Holy Envy

by Barbara Brown Taylor

  The hardest thing to remember is that most of these students were still in diapers when the second, successful attack on the World Trade Center took place in 2001. The United States has been at war in one Muslim country or another ever since. Hardly a day goes by without headlines involving troops, coups, bombings, or body counts. Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street have all capitalized on the fear generated by terrorist attacks at home and abroad. Trying to teach Islam under this sky full of thunderheads is like trying to teach Christianity at the height of the Thirty Years’ War, in which more than eight million Christians died.

  I have six class sessions in which to give students something better for their imaginations to work with. I started out with four—the same number as all of the other religions we study—but the unit on Islam was so full of difficulties that I stretched it out, so we could at least name some of the problems. On the first day of the unit I write them on the board:

  Recognizing the entanglement of politics, economics, history, and religion

  Noticing how religions change from culture to culture

  Vetting the viewpoints of your news sources

  Resisting the tendency to judge the many by the actions of the few

  Understanding the dynamics of your own fear

  The last one is such a sleeper that I sometimes wonder if Psychology 101 should be a prerequisite for Religion 101, but the truth is that all of these difficulties are embedded in the study of every religion. The only reason to tag them during the study of Islam is because they are lying right on top, easy to identify in controversies ranging from the veiling of women in the United States to the armed conflict between Syria and Iraq. But what are two extra class sessions compared to the weight of world news, hate speech on the web, the typecasting of TV villains with Middle Eastern accents, and the easy pass given to those who speak ill of Islam? Where are students supposed to get better information about ordinary Muslims who suffer from the actions of the few both at home and abroad?

  When I read a study that says 38 percent of Americans know someone who is Muslim,1 I test the statistic with a hand-raise in class. The figure is way too high for Piedmont students. So few of them know a single Muslim that there is no compelling reason for them to doubt the images they have gotten from a screen. If they learn something interesting in class and share it with a friend or family member, they risk being shut down by those who know nothing of Islam except what they hear on the news. “What, so you think it’s interesting that people who kidnap young girls and make them sex slaves also pray five times a day? You need to drop that class before you get recruited by ISIS.” A student actually repeated that comment by her father to me.

  I call it “the worst-case conversation stopper,” a technique that works on almost any subject. You try to have a conversation with another mother about letting your fifth-grade daughters walk six blocks to school together, and she cites the unsolved murder of a girl in another state who was last seen walking to school. You try to have a conversation with your gym buddy about guns in church, and he asks you if you really want the next shooter to be the only guy in the room with a gun.

  It is hard to argue with worst-case scenarios, especially those that have really happened. At the same time, allowing them to freeze-frame the discussion can put you in a code-orange state of readiness for a life that is—for most of the readers of this book anyway—largely shades of green. The last time I rode under the sign that keeps track of highway fatalities in Georgia, I realized that I was in far greater danger of dying in a traffic accident than I was of dying in a terrorist attack. That is an indelicate comparison, I know, but it points to the difference between mortal fear and terror. Most people’s fear of a drunk driver or a texting teenager does not spill over onto everyone they meet, but their fear of a terrorist does. Every Muslim becomes a suspect, or at least the ones who meet the stereotype of what a Muslim looks like. Even those who do not—the optometrist at Walmart, for instance, or the saleswoman at Nordstrom who tries to talk you into a shorter hemline—become used to hearing people say libelous things about them every single day, because of worst-case scenarios that terrify them as badly as anyone else.

  What must it be like to live like that? How does such constant scorn affect your faith? How do you teach your children to ignore what other people say about you and the things you hold most sacred? Since I am a Southerner with vivid memories of the American civil rights movement, it is easy to come up with a parallel set of questions. How do you deal with the deadly hostility of people who think they know everything about you simply by looking at you? How do you change a mind that knows nothing about its own shadows?

  Because white men can’t

  police their imagination

  black men are dying.

  These are three lines from Citizen: An American Lyric by the poet Claudia Rankine. When a British journalist asked her what was in her mind when she wrote it, Rankine said, “When white men are shooting black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of-control image of blackness in their minds.2 In the same way, I believe, there is an out-of-control image of Islam in many minds that has little to do with ordinary Muslims, who serve as the shadow-bearers for people with no wish or will to explore their own shadows.

  Though most of my students are too young to remember 9/11, I remember it well. It was a Tuesday. I was in my office collating handouts on the Five Pillars of Islam. A field trip to a historic masjid in Atlanta was coming up on Friday, and students always had a lot of questions about what to expect. When the telephone rang I debated letting it go to voicemail, since class began in a few minutes, but the phone rang so seldom I picked it up. It was my husband Ed, telling me that a plane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers in Manhattan.

  “Are you near a television?” he said. “You really should take a look.”

  “I will,” I said. “Right after class.”

  By Thursday I had checked with the dean to make sure the Friday field trip could go ahead. I had called the masjid to make sure there would be extra security guards on duty. The dean said we were good to go. Remembering all of that now tells me how much the culture of terror has grown over the years. Under the same circumstances, would I press for such a field trip now? No, I would not. I would cancel the trip, and everyone would understand why. Yet three days after the largest terrorist attack in US history, I and everyone I spoke to felt reasonably sure that it was safe to take college students to a large masjid in a major city. All that remained was to find out if anyone still wanted to go.

  First the students and I processed the events of the past week as best we could. Then I passed around the sign-up sheet for the field trip, which had sixteen names on it. When it came back to me, half of them were crossed off. In the end, eight of us went to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam for Friday prayers. When we arrived, close to six hundred people were jammed into a room that held radio and newspaper reporters as well as worshippers. The women students and I sat in the back, while the two men students sat nearer the front. As more and more people spilled into the room, ushers motioned us forward to make room for others.

  There is something about sitting on the floor with your shoes off that can calm you right down. I did not know how the students in the men’s section were feeling, but back in the women’s section things were pretty cozy. We were sitting shoulder to shoulder with our stocking feet sticking out in front of us. There were a couple of babies crawling around, and no one was scolding them. A couple of the students leaned against each other. Two others fooled around with each other’s scarves. It was like waiting for a concert to begin, with so many new things to look at that the mind stayed present in a room where anything could happen next.

  At 2:00 p.m. sharp the muezzin stood to give the call to prayer. His voice settled the crowd. One of the babies stopped crawling and sat down, looking up at his mother to see if she was making the sound. The students stopped fidgeting too. I had been to the masjid before, but th
ey had not. I hoped they were managing their anxiety. Mine was focused on what the imam would say and how the crowd would react. His name was Plemon Al-Amin. He had been at the masjid a long time. He was known in Atlanta as a bridge-builder and peacemaker, which helped explain the media presence. His job, like the job of every imam standing up to speak that Friday, was to address the pressing issues of the day and advise believers on how their faith should inform their lives. I wondered how much sleep he had gotten since Tuesday.

  Al-Amin began in the customary way, praising God and calling the congregation to attention in Arabic. Then he spoke in English, citing a teaching from the prophet Muhammad that “the ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.” In the hour that followed he spoke directly to my condition, though I have only my memory to rely on now. The actions of the hijackers exposed the falseness of their claim to being Muslims, he said. The only sympathy possible for them was the sympathy one might have for people who have lost their minds. Returning to his text, he explained that the long lineage of Muslim scholars who have worked collaboratively for centuries to interpret the Qur’an in the most humane ways are more to be trusted than those who spill blood based on their own readings and ambitions.

  The longer he talked, the deeper I breathed. I could not see the students’ faces both because of the scarves and because their eyes were fixed on him. They leaned forward, not back, hooking their arms around their knees. The imam did not say anything to stoke our fear or provoke our anger. He called us back to compassion, to peace, to trust in God. He told us how important it was to partner with those of other faiths to resist violence in our communities in the days to come. I say “us” and “our” because he made me feel like part of his congregation. Everything he said went straight to my ransacked heart. He was my Melchizedek.

  The Friday service ended as it always does, with congregational prayer. As soon as people started standing up, I led the women students off to the side of the room, hoping the men students remembered to do the same thing. Then we watched the Muslims draw near each other, lining up in straight rows with their toes touching the toes of the people on either side of them. A bunch of grandmothers sat with babies on their laps in a row of chairs along the back wall. A woman in a wheelchair to my right reached down to set her brakes.

  When the imam gave the word, the Muslims bowed with their hands crossed over their bodies, then dropped to their knees and pressed their heads to the ground. A woman with a toddler sheltered her child beneath her body. The woman in the wheelchair tipped as far forward as she could without falling out. When everyone repeated the movement a moment later, it was like watching a huge, perfect wave curl and fall with a rush toward the shore.

  Then it was over. Someone stepped up to the microphone and started making announcements. Reporters surrounded the imam, while women in bright headscarves did the same thing to the students and me. Some patted our backs or shoulders and asked us our names. Others embraced us or kissed us on both cheeks. “You came to see for yourself,” one woman said after she had stepped back from hugging me. “With so many wrong ideas about us, so many false reports—you came to see for yourself.”

  In years to come I would return to that masjid again and again, not only to let students experience that kind of welcome, but also to learn what I could from the imam about how to speak from my own faith to people of other faiths in such a powerful way. I envied that. But President Bush had said something on 9/11 that turned out to be prophetic, and not in a good way. In his address to the nation on the night of the attacks, he said, “The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, and huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.” All these years later, the unyielding anger is still there. If anything, it has gotten worse.

  On the day we discuss in class why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all called Abrahamic religions, one student is eager to share what she knows about Abraham’s household. Terrorism is God’s lasting judgment on Abraham for sleeping with his wife’s maid, she says. If he had not slept with Hagar, there would be no such thing as Islam and the world would be a safer place.

  “Who told you that?” I ask.

  “My preacher,” she says.

  Another student tells me that her pastor has launched a sermon series called “The Star, the Crescent, and the Cross.” Troubled by what he has seen and heard about Islamic terrorism, the pastor has decided to read the Qur’an all the way through, so he can tell his congregation what it really says. He does not read Arabic. He does not understand that Muslims do not the read the Qur’an the same way he reads the Bible. He is unaware of tafsir, the Arabic word for “exegesis,” which points to the long tradition of scholarly interpretation of the Qur’an. He does not ask a Muslim friend to help him understand what he is reading. He simply downloads an English translation of the Qur’an and begins to read—first from the beginning and then, when he finds the first chapter too tedious, from the shorter chapters at the end.

  In his first sermon he says that he is only three-quarters of the way through, but he has read enough to assure his congregation that, wherever they pick it up, the Qur’an is “one long droning of what Allah expects, and if you don’t turn to him, he’s going to give you incredibly painful divine retribution.” The pastor says a great deal more than that—all of it available on podcast—but his bottom line is that “these people have made themselves your enemy—the enemy of the cross.” This does not give his listeners license to make enemies of Muslims, he says, to his credit, but it does mean that they should expect attacks on non-Muslims to continue, since “the Qur’an incites people to violence.”

  When I hear things like that, I feel like I am bailing water out of a rowboat made from newspaper and spit. How can I possibly persuade students at a time like this that Islam is as rich and corruptible as any other religion? How can I teach them to deconstruct what they hear? It does not help that the Muslim world is in conflict on three continents. That this has as much to do with geopolitics as religion is of little interest to people in their early twenties. Most have no idea that the US backed fundamentalist Afghan mujahedin during the war with the Soviets in the 1980s, or supported Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq war of those same years. These are shadow stories that even I have a hard time hearing. There is also the age-old problem of sibling rivalry. The Abrahamic religions belong to a complicated blended family in which our similarities provoke as much friction as our differences.

  In his significant book Not in God’s Name, Jonathan Sacks reverses a popular trope. It is not our religion that makes us violent, he says. Instead, it is our penchant for violence that gives rise to our religious impulse. People are born with two sets of primal instincts, he notes: altruism toward those in our own group and aggression toward others.3 In daily life, this dynamic shows up in everything from football rivalry and political affiliation to racial division and armed combat.

  Since most of us need to feel good about ourselves while we are acting aggressively toward others, we develop psychological mechanisms such as splitting, projection, and scapegoating, which allow us to assign goodness to our group and badness to the other group. This not only relieves us of having to deal with the goodness and badness inside our own group; it also frees us to believe that our violence against the other group is essentially altruistic. We bond best with our group when we confront an external enemy.

  Sacks exposes another illusion when he points out that historical substitutes for religion have done greater harm than religion. These include the nationalism that sparked two world wars, the ideological system that gave Mao and Stalin license to murder millions of their own people, and the racism that fueled the Holocaust. “After that,” Sacks writes, “no one who argues that abolishing religion will lead to peace can be taken seriously.”4 It is neither our secularism nor our religion that fuels our violence, he concludes, but our fundamental “groupishness.”

 
By the time the students have finished six class sessions on Islam, they know how much Jews, Christians, and Muslims have in common: not just Abraham, but also Moses, the commandments, the prophets, the holy city of Jerusalem, charity, fasting, pilgrimage, prayer, sacred texts, sacred washing, justice, free will, care for neighbors, angels, the coming messiah, the day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and—sooner or later—participation in the eternal life of the one God. Everything on that long list belongs at the center of what the three religions share.

  The biggest surprise for everyone is that Christians and Muslims both revere Jesus. Muslims call him Isa, believing him to be both prophet and messiah. Christians believe he shares divine status with God, which neither Jews nor Muslims can affirm, but Muslims honor him as an exemplar of what it means to truly surrender to God. Contrary to popular opinion, Muslims and Christians can both wear “I ❤ Jesus” T-shirts and mean it.

  Letting this sink in for the first time, I am struck by the realization that Christians do not own Jesus any more than we own God. He has other sheep who do not belong to our fold, and when he is walking with them, they see him very differently. Hindus may see him in the saffron robes of a holy man or as an avatar who manifests the divine. Buddhists see him sitting in the lotus position as a bodhisattva, a compassionate being who works for the benefit of all beings. Jews have every reason to see him as the shepherd of a murderous flock, though there are a few who can see him as a liberal Pharisee of his day or a passionate rabbi who died for his vision of Judaism.

  The most interesting Jewish view of him that I come across is the idea of Jesus as a failed messiah—not false, but failed—who said and did all the right things but who could not achieve the final goal of bringing God’s kingdom to earth. The Jerusalem temple was destroyed a generation after his death. The lion did not lie down with the lamb. Yet this messiah son of Joseph, as one Jewish writer calls him, suffered and died to prepare the way for the final redemption to take place.5