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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.