announcements

Summer reading (for you) and writing (for me)

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Aug 04, 2010

Friends and foes:

I’m taking a break from blogging so I can complete the first draft of my next book. What’s the new book about? Click here.

Meanwhile, you can read — for free — a chunk of my previous book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. An online project called “Our Inner Lives” is featuring the introduction and first chapter.

If you like what you read in that extract, I predict you’ll love my next book. If you hate what you read in that extract, take heart: You’re not alone, as both Islam-supremacists and Islam-bashers prove with their daily blasts to me.

Wish to stay informed of the mission for Muslim reform and moral courage? Subscribe to my newsletter. I don’t bombard recipients; 3 or 4 dispatches per year is what you can expect. Here’s my latest newsletter.

Enjoy the summer sunshine for me, as I’ll be buried in writing. Good thing I was born with a tan.

Warmly,

Staying informed

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Jun 07, 2010

A few days ago, my latest electronic newsletter went out.  In it, I included news that many of my subscribers have responded to with eagerness. That news involves Faith Without Fear. Here’s what I reported:

“Recently, an Arab media expert informed me that my PBS documentary, Faith Without Fear, is being spliced and watched widely in the Muslim underground.

He suggested that I produce a discussion guide to the film and post it on my site. He, in turn, will recruit his vast network of dissidents to distribute the guide throughout the Middle East and Iran. 

How can I resist? (Get it? “Resist”? A little dissident humor for you.)”

The Faith Without Fear guide should be online by the time I send out my next e-newsletter.  If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here. It’s free and confidential.

And if you want to read the above newsletter in full, voila.

Sign my petition… or else

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Apr 26, 2010

These days, you don’t even have to attempt a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad — however lousy your attempt may be — to incur a death threat from Islamist thugs.

I’m referring, of course, to the South Park controversy. But remember: The “offending” episode didn’t portray the Prophet at all. It put Santa Claus in a bear suit and asked the audience to pretend that the Prophet stood inside the furry, sweaty costume. (Good thing he’s accustomed to warm climes.)

In reality — uh, whatever that means for a cartoon — the Prophet sat in a U-Haul truck at an undisclosed location. God, now the messenger of Islam is channeling Dick Cheney. Will the absurdity never end?

Let’s get serious. Here are the top three reasons why free expression is entirely acceptable in Islam, even if it’s not welcomed by some Muslims:

1) The Prophet Muhammad warned Muslims not to put him on a pedestal. That’s because he’s not the one to be revered; God alone is to be worshiped. Welcome to the hypocrisy of those who claim to be protecting the Prophet while violating one of his core teachings.

2) The Qur’an expressly affirms that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). Which means nobody should be forced to follow Islamic traditions, even if they’re “mocking” the religion.

3) The Qur’an advises Muslims to deal with hurt feelings by getting up and walking away (4:140). That’s it. Don’t retaliate. Just “do not sit with them.” Change the channel. Click the mouse. Move on. Once the dust has settled, come back to discuss the issues with those who’ve offended you.

I’m taking that advice.

See, as a faithful Muslim who’s trying to educate her fellow Muslims that Islam can be reconciled with free expression, I’m offended by the broadcaster of South Park, a channel called Comedy Central, which has censored any mention of Muhammad. I’m offended that the executives are caving to Islamist criminals. I’m offended that they’re infantilizing Muslims by expecting so little from us. Above all, I’m offended that they’re making my mission of Muslim reform that much harder.

So I want to discuss the issues with Comedy Central. But, dear readers, I need your help. I’m asking you to sign my petition against death threats and for secular values. This petition requests not just your name, but also your city.

Thanks to my Facebook community and news stories like these, we’ve amassed thousands of signatures since South Park hit the headlines. I’m planning to present these signatures to the executives at Comedy Central because I want them to see that if “ordinary” people have the guts to defy would-be murderers, the suits should have courage, too.

Beyond that — and in true Qur’anic spirit — I hope to generate a dialogue with Comedy Central and other broadcasters. The topic: why there’s no showdown between free expression on the one hand and respect for Islam on the other.  Media purveyors don’t need to make a false choice. Islam and free speech can be harmonized. Indeed, they must be.

Take it from the many Muslims who’ve already put their names on my petition. A quick sample:

* Hemin Sabir (Kurdistan, Iraq)

* Surya Lesmana (Yogyakarta, Indonesia)

* Salina Abaza (Damascus, Syria)

* Riaz Khan (Karachi, Pakistan)

* Mourad Menadi (Algiers, Algeria)

* Sheema Abdul Aziz (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

* Anees Ahmad (Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India)

* Sarah Al-Ahdal (Saudi Arabia)

You get the picture. Please sign now.

If you won’t do it for the brave Muslims above, do it for South Park’s bear community. They’re the real victims of humiliation here.

Proudly PC (post-wing & centrist)

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Apr 04, 2010

Manifesto for independent thinkers

A few days ago, The Daily Beast — a popular news and opinion site — named me one of the top 25 centrist commentators in America. Sharing space with journalistic icons such as David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Andrew Sullivan would have been enough for me. But to be affiliated with the label “centrist” only upped the honor.

In the essay he wrote to introduce The Daily Beast’s list of influential centrist commentators, John Avlon observes that centrists “have refused to surrender their conscience or common sense to walk in lockstep with one political party. Theirs is a rebellion from the pressures to conform in today’s hyper-partisan debates.”

As the author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, Avlon is well poised to weed out the centrists from the dogmatists. Wingnuts, he entertainingly details in his book, have succumbed to the suffocating grip of groupthink. By contrast, centrists insist on personal integrity through individuality. In that case, color me a centrist and gleefully so.

Whenever I’m asked whose “camp” I pitch my tent in, I answer, “My own.” If the questioner persists, I elaborate: “Independent thinkers don’t belong to a ‘camp.’ They belong to their conscience.“

Pressed further, I explain by invoking Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose-Driven Life. At the World Economic Forum a few years ago, I heard Warren deliver an incantation that has stuck with me ever since: “I’m not right-wing. I’m not left-wing. I’m for the whole bird.“

Now, I could tell curious folks that my politics are pro-bird. But that’s weird and not entirely true — I devour General Tso’s chicken and Thanksgiving turkey.  So I’ve adapted Warren’s words to my own convictions, pointing out that “I’m not left-wing. I’m not right-wing. I’m post-wing.“

Perhaps it’s because I’ve got so many identities that I don’t have to invest myself in any single descriptor. Which means there’s no need to cling to a particular dogma for validation.  When understood that way, being multi-dimensional, complex and fluid isn’t a curse; it’s both a blessing and an opportunity to re-imagine our power as individuals — not just in the voting booth or at the ballot box, but also in the lion’s den of religious reform.

One of my readers, Sahan, crystallized the lesson for me: “As a queer, Arab and Muslim, it seems I’ve been going against the current all my life. A torrent of native apologists on one side and sanguine fundamentalists on the other. I’ve waited too long for an intellectual to point out the problems in the dogma of Islam. The time is right for a reformation. Maybe some of us can see ahead and light the way better than someone who is entrenched in tradition. Maybe we are the ones who are forced to look at the norm from the outside, whether in terms of gender, sexuality, or spirituality.“

Let your freak flag fly, honey. Flap on.

But exactly because the fringe now has a disproportionately loud voice not only in Islam but also in American politics, it’s even more important not to get sucked into that vortex.

Take a cue from one of Charles Johnson. He runs a blog called LittleGreenFootballs. As The Daily Beast’s Jon Avlon notes, “Johnson had risen to prominence as a committed anti-jihadist — a cause he continues to fight. ‘I used to get pretty nasty emails from radical Islamists,’ he told me, ‘but the stuff I’m getting now from right-wingers is an order of magnitude worse.’“

Rather than leap to the Left in disgust with the Right, Johnson announced his independence from the partisan puppeteers. His camp is his own. He belongs to his conscience.

Is it conformity if more us follow his lead? Just by thinking about it, you’ll be breaking ranks with the wingnuts. Because you’ll be thinking, period.

Charles Le Gai Eaton (1921-2010)

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Mar 14, 2010

A few days ago, I woke up to an email from Leo Eaton, a filmmaker who’d collaborated closely on my PBS documentary, Faith Without Fear.

Leo wrote to tell me that his father had passed away. Now, you should know that Leo’s dad wasn’t just “the father of my friend.” Leo’s dad, Charles Le Gai Eaton, was among contemporary Islam’s most sophisticated thinkers.

I knew of Gai Eaton even before I’d met Leo. As the host of a Toronto TV program in 2000, I dispatched one of my producers to London, UK, where she interviewed him about homosexuality and Islam. After a vigorous back-and-forth with my producer, Mr. Eaton — a Muslim convert, accomplished author and distinguished consultant to London’s Islamic Cultural Centre — summarized why he couldn’t condemn homosexuality: “With a majestic God, anything is possible.”

It wasn’t his refusal to denounce gays and lesbians that stuck with me all these years. It was his refusal to play God. In a handful of unadorned words, Mr. Eaton captured the essence of my  faith in Islam — leaving final judgment to the Almighty rather than the Almighty’s self-appointed ambassadors. In so doing, he paid serious tribute to the Creator, suggesting that any Deity worth worshiping is grand and expansive enough to break the mold that His insecure creatures won’t. Mashallah.

Charles Le Gai Eaton prized intellectual honesty. Hearing nothing but protest against the Iraq war from British Muslims, he went on the record with his differences. “Saddam was such a monster,” Mr. Eaton told a magazine that caters to Muslims in the West. “[M]aybe we were right to interfere in this case. I am very torn either way and I cannot quite make up my mind.” How refreshing to encounter humble ethical uncertainty at a time of cavalier political absolutes.

The writer to whom he made that statement opined that “Eaton despairs at the state of the Muslim world, which he vehemently feels should address the issue of tyrants, injustice, poverty and human rights abuses littering its own backyard…” His moral courage, gently proffered, meant so much to Muslims like me who needed role models like him, and frankly still do.

When Leo emailed me about the death of Gai Eaton, he attached something he’d written. It’s the deeply personal “remembrance” of a son watching his father slip into the next world. Leo had shared it only privately, particularly with members of his dad’s tariqa or Sufi order.

Prepared to be turned down, I asked Leo if he’d allow me to post an excerpt of the remembrance for my international audience. To his credit and my delight, he agreed.

*****

Here’s the passage I’ve chosen:There have been a constant stream of Sufi Brothers and Sisters arriving at this bedside from around the world, and some days they’ve set up an almost continuous chanting of the Koran. It’s beautiful and strangely peaceful, this lovely musical  recitation that goes on any time of the day and night. They venerate him as though he is a saint; a strange way to think of ‘Dad.’

We have been warned that thousands will come to his funeral if given the chance, so leaders of the tariqa are helping us keep it to family and close friends. All this love and respect, based partly on four previous books, especially Islam and the Destiny of Man, which has changed so many lives, but also on my father’s character. In his old age, he had endless patience with young seekers of faith who came to him for advice and wisdom. And if they happened to be beautiful women, so much the better, as his just-published autobiography, A Bad Beginning, makes clear.

When my wife Jeri and I read the initial drafts of A Bad Beginning, drawn from over 75 years of diary entries that my father had written since childhood, we worried about how devout Muslims around the world who so respect his work might take stories of such a scandalous past.I am reminded of a story he tells of his first book, The Richest Vein, published by TS Eliot, that he wrote when he was still in his twenties. A respected clergymen came out from England to Jamaica, where Dad was living, awed by the book and wanting to meet the author, expecting some grey-haired sage. When introduced to my father, sitting with a girl on one knee and a drink in his hand, he exclaimed in horror: “That can’t be the man.”

Perhaps some Muslims awed by Islam and the Destiny of Man or Remembering God may also say “that can’t be the man,” but I suspect the majority will take inspiration from Dad’s circuitous path to Islam, a version of St. Augustine’s prayer, “Oh God, make me chaste, but not yet.”

And in any case, my father has always taken pains to separate the human persona from spiritual work. “God can choose even the most flawed vessel from which to pour out his blessings,” he has often told me. He would be horribly embarrassed to see this outpouring of love and veneration that now surrounds him. Sitting at his bedside these past days, I sense the beginning of a legend. I don’t know if I’m glad or sorry.

Ashhadu an la ilaha illa’Llah (There is no God but God)

*****

Having been privileged to ‘glimpse’ Charles Le Gai Eaton’s final hours, I now pray for him. May he rest in peace for as long as he needs. Then may he raise appropriate hell in heaven.

“The Stoning of Soraya M.” now out on DVD

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Feb 27, 2010

Does this man go through with hurling his stone at Soraya?      Watch the movie…

This week, among the most important movies of my generation, “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” comes out in DVD and Blu-Ray. You can order either version here.

“The Stoning,” starring recent Emmy-award winner Shohreh Aghdashloo, dramatizes the true story of an Iranian village wife whose deceitful husband sets her up for execution so that he can marry an unsuspecting girl in the city.

Ultimately, though, this isn’t a tale of female victimhood. Instead, it’s about moral courage. The target of the stoning — Soraya — has an aunt who shows us that even when you can’t stop the crime unfolding before you, there’s always an opportunity to use your mind, conscience and voice for longer-term good. That’s what Aunt Zahra does in this film. I won’t tell you how she does it. You’ll just have to buy the DVD!

Beyond buying it, I hope you’ll screen it in your homes, churches, temples, mosques, classrooms and community centers. The questions unleashed by “The Stoning” will generate amazing conversations.

I should know. My NYU leadership program, the Moral Courage Project, launched a human rights campaign around the film. Thanks to the participation of people worldwide, we won the 2009 Visionary Award from the Women’s International Film and Television Showcase. This couldn’t have happened without student bloggers, Facebookers and Tweeps engaging about what it means to be a global citizen today.

For example, are non-Muslims “allowed” to comment on issues that affect Muslim women — such as the so-called honor killing of Soraya? If you watch a movie like “The Stoning,” are you sticking your nose in “other” people’s business? In an interdependent world, is there such a thing as “other” people?

Aunt Zahra protecting Soraya

To get you into the spirit of hi-octane discussion, here’s what I would say if I were part of the film club that I want you to create once you buy the “The Stoning” DVD:

As a Muslim reformer, I routinely receive heart-wrenching emails from fellow Muslims whose basic human rights are being violated — not by “outsiders” but by members of their own communities. Equally saddening is that self-professed human rights activists in the West often play the purity game, suggesting that you can’t comment if you don’t represent.

Their misguided conviction: Anyone living in the West can’t legitimately expose oppressive practices in cultures elsewhere. Hmmm… Would they say the same to Muslims in the traditional Islamic world who expose America’s human rights abuses at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib? Of course not.

Nor should they. Human rights, being human, are above the politics of identity. As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in his Letter from a Birmingham City Jail, “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, parochial, ‘outside agitator’ idea.”

But it seems that Elise Auerbach, Iran specialist for Amnesty International USA, can more than live with the narrow and parochial. She practices it in her baffling denunciation of “The Stoning of Soraya M.”

Tellingly, Amnesty itself released a January 2008 report that described stonings as “grotesque and unacceptable”. In its press release about the report, Amnesty called on “the Iranian authorities to abolish death by stoning and impose an immediate moratorium on this horrific practice, specifically designed to increase the suffering of victims.”

In her remarkably contradictory review of “The Stoning” — a review in which she acknowledges the report — Auerbach emphasizes that “Iranians don’t need people from outside Iran telling them what is good for them…”

Really? Then why did her own organization dare to tell Iranian authorities what to do in its report against stoning?

And why did Amnesty feature “The Stoning” at its 2009 annual film festival?

Above all, why did Amnesty invite Cyrus Nowrasteh, the Iranian-American director of “The Stoning,” to introduce the film at its festival? Is it because he’s Iranian? If so, then what makes him someone “from outside” according to Auerbach?

Of course, Nowrasteh is American too.  Perhaps that’s the real taboo. In which case, isn’t Auerbach’s employer — UK-based Amnesty — also an outsider? Why does she continue to work for Amnesty and make herself part of the interference that she believes is a problem?

Within its own ranks, Amnesty International needs an intellectually honesty debate about how to realize its motto, “Defending Human Rights Worldwide.” Personally, I can attest that more than a few Amnesty activists worry about the scourge of moral and cultural relativism in their midst. That’s the single biggest concern confided to me when I presented at Amnesty’s 2006 conference in Mexico City.

Delegates disclosed to me that Amnesty International has no clear message about honor-based crimes, including stoning, because nobody wants to be deemed a bigot. As if defending human rights worldwide has ever been a matter of politeness.

It’s 2010 and apparently Amnesty has not resolved its dilemma. Auerbach condemns a movie that spotlights an Iranian heroine — Soraya’s aunt, Zahra — who tries to stop the stoning. Zahra is a Muslim who realizes her faith by speaking truth to power about the non-negotiable need for human dignity.

And yet, according to Auerbach, hapless audience dupes will respond with “disgust and revulsion at Iranians themselves, who are portrayed as primitive and bloodthirsty savages.” Thus, “we” — idiotic Westerners who can’t be trusted to reach independent conclusions — “still have to wait” for a “thoughtful” film about executions in Iran.

I hope we don’t have to wait for thoughtful human rights activists to speak truth to power in their organizations. Dissidents do exist, as I learned at the Amnesty conference that I attended. Will they exercise their own freedom of conscience? Of this, I can’t be sure. Moral courage is always more difficult than self-censorship.

To watch exclusive clips from “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” click here. And to buy the just-released DVD, click here.

The Moral Courage Project screens “The Stoning of Soraya M.” You can too.

What will happen to Habib?

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Jan 08, 2010

Martyr in the making? Habib, as shown in “Faith Without Fear”  (National Film Board of Canada/90th Parallel Productions)

U.S. media is currently marinated in analysis of what propels — or compels — a Muslim kid to become a terrorist. Through recent interviews, I too have contributed to the buzz. But combative exchanges don’t bring out the finer, nuanced, points of any serious exploration. Nor do they equip us to connect the dots.

Let this post help rectify that problem.  Without worry of being interrupted, here’s my step-by-step connecting of several dots:

* While filming my PBS documentary, “Faith Without Fear,” I traveled to Yemen and conversed on-camera with Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard.  Although the Yemeni government identified OBL’s bodyguard as an ex-jihadi, an extremist who’d been rehabilitated, the bodyguard affirmed his commitment to global jihad. In fact, he said he’s making plans for the martyrdom of his 5-year-old son, Habib (see the cutie above).

I knew right then and there that government initiatives to de-program jihadis wouldn’t be enough to defeat the spread of this plague. Even without daddy’s shameless recruiting, Habib is susceptible. He has only to switch on his computer.

* Thanks to the Internet, we’re seeing the globalization of grievance. Jihadis are using and abusing the freedom of the Web to preach a false narrative; one that nonetheless taps into a deep emotional need for young Muslims to belong to something more meaningful than watered-down, consumer society.

* The false narrative being preached is, in a nutshell, that the West hates Islam. After all, goes the story, look at how America and its allies slaughter Muslims indiscriminately.

But the reality is that more Muslims are tortured and murdered by other Muslims than by any foreign power. Last month, researchers — most of them Muslims — released a study proving that in the past two years alone, 98% of al-Qaeda’s victims have been innocent Muslims.

*Jihadis bring spiritual justification to their violence by citing Islam. Take, for example, Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the July 7 bombings in London, England. He left behind a marytr video. In it, Khan invoked UK foreign policy. But before going there, he proudly declared that “Islam is our religion and the prophet is our role model.”

In “Faith Without Fear,” OBL’s former bodyguard made precisely the same statement about the Prophet. Clearly, religious symbolism plays a role in violent jihadism.

* Moderate Muslims deny this. Reform-minded Muslims acknowledge this and are working from within Islam to fix the problem. We believe it’s our duty. The Quran tells us, “God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.” That’s chapter 13, verse 11. I like to think of it as a 13/11 kind of solution to a 9/11 kind of problem.

* Fear stops many reform-minded Muslims from coming forward.  If you want to know what gives rise to that fear, it’s one word: “honor.”

Honor is the cultural custom that requires Muslims to suppress our individuality in order to become property of the community. Which means your life isn’t your own; it belongs to a wider group of people — the family, the tribe, sometimes even the ummah (global Muslim nation).

In turn, that means when a Muslim is accused of dishonoring or shaming by breaking moral norms, the punishment against him or her must be large enough to compensate the family too.

* Tribal honor is so powerful that it afflicts young Muslim-Americans as much as it does the Islamic world. In 2007, PBS sent me and my mother to Detroit for a screening of “Faith Without Fear.” I was roundly pilloried during the Q & A.

As the night wore on, my mom noticed young Muslims gathering in a corner of the room. At the end of the evening, the now-numerous group approached my mom to say, “Thanks for supporting your daughter.”

Mom replied, “That’s nice to hear, but why didn’t you speak up before the reporters left, so that others who think like you would know they’re not alone?”

The kids glanced sheepishly at each other. Then one of them confided a sad truth. “You guys can walk away from Detroit two hours from now,” he whispered, looking at me and mom. “We can’t. And we can’t afford to be accused of dishonoring our families.” This, from a child of the First Amendment.

* Muslim students give me similar explanations when I lecture at American and European universities.  These institutions of higher learning are supposed to be citadels of questioning. Yet reform-minded Muslims often cower in fear at the intimidation and outright warnings from members of their school MSA’s (Muslim Students’ Associations). During my book tour a few years back, I learned of a particularly threatening email circulated by a Muslim student group at a major U.S. university.

SO WHAT CAN BE DONE?

* Muslims have to challenge the culture of honor within our own communities. This tribal custom comes right out of the desert, which doesn’t reflect the reality of a pluralistic and connected generation.  To boot, the culture of honor pre-dates Islam. Why should contemporary Muslims feel trapped and strapped by a non-Islamic, even un-Islamic, mentality?

* Non-Muslims should invest in reform-minded Muslims. Consider how the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) is going about it. The EFD is bringing together Muslim reformers who would otherwise operate in isolation. Besides creating a network for them, the EFD is giving them access to legislators, policy-makers and journalists so that Muslim reformists can finally be heard.  In effect, they’re creating a counter-jihad of ideas.

It remains to seen what will happen to 5-year-old Habib, whose name, in Arabic, means “beloved.” Whatever becomes of him becomes of us. All of us.

Martyr in the making? Habib, as shown in “Faith Without Fear” (National Film Board of Canada/90th Parallel Productions)

Ten (new) commandments for 2010

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Jan 01, 2010

Controversial display of Ten Commandments outside the Texas State Capitol Building (courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

Hello, Moses and Jesus? Hope y’all threw a great New Year’s Eve party in heaven Thursday night.

May I take just a minute of your eternal lives?  I’m a professor of leadership at New York University’s school of public service. In summer 2009, my program, the Moral Courage Project, launched a blogging campaign to stop the stoning of women.

One of the bloggers was Dana Gallagher. Something she posted about the sanctity of human rights caught my eye. I asked her to expand on it and, upon learning that she’s a Christian, I suggested she turn her initial post into an updated version of the Ten Commandments.

To sweeten the incentive, I promised Dana that I’d feature the new commandments on my website and bring them to my Facebook community for lively debate. Honestly, Prophets, I didn’t think she’d take me up on it. But whaddya know?

Be assured that Dana approaches this experiment with respectable values. She grew up in the American Midwest and graduated magna cum laude from Marymount Manhattan College.

Before we dive into her updated commandments, Dana wants you — and my readers –  to understand where she’s coming from. Here she is, in her own words:

I am a young Christian. I’ve been baptized, raised, and confirmed in the same church, and my experiences there have been among the most formative of my life.

Yet, as it is for so many people, my relationship with organized religion is complicated. The higher power that my soul recognizes and the one presented from the pulpit can be difficult to reconcile.

Over time I’ve learned not to fight the distance between them, but simply to let my faith guide me. And it’s my faith that inspires, even requires, me to re-think the Ten Commandments.

According to the Bible, God wrote the Ten Commandments twice. Moses got so fed up with his environment and the people around him that he broke the first set of tablets, and God had to make him some new ones.

With the challenges that we’ve faced in 2009, the first week of 2010 seems a good time to engage in some tablet-breaking of our own. But instead of destroying, let’s be constructive.  Let’s update God’s guidelines for the coming decade – or longer.

What if the commandments appealed to the best in us and what each of us is capable of, rather than assuming that the only thing keeping us from being lecherous, murderous, backstabbing thieves is endless guilt and the threat of hell?

With that in mind, welcome to my list of 10 for 2010:

I: Love yourself unconditionally. Christ asks us to “love thy neighbor as yourself.” Notice the pre-condition here: to embrace others, you must first make peace with who you are. So much of the hatred we direct towards others is spillover from the disdain we feel for ourselves. Love your whole, perfectly imperfect self.

And when you mess up, recognize that this is a part of the human journey. Feeling remorse is more than natural. It’s your spirit saying that your higher self believes you can do better. You can’t experience redemption if you don’t make mistakes. Forgive yourself, but equally important, pledge to do better. It’s the only way forward.

II: Love others unconditionally. Unconditional love is hard to contain, and if you’re able to cultivate it in yourself it’s likely to extend to the people around you. At the same time, it can be all too easy to shrink into ourselves until our hearts and minds narrow down to a lonely world of one.

Make a conscious effort to recognize the beautiful and, yes,  complicated individuals with whom you share this life. For better or worse, we really are in this together.

III: Don’t confuse loving with shoving. If your particular form of love comes with a big, leather-bound set of beliefs, kindly refrain from smacking innocent bystanders over the head with it. Pushing your beliefs on others isn’t faith; it’s insecurity.

IV: Corruption happens. The Bible has undergone many translations and revisions, often made by people whose intentions were not the purest.

No matter what any Sunday sermon or production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” would have you believe, Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. None of the Gospels refers to her as such, and her bad reputation can be traced to a speech given by Pope Gregory the Great in 591 AD. The Vatican finally issued a quiet retraction in 1969; so quiet that many Christians simply never heard it.

With so much of Christianity being based on the Word, it’s worth taking a closer look and finding out what the Word actually says. There are lots of good books on the subject — Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman, Junia: The First Woman Apostle, by Eldon Jay Epp and the soon to be released And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, by Joel M. Hoffman, PhD, to name just a few.

V: Keep your laws on your own naughty bits.  It’s strange to obsess over someone else’s sexual behavior, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Everyone is not, however, entitled to force those opinions on other people (see III).

Tend to your own naughty bits, please. Just as self-hatred often manifests as hatred of others, sexual repression often rears its ugly head as judgment and punishment of the sexual behavior of others. Show your body some love and maybe it won’t be so concerned about what everyone else is doing with theirs.

VI: Challenge the “bros before hoes” approach to religion. There is just no good reason to insist that women hold a “separate but equal” role in the church. As we all learned during South Africa’s apartheid years, “separate but equal” is a euphemism for subservience.

As with white supremacy, so with male superiority: most of the Christian arguments for it rely on sketchy Biblical quotes (see IV).  The rest can be boiled down to the schoolyard logic of “girls are stupid.” It’s 2010, and it’s time to grow up already.

VII: Be not afraid of scientists. I refer here to actual research-conducting, fact-checking, history-acknowledging scientists, not to dogmatists who jettison or distort any information that doesn’t align with their worldview.

Real scientists do the life affirming work of finding ways to repair the damage we’ve inflicted on the planet, advancing medicine and shedding light on our place within the universe. Yet they’re often subject to suspicion, oppression and hostility by members of the Christian community.

It’s time to make amends. Doing so does not make you an atheist any more than attending Sunday services strips a scientist of her passion for discovery.

VIII: Polar bears are God’s creatures, too. Just because there were only two polar bears on the Ark doesn’t mean there are only supposed to be two on the planet. We all have a responsibility to take care of the Earth and the life that goes with it. Let’s keep working to leave it in better shape than we found it.

IX: Keep your candle lit. Hope fuels our faith when it looks as though there isn’t any love, unconditional or otherwise, to be had. Each of us has a unique light to offer the world. Why else would our Creator have bothered to bring us into it?

X: Know when to be humble. So we don’t have it all figured out. So what? The wonderful thing about being one small part of a much bigger, much greater piece of work is that we don’t need to have all the answers. That’s the Almighty’s role. Our role might very well be to stop and listen after we’ve made nine brazenly big points.

What are yours? 

*****

Click here to join our Facebook community and engage directly with Irshad and Dana. Or email us your ideas: comments@irshadmanji.com.  However you decide to communicate with us, remember: every orthodoxy began as a heresy…

“Ten Commandments,” as rendered by Lucas Cranach the Elder and displayed in the townhall of Wittenberg, Germany (courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

Moral Courage Project named Visionary of the Year

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, On The Road, Announcements on Dec 04, 2009

With Emmy-winning Iranian actress Shohreh Agdashloo

“Hola!” from Los Angeles, where I’m accepting the 2009 Visionary Award bestowed by the Women’s International Film and Television Showcase.

This award recognizes the human rights campaign that the Moral Courage Project led over the summer. Inspired by the independent film, “The Stoning of Soraya M,” we used the movie and my thousands-strong Facebook community to galvanize people worldwide against the tribal practice of stoning in countries like Iran, Somolia, Afghanistan and Sudan.

According to Iranian actress Shohreh Agdashloo, who stars in “The Stoning,” international pressure has paid off: A few weeks after the film came out and our campaign gained steam, Iranian authorities announced that stoning would no longer be part of Iran’s penal code. Whether the new regulation gets enforced — particularly in rural Iran — is another matter altogether.

Still, we can all take strength that global campaigns work when back-channel diplomacy doesn’t. Just ask Maziar Bahari. He’s the Newsweek journalist unjustly jailed by Iranian authorities.  After 118 days in the notoriously nasty Evin Prison, Bahari was sprung. Last week, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that an international and very public effort by his wife and fellow journalists made all the difference.

In my next book, I’ll offer more examples of people in the West allying with people in the East and triumphing for the eminently universal cause of human rights.

For now, here’s my message: Don’t be silenced by the woe-is-us crowd who insist that we’re merely pawns of The Man.  They don’t know world history or individual agency.  Most tragic, they also don’t know what it means to leave a legacy.  If you want to leave a legacy, then exercise your personal leadership for a greater good.

You can start by joining my Facebook community.  Facebookers form the vanguard of the Moral Courage Project. They’re the ones who propelled the summer 2009 campaign against stoning. They’re the ones who made it viral. They deserve the Visionary Award that brings me to Los Angeles.

I accept it on behalf of them.

A sneak peek at my next book

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on Nov 26, 2009

With this post, I’m inaugurating a unique feature on my blog. I call it “Notes From My Next Book.”

Every so often, I’ll blog about an idea that I’m hashing out as I write the first draft of my new book. Send me your thoughts about the idea that I’m wrestling with, and you could find your advice reflected in the final product!

But first, what exactly am I writing?

My next book will be a guide to finding the God of love within Islam — the God that loves not only Muslims, but also Christians, Jews, agnostics and… questions.

I believe the God of the Qur’an wants us to replace our fears, not replicate them in dysfunctional, violent, forms. Being majestic, this God is secure enough to handle any doubt, any inquiry, any experiment. After all, nearly every chapter of the Qur’an opens by describing God as the “most merciful and compassionate.”

By contrast, the god of tribal culture is segregationist, irrational, vindictive and petty. Too many Muslims revere this god in the guise of Islam. As the world-renowned Palestinian psychologist Eyad Serraj told me, “Islam was introduced to move Arabs beyond tribalism. But Islam has not conquered Arab culture; Arab culture has conquered Islam.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. A new generation of Muslims, especially those of us lucky enough to live in open societies, can change pernicious customs. We have the right — and the responsibility.

In Islam, our choices aren’t limited to conforming or leaving, as I so often hear from young Muslims who write to me in frustration. With my new book, I’ll show struggling Muslims how to embrace a third option: reforming ourselves. When we reform ourselves, we transform our understanding of faith. Not only do we renew what it means to believe in our Creator; we give our Creator a reason to believe in us.

Fear of God can thus be replaced with a genuine relationship.

By introducing the God of love to Muslims, I want non-Muslims to see that they, too, can transcend their fears of asking questions about Islam. I’ll explain why good-hearted non-Muslims should risk offending. Their willingness to bust deadly silences can encourage reformist Muslims to speak up, too.

Bottom line: Liberal Muslims need the support of liberal non-Muslims. And the future of liberal democracy needs us all.

This isn’t a clarion call for “moderation.” It’s a call for more of us to be, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “creative extremists.”  Rooting out corruption is never an act of moderation. Honesty demands intense commitment — and commitment strikes moral relativists as extremism. But while terrorists exemplify destructive extremism, honest-to-God reformers fight with the most creative resource of all: moral courage. I’ll demonstrate how all of us, Muslim and not, can develop moral courage for a life defined by purpose — even transcendence.

That’s entirely consistent with Enlightenment ideals.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the iconic Enlightenment philosophe, pointed out that “[t]here is one further distinguishing characteristic of  man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement.” Not so different from the Qur’anic injunction that “God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves” (13:11).

In my next book, global politics meets personal growth.  Now, I must meet deadlines.

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