Category — What I'm reading

Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of A Sceptical Muslim
by Ziauddin Sardar
(London: Granta Books, 2005)

‘Islam is wearing a beard, a trench coat and a turban,’ a Sufi sheikh in Konya, the Turkish city where the incomparable Rumi is buried, tells Ziauddin Sardar and launches into a discourse on the importance of symbols in Islam, particularly the symbols of paradise – gardens, rivers of milk and honey, the Throne, the Lote Tree. ‘You make what you will of these symbols,’ says the sheikh.

Sardar, who describes himself as a sceptical Muslim but who is clearly passionately committed to Islam, can make nothing of these symbols. The sheikh tells him, ‘The Master you seek knows not that he is the Master. And he takes no disciples. You must chalk out your own route to paradise.’

Ziauddin Sardar, an engaging, humorous and intelligent writer, tells the story of his physical, mental and spiritual journeys through the many ways to paradise prescribed by different Muslim groups and sects in search of his paradise of an Islam in which ‘intrinsic values combine with freedom to engender beauty and creativity,’ an Islam ‘expressed as an open system flowering with diversity.’

These journeys take him from the literalism of the Tablighi-Jamaat and the Muslim Brotherhood through the mysticism of various Sufi and pseudo-Sufi groups to modern Islamic states such as Iran, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. What does he find?

‘The world of the Muslim mystic’ says Sardar, ‘is selfish…. The world of literalism is dry, dreadful and totally dead. One drowns in Selfhood, the other fries in a medieval mindset – both are fatally flawed, dangerously drunk.’ Most of the Islamic states are deeply depressing in their narrow-minded ideological approach to Islam and their rejection of plurality.

Sardar concludes that the Muslim paradise is not a destination but a way of travelling. ‘Just as we cannot stop living,’ he says, ‘we cannot stop searching for our paradise. But the search is for a continual kind of becoming.’

Those who think they have arrived in paradise are deluded and dangerous. Deluded because one never arrives, dangerous because ‘People with absolute certainty have an absolute passion for not being forgiving’.

Most Muslims think of paradise as a piece of property one can purchase by accumulating the right amount of Islamic deeds: imposing outmoded concepts of the Shariah, banning all varieties of art, literature and culture, killing and being killed in the name of Islam. The accumulation of this supposed wealth has become an end in itself! So the Qur’anic vision of paradise has been turned into an earthly vision of hell: an enclave of bloodbath and bigotry, suppression and severity, censorship and castration. Evil often thrives in those who constantly proclaim “evil doesn’t live here any more”. What could be further from the spirit of the Qur’an, so far removed from its description of paradise?

Sardar takes seriously Al-Ghazali’s view that travel is an essential component of belief. According to Al-Ghazali, knowledge of one’s Self and knowledge of one’s place in the cosmos are acquired through travel. Desperately Seeking Paradise may be framed as a picaresque series of journeys and encounters but it has deeply serious intellectual and spiritual intentions.

What Sardar yearns for is…

A world where intrinsic values combine with freedom to engender beauty and creativity, where Islam is expressed as an open system flowering with diversity. It is the vision of the “earthly paradise” I set out to discover.

As I read the book I couldn’t help think of Ziauddin Sardar’s spiritual journey from a Baha’i perspective. The paradise he is so desperately seeks is to be found in the teachings of the Baha’i Faith and the life and experience of the Baha’i community worldwide. However, those who seek paradise aren’t always willing to seek away from what is familiar to them. In His Book of Certitude, Baha’u'llah warns…

But, O my brother, when a true seeker determineth to take the step of search in the path leading to the knowledge of the Ancient of Days, he must, before all else, cleanse and purify his heart, which is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God, from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge, and the allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy. He must purge his breast, which is the sanctuary of the abiding love of the Beloved, of every defilement, and sanctify his soul from all that pertaineth to water and clay, from all shadowy and ephemeral attachments. He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth. Even as thou dost witness in this day how most of the people, because of such love and hate, are bereft of the immortal Face, have strayed far from the Embodiments of the divine mysteries, and, shepherdless, are roaming through the wilderness of oblivion and error.

Like Ed Husain’s The Islamist, Ziauddin Sardar’s Desperately Seeking Paradise offers us an insider’s view of the contemporary challenges facing Islam. It is a must-read for anyone wanting a nuanced account of one Muslim’s life in the modern world. Needless to say, it is only one Muslim’s account and there are many, Muslims and others, who would object to his take on Islam.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Islam, Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise, true seeker, religion

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If you haven’t already read it, you should!

Moojan Momen’s Baha’u'llah: A Short Biography (published by Oneworld Publications) is an excellent account of Baha’u'llah’s life. As the publisher’s blurb says:

From his early life in Iran as the son of senior civil servant to his death in exile near Akka, in what is now Israel, this is a carefully constructed account of the eventful life of this influential nineteenth-century religious figure. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, some of which have never been used before, Momen offers a comprehensive survey of Baha’u'llah’s life, works and teachings…

Momen writes his account of Baha’u'llah’s life in a neutral style. In other words, he is not trying to persuade the reader of the veracity of the Baha’i Faith nor does he use Baha’i jargon - or if he does, he signposts terms such as “tablet” as language that Baha’is use. He writes as a scholar and a historian (although this is not an academic tome), avoids hyperbole, and tells the story with copious reference to a range of historical sources and the Baha’i scriptures.

Paradoxically, this approach brings out the drama of an extraordinary life and illustrates Baha’u'llah’s spiritual power and his relationships with his family and followers far more effectively than would a hagiography. In reading this book I could feel and see Baha’u'llah as a real person in a real historical context. Momen outlines the trajectory of Baha’u'llah’s life from wealth and respect through imprisonment and torture to perpetual exile. We see Baha’u'llah as a family man who becomes a leading figure in the Babi movement, is arrested, imprisoned, exiled; he loses almost all his worldly wealth; he spends time as a dervish in the Kurdistan mountains of Iraq; he declares his mission as the one the Bab had spoken of, ‘He whom God will make manifest’; he suffers further exiles and is sent, eventually, to Acre (Akka) in the the Ottoman province of Syria, in whose environs he passes away in 1892.

During all of this, despite grief and loss, despite caring for his family and followers, despite constant pressure from the Ottoman authorities and coping with the intrigues of those who opposed him (although he increasingly relies on ‘Abdu’l-Bah

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Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fight for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. [William Morris]

Adam Hochschild quotes Morris in the epilogue to his excellent book Bury The Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, which I have just finished reading.

Hochschild has done his research and, as Ian Thomson wrote in the Daily Telegraph

…has a novelist’s flair for narrative, and this is a horrifically readable history … a powerful account of the group of high-minded Englishmen who opposed a brute, mercantile greed and its arsenal of chains, whips and leg irons.

Why the quote from Morris? The British abolitionists of the 18th century fought from 1787 to abolish an evil trade in human beings, a trade that was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1807. Parliament voted through a further Act to abolish slavery itself and to emancipate the slaves in the British Empire in 1833. But the victory was tainted. Emancipation was to happen in two stages - former slaves were to work as “apprentices” for six years from 1834 without pay before full emancipation would take effect.

Parliament also voted to recompense the former slave owners with

The life of the Prophet Muhammad has always polarized opinion in the West. After 9/11 and 7/7 it has become increasingly difficult to find balanced accounts of Islam and its founder. Having read Robert Spencer’s “The Truth About Muhammad”, which is relentlessly hostile, I was looking for something rather more sympathetic about Muhammad’s life. I found it in Barnaby Rogerson’s book (published by Abacus in 2003. ISBN: 0-349-11586-9).

Rogerson is an excellent storyteller, a professional, in fact. In the preface, Rogerson tells how, when taking Western tourists around Roman sites in a Muslim country, he heard groups of men sitting around in cafes telling tales from the days of the Prophet as if they were fresh and new. “I was on the side of a good story,” says Rogerson. “The life of the Prophet Muhammad is a story of overpowering pathos and beauty. It is history, tragedy and enlightenment compressed into one tale.” And that’s how Rogerson tells it.

He has the knack of taking the reader into the picture, of conjuring up the sights and sounds and smells of Arabia in the days of Muhammad. And he gives us a sense of the struggles that Muhammad and his early followers went through, of the Prophet’s family, and of the harsh life of the Arabs in the desert. He tells it in the end as a tale of triumph over challenge, but never implies that victory was a foregone conclusion.

But - and it is a big but - I was conscious throughout that Rogerson had omitted many of the very difficult episodes of Muhammad’s apparent cruelty that Spencer includes in his book. In fact, my first reaction to Rogerson’s book was that he was a Romantic, that he had to some extent sentimentalized Muhammad’s story and had evaded these difficult episodes. The problem with writing a biography of Muhammad that is accessible and readable for the non-scholarly Western, non-Muslim reader (which is what I am) is that the writer must inevitably abbreviate the story and cannot really acknowledge the difficulties that a historian would have with the very limited primary sources for the life of Muhammad.

This is not to say that Rogerson avoids reference to sources. In fact, he has included a useful note on sources, as well as a timeline, maps, profiles of the main characters in the story, and a glossary of the 99 Names of God. But the main issue, as with all historical material, is one of interpretation. What do the various episodes mean? What frame of reference do we wish to put on the story of Muhammad? Spencer starts with harshly negative assumptions and sets out to prove what he already believes about Muhammad. Rogerson, on the other hand, starts with positive assumptions and sets out to show the beauty and majesty of Muhammad’s life.

I have to admit I was repelled by Spencer and beguiled by Rogerson. Beguiled, but always a tad suspicious that he was carried away with the story and not conscious enough of where there could be difficulties and different views of what he was asserting about Muhammad. Somehow, I heard the echoes of Fitzgerald’s translations of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam in Rogerson’s voice.

As a Baha’i I found Rogerson’s telling appropriate, respectful, and filled with faith (although I don’t think he is a Muslim himself). As it happens, I am reading passages from Gems of Divine Mysteries, that wonderful effusion of the Pen of Baha’u'llah, each morning and evening. The other day I read this (pages 38-41):

It is Our wish at this juncture to digress from Our theme to recount that which befell the Point of the Qur’an, and to extol His remembrance…

Consider and reflect upon His days, when God raised Him up to promote His Cause and to stand as the representative of His own Self. Witness how He was assailed, denied, and denounced by all; how when He set foot in the streets and marketplaces, the people derided Him, and laughed Him to scorn; how at every moment they sought to slay Him. Such were their doings that the earth in all its vastness was straitened for Him, the Concourse on High bewailed His plight…

…

Had these souls but clung steadfastly to the Handle of God manifested in the Person of Muhammad, had they turned wholly unto God and cast aside all that they had learned from their divines, He would assuredly have guided them through His grace and acquainted them with the sacred truths that are enshrined within His imperishable utterances.

Rogerson’s telling of the life of the Prophet gave me a sense of the historical reality of what Baha’u'llah says about His illustrious predecessor.

I shall now read Rogerson’s “The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad” and move on to the next part of the story of Islam. It is essential that we understand Islam’s history and try to avoid the hatred and prejudice that so many in the West accept as the “proper” reaction to Islam. However, we must also acknowledge that extremist voices have captured the attention of the media and, indeed, of the Muslim community. Any form of religious extremism is, as Baha’u'llah says, “a world-devouring fire”.

Technorati Tags: Muhammad, Islam, Muslim, Arabia, Baha’i, Baha’u'llah, Qur’an

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It’s strange to cry over a novel in the early hours of the morning, but that’s what I did when reading Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. This is what the blurb on the back cover says:

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time…”

On his eighty-third birthday, Eddie, a lonely war veteran, dies in a tragic accident trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his - and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers, Yet each of them changed your path forever.

What got me crying? It was the part of the story where Eddie meets his wife Marguerite. She died before him and she’s one of the five people he meets in heaven, one of the five people who explains his life to him.

Even in his worst moments, Eddie had never stopped loving Marguerite, nor she him. And she’s young again when they meet in heaven. He’d felt his loss every day of his life after she’d died, and all he wants to do is to be reunited with Marguerite.

They review what they’d had togetherand what they’d missed. They’d not been able to have a longed-for child because she’d been severely injured when her car swerved into the central barrier of the highway when a bottle dropped by drunken teenagers from an overbridge had shattered the windscreen. She’d been on a mission of love to rescue Eddie on his birthday from a racetrack where he was gambling away the money they’d been saving to have the child.

Their love had faltered, but it had never disappeared. And it revived as they grew older together. Eddie was desolate and lonely when she died, and to meet her again in heaven is his heart’s desire.

Well, that part of the story triggered thoughts and feelings about my [tag[love[/tag] for Erica and our lives together, what we’ve had together and what we’ve missed. In fact, we were talking this morning at breakfast about one relocation we both felt had been wrong - for ourselves and our children. If we could wind the clock back, and knowing what we know no, we wouldn’t do that again.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? We do what we do, we make the decisions we make, without fully being able to foresee the consequences.

What really made me cry, though, was the fear of loss. How could I live if I lost the one who is closest to me, who knows me best, of whose love I have absolutely no doubt?

Albom’s book is written in a straightforward prose, no flowery language, and the characters are not particularly exalted or noble. But he writes about profound things, life, death, things that are matters of the human spirit.

It’s worth reading.

Technorati Tags: Mitch Albom, Heaven, life, death

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Training ship Thor Heyerdahl in Lerwick harbour, Shetland

I’ve just finished reading Patrick O’Brian’s Blue at the Mizzen, the twentieth and last of the historical novels about the lives and doings of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin, naval surgeon, secret agent and Aubrey’s close friend. The first of the series is Master and Commander, which is probably the one most people will have heard of because of the film starring Russell Crowe.

The Bombardment of Algiers by the Royal Navy in 1816

This is what one critic writes about these wonderful novels:

Why do the sea-faring adventure novels of Patrick O’Brian enjoy such a phenomenally devoted readership? Actually, O’Brian enthusiasts can take their pick from a variety of qualities of excellence: the sheer command of writing technique; the adroit characterisation of his heroes, every bit as rich and well-rounded as anything in serious fiction; and, of course, the bracingly-realised atmosphere of the sea on which the author sets his tales of derring-do.

As a boy I read all the Hornblower novels, which I just loved. But the Aubrey/Maturin novels knock Hornblower into a cocked hat (an appropriate metaphor, given that cocked hats were usual apparel in the late 18th and early 19th century, which is when the Aubrey/Maturin novels are set). O’Brian’s main characters show their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and O’Brian is not afraid to allow his characters to suffer - sometimes to die.

“Lucky” Jack Aubrey is one of the most celebrated captains of the King’s Navy, as the traditionalists (like Jack Aubrey) called it and is famous for his brave actions, many of which gain him and his men large amounts of prize money. But he’s not so lucky on land and makes some serious mistakes in handling his money and his small estate. He has enemies at court as well as friends and his career is not a conventional one for the time, since he is often sent on special missions to take Maturin to do his secret agent stuff.

Maturin starts out as a complete landlubber and the complexities of an 18th century man-of-war are revealed to us through the explanations given him by the sailors of what the masts and sails and various bits of rigging do. O’Brian uses naval terminology of the time without explanation, so it’s useful, when reading the novels, to have some kind of reference book at hand. The one I like is Patrick O’Brian’s Navy, a beautifully illustrated history of the naval world that Jack Aubrey would have known.

The line-of-battle ships and the frigates of the Royal Navy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were the most complex machines of their day. Their effectiveness in battle depended utterly on the skills of highly trained crews. The most effective ships were not those commanded by tyrannical officers who meted out terrible physical punishments for the least offence; the most effective ships were those in which the crew’s hearts and loyalty were given to their captain. Jack Aubrey was a “tight” captain: he expected - and got - absolute discipline, not by flogging his men within an inch of their lives, but by being fair, by caring for his men, and by being a matchless naval tactitian.

O’Brian’s writing has many strengths, not least of which are his ability to delineate character and his descriptions of naval battles. These descriptions take one right inside the battle, with all the noise and confusion and smoke and blood. Tension rises and the outcome is never a foregone conclusion. Beyond that, the feeling he conveys of living in a wooden-walled ship and travelling vast distances across the planet, utterly dependent on the wind and waves and on the stores that the ship is carrying, is unparalleled in my view. O’Brian himself was (he passed away in 2000) a sailor and loved the sea and ships.

Technorati Tags: Patrick O’Brian, novels, Aubrey, Maturin, Navy, ships, frigates

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I can recommend Melanie Phillips’s Diary as a source of thought-provoking ideas and analysis. One interesting post introduces a group called Anglicans for Israel; this is worth reading as a corrective to the ignorance and bile that lies behind so much writing and broadcasting in the UK about Israel.

Technorati Tags: politics, religion

Charles L Mee’s memoir A Nearly Normal Life (Little, Brown & Co, 1999) wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of early 1950’s small-town America and the constant dread that the annual polio epidemics brought to a land so shaped by the ethos of optimism, youth and health and can-do. But the last thing Mee, a 14-year-old, ‘with buck teeth, a crew cut, a love of swimming, football and comic books’ expects is that his life will be for ever changed by this disease. This was something that happened to other people. There was no cure for the disease and it struck unpredictably…

…and left its victims dead or paralyzed, washed up in wheelchairs, white-faced, shrunken, with frightened eyes, light blankets over their legs, or lying on their backs inside iron lungs, constantly shushing and hissing with the intake and exhaust of pressure that made a person’s diaphragm expand and contract, breathing for him because the muscles in his chest had stopped working - his head and feet sticking out uselessly at either end.

In 1953, the 14-year-old Mee himself catches the dread disease. He seems to have picked up the virus on a road trip with his mother and sister from their home in Barrington, Illinois, to Boulder, Colorado.
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