tribe. " --Hamza Yusuf
Seeing with Muslim Eyes
HAMZA YUSUF
( excerpt from The Empire and the Crescent,
Global Implications For a New American Century)
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single
paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms. ---
Aristotle.
THE MYSTIC POET,
Rumi, tells of three foreigners traveling down a road together.
They come across a drachma on the road, and picking it up
together, each declares what he wishes to do with it. The first
says he will buy `inab, which is Arabic for grapes; the second,
a Persian, says, "No! We must buy angur;' Farsi for grapes. The
third, a Roman, exclaims it must be vitis? Latin for grapes.
They begin to fight, and soon a journey distinguished by
camaraderie descends into a fisticuff of animosity. Rumi remarks
that all they needed was a translator to explain that they all
really wanted the same thing.
A tragedy of the human condition is that at the root of much of
our suffering is a simple human desire: the desire for men and
women to live in human dignity, treated with respect. When
people are not treated with respect, they often become angry.
This anger is either expressed or repressed. When repressed, it
often manifests as sorrow and grief. In order to explore why so
many people in the modern world are angry, let us first define
some terms.
If understood properly, many of the words we use to describe
states and qualities would, in their actual definitions, explain
how human states come about. Anger is an old English word that
originally meant "sorrow;' but this doesn't tell us much if we
don't define sorrow. Webster tells us it is "mental anguish
[anger's root lies hidden in that word, anguish, as well] caused
by injury, loss or despair." What does all this mean?
Mental anguish is a state of mind, an overwhelming experience of
pain that is not of the body, although it is certainly
experienced in the body, and affects profoundly the state of the
body. It results from injury, a word derived from two Latin
words in juria meaning "unjust or wrongful." Injury is a wrong
that was not deserved. One can see how a person who bumps his
head on a tree branch he did not see, experiences it as an
injury, a wrong that was undeserved.
King Lear remarks that he was a man "more sinned against than
sinning." The irony of his remark is lost on him, as it is on
most people who injure others and are in turn injured by those
they initially wronged; in Lear's case, they were his daughters.
Loss occurs when something we believe is ours is no longer
accessible. It could be by death or by destruction, as in the
loss of property, or it could be by something less tangible,
such as a loss of respect.
Finally, in the definition of anger appears despair. How do we
define despair? It is perhaps the easiest to define and yet the
hardest. It comes from two Latin words meaning simply "without
hope." Sperare in Latin is glossed "to hope." The Spanish have a
wonderful expression, "espere me," meaning "hold on"; but
etymologically, it is closer to "have hope in me:' We despair of
people when we no longer believe them, when they tell us to give
them some more time, yet we feel we have given them enough
already and that this is just another ploy to keep us hopeful of
help that we know is not forthcoming.
In our attempt at understanding the anger of the Muslim world,
we have to try to understand the history of the Muslim world's
relationship with the West, something most people have neither
the time nor the inclination to do. David Fromkin wrote a
compelling and cogent book:
The Peace to End All Peace. When it first came out, I read all
five hundred and some odd small print pages, trying to
understand a world I had become intimately familiar with, but
deeply perplexed by, the Arab world. After September of 2001,
like many other books on the Middle East, it has resurfaced in a
new edition. The author painstakingly documents how the
configuration in the Middle East was designed to ensure that
peace would never be achieved a rather depressing account
of another chapter in the "Great Game" : There is a sad but
enduring myth, bantered about by supercilious journalists
attempting to edify the rest of us, that "the Arab/Israeli
conflict is an ancient one." If less than a century is ancient,
then I suppose they have a case. For journalists, less than
twenty four hours is often ancient, which is part of the
problem.
To understand the anger in the Muslim world, one must understand
the Crusades, the centuries of antagonistic detente, cold war
and sometimes hot war, as well as the many betrayals by the
colonialists, the broken treaties and promises, burnt libraries
and massacres. Indeed, I could also enumerate terrors inflicted
by Muslims of the past, but as a Western convert to Islam, a
multi-generational American whose father, grandfathers and great
grandfathers have worn the uniforms of this country and fought
its wars, who has studied the history and traditions of both
sides, I can honestly say, I did not convert to Islam for
nothing. If I side at all, I side with truth not tribe.
Muslims, like many Native Americans, feel that "white men speak
with forked tongues." Understanding the anger in the Muslim
world requires that one attempt to understand the pain, the
injury, the loss and the despair that has arisen from so much
treachery, so many lies and so meager an attempt at ever
acknowledging these wrongs. It requires an attempt to understand
the past, the roots of what is now a moribund and desperate
culture that views suicide as a glorious, albeit tragic,
testimony to the spark of resistance that still lies in the
almost extinguished embers of hope.
To understand anger, one must understand mental anguish, some
thing Western people should be very adept at, given the fourth
quarter returns of pharmaceuticals that produce anti-depressants
and anxiolytic drugs. Anxiolytic? what a strange but interesting
word: literally "anxiety loosing" : Anxiety is a fear of some
perceived future difficulty. The Arabs have a beautiful word for
it: "hamm." You can hear the worry in it if you say it, much
like our "hum" ; which can mean "to express hesitation or
doubt." The Prophet Muhammad said, "Anxiety is half of aging."
We grow old faster by fearing the future. Mental anguish is
often precipitated by the past, by an injury or by loss or
despair, but it is in reality a fear of the future. Anguish is
clinging to the past, relishing the injury, living the loss over
and over and despairing of a different future. We in the West
know a lot about mental anguish, but we fail to sympathize with
the anguish of others in the South and in the East. Their
anguish, unlike ours, is often exogenous: it relates to the very
real conditions that literally surround them and leave them in
despair, without hope of a better future. They no longer believe
the politicians who promise that things will be different this
time around; they don't believe that America will allow a
democratically elected government do what is good for their
country if it means the United States may lose some less than
vital interests.
The anger in the West, like the East's anger, is deeply
repressed and rooted invariably in sorrow. Sometimes it comes
out in road rage. Road rage is usually precipitated by some
slight on the road, some tragic attempt at getting somewhere too
fast without care for others on the road. It is bad manners,
plain and simple, but the response is almost always out of
proportion. Temper, like temperature, is something we need to
adjust to constantly, but most of us are not very adept at it,
and we are becoming less so by the minute.
September 11th was in some ways a type of road or air rage. The
first recorded case of road rage is in Sophocles' play, Oedipus
Rex. Oedipus kills his father who slighted him on the road. What
neither of them knew was that they were father and son. Oedipus'
rage was a result of abandonment. He was sent by his father to
die, but the father's servant took pity on him and abandoned him
to the elements. This abandonment is at the root of Oedipus'
sorrow, which shows up as rage later in his life. We need to
understand this to comprehend the result of America using Osama
bin Laden to do a job for which America was not willing to kill
her sons. She decided to get others to fight her war, as did T.
E. Lawrence. Known as Lawrence of Arabia, he tells us that the
only reason he used the Arabs to destroy the Ottoman Empire was
because he did not want young English boys to die. The Ottoman
Empire was seen as the evil empire of its day as far as the
Europeans were concerned, and so Lawrence used the brave but
treacherous Arabs against their fellow Muslims. Similarly,
America, in what was called Operation Mosquito, decided to use
the Afghans to bring down the Russian Empire. Zbigniew
Brzezinski (who served as the National Security Advisor to
President Carter from 1977 to 1981) boasts of luring the
Russians into Afghanistan. Into the web of intrigue they came
only to be consumed by the spider's game. Osama worked as an
operative being used by Pakistani, Saudi and American
intelligence. He funneled money into the "noble" war effort. The
godless Russians were clearly infidels even to the Americans
because they did not believe in Western markets, and that is
akin to saying "there is no God" in the West. After many years
of struggle and a loss of one and a half million Afghanis, to
add insult to injury, we in the West walked away and washed our
hands of it. The "fathers" who produced Osama abandoned their
son to the elements of Afghanistan after training him, because
the hunt was over and the game bagged.
Is the Muslim world angry? Yes, it is indeed. Its people feel
mental anguish from injury, loss and despair, not of God, but of
a godless world that has long forgotten the strings of betrayal,
the webs of deceit, the chains of broken promises. The West
would do well to understand why we have so much mental anguish
here. I believe it is a deep seated fear of a future conflict
between the oppressed and those who either oppress them with
impunity or who sit by and watch the process. We all know in our
heart of hearts something is deeply wrong with the world we all
share and inhabit: the injuries our lifestyles in the West cause
to so many others, the loss to others caused by our Western
consumption levels and the despair our deaf ears cause to the
multitudinous people around the world whose cries we ignore. We
cannot just sit back and watch our world disintegrate before our
eyes, a beautiful, abundant and divine theater of grace in which
so many suffer so needlessly because of the actions of so few.
To the Muslims, I can only warn them: "the one who fights
monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."
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