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A Prophet for
All Page 54 As the bombs fell on Baghdad,
acclaimed poet, essayist and adversary of the Bush administration Eliot Weinberger sought refuge in
the texts of classical Islam – particularly writings about the Prophet
Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. The result of his readings
is a slim volume entitled simply Muhammad, a mystical biography that
seeks to inspire wide-eyed wonder at the life and times of the last
Prophet. Weinberger spoke to Abdul-Rehman
Malik about being a New Yorker, the rise of fundamentalisms and
the “superhumanity” of the Best of Creation. Eliot Weinberger: If you only read the newspapers – or worse, watch television news – you tend to go crazy, so the way I try to keep my sanity is by reading literature from or about those places dominating the headlines. It gives depth and complexity, and most of all, a human face to the latest events. During the first Gulf War, I was reading poetry and the histories from the Abbasid caliphate, a thousand years ago, when Baghdad was probably the most civilized city in the Western world. With the US invasion of Iraq, I began to read Islamic philosophy, selections from the Hadith and other writings about the life of Muhammad. As a non-Muslim, most of these stories about the Prophet were new to me, and since writers love to retell the old stories – particularly the stories from the major religions – I thought I would attempt to present some fragments from the life of the Muhammad. It’s not a real biography – and certainly not a scholarly text – but more of a poetic evocation of the Prophet, based entirely on traditional sources. I mainly relied on selections from the Hadith; the great Baghdad historian of the 10th century, al-Tabari; some modern histories; and a wonderful biography of Muhammad by the 17th-century Persian cleric, al-Majlisi, which I found in a 19th-century translation. That book should be reprinted. During the first Gulf War, I came across a line by the 11th century Baghdad poet, al-Ma’ari that has remained my talisman: “Don’t let your life be governed by that which disturbs you.” Unfortunately, I don’t know any Arabic or Farsi, so I depended on translations. Fortunately, many of these were done by excellent scholars. And having been involved in translation most of my life, one develops a second sense for mistakes or distortions, even from languages one doesn’t know. Q: You say that the book is a response to the contemporary demonization of the Muslim world. What in your view is the genealogy of that demonisation and how will an exploration of the life of Muhammad challenge it? Weinberger: The demonization of the Muslim world is of course as old as the Crusades, but in recent centuries it was largely replaced by the more benign, however demeaning, exoticism of “Orientalism.” The current anti-Muslim sentiment is entirely the product of post-World War II Western policies: encouraging Sunni fundamentalist groups as bulwarks against pan-Arab nationalism and the Soviet Union, encouraging Saddam Hussein as a bulwark against Shia fundamentalism in Iran, and so forth. The West sowed a lot of money and a lot of weapons, and then was surprised when certain factions began to use those weapons against the West. Meanwhile, an unpopular American president, who hadn’t even been legally elected, discovered he could rally the nation by wildly exaggerating the threat of these people “who hate us because we are free.” This, needless to say, is a very long story that can’t be summarized in a few sentences, and it seems ridiculous to talk about my little book in such a context. But since you asked: Muhammad is the only founder of a major religion who is an absolutely historically verifiable person. As such, he exists both in history and in the legends that always arise around religious figures. To my mind, he is most universal both in his ordinary habits as a human (as attested by those who knew him) and in the miracles or marvellous things attributed to him, which are similar to those attributed to Catholic saints or the Buddha or the Hindu gods. And it is precisely images of universality that help, in however small a way, to counter the demonizing images of “otherness.” Q: In a time when so many influential policy makers, pundits and commentators have accepted the notion that we are in the midst of a “clash of civilisations” youturned instead to classical and medieval Islamic philosophy and mystical writing. Why was that your antidote to the current state of affairs? Weinberger: The real “clash of civilizations” is not between Islam and the “West” (whatever the “West” means) but between the cosmopolitans and the fundamentalists. As a New Yorker, I have more in common with an ordinary citizen of Cairo or Beirut than I do with those fellow Americans in Kansas who are trying to ban the teaching of evolution in schools. This clash is a global problem, affecting Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus. Unfortunately, it is the fundamentalists who are dominating the discourse (at the expense of the vast majorities of moderate practitioners of the respective religions) and in certain cases – the USA being one – seizing power. Q: The mystical stories of Muhammad have been regarded in contemporary times withsuspicion, labelled spurious and - to some Muslim writers - have indicated an inherent backwardness in Muslim discourse. These “old stories” simply aren’t modern enough. Yet, you have chosen those very aspects to highlight in your telling of the Prophet’s life. Weinberger: It is always case that the first generations of an educated middle class reject the old and want everything new. Then, a few generations later, they begin to realize there was beauty and wisdom in the old ways of making things and thinking about things. Genuine modernity is not slavish devotion to the new, but rather a dialogue between old and new, and a continual rethinking and re-imagining of the old. As for Muhammad: Those who are only interested in utilising Islam for political purposes will naturally only be interested in his political role. But there is more to the world than politics, and Islam – I need hardly say – has an incredibly rich and complicated history of discussing (and debating) all aspects of human life, from the practical to the mystical. Q: Why did you choose the aspects of the Prophet’s life you did in your telling of his life? Weinberger: It sounds somewhat contradictory, but I was most interested in the aspects that show his humanity and his – let’s call it superhumanity. On the one hand, unlike say Jesus or the Buddha, we know a lot about him as a man: what he liked to eat, the names of his camels and donkeys, and so on. On the other hand, there are the superhuman qualities, such as the light beaming from his forehead. Both of these aspects serve, for non-Muslims, to take the figure of Muhammad out of the category of “demonic other” and into the categories both of universal humanity and universal religion. I deliberately avoided the stories of Muhammad as a political or a military leader, because those are the only ones non-Muslims ever hear. Q: Most Muslim readers would approach the vignettes of the Prophet’s life found in your book with a certain context - a sense of the allegory and symbolism of thestories. The non-Muslim reader would not have the same context. Could the stories be misread by the lay reader? Weinberger: First, I don’t think there is a monolithic “Muslim” reading or understanding of the life of Muhammad – in the same way that the Quran, while an unchanging text, is open to an infinite variety of readings – readings that certainly have been hotly debated for centuries. (And isn’t this the problem with fundamentalists in general? They insist on one single interpretation of texts whose very sacredness, in a way, comes from their plenitude of possible readings.) Clearly a Muslim would come to my book with a different context and a richer background than a non-Muslim. But that doesn’t mean that the non-Muslim would necessarily find it somewhat incomprehensible. Take the Night Journey. Because Dante was inspired by the account in the Quran – which few people know – that kind of allegorical journey, where one meets sinners in eternal damnation, is also very much part of Christian consciousness. Any non-Muslim will know that those unfortunates are there for a reason. I never imagined any Muslim readers for the books, as I assumed it would be far too familiar for them. But a Lebanese novelist I know wrote me that she loved the book because it reminded her of the stories she heard about Muhammad as a child. For her, it brought back a kind of wide-eyed wonder that is missing in so much contemporary discourse about Islam. Q: The rise of fundamentalisms in America, the Muslim world and beyond appear to the secular intelligentsia - both right and left - as a threat to the very foundations of “civilisation” and “democracy". What is the role of religion and faith in the public square? What do you make of the increasing influence of the religious right in America? Weinberger: To take the last question first, it’s worth remembering that in the United States in the 1960’s, the civil rights movement and much of the anti-Vietnam war movement were led by ministers and church groups. Real Christianity is based on helping the poor and loving thy neighbour – both politically radical concepts. The problem is not religion, but the mask of religion worn by fanatics with political goals. Most of the Republican Party and the current occupants of the White House are not any kind of Christians that Jesus would recognize. Certainly the men who blew up the trains in Madrid in the name of recuperating al-Andalus would have no desire to live in the multi-ethnic, mutually tolerant, culturally flourishing world that was the real al-Andalus. In India, it was Hindu fanatics who assassinated Gandhi, and their descendants are the ones who became the BJP Party. Conversely, it should be remembered that the dream of Israel was an entirely secular (and socialist) nation where Jews would be safe from persecution. In that sense one could say that the Israeli government, especially in the last several decades, is not Zionist at all. And it can hardly be said that the most powerful orthodox Muslims are devoted to the Pillar of charity. Imagine if the $25 billion a year that Saudis spend on defence was used to feed starving Muslims in Africa. Unlike the present American administration, I believe in the absolute separation of church and state, one of the foundations of American democracy. And the absolute freedom to worship (or not worship at all). What has become intolerable – whether in Kansas, Kabul, or Mumbai – is the insistence that others must live according to the faith you profess. Q: Your work has challenged American policy in Iraq and attacked the Bush doctrine. It has been powerful, persuasive, subversive writing. Do you see yourself as an American writer? What kind of vision do you have for America beyond Bush? Weinberger: I think of myself as a New York writer, in that I was born here and have lived my whole life here. New York is a city where half the inhabitants were born in another country, and most of the other half (including me) are their children. It really is the World City, and has very little to do with what happens in the rest of the USA. 85% of us, for example, voted against Bush. Bush is being increasingly recognized – including by many conservatives– as the worst President in American history. His administration (for which Bush himself is merely the spokesman) has gone far beyond the usual distinctions between Republican and Democrat – in the not too distant future, Americans will wonder how they ever let it happen. But the long-term problem is that, ever since Reagan, the centre has shifted so far over that the Democrats are now to the right of a European conservative party, and the Republicans only slightly to the left of a European national front party. And from the essentially middle-class nation of my childhood in the 1950s, we have become the richest banana republic on earth. Q: With Muhammad being published on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, is the book in some way a response to the tragedy as well? Weinberger: It’s a kind of response to the response to the tragedy. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, it’s worth noting that Ground Zero is still Ground Zero. It is a symbol of the absolute paralysis of the Bush government that nothing has been built. And Ground Zero on an enormous scale is now the former city of New Orleans. Q: Young Muslims - in Britain and Europe in particular - are becoming more and more alienated from the societies in which they live. They are frustrated about the global ummah, the foreign entanglements of their governments and global injustice. They have much of the same anger that you and so many others do, but they feel it in a visceral kind of way. What would you say to them? Weinberger: I can’t presume to give advice to anyone I don’t know personally. But in the most general terms, I’d say that rage at this present world is entirely justified, but one must be very sceptical about the solutions being offered. The history of Islam, after all, is full of people asking questions and challenging the answers. Eliot Weinberger recently participated in Dropping Knowledge – an international roundtable of the world’s leading intellectuals, held in Berlin. Muhammad was published in the United Kingdom in September 2006. Muhammad by Eliot Weinberger is published by Verso (London and New York: Verso, 2006) |