The Pangs of Ramadan

"Wallahi this is hard," complained Abderrahman as he stopped by my desk the other day. "Ramadan in August is not easy! We have finished eight days, and still have 22 more to go."

He was perhaps expecting a word of encouragement or commiseration from me, but when none was forthcoming his tone picked up. "I've been reading articles about the benefits of fasting," he assured me. "It cleans out your digestive system and purifies your kidneys. It removes toxins from your body and gives it an entirely fresh start."

As Abderrahman left to wait anxiously for six more hours until he could swallow a taste of water or a morsel of food, I realized there was no way I could tell him what I was really thinking. Do Muslims realize how often people do not respond to them simply because of the realization the conversation will go nowhere? If I could have said what I wanted to, it would have been, "Abderrahman, God could care less whether you wait until sundown to swallow your saliva, have something to eat or drink, smoke a cigarette or have sex. He's not going to forgive any more or less of your sins based on how well you keep Ramadan. Fasting during the sacred month was only one of many Jewish pre-Islamic religious practices Muhammad adopted in his attempts to make the Jews believe he was the Prophet he claimed to me. You fast because you have been socially conditioned your entire life to do so, and the shame, fear, and guilt you would feel by not fasting far outweighs the physical discomfort of doing so. Most of all, just keep in mind the spiritual pride you will feel when it is all over!"

To be fair, Muslims are not the only people who live within the framework of the religious insanity that results from keeping man-made traditions intended to impose spirituality and morality. Yesterday I visited the land of my roots, the Pennsylvania Dutch country. As I followed Amish slow-moving horse-drawn buggies and saw Mennonite women with their plain dresses and white hair-coverings, I had the same question. "Do you really think God cares whether you drive a buggy or a Buick, whether you wear jeans or a long skirt?"

What I find interesting is how young Mennonites and Muslims, particularly teen-age girls, try to break away from the constraints of their religious communities. Anyone who has been to Cairo has noticed young Muslim girls wearing the hijab and long skirts - but with those skirts hugging their hips as tightly as they can wear them. Yesterday I saw young Mennonite girls wearing not the unattractive white hair coverings of their mothers, but thin slivers of black cloth that only covered a fraction of their hair. They almost looked as if they were cut out of black lace panties! (OK, I'll admit that is a very bad pun). The point is that Mennonite teenagers in Lancaster Pennsylvania and Muslims girls in Cairo Egypt are both suffering under the constraints of the religious systems imposed upon them, and both want escape. The more young people question why they do what they are told they must do, and have the courage to break with traditions that really make no sense, the better off they - and all the rest of us - will be.

Blessed Holy Ramadan

Islam is the only religion in the world that forces its adherents, under penalty of law, to keep its religious traditions.

On this Arabic TV show host Rashid recently listed the penalties for eating publicly in Muslim countries during Ramadan. Morocco's criminal code stipulates that any Muslim found eating in a public place during Ramadan will be fined and imprisoned from one to six months. In Qatar the penalty is not limited to Muslims; anyone including non-Muslim expatriates and foreign workers caught eating, drinking, or smoking in public will be fined and put in prison up to three months. The penalty in the UAE and Kuwait also applies to all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, although the imprisonment is only one month.

Egypt's constitution does not ban eating publicly in Ramadan, but 155 Christians were arrested in one province alone, Aswan, in 2009 for eating publicly. With the collapse of the government and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist movements, there is no telling how many will be arrested, persecuted, or harassed this year.

In Iran in 2004, a 14-year old youth died as a result of the 85 lashes he received for eating during Ramadan. In Algeria in 2010, Algerian Christians who were tried for eating publicly during Ramadan were sentenced to three years in prison, although the sentence was commuted as a result of media attention. At the beginning of Ramadan each year in Saudi Arabia, guest workers are warned that if they eat publicly during the month they will be arrested and subject to imprisonment and deportation.

Muslims in the West love to talk about the spiritual benefits they achieve from Ramadan. It brings them closer to God, they say, increases their Patience and gives them opportunity to focus their attention on matters of the spirit.

That could be true. Spirituality is incredibly subjective, and if someone says that going without food from dawn to dusk makes him or her a more spiritual person who am I to question?

What I find interesting, however, is that young Muslims living in Muslim societies overseas are questioning more and more the regulations that force them to follow particular religious practices whether they want to or not. A young Moroccan blogger named Kacem El Ghazzali, whose English blog can be seen here, posted an Arabic video on youtube in which he forcefully and eloquently argued that penalizing people for eating publicly during Ramadan is a violation of personal freedom and human rights.  Not only does it violate the human rights of Muslims, he argues, but it represents an Islam that imposes itself upon Muslims and non-Muslims whether they want it or not. More than 200,000 Arab-speaking people have viewed his video.

I find this amazing. Had he posted the same video just a few years ago, he might have received only a few hits. But young Muslims are questioning as never before tenets of their religion that their ancestors accepted without argument for centuries. Why does anyone, they are asking, have the right to tell me that I cannot have a sandwich in public for an entire month? What right does anyone have to inform non-Muslim visitors they cannot eat in a restaurant because that might offend Muslims? Why do we belong to a religion that imposes itself upon others whether they want it or not?

Much of this questioning is beyond the radar of the Western media. You probably won't read an article in the Huffington Post about Kacem El Ghazzali's 200,000 hits for his "Let's All Eat in Ramadan" campaign. I would suggest, however, it is much more important than opeds you will read there by Western Muslims telling us how much closer they feel to God during the Holy and Blessed month of Ramadan.

Dr. Laura and Gay Marriage

Today a man called radio talk-show host Dr. Laura with an interesting dilemma. He was gay, he said, 51 years old and had been celibate his entire life. He had a female friend whose company he enjoyed. They were both growing older, and the prospect of being old alone was not attractive to either of them. Would it be wrong for them to get married, he asked, with the understanding they would sleep in separate bedrooms and never have a physical relationship?

Dr. Laura reminded the caller that women enter marriage with expectations and fantasies of what the relationship will develop into. Did his friend secretly hope she might un-gay him? Was she really prepared to spend the rest of her life without physical intimacy? What would happen if she came to his bedroom one night needing something more and he refused her?

I'm really looking out for you, Dr. Laura informed her caller. You are the one who stands to get hurt if this marriage doesn't work out.

But as she often does, Dr. Laura was not content to let the matter rest but went a little deeper. If you are gay, she asked, Why have you spent your entire life celibate?

In his response the caller revealed he had come from a conservative, non-gay-accepting background, and had always been fearful and ashamed of his homosexuality.

But aren't you even now, probed Dr. Laura, Avoiding the reality of your gayness? Instead of marrying a straight woman and setting yourself up for heartbreak, why don't you find a mature gay man with whom you can have a real relationship?

And here is my question for Dr. Laura. She is against gay marriage. But she is also against "shacking up", as she calls it when two unmarried people live together. She is against sex outside marriage, often describing women who engage in it as "unpaid whores". But didn't she just go against her own principles by advising her caller to find a gay man with whom he could have a relationship? She was encouraging a relationship that would naturally include physical intimacy, as far as I could tell, and at the same time asserting he and his partner could not get married. I don't get it.

Spiritual DNA and Tithing

A psychiatrist once told me that it takes three generations to move out of a cult. I'm not sure if that is correct or not, but it was true in my case. My grandfather was a member of the Amish church, a cult that does not allow its members to use electricity or drive automobiles. He left that to join the Mennonite church which was a little less strict - you could drive a car, but women were expected to have long hair and wear little white caps known as "coverings". My father left the Mennonite church to join a fundamentalist church, and I have moved away from that. So there you are, three generations.

But I haven't completely escaped - there are still aspects of the fundamentalist Christian world view that permeate my spiritual DNA and are hard to break. Take the principle of tithing, which means you give a full ten percent of your gross income (for overseas readers, that means before taxes are taken out) to your local church. If you do this, God will "bless" you and your family. If you don't, God will get that ten percent one way or the other because it belongs to him and according to one well-known verse from the Old Testament you are "robbing God".  God's ways of getting his due money are numerous including job loss, ill health, wayward children, and car wrecks.

One might wonder where such a grotesque idea came from. It began in the book of Genesis, when Abraham went out with a small army to attack a king who had robbed and kidnapped his relatives. Abraham defeated the enemy king and on the way home was met by a mysterious priest called Melchizedek who blessed Abraham for his victory. Abraham responded by giving the priest ten percent of the spoils of war.

Fast forward to the end of  Leviticus, where an elaborate religious system had been established for the nation of Israel. Leviticus 27:30 says, "A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord." Since the word "tithe" by definition means ten percent, farmers were expected to donate ten percent of their grain and fruit crops to support the priests and their families. Deuteronomy 12:17 adds that the people were not simply to eat their donations at home, but were to take them to the tabernacle where they were to be shared with family, friends, and the priests. It was actually a beautiful idea. As people made their pilgrimages to the tabernacle, they took food with them to share in great communal feasts that included the entire community.

The only other reference to tithing in the entire Bible, as far as I know, is the reference in Malachi where the author warned the people that if they refused to bring this food to the temple they were in fact robbing God.

The New Testament does not mention the tithe a single time. Jesus, Paul, the other apostles and authors - not a single word. The emphasis shifted from giving an obligatory ten percent to donating what you could to help people in need.

So why did I, when I got my first real job that paid seventeen thousand dollars a year, make sure that seventeen hundred of that went to my church? Was it fear that if I didn't God would zap me one way or the other? Was it really based upon a desire to give? I'm still not sure. All I know is that it was a part of my spiritual DNA, something I felt obligated to do.

American Christianity is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and God seems to have an insatiable thrist for new buildings. Each of these buildings costs millions of dollars, to say nothing of the staff and programs required to run them. What better way to finance the entire operation than to at least once a year have a few sermons on tithing? These sermons typically dangle before the congregation both the carrot and the stick. God's blessing is waiting to be received by those who tithe, but beware if you don't.

Part of this makes sense. If you belong to a country club you are required to pay annual dues - often thousands of dollars - to keep the club in the red. If you attend a church that has buildings to maintain, staff to pay and programs to run, you should do your part in meeting expenses. I'm just not convinced that the high-pressure tithe is the way to do it.

In a very real way, the tithing principle corrupts faith. The idea behind it is that you give ten percent to God, and the rest is yours to do with as you like. A person with disposable income can pay the tithe and have money to waste with no sense of responsibility to the person sitting next to her who doesn't have money to feed her children.

Imagine, for example, that you make two hundred thousand dollars a year and want a luxury car. The principle of tithing says that you give twenty thousand to the church and God will bless you as you enjoy your car. But if you skip the tithe and purchase the car, watch out! You might not make it home from the dealership.

Aren't there other principles that make a lot more sense? If you want a nice car, why not just save your money until you have the cash to go buy it? Or if you decide you can do with a lesser car, or drive the one you have a few more years because you would like to have more money available to help others, go for it. The money you give does not need to be an obligation. I don't think that is what God intended.

So why do I still feel the need to tithe? Remember what I said about your spiritual DNA, those principles you inherited from your childhood that are extemely difficult to erase or overcome? I'm still not sure that God is not out to get me if I don't put ten percent of this month's income in the offering plate next week.

The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA by Joby Warrick

I've recently read - and highly recommend - The Triple Agent. It is the story of how al-Qaeda agent Himam Balawi was trusted by the CIA well enough to be allowed onto their base in Khost, Afghanistan, where he blew himself up as well as several CIA case officers. It was one of the most tragic days in the history of the organization. Rather than review the book, I'd rather just comment on a few quotes. At one point, the author wrote:

"But somewhere Balawi had fallen off a cliff...against all logic and his own self-interest, he had embraced a virulent philosophy that threatened to destroy everything that Jordan had achieved in a half century of faltering progress toward modernity. He had risked his reputation and his own family in the service of fanatics living in caves two thousand miles away. How such a thing could happen to such a clever, world-wise young man as Balawi was unfathomable."

I've gone way past amazement - although I am still disappointed - when I hear otherwise intelligent, educated, articulate individuals such as Joby Warrick (and almost everybody else in the intelligence and academic communities as well as the media and the government) describe the radicalization of young Muslims as "unfathomable". It's like hearing someone describe Warren Jeff's belief in polygamy as "unfathomable". Excuse me, that's what your prophet did! Just as Mormon polygamists justify their behavior with chapter and verse from their holy books and the life of their prophet, so do Muslims Jihadists justify their terror, chapter and verse, from the Koran, the Sunna and the Sira (the life and sayings of Muhammad). And just as progressive Mormons try to argue - often with great difficulty and little success - that trying to model Joseph Smith in the 21st century is not a viable option, so moderate Muslims face an impossible task when they protest that the Jihadists are taking verses from the Koran and examples from the life of Muhammad out of context when they carry out their acts of terror.

At one point in the book the author described the efforts of Jordanian intelligence officer Bin Zeid to deradicalize Balawi. "Osama bin Laden's vision of Islam is distorted," Bin Zeid would say. "The Koran forbids the taking of innocent life."

There is nothing more amusing - although tragic - than reading the attempts of Muslims who are not Islamic scholars as they try to convince the Jihadists that they have Islam and Muhammad all wrong. At this post, I described the futile efforts of Tawfik Hamid to do just that. Bin Zeid might argue that the Koran forbids the taking of innocent life, but he completely skirts the questions of who is innocent in Islam. According to the Koran, no-one who denies the message of Muhammad can be described as innocent. Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi argues that no Israeli can ever be considered innocent. It is only a step further for al-Qaeda to argue that no American is innocent. Again, the Jihadist Sharia scholars trump non-scholars like Bin Zeid and Tawfik Hamid every time.

Towards the end of the book, just before the explosion in Khost on that fateful day, Warrick discussed some of the questions being raised about allowing Balawi on the compound.
"The Mukhabarat had been dealing with jihadists of all stripes for many years, and it knew a few things about them, including which ones could be flipped. The low-level types - the thugs and opportunists who glommed on to terrorist movements for personal advantage - could be transformed and might even become useful informants. But radicals and ideologues never truly switched sides. A true believer might lie and deceive, but deep down he could never betray his cause. And Humam al-Balawi had all the markings of a true believer."

This is probably the most important paragraph in the entire book. How naively we seem to believe Saudi claims that hundreds of former jihadists have been "reformed" by taking them through a comfortable rehabilitation program and then giving them a car, an apartment, a job and a wife. As Warrick accurately noted, these are not the true believers. Those who are truly convinced will never change.

They will never change, that is, unless they have a complete paradigm shift - to use a hackneyed phrase - and dare to ask the questions no Muslims yet dare to raise publicly, "Is it possible that Muhammad was not a Prophet of God? Could it be that he was nothing more than a seventh century military and political commander who had nothing to do with God? Is it conceivable that the Koran could be just a collection of sayings that was presented to the Muslim community as the word of God?"

"I'm a Muslim," a  lawyer told me recently in Tunisia, "But I'm an atheist." Well I'm not an atheist, but I admire his courage. I'm just looking for the day when he will be able to make that admission, not to a visiting American infidel, but to his own Muslim community without fear of reprisal or condemnation. I'm hopeful enough to believe that day will come.

Sex, Mom, and God

I've recently read Sex, Mom, and God by Frank Schaeffer. Although I highly recommend the book, I would suggest that if you haven't read Crazy for God you read that first. Crazy is autobiographical, tracing Frank's life as the son of evangelical Christian leaders, and Sex fleshes out a few developments that were left uncovered in the first book.

One of the things I like about Frank's writings is that he and I have followed similar spiritual and intellectual  paths. As a gifted and professional author, however, he has more time and skill to articulate his thoughts than I do. Things that I fleetingly think about find full expression in his paragraphs, and I find myself in agreement with much of what he has to say.

One particular example of this is his view of the Bible in general and the Old Testament in particular. As a critic of Islam as expressed and practiced by Muhammad, I've found myself looking more judgmentally at objectionable parts of early Islamic history than I have at objectionable parts of early Hebrew history. I criticize Muhammad for slaughtering 800 Jewish boys and men at Medina for not accepting him as a Prophet but gloss over Joshua and Saul slaughtering the populations of entire towns including newborn infants for not worshipping the God of the Jews. I condemn Muhammad for stoning to death an adulterous couple in Medina, but ignore the fact that the God of Moses ordered the stoning of married brides who were found to not be virgins. I scorn Muhammad for initiating a sexual relationship with a nine-year-old child (Aisha) that could only be described in today's terms as rape, as well as marrying his own daughter-in-law (Zaynab) and raping another wife (Sofiya) after torturing, robbing, and beheading her husband (Kinana of Khaybar), but skip right over Soloman's Biblical sexual conquest of not dozens but hundreds of women.

What I've done is simply use the excuses Christians have always used and continue to use. It's true that Joshua slaughtered children, they argue, but we don't do that anymore. Besides, maybe those people were so evil their babies needed to be sliced through with those swords. That was for a special time, they argue, only temporary whereas the injunctions of the Koran are for all time and all people everywhere. Jesus has taken us beyond the law of Moses, they argue, and now Muhammad wants to take us back to the law.

All of the above might be true, but they miss the main point which is that the Jehovah of Moses and the Allah of Muhammad both commanded the slaughter of innocents, allowed the sexual conquest of women as the property of men, and ordered the stoning of women who did not abide by the rules.

Maybe it's time for Christians to think a little more clearly, and be a lot more honest. If we are going to argue that their book is flawed and human, is it time for us to admit the same about ours? That's not saying both books are the same, or communicate the same basic message (which I don't think they do). It's just looking at our book with the same critical stance that we use when we look at theirs.

A Wedding Conversation

Last weekend I attended the wedding of two Muslim family friends. The groom’s family is from Pakistan and that of the bride from Bangladesh. As the Imam emphasized in his sermon before the marriage contract was signed, the marriage was bringing those two families and their respective communities closer together.

At the reception dinner I sat next to a university professor who had taught the bride in a few of her graduate classes. The professor and I were talking about retirement, and when she asked me if I had post-retirement plans she might have been surprised by my answer. “I’d like to convince one and a half billion Muslims,” I replied, “That Muhammad was just an ordinary man and the Koran is just a human book.”

“I was recently in Tunisia,” I continued, “And had a conversation with a taxi driver. ‘We just want to be free,’ he said. ‘Let those who want to pray go to the mosque, and let those who want to drink go to the bar.’”

“That’s fine,” I told him. “But there’s only one problem. Muhammad said you can’t go to the bar. As soon as you try to exercise that freedom, someone will grab you from behind and remind you that Muhammad or the Koran said you are not allowed to do that.”

“Educated people might agree with you,” the professor countered. “But the key to change is education. The average Muslim would never accept what you are trying to say.”

"Ordinary people can change,” I replied. “I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family where we were taught every word of the Bible was literally true. But now as I read the first chapter of Genesis, it sounds much less God’s description of how the universe came into existence than a man living in the Bronze Age four thousand years ago imagining how he thought it came to be.”

“A few minutes ago,” I continued, “The Imam read words from the Koran describing God as being the Great One, the Compassionate One, the All Powerful Creator, and the Righteous Judge. As I listened to those words, it sounded much more to me like someone 1400 years ago describing what he imagined God to be like, rather than God’s description of himself.”

“But how would you persuade Muslims that Muhammad was not a Prophet of God, or the Koran was just a human book?” the professor inquired.

“Most Muslims know very little about the life of their Prophet,” I replied. “From before they can walk or talk they are taught to believe in this compassionate, wise person they imagine existed. The average Muslim knows next to nothing of his true history. I would begin by just pointing out events in his life they perhaps haven’t thought about that portray him in a less-than-prophetic light. For example, the fact that he persuaded his own son to divorce his wife so that he could marry his daughter-in-law, and then justified the whole sordid affair by stating that God had commanded him to do it.”

Had we more time to continue the conversation, I might have pointed out to her that many, many Muslims, including the couple whose wedding we had just celebrated, are wonderful loving people. Well, not all of them of course. Not the pick-pocket who had stolen my wallet a few weeks before at the entrance of the old souk in downtown Tunis. But the shopkeeper who recovered my wallet with documents intact and went to quite a bit of trouble to get it back to me certainly was. I just believe that what their Prophet and his book teaches them about God and people holds them back from being all they can be.

One thing the professor said stuck with me. We both have two daughters, and I commented to her that three of the greatest blessings we can give our daughters are to be whoever they choose to me, to marry whomever they choose to marry, and to believe whatever they want to believe. “Islam grants daughters none of those rights,” I said. “Muslim women are not allowed to publicly acknowledge they are lesbian even if they are, Muslim women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim men, and they are not free to let it be known publicly that they are atheists or do not believe Muhammad was a prophet.”

“But that is not true only of Islam,” the professor replied, “Many orthodox Jewish women or evangelical Christian girls are not free to say similar things."

I agreed with her. We might disagree on the penalty - Muslims can be killed for criticizing Muhammad, and although ex-Amish Christians and ex-Orthodox Jews can be shunned by their respective communities for leaving the faith I haven't yet heard of it costing them their heads. But I would agree with her that devotion to any inspired text, and in particular allowing religious leaders to interpret that text to you as a mandate to how you are expected to believe and behave, can be a dangerous thing.