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A Quantum Novel

Posted March 9th, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

Allow me to rave. I’ve read several good novels over the past few months, but none has bowled me over like this one.

suddendeath2Sudden Death is bawdy and metaphysical, cheeky and deadly serious, vividly funny and yet written from a place of very deep pain. In other words, it’s totally uncategorizable. And if I try to describe it, I know I’ll only turn most readers off.

It’s set in the sixteenth century, for a start. It revolves around a tennis match. It takes place in Mexico and Italy and Spain. The dialogue is without quotation marks, so you need to hear the speakers rather than read them. And on the very first page, there’s a sentence in Latin, untranslated.

Are you sufficiently turned off?

So let me tell you that the tennis ball in play is made of Ann Boleyn’s red hair, cut off her head just before her head was cut off from her body. And that there was nothing Wimbledon-like about tennis in the Renaissance, when it was a vicious game beloved by gamblers and low-lifes.

Then let me tell you that one of the players is a certain artist by the name of Caravaggio. And that one of the judges is a mathematician who turns out to be, on nearly the very last page… (but no, that would be a spoiler). And that major appearances are made by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, by Aztec emperors, by a Mayan princess, and by an assortment of venal popes. And – the clincher for me – grappa is downed by the jugful.

Or perhaps you’ll be as entranced as I am by tapestries woven entirely of feathers (scroll to the end for a piece made of hummingbird and parrot feathers). Or by the extraordinary mastery of the way Enrigue spans time and distance, finally setting my head spinning as though I was on mushrooms.

This Spanish and Mexican award-winner is the first of Enrigue’s novels to be translated into English, and I want to read all of them, right now. In the meantime, after marveling for a day once I’d finished this one, I began reading it again – and realized that of all the blurbs on the back cover, only the late lamented Carlos Fuentes manages to describe Sudden Death the way I would if I could.

This is a novel, he wrote, that “belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.”

Precisely (as it were): a quantum novel. No wonder I can’t describe it. No wonder many people will be frustrated by it. No wonder I love it.

————-

In case you take the leap, here’s a rough version of the Latin on the first page (with a bit of help from Google Translate). It’s a quote from the fifteenth-century Bishop of Exeter describing tennis as “profane oaths and gatherings, illicit and full of perjuries, often with fighting.”

And here — miserably flat and two-dimensional — is a Mexican Indian feather-art portrait of Jesus, made with hummingbird and parrot feathers:

feather portrait

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File under: art, Christianity | Tagged: Tags: 'Sudden Death', Albert Einstein, Alvaro Enrigue, Ann Boleyn, Caravaggio, Carlos Fuentes, Galileo, Hernan Cortes, Italy, Max Planck, Mayan, Mexican feather art, Mexico, popes, Renaissance, Spain, tennis | 2 Comments
  1. Karen Parano says:
    March 9, 2016 at 11:17 am

    Sounds fascinating! When I added to my Goodreads.com list a few moments ago, I noticed they are having a giveaway for this same novel. One more day to enter, folks.

  2. Elle Griffin says:
    March 9, 2016 at 3:11 pm

    Sold! Added it to my list!

Speaking Out

Posted December 18th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

Sometimes you have the privilege of getting to say the right thing at the right time, as with this nine-minute talk I gave the other night to a hugely supportive audience of Christians and Muslims at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, WA.  The event was called “Love in a Time of Fear,” but I wasn’t afraid, I was angry, and I said so:

 

[youtube=https://youtu.be/RhKDsdIeeHo]

Full video of the evening is here, with special thanks to Terry Kyllo of Catacomb Churches and to Jeff Siddiqui for bringing it all together, and to the excellent work of Lutheran Community Services Northwest in support of Syrian refugees.

 

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File under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, ugliness, US politics | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Black Lives Matter, Colorado Springs, Donald Trump, gay marriage, Hitler, Martin Niemoller, neo-fascism, New York Daily News, Planned Parenthood, Republican party, San Bernardino, Ted Cruz | 3 Comments
  1. Mary Johnson says:
    December 18, 2015 at 2:17 pm

    Thank you, Lesley. This is SO important, and so well said.

    You might be interested in this, from my sister Margaret, who converted to Islam before the birth of her first child and is trying to raise a Muslim family in the US: https://medium.com/@coexistmarge/this-time-it-s-different-c0c70fd2db3f#.yo8zgn6nj

    Hoping you are well. Thankful you are angry.

    Mary

    >

  2. Nuzhat says:
    December 18, 2015 at 8:17 pm

    Every voice raised is a step towards correction. There may be enough laid back listeners, but being a part of the vocal band is being more responsible, and important in awakening the sense of direction the listeners can take.
    You always hit the mark with even few words said, Lesley….
    well spoken!
    Nuzhat.

  3. Frederick Osman says:
    December 19, 2015 at 2:13 pm

    Thank you, Lesley. Wonderful, as usual.

Shameless Advice

Posted September 17th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

The advice-to-young-people racket is utterly shameless. Even William Burroughs gave in to the temptation, proving that the best advice-to-young-people may be to ignore all advice-to-young-people. Unless, of course, it comes from The Stranger, Seattle’s ornery, Pulitzer-prize-winning alternative weekly, whose annual back-to-school issue confronts incoming freshpeople with all manner of weird, ironic, and occasionally even useful advice on life, love, and… oh yes, sex.

This year, they decided to go for broke and include religion, and who else would they turn to but the Accidental Theologist? — who obligingly came up with ten questions for “young people” to ask if they’re trying to choose a religion:

1. How loud do its proponents talk? If they’re shouting, that doesn’t make what they say truer. On the contrary: There’s generally an inverse relationship between decibels and truth. Besides, do you really enjoy being preached at?

2. Do they know what God wants/thinks/intends? If so, either they are God or they think they are God. That’s called heresy if you’re religious, and psychosis if you’re not.

3. Are they obsessed with sex? If they’re threatened by women or are LGBT-phobic, there’s weird sexual stuff going on. If you’re similarly threatened and phobic, Westboro Baptist Church or Mars Hill Church will happily provide a home for your penis.

4. Do they have good music? Christians might have this one beat (Bach’s Mass in B minor, gospel music…), but if you’ve never heard Pakistan’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, you have an ecstatic Sufi feast in store.

5. Talking of feasts, do they have good food? Communion wafer, anyone? At least Jews have matzo-ball soup and four glasses of wine at Passover. And Muslims get to dine on fatted lamb at Eid al-Adha—but winelessly.

6. Do they cite chapter and verse at you? This is the primo tactic of fundamentalists: cherry-picked quotes, out of context. Try tossing this one back at them: “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” (And since they can’t hear you unless you add numbers, that’s 2 Corinthians 3:6.)

7. Do they have any idea what “metaphor” means? If not, gently suggest they sign up for English Literature 101—no, demand it. Do not put up with literalism.

8. Are they into social justice? That’s the essential subtext of both the Bible and the Quran: social and economic protest against corrupt elites. The Big Three monotheisms began as the Occupy movements of the ancient Middle East. Where do you think Marx got his ideas from?

9. Do they insist on your swearing belief/loyalty/obedience? If they lack a sense of mystery and claim to have all the answers, run like hell. That’s not faith, that’s dogma.

10. Are they into joy? Do they celebrate life—in this world, not a next one? Do they make you want to laugh, cry, hug, dance, stay up all night and watch the sunrise? Do they make you happy and grateful and goddamn humbled by this strange thing we call existence? A++ if they do.

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, existence, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: 2014 Back to School Issue, advice-to-young-people, ten questions, The Stranger | 14 Comments
  1. Chad says:
    September 17, 2014 at 12:14 pm

    Well said. Can’t think of any more questions to add. Of course, by following these wuestions, a person would have excluded the vast majority of religions out there. So we are better off drawing our own path to spirituality. And I am guessing that’s why you put between quotation marks the words “choosing a religion”. Awesome.

    By the way, speaking of great spiritual music, one great Sufi musician who is trying to bring Sufi music into the 21st century and also adding jazz influences is Dhafer Youssef. Check out his album labelled “Electric Sufi”. Would love to hear your feedback about it if you do check it out!

  2. Katherine Sbarbaro says:
    September 17, 2014 at 2:03 pm

    Shoot! Why weren’t you around giving out advice when I was a kid?! I LOVE #10 – the be all and end all of what any religion should be about. Thank you, Lesley Hazleton. You’re my heroine for today.

  3. Nuzhat says:
    September 17, 2014 at 8:56 pm

    Spot on Lesley, as usual. Do call me when the mullahs/ evangelists etc. come for you….you’ve touched the rawest nerves!

  4. Nancy McClelland says:
    September 17, 2014 at 9:44 pm

    Love it. LOVE it. Well done.

  5. jveeds says:
    September 18, 2014 at 11:13 am

    Excellent job Lesley.

    On a side note, I discovered your “First Muslim,” “After the Prophet” and “Mary” books a year ago and highly recommend them to others.

    • amin tan says:
      September 20, 2014 at 5:08 pm

      BRAVO, lesley Hazleton. I too heartily concur with Mr jweeds. It is an excellent book for Muslims as well as non muslims. The book is an intelligent insight into the events that took place more than 1400 years ago, that has so much bearing on our todays lives.

      amin tan

  6. chakaoc says:
    September 22, 2014 at 2:43 am

    Bravo, Lesley…it leaves little room for all those with an agenda other than a spiritual life.

  7. Tea-mahm says:
    September 22, 2014 at 8:48 am

    Yes! to post on every playground fence, How about daycare centers. Come to think of it waterproof-words on every shower stall at school and home, and at the grandparents’ house!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 22, 2014 at 7:06 pm

      Waterproofed words? Love it, T!

  8. Bernard S. Sadowski says:
    September 24, 2014 at 2:10 pm

    Fantastic! I am a 75 year – old Roman Catholic who needed to read this. Thank you!!!

  9. Omer says:
    October 4, 2014 at 10:29 pm

    Leslie,

    As a theist and a Muslim, I resonate with much of what you say.

    Just now, I saw your interview with Edip Yuksel. I liked your candor and I appreciate your openness to his views. Thanks much for that openness.

    I completely agree that it is indeed sheer arrogance for someone (finite creation) to know the will of God (the transcendent One) in some all encompassing way.

    I feel (and agree) that many of your points you provided to this Seattle paper speak to this snobbish attitude (of some who try to manipulate religion).

    Regarding your last point, I think that if one views this transitory life of ours as a test for the everlasting life ahead, then to me it is wise to prepare for that immortal hereafter.

    However, I empathize that if we don’t appreciate and wonder about this strange thing called existence, then we have not reflected enough. Such reflection should lead us to celebrate life.

    As a theist, I think it should also lead us to celebrate the source of all existence.

    Also, if we don’t strive to make life good in the here and now and to do so for all people, then we are being selfish and I agree that is a shortcoming.

    Thanks for sharing and thanks much for hearing me as well.

  10. Brigitte Lee says:
    October 30, 2014 at 12:45 pm

    I read ‘The First Muslim’, and ‘Zealot:the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth’. Very informative.
    Is there a comparable, factual book on the historical basis of Judaism?
    Thanks for any suggestion.

    Brigitte Lee

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      November 8, 2014 at 10:09 am

      Well of course there’s my own book ‘Jezebel,’ which reaches from Jezebel’s epic confrontation with Elijah in the 9th century BC to the Babylonian exile three hundred years later, when much of the bible as we know it was written. For a more general introduction, you might want to take a look at Simon Schama’s ‘The Story of the Jews,’ which takes the story up to 1492 AD.

      • Brigitte Lee says:
        November 8, 2014 at 2:25 pm

        Thank you very much. I am looking forward to reading your book.

        Brigitte Lee

“I Had No Idea…”

Posted May 20th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

macklemore2There’s a back story to this post.  I was asked to write it yesterday by Seattle’s alternative paper The Stranger.  Specifically, they asked for some “historical perspective” to singer Macklemore’s perverse twist on wardrobe malfunction onstage last Friday night, when he decided it’d be cool to perform in what’s sold in variety stores as a “Sheik/Fagin mask,” huge hook nose and all.

When the shit hit the fan, the Seattle-born Macklemore said his get-up was merely a “witch mask” and there was nothing anti-Semitic about it.  This morning, Tuesday, he finally issued an apology: “I had no idea,” he said.  And later this morning, despite huge numbers of comments on its coverage, The Stranger decided that “this story is over.”

I disagree, so am posting what I wrote right here:

———

For years I thought of myself as a wandering Jew. I moved not just between cities but between continents — London to Jerusalem to New York to Seattle. It was as though I fit the stereotype of the “rootless cosmopolitan.” Yet while I now seem to have become rooted after all, or at least as rooted as anyone whose houseboat floats on forty feet of water can be, I still can’t help thinking of rootless cosmopolitanism – anti-Semitic code for shiftless, untrustworthy, disloyal Jewishness — as a rather attractive existential state of being. And I still romanticize the idea of the wandering Jew, even though I know it began as an anti-Semitic legend in Christian Rome.

The story goes that a Jewish cobbler wouldn’t allow Christ to rest on his stoop during the trek to Golgotha, for which Christ condemned him to wander the world for eternity, with no rest. The Crusaders brought the legend back to England in the 12th century, where it was embroidered and expanded, and where this particular wandering Jew was born several centuries later. I’d be the only Jew in a Catholic convent school whose nuns referred to me as “the Hebrew girl” — with a certain pause before the word Hebrew, as though to emphasize that they were using a delicate euphemism. At least they refrained from telling me that I’d killed Christ (or given him no rest). Instead, they told me I was going to limbo, which seemed to be a kind of mezzanine between heaven and hell. To their horror, I kind of liked the idea of limbo.

This was only a few years after the end of World War Two. No, I’m not going to bring the six million in here; I have no desire to contribute to the obscenity of invoking their memory in support of current argument. My point is that despite its anti-Nazi stance, England was still deeply anti-Semitic. Which is not surprising given that it was where the “blood libel” first burst into murderous flame.

The blood libel was a medieval urban legend about Jews ritually slaughtering Christian boys and draining their blood to mix into Passover matzos (I kid you not). It spread like wildfire. Thousands of Jews were burned alive and otherwise massacred (and several boys declared saints) until Jews were expelled completely from British shores in 1290, to be allowed back only in 1655. In the light of which, Queen Isabella of Spain’s much better-known expulsion of Spain’s Jews in 1492, followed by that of all Spain’s Muslims thirty years later, seems pretty par for the course.

The two most infamous Jews in all of literature were created by Englishmen strong and true: Shylock in the 16th century and Fagin in the 19th. Both were portrayed as hunch-backed, lecherous-lipped, greedy-eyed, and of course, flamboyantly hook-nosed (a word that is inherently prejudicial — in Arab countries, it’s known as an eagle’s nose, and has traditionally been considered a sign of nobility). But neither Fagin nor Shylock were new creations. They were personifications of cartoon stereotypes that had become widespread with printing. The Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer didn’t invent the style, but it did help propagate it so widely that it still features on hysterically anti-Semitic websites from the USA to Poland to Yemen. It appeared in Egyptian schoolbooks and newspapers for years. And it turned up with an ironic twist in Denmark in 2006 with the publication of cartoons caricaturing Muhammad and all Muslims as terrorists, all with the “Sheik/Fagin nose” sold so amusingly as a mask at party stores. One Semite apparently looks pretty much like another.

Mild-mannered Seattle might seem a sweet respite from all this. Yet it was in Seattle that I first heard someone say “he Jewed me down” — quite blithely, with no self-consciousness, as though it were perfectly normal. Here that someone tried to make me her token Jew (“Wow, I’ve never had a Jewish friend before,” she said, and she didn’t after either). Here that a former Catholic schoolboy who didn’t realize I was Jewish (“that’s Jewish, you don’t look funny” went the old music-hall joke) assumed that I’d join him in changing the words of the carol “Joy to the world” to “Fuck all the Jews.” Here that I get a finger-pointing “you people” or “you Jews” as I’m held responsible for the actions of an Israeli government I criticize far more bitterly than those to whom the accusatory fingers belong. And it’s here, in the comments on The Stranger’s coverage of the Macklemore affair, that I find all the usual anti-Semitic code words: “touchy,” “thin-skinned,” and that old standby “pushy.”

Seattle is a young city, almost an ahistorical one compared to Jerusalem, and this ahistorical sense has allowed me to find calm writerly perspective on what happened halfway round the world in the Middle East of fifteen hundred, two thousand, even three thousand years ago. I’m immensely grateful for that. But could an absence of historical awareness just be another way of saying innocence? Or should that be ignorance?

When the subject of literary fraud came up in conversation not long ago, for instance, I mentioned the most infamous example of all – “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” And was stunned to realize that nobody had heard of this screed, which first surfaced in Russia in 1903. Purportedly the record of a meeting of leading Jews plotting to take over the world, it’s a classic demonstration of the ornate convolutions performed by the paranoid-conspiratorial mind, and has thus proved remarkably resilient to all evidence that it’s a fiction. Hitler made much use of it, of course, and America’s own tainted automotive titan Henry Ford had half a million copies printed and distributed in the 1920s. You can still find the full text on anti-Semitic websites, while print versions, complete with the usual hook-nosed illustrations, continue to sell steadily in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

macklemorePerhaps Seattle is a bit less innocent after Macklemore’s now infamous twist on the idea of wardrobe malfunction. Or perhaps not. I opt to believe him when he says that he had no idea of the anti-Semitic stereotype, and can understand his initial defensiveness — nobody likes to have their unconscious biases paraded in public. But as he now acknowledges, it’s precisely this no-idea-ness that’s the problem. And that may be true for Seattle as well as for him.

We pride ourselves here on being progressive and tolerant. That’s part of our civic image. But tolerance is an ambiguous ideal. You only need to tolerate what – or whom — you don’t really accept. Stereotypes are inherent in the idea of tolerance, and until we can get beyond them, our proud progressiveness runs the risk of being… well,  just another mask.

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File under: Christianity, Judaism, ugliness | Tagged: Tags: "rootless cosmopolitan", "wandering Jew", anti-Semitism, Fagin, ignorance, innocence, Islamophobia, Macklemore, Seattle, Shylock, The Stranger | 45 Comments
  1. Mary Scriver says:
    May 20, 2014 at 6:13 pm

    Ask your nice Seattle liberals how they feel about Native Americans. Better yet, watch them walk down the sidewalk past a few guys with brown paper bags, having a great time.

    Prairie Mary

  2. candacedavis2013 says:
    May 20, 2014 at 7:10 pm

    Oh dear, the constant human need to define ourselves against some “other” that we feel free to denigrate and project on doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Thank you Lesley for calling us on it.
    How disappointing a species we are sometimes. Gratitudes, ace

  3. shuaib says:
    May 20, 2014 at 8:57 pm

    its a great article based on facts ,its also a fact that western civilization couldn’t have been possible without contribution the Muslims n Jews

  4. Ross says:
    May 20, 2014 at 11:25 pm

    Perhaps, as you refer to the Blood Libel in England, you are aware of this historical document. preserved in the Child Ballads? FYI anyway:
    http://www.contemplator.com/child/sirhugh.html

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 21, 2014 at 8:10 am

      Hadn’t seen this one before. Thanks (I think!). The one I remember because it’s wicked short is this, from about the same time: “Repent, repent, oh England / Repent while thou hast space / And do not like the wicked Jews / Deny God’s proffered grace.”

  5. fatmakalkan says:
    May 21, 2014 at 7:39 am

    Wow Lesley! Growing up at Izmir, Turkey with Jewish neighbors I never heard of this stories. There was a mutual respect one another and I never heard any belittling remarks or this kind of stereotyping. My parents let me visit Jewish neighbors by myself during my childhood because they did not have children and they adored me. Every morning they greet each other from windows or at the entrance of our apartment. Jews lived in my city or country as a respected citizens. We never mix the two. Israilie governments wrong actions towards Palestenians and our Jewish citizens .

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 21, 2014 at 8:15 am

      Thanks, Fatma — I appreciate the positive counter-balance.

  6. pah says:
    May 21, 2014 at 1:33 pm

    whew! Leslie…i mean this could take days and months to discuss.
    i am just re-reading “Ivanhoe” and surely Sir Walter Scott also stereotyped Jews….The truth is, as Humans, we don;t seem to move on….in fact, in may ways, we are becoming more “medieval.”
    But, on the up side, Leslie, glad to see you back in the fray. take care

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 21, 2014 at 2:53 pm

      You’re right: there’d be hardly any English lit left if were to judge by anti-Semitism alone. I choose to still adore T.S.Eliot, for instance, despite lines like “The Jew squats on the windowsill / The rats are underneath the piles” (Gerontion). Sigh.

      • sweetk8 says:
        May 21, 2014 at 10:40 pm

        When I suggested to my English Lit professor that T.S. Elliot was anti-Semitic, she looked at me aghast, saying it wasn’t possible! She said no one had ever broached this idea to her… I could read his works then and find instances, why was I able to, and not her or anyone else?
        I enjoyed your article and hope it brings awareness to the countless who remain in the dark about racial, ethnic and religious bias.

  7. anolivedaily says:
    May 21, 2014 at 2:18 pm

    I feel a little torn reading this. First, I think you did an amazing job of explaining the history behind this whole ordeal. I think anyone, Macklemore included, would see how offensive the costume is after reading this. But I also think to myself, do I know any better? I didn’t know most of what you wrote about. It may seem crazy, but the reality is our schools teach us white American history. Every different nationality and race are left out of the text books, or only mentioned in relation to a white American topic. It really is a shame. There should be no way a person can get into their 20s and 30s and still be ignorant about these things, but what if they are never taught?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 21, 2014 at 2:45 pm

      Excellent point about the mono-cultural focus of American education (which also accounts for American helplessness with world geography). There’s a parochialism behind all this that I find very disturbing.
      I guess my point with the brief historical tour was that I fell in love with the ideas of the wandering Jew and the rootless cosmopolitan before I knew their origins in anti-Semitism — i.e. biased ideas work their into our minds without us knowing it, let alone why. I should have made that clear. But I’m sure you recognized that “Sheik/Fagin” mask nevertheless for what it was.

  8. A.J. Valliant says:
    May 21, 2014 at 7:28 pm

    The man at one point had a debilitating cough syrup addiction and saw no issue with a straight white dude being the spokesman for the LGBT community’s relationship to hip-hop.

    “Sorry, I’m more than a little slow” is a shockingly plausible defense in his case.

  9. brinkling says:
    May 21, 2014 at 8:39 pm

    Great post!! I wasn’t aware of all the history.

    It’s sad that there’s still so much ignorance and prejudice in the world.

  10. simaroseblossom says:
    May 21, 2014 at 9:21 pm

    I definitely related to a lot of what you said. I feel like Macklemore had to have known and just wanted attention. It’s so insensitive t a people that have always been put on trial.

    • M2M says:
      May 22, 2014 at 1:48 am

      Like others I had no idea about the depth and history of these feelings. I remember asking what anti-semitism actually meant after Mel Gibson made the news – or rather where it came from. – as I struggle to comprehend that people can seem to decide to hate on an entire human ‘group’ without cause. So it seems to be a believing in old/urban stories and legends? Really? Incredible. How are practical men like Henry Ford or educated men like TS Elliot able to be drawn in by this nonsense? On the other hand I have been stabbed, axed, beaten and singled out for prejudice by members of my ‘own kind’ thanks to nothing more than an accent. So I do get it. People can be shallow, arrogant, ignorant…innocent?
      Great post, thanks.
      Al

  11. shek1na says:
    May 21, 2014 at 9:46 pm

    Much of the Jew hatred today comes from Islam and the Quran, but it is not the whole picture. We must admit that much hatred throughout history have come from the so-called Christians, the Catholic Church and the Lutherans. It is unfortunately the truth.

    (Let me remind you all of Pope Urban II’s speech when he started the very first crusade. All Jews they found on the way to Jerusalem to be killed without mercy).

    Where did the Nazis come from? Only one crazy man? If you investigate you will find that many SS officers had backgrounds in Catholicism […]

    But after the Holocaust the attitude of the Jews improved a lot. I hope it lasts. If you read the Bible, you will understand that Salvation comes from the Jews. No man took the life of Jesus, He gave it as a sacrifice for ALL sin.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 22, 2014 at 9:42 am

      On the other hand (and there are many hands here), this from the Quran (Sura 2, verse 62): “Surely they that believe, and those that follow the Jewish scriptures, and Christians, and Sabians — all who believe in God and the Day of Judgment, and do right — shall have their reward with their Lord. No fear shall be on them; neither shall they sorrow.”
      Plus of course the justly famous “To you your religion, to me mine.”

  12. Dani says:
    May 21, 2014 at 10:26 pm

    Brilliantly written.

    Thank you.

  13. rjjainrahul97 says:
    May 22, 2014 at 12:38 am

    I respect your relatively unbiased opinion and the fact that you respected Macklemore’s apologies and were open to the fact that people can make mistakes.

    Since my knowledge on the topic is nearly non-existent i will refrain from diving into the heart of the issue but I think we can say that there are a lot of things in the world and it is hard to keep track of all the symbolism. Also given what a commenter above (or is that below) said regarding the mono-cultural focus I guess we should consider giving a public apology by these stars as genuine for if nothing else, the relatively obscure topic became that little bit less obscure and may help in raising the issue and awareness hopefully in the right manner.

  14. awax1217 says:
    May 22, 2014 at 6:03 am

    I am a Jew. I married a Jew and had three Jewish children. I try hard not to be offended but it seems there something offensive in his actions. I believe people should think first and then no apology is needed.

  15. amelie88 says:
    May 22, 2014 at 10:23 am

    I’m from the suburbs of NYC so we have plenty of Jews here. But even as someone who grew up surrounded by Jews, I didn’t see the costume as anti-Semitic at first. I was just confused as to why Macklemore decided to wear a really ugly mask since it wasn’t Halloween. After seeing the reaction, I see it now in context and I understand. Though I probably would not have made the connection had a Jew not pointed it out to me. Like a commenter posted above, it is difficult to know what symbol may be offensive to others. It all depends on your personal experiences.

    I remember being very surprised when I first went to Spain to see that during Holy Week, all the men carrying the religious floats were decked out in what looked like the Ku Klux Klan uniform. As it turns out, the KKK appropriated that costume for their cause and it became a negative symbol here in the US. However in Spain they’ve been using that uniform for hundreds of years during their processions and it carries no negative association and is part of Catholic tradition. It’s still jarring for me to see, but the symbolism doesn’t have KKK connotation over there. Not sure if it’s in the same vein as Macklemore’s situation since he has lived in the US his whole life and should be more aware of these things. But it’s just a thought.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 22, 2014 at 11:02 am

      Thanks, Amelie — that’s an excellent and (in this context) wonderfully ironic example of the need for awareness not only of cultural context, but also of its history.

  16. SISI DA FIZ says:
    May 22, 2014 at 12:51 pm

    ROTFL

  17. Roxy Hathaway says:
    May 22, 2014 at 2:13 pm

    In this case ignorance is not bliss. He went down several notches in my esteem.

  18. Harry Underwood says:
    May 22, 2014 at 2:38 pm

    Reblogged this on World of Values and commented:
    A good post regarding Macklemore’s jarring appearance in a “Jewish costume”, and why the costume has a long and highly-bigoted history in Abrahamic religion. On point:

  19. Relatable XO says:
    May 23, 2014 at 1:20 am

    I enjoyed reading your post. You have great opinions and I agree Macklemore’s costume was a bit absurd, no matter what his goal or angle was. I think your opinion is a BIT broad, saying that Seattle is innocent/ignorant because of the people you have met. Well, I’m from Germany and people know that, and I have not once been called a Nazi whereas when I have travelled other places people aren’t afraid to make that “joke.” It depends who you surround yourself with. You will find innocent/ignorant people everywhere! Don’t let them get to you. They’re uneducated and have nothing better to do.

    Thanks for posting!

  20. Ethen Hunt says:
    May 23, 2014 at 1:43 am

    I spent last 2 hours reading your articles ! And must say: awseome website ! !

  21. Swiss-Ami-Mom says:
    May 23, 2014 at 4:08 am

    That he has has been known to dress in costume, and hang outside the venues with his fans in costume, I can honestly believe his intent was none other than what he stated. As a Jewish person myself AND a as a person that respects Macklemores work, I think this has been hyped out of control. If you listen to his music, his words of support for various walks of life, you would be gretting him with an apology. This is anti-semetic paranoia.

  22. syrbal-labrys says:
    May 23, 2014 at 1:03 pm

    I was horrified to recently read that the majority of younger Americans do not even know what “the Holocaust” means as a phrase. Shocking lack of history teaching…

  23. christiancontrarian says:
    May 24, 2014 at 6:30 pm

    A White guy who sings in a traditionally African-American style dressed as a Jewish man. Confused much?

  24. murphyji says:
    May 26, 2014 at 8:26 am

    Marginalising people for their religion, nationality, or cultural background is what sells copy, gets people elected and starts wars. In Britain a right wing political party is causing a feeding frenzy on immigration. This is no new event. History is full of examples of pea brained thinkers who have caused untold misery and death. Current world events, which I don’t need to list, focus on difference rather than similarity and look where that has led. So be grateful for dialogue giving the culprit an opportunity to review their act or statement which has caused offence, rather than filling the coffers of arms manufacturers and dealers.

  25. Author Catherine Townsend-Lyon says:
    May 26, 2014 at 9:19 am

    Great Post, but lets keep ‘It Real” as we all know when a band hits the stage? No matter what they are wearing, dressed up in, or masks or not, it’s “Entertainment” not downing on some group of people…..

    No matter what Macklemore does in a their show, lets remember, It’s A Show, not to be taken seriously. Give them break already. Their messages in their Music is really the point…… I still, and always will LUV them!

    Author, Catherine Lyon 🙂

  26. cerabellum says:
    May 29, 2014 at 11:04 am

    Interesting. As a British male 20yo I grew up with a lot of the anti-semitic nonsense without really associating it with Jewish people. I didn’t know any Jewish people but if I did, they would have just been normal friends. As I got older though I still laughed at Jewish jokes about money or whatnot. Just as I laughed at a tonne of un-pc jokes relating to race, gender, religion.

    The side of me which studies this knows the world would be a whole lot better if Israel had more power. That the Jewish population was 500 million rather than what… 40? but then, this kind of silly costume is what I would laugh at… Ok not in this context, maybe on Family guy but… It doesn’t change the fact I support Jewish people far more than Christians and FAR more than Muslims.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 29, 2014 at 1:36 pm

      But hey, Cerabellum, why would you “support” any one religious group as a whole, whether Jews, Christians, or Muslims? Maybe think about it a moment, and then ask if this isn’t another form of stereotyping…
      Plus you seem to have fallen into the trap of confusing Israel with Judaism. The Israeli government may present itself as representing all Jews, but I’m damned if it represents me, or the majority of Jews I know, or even half of Israeli Jews.

      • cerabellum says:
        May 29, 2014 at 2:30 pm

        Yes I do hear that as a consensus among Jewish people who don’t live in Israel. I am not a religious man so I don’t prefer religions based solely on their teachings. I prefer them on how they are implemented in communities – a function of social evolution.

        Christians a few hundred years ago were the epitome of regression and savagery. Now they just have a few pockets of extremists, all bark and no bite. Islam to this day envelops a country in darkness. I haven’t found a majority Muslim country so far which doesn’t implement some part of Sharia.

        This isn’t just about censoring opinions. It is about all kinds of horrible issues. Some extremely similar to Christianity a few hundred years ago, others a whole new species of evil. Marrying children, raping wives – treating women like property. Murdering minorities; gay people, atheists, bloggers and activists. murdering apostates despite their heritage being christian – it’s all about the men…

        Who knows whether Islam will evolve to the extent Christianity has – I hope it does. But I sympathize greatly with Israel. By all accounts not the most rational, morally sounds country in the world but… To be surrounded with such hatred, often directed at exterminating Jews as well… I could never understand that feeling.

        I guess Jewish people have just been the most innocuous, placid religious influence on my life. I like it that way 🙂

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          May 29, 2014 at 6:37 pm

          “Innocuous and placid”? — I wish! But…
          Sometimes I fear Israel is well on the way to becoming a kind of Jewish Saudi Arabia, with fanatic believers dictating a distorted hypernationalist “death-to-Arabs” form of extreme Judaism. No religion has a monopoly on either “truth” or ugliness.
          And another “but”:
          Sharia is not the monolithically repressive system you seem to think it is. As Boyd Tomkin wrote in The Independent re Sadakat Kadri’s wonderful history of sharia, ‘Heaven on Earth’ (an ironic title, of course), “the kinds of sharia now trumpeted by theocrats and militants always owe more to human arrogance than to divine inspiration.”
          The problem here is the confusion of militant extremist forms of a religion with the whole of that religion, whatever religion we may be talking about.

          • cerabellum says:
            May 30, 2014 at 3:44 am

            That is interesting – I don’t know much about Israel to be honest save a couple of documentaries. It would be mortifying if Israel took such a path but given Jewish history, I guess anything’s possible…

            As for Islam, divine inspiration can only get you so far, I agree. Although I have read the Koran and it is a shocking book. Of course a lot of it is just repetition and the divinity of Allah but… There are teachings in there that frankly are pure evil. Now this isn’t to say the old testament – even to some extent the new – doesn’t have shocking things in it.

            But it certainly plays out differently in today’s world and that is, as a non religious person, what i am interested in. What I see is that nearly all Islamic majority country has psychological and physical abuse of women built into society. That an influx of immigrant from places like Saudi and Pakistan into Sweden has directly resulted in Sweden now having the second highest rape per ca-pita in the world. Highest in Europe.

            I have the same view as you on Israel turning into some rabid, foaming mouthed anti all Muslim country but… Given all the surrounding caliphates have a similar stance toward them, I don’t think I would see things any better or act better.

          • Lesley Hazleton says:
            May 30, 2014 at 8:08 am

            “Surrounding caliphates”? “A couple of documentaries”? Cerabellum, I think it’s time to do some serious reading so that you can avoid coming to weird, uninformed, and unwarranted conclusions. You might start with actually reading the Bible, since the Quran is a pussycat by comparison. And by looking at exactly where that Swedish-rape statistic comes from, since it sounds like racist urban legend to me.

      • anonyme13 says:
        June 8, 2014 at 1:20 pm

        I am sorry Lesley, but you are wrong! Now when somebody attack Israel, it is a disguised anti-Semitism, flat out. Some people are so ignorant about Israel, but they love to feel sorry for Palestinians. They have no idea that “Palestine” and “palestinian” the words are a modern invention, that jews bought the land in Israel with hard money, and that the Arab Lands are huge and Israel is the tiniest country possible. That sixty years later, the so called palestinians, for political reasons, still leave in refugee camps. How about all the refugees from Arab countries, were are they, my family included(from algeria, out of Spain from the time of Isabella)? I will tell you why you can’t find any jewish refugees, because they started to rebuilt their lives as soon as they were expelled!

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          June 8, 2014 at 5:19 pm

          It takes some chutzpah to talk about ignorance so ignorantly!
          Palestine is a very ancient name, used by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines. Though you are right that Palestinians still live in the refugee camps for political reasons — because Israel has confiscated their land.

  27. venuscallipyge says:
    May 30, 2014 at 6:47 pm

    Fellow Seattleite here. I’ve noticed Seattle’s subtle racism on many occasions, first when I was living in the CD and being told several times I would get raped or stabbed for being “white” if I walked home alone often like I did, later I saw the disproportionate treatment by police toward those of color on the street when I was caught up in my active drug addiction. I’ve been told that Seattle police are more racist than those in many other urban centers, and I believe it. If the general population here were less prejudiced, the behavior of our police force would not be countenanced like it is now and in the past. I am aware that I am privileged because I look white, and I don’t take that for granted… I do my best to counter the unjust discrimination I see around me, whether for a person’s color, age, sexual identity, creed, religion, and so on. Thank you for your thoughtful post.

  28. epicrevieweradmin says:
    June 3, 2014 at 1:28 am

    Let me think about this, a white guy who does rap and is looking like a jewish guy……………………..

  29. terzahcain says:
    June 5, 2014 at 11:24 pm

    I have entirely too much to say in response to this wonderful article and all the thoughtful comments. May I post a pingback link to your article in an upcoming post on my site?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 6, 2014 at 8:52 am

      Sure — it’s public domain. — L. (Just remember to link and/or attribute.)

A Rainbow Gathering

Posted October 18th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

If you haven’t yet heard of it, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the Ravel/Unravel project.  “Unravel your assumptions” is their motto.  And they’re asking you to help them ravel your unraveling into something wonderfully new — “a multimedia exploration of the tapestry of religious and spiritual identities that make up our communities and our world.”  (See the video below.)

Begun a year ago by Project Interfaith in Omaha, Ravel/Unravel is an invitation:  “We’re exploring the tapestry of religious and spiritual identities that make up our communities and the complexities of how we construct and deconstruct identity.  We invite you to view the stories that make up RavelUnravel and add to the movement by sharing your own.”

Close to a thousand people have taken up that invitation so far.  And it’s fun to do.  Just turn on the camera in your phone or your computer, follow the prompts on the website, and upload your answers.  Yes, I’m already there, part of a rainbow gathering of age and gender, ethnicity and nationality, faith and spirituality, including (but not limited to) Christians, Muslims and Jews of all denominations, Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs, agnostics and atheists and secular humanists, Native Americans and pantheists.

The questions you’re prompted to speak to (reasonably briefly!):

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your religious or spiritual identity and why do you identify as such?

3. What is a stereotype that impacts you based on your religious or spiritual identity?

4. Have you found your community welcoming of your chosen religious or spiritual path? Why or why not?

5. Is there anything else you would like us to know about you and your religion or belief system?

My advice:  don’t overthink it, just do it.  And enjoy it.  As the director of Project Interfaith says here:  “This isn’t about theology;  this is about community.”

–

[youtube=http://youtu.be/PEZ2-otmWdU]

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  1. Reaching Out says:
    October 18, 2013 at 5:01 pm

    Reblogged this on Reaching Out and commented:
    Good interfaith scene – check it out!

Adoring ‘Darling’

Posted October 13th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Here’s my review of Richard Rodriguez’ “Persian carpet of a book” in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, it’s a rave.

No, I’ve never met him.

Yes, I’d love to:

'darling'On rare occasion, a writer makes a reviewer’s life hard. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography has to be celebrated as one of those occasions.

The deep pleasures of such a book defy the usual capsule account. Instead you want to read sentences and whole passages aloud as I’ve been doing over cafe and dinner tables the past few weeks – “Listen to this!” You want to press “Darling” on others as a gift of friendship, judiciously picking whom to share it with lest you expose Rodriguez to pedants who can’t fathom the way his mind works.

“I did not intend to write a spiritual autobiography,” he writes in the foreword, and I’m glad to say that despite the subtitle (an editorial addition, I suspect), he hasn’t. This is something infinitely more supple – a rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book. True, it’s framed as an exploration of his own Catholicism post-9/11, when he realized that “Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light,” and began to wonder how he and the “cockpit terrorists” could worship the same Abrahamic God.

But Rodriguez’s faith is light-years away from the deadening dogma of “mitered, bearded, fringed holy men.” As he investigates “the ecologies of the holy desert” – specifically the Judean desert – what he creates instead is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

St. Francis, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Cesar Chavez, Keats, William Randolph Hearst, Moses, Warhol, Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Day, Shelley – a short list of the roster of personalities jostling shoulders as they wander in and out of the virtual salon of Rodriguez’s mind, where San Francisco is “the mystical, witty, sourdough city,” Las Vegas is “disarmingly innocent,” and Jerusalem’s multiple archaeological layers are “vertiginously sunken – resentments and miracles parfaited.”

His writing is suffused with such little epiphanies, words and images springing to fresh life: His Mexican mother’s ojalá, “God willing,” as a Spanish borrowing from the Muslim inshallah; yellow tulips “closed and as thumpable as drumsticks” outside a Vegas hotel as a friend dies of AIDS in a nearby hospice; Picasso’s division of the female face “into competing arrondissements – one tearful, one tyrannical – like the faces of playing-card Queens.”

But at the heart of this book are women. Rodriguez – gay, Catholic Rodriguez – loves women. Not the way many men say they do, with a sexual twinkle in their eye, but deeply and gratefully. The stand-alone masterpiece of the title chapter starts with that “voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen” (Noël Coward‘s “sequined grace notes flying up” like “starlings in a summer sky”), touches among other things on the use of habeebee among Arab men (“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues … men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality”), and builds to the central take on how much the three “desert religions” need women to survive (“Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.”).

Rodriguez depends on women “to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.” It was women who stood against the arid maleness he sensed as a child: “Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear – fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning – crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger – a civet smell. Scripture began to smell of blood – of iron, of salt.”

He writes movingly of his schoolteachers, the Sisters of Mercy – movingly, yet with a wry, clear eye. A single sentence evokes a whole Irish immigrant world: “Most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind.” That wry eye notes their “burqa-like habits” – perfect! – which “lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of romance.” These women in teaching and hospital orders, he writes, were the forerunners of feminism, “the least sequestered women imaginable.”

The specific “darling” here is a newly divorced friend, and the whole chapter is in a way a conversation with her – an extended love letter, really – leading up to this stunning conclusion: “I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women. Without you.”

Even the most flinty-hearted reviewer could only melt at that.

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, ecology, existence, Islam, Judaism, light, Middle East, women | Tagged: Tags: 'Darling', Catholic, gay, literature, Mexican-American, review, Richard Rodriguez, San Francisco Chronicle, Sisters of Mercy, spiritual autobiography | Be the First to leave a comment

“Why would you write a book?”

Posted August 2nd, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus.  The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!).  It inspired several spoofs, including this one here.  Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list;  by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

'Zealot'The First Muslim - CoverI’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were.  The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about?  This man who carved such a huge profile in history?  He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer.  It was about my decision as a Jew.  Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away:  just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine.  It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable.  But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor.  Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam.  Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know?  What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental?  Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider.  It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place.  Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad:  by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith;  it humanizes it.  And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: 'Zealot', biography, Fox News, Islamophobia, outsider, Reza Aslan, The First Muslim, writing | 14 Comments
  1. mary scriver says:
    August 2, 2013 at 11:03 am

    The relevant term here is “fencing the Communion.” You know the little fence at the front of the church where you lean your elbows while waiting for the Elements to reach you? (Maybe not — ask a Catholic.) There was a huge early battle about who had to stay outside that railing and who was entitled to enter. Territoriality. Tribal. Strongest when the group is uneasy about its identity and afraid of dilution by outsiders. (Check the Mexican border. Heck, even the Canadian border.) Writing about American Indians without BEING American Indian is a mortal crime because it becomes harder and harder to define an American Indian.

    Prairie mary

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 2, 2013 at 11:13 am

      Great comment: territoriality is exactly the right word.

    • Mary Johnson (@_MaryJohnson) says:
      August 2, 2013 at 11:34 am

      Yes, Lesley you are SO right on here! And even if you’re a former believer, believers still automatically assume that a writer is out to, at best, criticize, at worst, completely demolish all they hold dear. People become so defensive that they can’t see that what a writer might really want to do is to explore, to understand, to express…..

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        August 2, 2013 at 12:12 pm

        Yes, I saw it happening with you too, Mary. (For those who don’t know, Mary is a former nun who wrote a deeply moving memoir about her years with Mother Teresa and her decision to become secular: http://www.amazon.com/Unquenchable-Thirst-Memoir-Mary-Johnson/dp/0385527470/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375470558&sr=1-1&keywords=mary+johnson)

  2. sharmin banu says:
    August 2, 2013 at 11:14 am

    Very well said:).
    Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam. Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

  3. Fakhra says:
    August 2, 2013 at 4:52 pm

    Reblogged this on TOAL.

  4. saheemwani says:
    August 2, 2013 at 6:57 pm

    The advantage of a writer who doesn’t share the ideas/beliefs of the subject, in your case a prophet whose life was centered exactly on those ideas/beliefs, is a much-needed unbiased perspective of what that man did.

    The disadvantage could be not understanding the subject himself and missing out on the essence of why he did what he did.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 2, 2013 at 7:29 pm

      True, but understanding is on whose terms? Part of what I mean by “an agnostic eye” (in the banner of this blog) is an independent one.

  5. fatmakalkan says:
    August 3, 2013 at 11:37 pm

    I agree with you as a devout Muslim. In many verses in Quran Allah wants human-beings to contemplate but human- beings are afraid to contemplate about their faith. Or they are lazy or they simply doesn’t care about religion. They are culturally Jew , Christian or Muslim. They prefer to follow their forefathers religion not their own. When they pickup Revised addition of Bible how come they don’t ask this question: who has a right to revise God’s word? They are def, they are blind and impaired to think. My ten year old daughter was asking me about popular Belief about Jesus being son of God or being God. She asked me: don’t Christians think that Jesus died 2000 years ago if God died 2000 years ago who is running universe?and If Jesus couldn’t save himself how he is going to save them ? Or don’t they think how come eternal God dies?
    Bible says God is one! Why they made him 3? She is also asking about Islam and She is developing her faith. Contemplating is the key. Who doesn’t contemplate doesn’t have real faith they copy others faith.

  6. Tea-mahm says:
    August 6, 2013 at 11:28 am

    Yes! Keep the word bridges safe to pass over… thank you, Lesley and Reza. T’m

  7. anon says:
    August 11, 2013 at 10:34 pm

    I don’t think Aslan was writing as a “Muslim”—though it may have effected his perspective. I havn’t read the book but from watching various interviews, Aslan, apparently, puts the illiterate Jewish carpenter from Nazareth into a historical context/time-period.
    However,the picture of Jesus (pbuh) in the Quran is a Jewish man who is intelligent, literate, a good communicator, exceptionally skilled, and highly spiritual.

  8. Luis Alexis Rodríguez Cruz says:
    August 24, 2013 at 8:30 pm

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. I think that the reporter did not use an intellectual point of view to question Aslan. Anyways, conservatism and closed minds always try to overlap what it is true. Also I think that his book is an academic book such as yours, books for academics, for open minded people, for intellectual people who think critically. Negative comments will always exist…

  9. Farrukh says:
    August 25, 2013 at 7:20 am

    Hello Lesley,

    I just wanted to appreciate your statement:

    Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith; it humanizes it. And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

    I’ve just placed the order of your book, The First Muslim in India, it was very expensive, however, they have now priced it correctly. This shall be my third biography on Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be on him, which I’m going two read. The other two by Karen Armstrong and Safiur Rehman Mubarakpuri.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 25, 2013 at 8:31 pm

      Thank you, Farrukh. And re The First Muslim, the UK edition is due out November 7. Since India is part of the ‘UK and Commonwealth’ distribution system, it should then be easily available in bookstores.

The Taming of Jesus

Posted July 27th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

'Zealot'“A tough-minded, deeply political book” — my review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Reza Aslan’s best-selling ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth‘

‘Zealot’?  A biography of Jesus could have no more provocative title.  But it turns out to be the perfect one for Reza Aslan’s unearthing (or should that be un-heavening?) of “the Jesus before Christianity.”  As he cogently demonstrates, the real Jesus — the radical Jew who preached, agitated, and was executed for his pains — was a far more complex figure than many Christians care to acknowledge.

The zeal in question is both religious and political.  At a time when this kind of zealotry is associated predominantly with Islamic extremists, it’s fascinating to see similar processes at work in first-century Jewish Palestine, which was occupied territory – occupied, that is, by the Romans.  In opposition, messianic nationalist movements created what Aslan aptly describes as “zealous warriors of God who would cleanse the land of all foreigners and idolaters.”

This is the historical and political context Jesus was born into, one that takes us beyond the Christ figure created by his followers after his death to the actual man, “a revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of his era were, in religious and political turmoil.”

Given that turmoil, it should come as no surprise that “the Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence” than is usually assumed.  Gentle shepherds don’t have much place here.  Aslan reads the admonitions to love your enemies and turn the other cheek as directed toward relationships between Jews, not between Jews and foreigners, and especially not between Jews and occupiers.  “The message was one of repossessing the land,“ he writes, “a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed.”  A kingdom, that is, very much of this world, not another.

This historical territory has been explored before, by biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley and Dominic Crossan.  But in Aslan’s hands, it gains broader resonance.  He brings to bear his expertise in the volatile territory of politics and religion (his earlier book Beyond Fundamentalism analyzed the root causes of militant religious extremism) as well as his deep background as a scholar of religion, renowned especially for the most readable history of Islam yet written, No god But God.

As in those earlier books, not only does he get the full picture, but he can also write – sometimes irresistibly, as when he drops into a kind of tongue-in-cheek interfaith slang, mentioning Herod’s “nebbish sons,” for instance, and Herod himself as “King of the Jews, no less!”

But cherished legends, watch out.  Aslan can be scathingly dismissive of such episodes as Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head, or Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Prepare for words like “nonsense” and “fairy tale” as he traces what holds up historically (and geographically), and what’s been elided, even deliberately disguised, in the gospel accounts.  Which is not to blame the gospel writers.  Aslan points out that the concept of empirically valid historical reality is a relatively modern one.  “It would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zealot, then, is the analysis of how Jesus was tamed by his own followers, and why.  Soon after his death, the early Jesus movement split between the “Hebrews” who stayed in Jerusalem under James’ leadership, and the Hellenists abroad led by Paul.  The bitter infighting between them would be resolved by force majeure:  the disastrous failure of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which led to the torching of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the expulsion of surviving Jews from what remained of the city.  With the ‘Hebrew’ faction thus in disarray, the Hellenist appeal of Paul’s Christianity won out, and Jesus’ specifically Jewish revolutionary fervor would be toned down to suit a much larger audience:  the Roman empire itself.

This entailed absolving the Romans from responsibility for the crucifixion, instead blaming the unruly (and unrulable) Jews, and thus laying the basis for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. Where the early Jesus movement was Jewish, Christianity would now be anything but.  As Aslan notes, the gospels are, in this sense, a radical break with history – a wiping out of the specific past to be replaced by a universal future.

Yet Zealot itself is testament to the fact that they didn’t quite succeed.  Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology, and certainly more intriguing and exciting for any modern reader not piously devoted to the idea of gospel truth.  This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.

(Seattle:  I’ll be talking about the book with Reza Aslan in the auditorium of the downtown Central Library on Monday July 29, 7-8.30 pm.  Free admission.)

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File under: Christianity, Judaism, messianism | Tagged: Tags: 'Zealot', Christ, gospels, life of Jesus, review, Reza Aslan, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Public Library | 9 Comments
  1. Sohail Kizilbash says:
    July 27, 2013 at 9:51 am

    Thank you Lesley for the review. It seems to be a very interesting book.

    Annemarie Schimmel said in one of her books that, it does not matter what the fact was, what matters is, what people believe in. I suppose 3 billion plus people will continue to believe what they have been told for the last 2,000 years.

  2. Jerry M says:
    July 28, 2013 at 10:37 am

    I was watching a fox news interview with him and I was surprised at how ignorant the interviewer was. For a US writer who writes on religion and who already wrote a book on Islam, it would be a surprise for him not to tackle Christianity.

  3. Matthew Melle Johnson says:
    July 28, 2013 at 5:44 pm

    Reblogged this on Von Melee.

  4. Nancy McClelland says:
    July 29, 2013 at 7:34 pm

    Jerry, I saw the same interview — buzzfeed was pretty astonished by it as well:
    http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-interview-fox-news-has-ever-do

  5. danielabdalhayymoore says:
    July 31, 2013 at 4:05 pm

    Greetings:
    Please excuse me, Lesley, if this has been covered, as I haven’t quite managed to read through every email here (your About page). But I am wondering if you have been interrogated as thoroughly (credentials, etc.) by the “western media” regarding your book on the Prophet Muhammad (salallahu alayhi wa sallam) as heavily as Reza Aslan has on this book of his on (the prophet) Jesus (alayhi wa sallam). It occurred to me to ask this, having read and found certainly thought-provoking your fine book on the Shi’a split, and on Muhammad, and having viewed a good interviewer talking with him from Huffington Post, and read about the Fox interviewer, who (without viewing it) seems to have been less so. Have you been put on the defensive at all?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 31, 2013 at 6:06 pm

      Oh yes. Not as publicly, and not by “western media,” but some conservative Muslims have made it clear that for them, my Jewishness is as suspicious as Reza’s Muslimness is to Fox News. Basically they ask the same question: what made you, as a Muslim/Jew, write about Jesus/Muhammad. And behind that question, first, a challenge as to your “right” to do so, and second, the assumption of an “agenda” — in Reza’s case, anti-Christian, in my case, anti-Muslim. On the other hand, many thinking Muslims have welcomed The First Muslim, as you’ll see if you scroll through comments on posts about the book, just as many thinking Christians have welcomed Reza’s book. Humanizing history doesn’t undermine faith, as conservatives seem to imagine; both Jesus and Muhammad are not less but more remarkable when seen in their lived context and experience.
      I’ll be posting at greater length about all this very soon.

      • Nancy McClelland says:
        July 31, 2013 at 11:16 pm

        What an excellent and humble response to an honest and obvious question. Kudos to you both.

  6. milons says:
    September 7, 2013 at 4:56 pm

    It’s a shame you have to entertain comments from some of my bone-headed co-religionists, who can’t see past your Jewishness. They tend to define themselves against what they’re not as to opposed to what they are and have done a fine job of covering beauty with filth. It reminds me of the Month Python sketch about the Spanish Inquisition.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 7, 2013 at 6:19 pm

      Vive Monty Python!

Suddenly, Summer

Posted July 16th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

A few hours ago, at five in the afternoon of a pure-blue-skied, warm summer’s day, I took a glass of water outside — a couple of ice cubes making it tinkle pleasantly — and sat down in the easy chair on the deck of my houseboat, in the shade.  I had a book with me too, and a pencil, but for a while I just sat there with the book lying unopened on my lap, gazing at the pine tree and the olive tree and the slowly angling sunlight playing on the water, and listening to the quiet around me. “Finally,” I found myself breathing out loud, “the idyll.”

This was my image of how I’d wanted to spend the summer.  Not hunkered down at my desk like the past several ones, unaware of even the most beautiful days outside.  Not trying to meet deadlines, either imposed by others or self-imposed.  Not full of things-I-have-to-do.  Because this year I wanted a real summer, before I begin serious work on the next book. A lazing-around-doing-nothing kind of summer, that is — a potter-around-on-the-deck and dive-off-the-end-of-the-dock and kayak-at-dawn and raid-the-fridge-with-friends and read-some-great-novels summer.  A let-the-next-book-simmer-in-the-back-of-my-mind-while-the-front-of-my-mind-idles summer.  A languorous, infinitely hyphenated summer, for both body and mind.

And then suddenly, when I sat down in that chair a few hours ago, that summer was here. Image had become reality.

This might have had something to do also with the book in my lap, which I opened to the marked page and continued reading.  It was Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time to Keep Silence.”  A friend had mentioned in an email that she was reading it, and something about the way she did the mentioning made it seem essential that I also read it, though she had done no urging.  She didn’t even say it was a book about monasteries and monks, which it is.  She didn’t actually say anything at all about it.  Except that somehow I knew it had something to do with a kind of hard-won tranquility — or what mystically minded Christians might call grace.

I was reading it neither for work nor for play, but for the serious pleasure of it. Though I confess (the right word here) that this pleasure may have been heightened in that I was reading about the drastic strictures of monastic life while cushioned in a comfortable chair, my feet up on a footstool, pausing every now and then to stroke the cat stretched out alongside as I savored Leigh Fermor’s gorgeously evocative writing, which gave the everyday repetitiveness of monasticism a stern, almost enviable beauty.

Quiet and calm — and fortunate those of us who can find such an idyll, if only for a few hours.  I think of the opening line of my favorite poem by Wallace Stevens, which is also its title.  Here’s the whole of it:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

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File under: Christianity, existence | Tagged: Tags: A Time To Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor, tranquility, Wallace Stevens | 4 Comments
  1. nuzhat fakih says:
    July 16, 2013 at 10:34 pm

    your well deserved summer Lesley!
    sure we will get a sneak peek into the context of the book simmering in the cauldron of your mind, in the coming months…?
    even the hint of the smell of a new dish of a book from you, whips up a healthy appetite for that extra food for thought you generate……

    enjoying the same tranquility as your summer, in this month of Ramadhan……(perhaps the reason for the food analogy!).
    wishes for the new project.
    Nuzhat.

  2. Guy de la Rupelle says:
    July 17, 2013 at 6:16 am

    Lovely, restful posting and sharing Stevens’ poetry was thought-provoking. I lived (briefly) on a sailboat in North Carolina and there’s something to be said for living on the water. The salty misty breeze, the gentle rocking of one’s craft, the lapping sound of the wavelets against the hull, the occasional screeching sea gull (and later, in Florida, I found the pelicans absolutely fascinating). Enjoy your summer…

  3. Jane says:
    July 17, 2013 at 11:20 am

    T thank you…especially for the poem, which made it perfect as a summer’s day.

  4. tamam Kahn says:
    July 22, 2013 at 8:15 am

    The poem is like a souffle — nourishing, literal ingredients… lightened, and so delicious… Mmmmmm
    May we all have many of such moments.

Beyond Tarzan and Jane

Posted June 28th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

I just came across these four short clips from an interview I gave a few months ago — so impromptu and off the cuff that I’d forgotten I did it. Tarzan and Jane come up in the first one, when I’m asked about interfaith gatherings, which I generally find kind of stilted. “We tend to get together as me-Tarzan-you-Jane-we-friends,” I said. “That is, me-Jew-you-Muslim-we-friends. We need to get beyond that. We need to see each other first as people…. talk about anything but religion… eat together, two or three or four at a time, over our own dining tables…”

On the other hand, swinging around on those vines could be fun.

It seems I also had a thing or two to say about responding to Islamophobia, and about women in Islam:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC0TEgv8wJg&feature=share&list=PL2GledsAJtlnCZQD1DTLSadb395gWqnDz]

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File under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, women | Tagged: Tags: eating together, humor, interfaith, interview, Islamophobia, Jew, Muslim, Muslims for Peace, women imams | 9 Comments
  1. sarabressler says:
    June 28, 2013 at 5:01 pm

    That’s a beautiful sentiment. I strive to have a way with words as you certainly do.

  2. Gary Rizzo says:
    June 28, 2013 at 7:58 pm

    Lesley…..is not faith the meaning of your life ?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 28, 2013 at 8:17 pm

      Repeat: agnostic. I have no idea what “the meaning of my life” may be. Or indeed if there is any. I do my best to live it, that’s all.

  3. Reaching Out says:
    June 28, 2013 at 9:34 pm

    I love your mind… I love work, and by extension, love the person behind the work. May Allah bless you! 🙂

    • Reaching Out says:
      June 28, 2013 at 9:35 pm

      Correction: love your work

  4. Robert Corbett says:
    June 29, 2013 at 7:19 pm

    I think it got taken down, Lesley. At least the link is not showing up.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 30, 2013 at 9:04 am

      Just tried it on both my computer and my iPad, and it seems okay. Your glitch or mine, Roberto? Anyone else having trouble?

  5. Robert Corbett says:
    June 30, 2013 at 1:14 pm

    It’s back. Maybe it was a gremlin in my computer.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 30, 2013 at 2:19 pm

      A djinn!

New: My TEDGlobal Talk — Video

Posted June 24th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

The talk I gave at TEDGlobal twelve days ago just went live!

Here it is — on Muhammad, the relationship between faith and doubt, and the travesty of fundamentalism:

Anything you can do to forward/repost/facebook/tweet/email/tumble/reddit/generally-spread-the-word will be wonderful.  Let’s stop being the far-too-silent majority!

Shortcut url is http://on.ted.com/Hazleton

————————————————–

[In case you missed it, my earlier TEDx talk on reading the Quran is here.]

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, existence, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism, Middle East, TED TALKS | Tagged: Tags: doubt, faith, Hazleton talk, Muhammad, TEDGlobal 2013, The First Muslim | 26 Comments
  1. Meezan says:
    June 24, 2013 at 10:35 pm

    Arguably the most emotional speech of yours. I am not afraid to admit that some man-tears were shed here (“blood – — – brothers, steeped in other people’s blood”, goosebumps). Brilliant as always. I must admit I always thought of faith as a non-questioning, always believing blindly and following orders kind of attitude. This has brought a new perspective on things; I am thankful to you for that.

    I have taken up the task of translating all of your ted speeches into Urdu. Time to wipe the dust off of my dictionaries. Fecundity. . . . . hmmmm.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 25, 2013 at 7:20 am

      Those man-tears especially appreciated, Meezan. Am both delighted and grateful that you’ve taken on the task of Urdu translation. Deep thanks. — L. (and feel free to email me if you have any questions re translation)

  2. Saheem says:
    June 25, 2013 at 4:01 pm

    Dear Lesley

    Thank you for your words. You never fail to impress by what you say and how you say it. Like its predecessors, this talk was deeply inspiring and informative. And it made perfect sense.

    It totally resonated with me – a Muslim believer. Till sometime back I used to think ‘I know’, then one day I dared to doubt. I started asking questions. From – ‘Is there a God?’ to ‘What is the whole purpose of this life?’

    After many sleeplesss nights, I got a few answers, all pointing in one direction. That there is so much to learn and a long way to go. And I would never have started on this journey towards truth had I not doubted.

    I’m no longer afraid to doubt. The basis of true belief lies in true doubt.

    Saheem

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 25, 2013 at 5:48 pm

      Reminds me of this from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

  3. ZubinNur says:
    June 26, 2013 at 12:29 am

    Thank you so much Lesley for your work, for the inspiration you share. I hope and trust many will watch your video and feel more hope, more peace… or basically just be able to hold the space. We all do our thing. THANK YOU.

  4. annie minton says:
    June 26, 2013 at 2:28 am

    fabulous and thought provoking. Many thanks

  5. Joseph L. Puente says:
    June 26, 2013 at 12:54 pm

    Thank you for a wonderful talk. I found that it gelled quite well with an essay I wrote on my own blog and I would like to share it here: http://flippinutahmormons.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-doubt-skepticism-and-faith.html

  6. jeancallioux says:
    June 27, 2013 at 7:02 am

    I was both impressed and enlighted by your TED talk. Which brought me on the idea to translate it in Dutch (I am from the Netherlands), because it would make me understand your well-chosen words better. Also the video on Ted.com could/might be subtitled for Dutch viewers. Would you mind? And if not, do you have a text-version of your talk I could obtain?

    Yours sincerely, Jurgen

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 27, 2013 at 8:54 am

      Hi Jurgen, and thank you! Translations are done through TED’s all-volunteer Open Translation Project (http://www.ted.com/OpenTranslationProject). I know someone is already at work translating this talk into Dutch, but with so many talks coming out all the time, am sure TED would love to have you on board. — L.
      (A link to the English transcription of this talk is already online on the video page.)

  7. Guy de la Rupelle says:
    June 28, 2013 at 5:10 am

    P.S. I forgot to add what one person wisely said, that faith and doubt are the two sides of the same religious experience.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 28, 2013 at 11:16 am

      Ah, but you did say it — in your own way.

  8. irfan says:
    June 28, 2013 at 9:56 pm

    Thanks Lesley for such a beautiful speech, whenever I am watching your videos there is an experience of new learning…I know everything mentality is an arrogant mentality which closes the doors of new learning experiences in the life.

  9. nuzhat fakih says:
    June 29, 2013 at 8:11 am

    hi lesley,
    after hearing you on Ted, I stand by my verdict in the reply to your previous post, that you deserve to remain in the cloud……
    ‘doubt’ vis a vis ‘faith’ may be open to a subjective response, but the last part of the talk, as per Muhammad’s reaction to the present day scenario in the Islamic world, and the attitude of his followers is spot on…i have been trying to convince this viewpoint to whoever is ready to talk on this topic in the circle I interact with.
    thanks for reafffirming my faith in this context.
    nuzhat.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 29, 2013 at 8:48 am

      Thank you Nuzhat! “We love you in any state of gravity,” you wrote as I wondered how I was going to get my feet back to earth again, and I broke into a huge smile at that. It’s my privilege to help open up the conversation. — L.

  10. Nuzhat fakih says:
    June 30, 2013 at 3:59 am

    One more thought….for people who took offence to your word on the prophet’s “doubt” at the first instant of revelation…. I would say that this reaction conformed to his inbuilt nature of being humble. He did not take pride in being the chosen one, (and never did all his life),
    but in all humility needed reassurance at that point, of having been given that responsibility. Can anyone just accept prophethood one fine day, even when it was thrust upon him and that too without any aspiration for the same?
    I could plead with my community on so many issues to be understood in their right spirit, Lesley. People like you and me can scream ourselves hoarse. Thanks for your commitment though.
    Nuzhat.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 30, 2013 at 9:07 am

      Thanks, Nuzhat, but let’s not go hoarse! Isn’t it the gentleness of doubt that we value, as opposed to the violence of conviction?

  11. Nuzhat fakih says:
    June 30, 2013 at 7:37 pm

    True…..wish others could understand the human aspect of the prophet. Reverance would be more natural than ingrained.
    At this point I will share a secret…..a few years ago, standing at his tomb in Medina, prayers eluded me for a while, as his entire life story played in my mind. I could only have a silent conversation with him, telling him I wished I could have been present then, to have helped him in whatever way,etc…..that was my way of connection!

    Sorry, I think I’m beginning a Tarzan/Jane-Jew! relation with you….
    Love it and you….
    Nuzhat.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 1, 2013 at 1:21 pm

      Beyond prayer… Yes. Thank you, Nuzhat.

  12. Yusra Zainab says:
    July 6, 2013 at 5:04 am

    Hi Lesley,

    I am a muslim business student from Pakistan and your talk is very impressive. There is a lot that I agree with you on especially on the point that how one can never claim to be all-knowing and righteous. Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon Him) always displayed humility and modesty. However, what seems questionable to me is the idea that Prophet Muhammad’s complete life and struggle in Islam was based on doubt. At the time of revelation, it was indeed fear and maybe doubt also that overwhelmed him. But later, with more revelations from God and at the point when he had to take major decisions, reform society, act as advocate of social and economic justice, propagate the message of Islam, he had complete conviction on the existence of God and on the revelations being the truth. There couldnt be any room for doubt or else, he might not even have taken those steps which he actually did. However,I also agree that faith is incomplete without doubt. For the courageous steps that he took, faith and doubt had to go hand in hand. But the doubt that remained with the prophet for his life which made him humble in his ways and for which Quran tells him not to despair was not the the doubt on the existence of the God but was doubt with regards to his own and his follower’s abilities, and if he had done his best in reforming the society, and if he had conveyed the message in rightful way. This was the doubt that made him alive, made him to give his best, be humble, continue his struggle, and ultimately have faith. This is according to my understanding of the religion but Allah knows best. It would be nice to hear your views on it. Thank you.

    Yusra Zainab.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 6, 2013 at 10:09 am

      I can only speak for my understanding of Muhammad — not as a believer, but as a human being. You’ve expressed the believer’s understanding very well — indeed, beautifully — and I thank you for what I read as a bridge between where I am and where you are. (I love the phrase “Allah knows best,” which comes up repeatedly in the early Islamic sources, because it acknowledges that humans beings often disagree, that there are limits to our knowledge, and that none of us can justifiably claim absolute “right.”)

  13. Nuzhat fakih says:
    July 7, 2013 at 3:58 am

    Yusra…..I suggest you read Muhammad Asad’s views on doubt being integral to ‘enhance’ and reiterate faith, in his interpretation of Sahih Bukhari, section 2, (the book of faith).
    He confirms that it (having doubts) held true for the prophet too, from the very word go…… As fellow Muslims we understand the prophetic mission carried out with sincerity and integrity, in its own religious context. As you also pointed out, his doubts were in true humility.

    But this talk, actually awakens us to the very Islamic philosophy of ‘exerting’ ourselves to the utmost, by questioning, to enable our spiritual upliftment.
    Faith (iman) need never be shaken by right enquiry, nor can it make you a lesser believer. Or else itjtihad would not be permitted to us.
    sharing my viewpoint, is the intention here.
    Nuzhat.

  14. Yusra Zainab says:
    July 7, 2013 at 12:38 pm

    Thanks Lesley for your views.

    Thank you Nuzhat for the reading suggestion. I will InshaaAllah try my best to go through them. I completely understand the importance of doubt in enhancing one’s faith and do not deny to that fact. My own journey to understand and then form belief on the teachings of Islam, Allah Almighty and Prophet Muhammad has been driven by continuous questioning, pondering and going through the scriptures and various articles that I could get hold of. Also, in my opinion, I don’t think one can be called a true believer until one has at least once questioned one’s beliefs, driven into details, tried to find more, and undergone the struggle to find the answers to the important questions. Or else, it would have been too easy to call oneself a believer. But from my experience and understanding, constant questioning often leads one to become more firm on what one holds as his/her beliefs as they (the beliefs) are now tested, and then accepted. It is at this stage when what one believes begins to impact his/her behaviour, actions, and objectives. The prophet too, I believed, reached that stage during his prophet hood and that is when, acting on his firm belief on the existence of God, he reformed the society. We know from the Islamic history about the incidence of Miraaj, and how prophet asked his followers and people to believe on it. How could one preach a message with extreme determination, bearing all atrocities and hard times, when one himself is in doubt about it? Especially, if we observe how specific Islamic teachings are about the basic tenants of belief. Thus, he believed with certainty that which he preached. However, it is not that his struggle was free from all doubts, fear and uncertainties. He often used to be concerned about his Ummah and faced doubts and Allah tells him not to despair. This is when he displays faith on Allah. He also indicated uncertainty over the fulfilment of his duty of conveying the message when Allah in the Quran assures him. Thus, I agree with you that having doubts held true for the prophet too but this wasn’t doubt on the belief of the existence of God or the message of the revelations but rather of a little different nature as elaborated above.

    The Quran also takes both the sides. At one point in Quran, Allah asks people to reflect upon and ponder over the Quran. In another Surah, Surah Hujjurat, chapter 49, verse 15, Allah says, ” The believers are only the ones who have believed in Allah and His Messenger and then doubt not but strive with their properties and their lives in the cause of Allah . It is those who are the truthful.”

    I will InshaaAllah try to go through the readings you have recommended and it maybe that my views are not right and there may be much more to it. But, I have only shared what my understanding has been till now from what I have read and experienced. May Allah guide us. I completely agree with what Lesley has pointed that there could be different understandings and interpretation from the life of the prophet(peace be upon him) himself. I appreciate her intense research and the talk. It has definitely given me some food for thought.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 7, 2013 at 1:51 pm

      Yusra — to me it’s not a matter of “being right” or “correct” (or “wrong” or “incorrect”). To me it’s an exploration — an attempt to see things in more depth and complexity, and thus in more richness, which I know you’ll agree is one of the great privileges of thought.

  15. ramio1983 says:
    July 27, 2013 at 7:44 am

    Lesley so well presented, you are wonderful at what you do. Yes indeed, Mohammed is one who is far more relatable than any other Prophet of the past and i feel the main reason for that was his human reaction to Prophethood. The fear, the doubt and the burden of which rested on his shoulders showed on his face, from the time he cried to his wife Khadija “Cover me” to the time he wept as he walked away bloodied from being stoned at Ta’if. We come to see a man who did what he could to change and shape his society, for the better- at least from the perspective of an upcoming and final messenger and the bitter reality of the world around us is still witnessed today to the ever so resentful responses to Mohammed and his prophethood, his test of faith came knowing that he completed his message and died at rest, releasing this burden and sighing in relief to meet his planner.

    Peace Lesley, i love what you do. From a fellow author, poet and Muslim/Human, Ramey.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 27, 2013 at 8:44 am

      Thank you Ramey. A poet indeed.
      Peace be upon us all. — L.

  16. Why Go Public With Your [Dis] Belief | halalrepublic says:
    October 2, 2013 at 10:59 am

    […] classifying one as either (theist or atheist) is rather childish and we should be committed to doubt by falling on neither side. But in my country, you do not have the luxury to sit on the fence: everything you do, how you live […]

“For The Greater Good”

Posted May 18th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

This came in as a comment from someone called Bob.  It seems to be a response primarily to my previous post, Guilt By Drone, and the earlier Armed to the Eyeballs.  I’m running it as a separate post with a kind of wondering bemusement at its rather low level of literacy and humanity, and its rather high one of piety and righteousness.  Am particularly intrigued by his saying “too many guns and killing of children by drones, and all I see are complaints,” and by the almost delightful non sequitur of his concluding with “thank you and God bless.”

I read some of the posts like guilty by drone and armed to the eyeballs and I thought, wow are these people serious, to much of an military to many guns and the killing of children by drones and all I saw we’re complaints. Well if your not happy with the free, great country America than why don’t you leave I mean come on your lucky to have such a dedicated military like ours and truly I don’t know if you’ve realized this but the only way to gain peace is through war I’m sorry but that’s basically how no doubt about it. Our military keeps this country safe and under our lord and savior and keeps us the nation we are. No ones perfect and we can’t make everyone happy in this world sorry, and what are we just gonna sit back and watch our country get attacked like 9/11 saying o please don’t hurt us let’s make peace well wake up not everyone wants that and the reason we send drones and kids die is because unfortunately that’s how it has to be why I don’t know and neither do you but each decision we make has a impact and is for the greater good so give thanks to who we are and how great of a military we have and how much you and I have. Thank you and God bless

————————————————————

Later:  novelist Michael Gruber posted a brief but cogent analysis of Bob’s thinking on my Facebook page.  Here it is:

“The statement arises naturally from the characterization of 9/11 (which we owe to Mr Bush) as an act of existential evil, rather than as a political act with its own logic. The man’s premises are that the USA is an exceptional nation under the special protection of Christ, and thus any attack against it is not a political act but a move in a cosmic contest, in which an apocalyptic response by the American military is not only justified, but required.

“The logic moves from the legitimate desire to punish the organizers of the attack, to the desire to punish those who are “like” the attackers, which results in killing those associated with those who are like the attackers, to, ultimately, the punishment of the societies who produce those who are like the attackers.

“A similar progression characterized WW2, in which the world was shocked when the fascist nations bombed cities, after which it was considered legitimate to bomb the cities of the fascists into rubble. This at least had the amoral logic of tit for tat. But in the present situation, some militants kill their own people in pursuit of sectarian triumph, and we drone kill the militants and their kin, so that . . . And here we lose the last scraps of logical policy. At some level we [I’m assuming he means US policy-makers — LH] sort of agree with this bozo.”

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File under: absurd, Christianity, US politics, war | Tagged: Tags: drones, God, gun control, Michael Gruber, US military | 6 Comments
  1. Abdulrazak Ibrahim says:
    May 18, 2013 at 2:17 pm

    Wow! What could make a person think and write like this?

  2. sohail says:
    May 18, 2013 at 6:51 pm

    It is really sad that Bob has a vote in the American elections.

  3. zummard. says:
    May 19, 2013 at 5:16 am

    A little too drunk and no ‘speech writers’ on hand. I am glad some important people from the past read your posts too. It reminds me of what Shakespeare said so well.
    “LIFE IS A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT, FULL OF SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING.”
    I am left with the thought – everyone in the world needs education, not just those on the other side of the fence. Let’s start from ‘home’. Keep up your mission, Lesley.

  4. Nasir Khan says:
    May 19, 2013 at 7:31 am

    Ah, what to say! Suffice it may be that the 9/11 was an inside job. Buildings dont come down like that and debris dont melt away and vanish, unless there is an inside job…

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 19, 2013 at 12:33 pm

      Any New Yorker who detests Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld etc far more than you do can tell you that this is just conspiracy-theory nonsense. Kindly keep it off this blog.

  5. Gustav Hellthaler says:
    May 19, 2013 at 12:42 pm

    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death

    Mr Khan,
    Take a cubic foot of molten aluminum and pour it into a cubic foot of water as Alcoa did many years ago, and watch your laboratory disappear. Take an hundred tons of molten aluminum and have it flow down stairwells to where the sprinklers are working and watch several floors disappear with a lot of intact building above. The impact of the falling upper floor would make the base structure buckle. No conspiracy necessary.

    Gus Hellthaler

The Battle of the Muhammad Movies

Posted March 18th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Coming soon to a screen near you:  not one but two biopics about the life of Muhammad.  One from Iran, one from Qatar.  In other words:  one Shia, one Sunni.

Oy.

And double oy.  Because how do you make a movie about someone you can’t show on the screen?  Images of Muhammad are a no-no in Islam.  Though a few medieval Persian miniatures do show his cloaked figure, his face is blanked out — a white oval in the otherwise vividly colored painting.

quinnNo surprise, then, that there hasn’t been a feature movie about Muhammad since 1976, when Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi — yes, that Qaddafi — funded “The Message,” starring Anthony Quinn (shown here at left) as Muhammad’s uncle Hamza.

Who played Muhammad?  Nobody.  The solution was not to show him at all.  Instead, the camera acted as his eyes.  When the camera panned, you were supposed to think that this was what Muhammad was seeing.  The result was… less than convincing.

What was all too convincing was the violence surrounding the movie’s planned US debut in 1977.  Twelve Nation of Islam extremists not given to fact-checking heard a rumor that Quinn had played not Hamza, but Muhammad himself.  They laid siege to three buildings in Washington DC, where they held 149 hostages and killed a journalist and a police officer until they were persuaded by the combined efforts of the Egyptian, Pakistani, and Iranian ambassadors to surrender.  (The whole miserable story is here.)

Of course the hostage-takers hadn’t seen the movie.  If they had, they might have been amazed by its stereotypical blandness.  And they’d never be aware of their ironic role in ensuring that the director, Moustapha Akkad, gave up on religious-themed movies after “The Message,” made a small fortune directing Jamie Lee Curtis in the famed “Halloween” sequels, and then in 2005 went to a wedding in Jordan and got blown up by a suicide bomber.

If it seems way past time that a better film about Muhammad be made, the question remains how it can be done without violence.  And the problem remains of how to do it without showing him.

The highly regarded Iranian director Majid Majidi (“Children of Heaven,” “Color of Paradise”) began work on his $30-million movie last October, and reportedly intends to show Muhammad’s cloaked figure, but not his face.  In short order, an outraged denunciation came from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, followed by the announcement of plans for a rival movie from Sunni-majority Qatar,  with the blessing of a top Muslim Brotherhood theologian and a budget ranging, in various reports, from $200 million to $1 billion.

So how will the two movies differ, aside from the obvious lavishness of production moola and the issue of cloaked figure or no figure?  If you’ve read After the Prophet, you’ll know that the Iranian movie will likely give a far greater role to Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom Shia believe Muhammad designated as his successor — his first khalifa, or caliph.  The Qatari movie will just as likely give a heftier role to Muhammad’s father-in-law abu-Bakr, who in fact became the first caliph of Sunni Islam.  In other words, the two movies are likely to act out the Sunni-Shia split.

I guess acting it out with cameras is far preferable to doing so with guns, but the risk of course is that angry denunciations such as that of al-Azhar will only encourage the latter.

croweMeanwhile, Hollywood seems determined not to be left out of the prophets (and, of course, the profits).  Two biopics of Moses are reportedly in the works, with names like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Ang Lee being bandied around with Hollywood abandon and zero confirmation.  And gird your loins for a biopic of Noah due for release next year, with the ark-builder being played by the star of “The Gladiator,” Russell Crowe.

Somehow I can’t quite imagine Russell Crowe with an olive branch…

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File under: art, Christianity, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: abu-Bakr, After the Prophet, al-Azhar, Ali, Anthony Quinn, biopics, Hamza, Iran, Majid Majidi, Qaddafi, Qatar, Russell Crowe, Shia, Sunni, The Message | 16 Comments
  1. Jerry M says:
    March 18, 2013 at 3:33 pm

    The story of Muhammed could make a compelling movie as long as they would play it straight. If you remember “The Last Temptation of Christ”, you will know that religious movies can be done that don’t turn the main character into a plaster saint. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone of Scorcese’s caliber is going to work on this movie. My own preference is for something on the order of “Lawrence of Arabia”. Stunning visuals and action scenes. I don’t think the backers have the guts to play the story straight.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 18, 2013 at 4:44 pm

      You surely remember the protests over The Last Temptation of Christ, even though it was clearly fiction, based on Kazantzakis’ novel.

      • Jerry M says:
        March 18, 2013 at 6:35 pm

        Yes, I do remember the protests. In fact when I saw the movie during an afternoon showing in New Jersey, I found out later that the evening showing was picketted. I was sorry I missed it.

  2. Ali Scott says:
    March 18, 2013 at 8:01 pm

    Bit of an aside but was shocked about the mention of Nation Of Islam members in the siege, since the NOI generally have a less than orthodox stance towards the Prophet (SAW) and were at least officially antiviolence, but then the wiki article said they were part of a “Hanafi Muslim Movement” which i have never heard of (in the context of the NOI, aware of the Sunni madhab). Do you know if they were closer to conventional Hanafis or an offshoot of NOI teachings and theology? Sorry, have a weird interest in that whole area of things.

    Looking forward to seeing both of these films if I can iA, it’s a fascinating story. Granted it will be slanted in whatever direction the directors’ affiliations lie, but that is to be expected. Feels like at this point he is as much a myth for us to project our desires onto as a historical figure. And will save a lot of the emotional and spiritual wrestling with the historical figure your last book provoked in me! Would be very difficult to watch the killings of the Banu Qurayza and the Medinan poets onscreen.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 18, 2013 at 10:04 pm

      Wish I could tell you more re that 1977 incident, Ali, but I was still in Jerusalem at the time it happened. (It does sound from that wiki entry as though Islam was being used as a secondary rationale, but I really don’t know.) It did kill general release of the movie, which nonetheless went on to become very popular in mosques and Islamic centers.
      I’m not sure whether to apologize or to be complimented that ‘The First Muslim’ provoked emotional and spiritual wrestling on your part. Maybe complimented, because it sounds as though you’ve come through it stronger. Re the movies now in the works, you’re right, of course. But I do hope they include at least some emotional and spiritual wrestling on the part of Muhammad, thus according him the depth and complexity of human reality.

  3. Hashmi says:
    March 18, 2013 at 10:42 pm

    You are so well read and have a deep insight into Islam and other religions plus the the high esteem the last Prophet (peace be upon him) is held in.. then why do you use his name so casually, disregarding all respect…

    • SusieOfArabia says:
      March 19, 2013 at 3:27 am

      Hashmi – With all due respect, the Muslim habit of always including PBUH with the mention of the Prophet’s name is something that Muslims do. Non-Muslims don’t do this, nor do we consider it disrespectful not to. Please stop taking offense where none is intended – and the world will be a better and more peaceful place.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 19, 2013 at 9:48 am

      I think it would be hypocritical of me to refer to Muhammad in the traditional Muslim manner, since I am not Muslim.

  4. Sam says:
    March 19, 2013 at 6:13 am

    Mustapha Akkad’s movie is not that bad…. also there are some manuscripts from the Mongol Period in Iran (especially the Ilkhanid period i am not too sure about the Timurid period) which have depictions of Prophet Mohammed without a veil a very famous one is The compendium of the World or Jami’h al-Tawarikh by Rashid ud-Din but there are other Miraj-Nameh (the story of the Isra wa al Miraj) for example which have copious amounts of depictions of the Prophet without any veil…
    http://www.amazon.com/The-Ilkhanid-Book-Ascension-Persian-Sunni/dp/184511499X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1363698618&sr=8-5&keywords=christiane+gruber

    http://www.amazon.com/COMPENDIUM-CHRONICLES-al-Dins-Illustrated-Collection/dp/019727627X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363698686&sr=1-2&keywords=sheila+blair+world

  5. Ali Scott says:
    March 19, 2013 at 6:27 am

    It was definitely a compliment. Loved the book even while struggling at times. I think all too often people want to strip away his humanity and just leave this semi-divine archetypal figure in his place. Which is obviously not cool, Islamically speaking. The Qur’an itself admonishes him for making mistakes. And he lived in a fundamentally different era in a different social context to the one we live in today. To me it is more about being inspired by who he was to the society he was in rather than imitating his actions literally. I think one does faith a disservice if not intellectually honest with it.

    The Medina period does seem quite incongruous, but power is a tricky thing. I struggle to reconcile Medina with my own morality and reason, but there’s still Mecca, and Islam for me is about far more than the Prophet (SAW) himself.

    I do think were the films to depict some of the more controversial events in Medina there might be a backlash, from islamophobes saying “See! I told you so!” and from some Muslims assuming they had invented them. Many of my friends aren’t really aware of that side of things. It’s a difficult topic that I don’t think I will ever have the answer to.

    Oh and meant to say I loved After the Prophet too! Thank you for your books, your words here and your TED talks, apologies for the monster comment!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 19, 2013 at 9:53 am

      Thanks for confirming, Ali. Particularly appreciate your saying “I think one does faith a disservice if not intellectually honest with it,” and with your permission, intend to adopt it. — L.

      • Ali Scott says:
        March 19, 2013 at 2:24 pm

        I would be honoured if you did.

  6. Ali Scott says:
    March 19, 2013 at 6:27 am

    *monster-sized comment i mean

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 19, 2013 at 9:54 am

      Understood! Here be no monsters.

  7. saimma says:
    July 14, 2013 at 12:43 pm

    Lesley – love your Ted talks and so happy to find your website. Excellent article and I look forward to making my way through the rest.

    BTW – I am a Muslim and I do not feel the need to say ‘Peace be upon him’ every time the Prophet’s name is said. You speak about him with more respect that most Muslims do in their behaviour. Respect and honouring is about more than four words.

    In gratitude

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 14, 2013 at 6:02 pm

      My feeling too — Thanks Saimma.

Pope Goes The Weasel

Posted March 1st, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

That headline isn’t mine — it’s courtesy of Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host of The Colbert Report, and a practicing Catholic.  His word for Ratzinger/Benedict’s resignation: “popectomy.”

I find myself in the same bind as Colbert.  It seems like I should have all sorts of incredibly pertinent things to say about Ratzi’s helicoptering off into the twilight, but the papacy has become so impertinent that the only real question that concerns me is this:

What happens to the nifty red shoes?

redshoesPrada shoes, they say.  Ratzi’s favorites.  To be left behind as he he now declares himself just “a humble pilgrim.”  (Gagging sounds heard offstage.)

How humble?  Well, since he’s said he’ll live out his remaining days “hidden from the world,” I’m assuming he means “hidden” in the same sense as the Mahdi, the messiah figure of Shiism, who disappeared into a cave twelve centuries ago and who will return at the end of days.

Of course Ratzi has to give up the red shoes.  Who could hide in red shoes?

Especially since he has such a lot to hide from.

What’s really puzzling is that anyone still takes the papacy seriously.  The media are hyping up the election of a new pope for obvious reasons.  Men in fancy dress, an electoral race, cloaked ambition, secret balloting, colored smoke — it all makes for good theater.  The fact that so many of those involved in all this are deeply corrupt gives an extra thrill to it all.  Whether it’s actual pedophilia or “merely” covering it up;  closet homosexuality by public homophobes;  unveiled misogyny displayed in the inquisition of nuns;  plummeting numbers of priests unable to marry a woman, let alone a man;  and now, a secret report on a sex and blackmail scandal within the Vatican walls — how could the media resist such a totally sick soap opera?

What we’re seeing is a huge fundamentalist institution deep into the process of self-destruction.  It’s imploding right in front of us.  The weasel has definitely popped, and the infallible is about as fallible as it can get.

If the Roman Catholic church doesn’t undergo thorough reform, right now, predicts the famed Swiss theologian Hans Kung, it will “fall into a new ice age and run the danger of shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect.”  He cites a recent poll in Germany showing that 85% of Catholics support marriage for priests, and 75% support ordination of women.

Religious historian Garry Wills’ new book Why Priests? – A Failed Tradition goes further and advocates abolishing the priesthood altogether.  Not only did Christianity begin without a priesthood, he points out, but it actively opposed it.  And rank-and-file priests are speaking up too, like Tony Flannery in Dublin, suspended by the Vatican for refusing to adhere to church orthodoxy on contraception and homosexuality, or Roy Bourgeois in the US, who was excommunicated for supporting the ordination of women.

But all this is far too pertinent.  So let’s take refuge in the impertinent and get back to the issue at hand:  what’ll happen to those hand-made red shoes?  Will they be bronzed like baby booties?  Will they be displayed in an air-conditioned glass relics case?   Will they be auctioned off on eBay?

Fundamentalists of all religious stripes, take note:  this is how imposed orthodoxy ends — not with a bang, but with a red-bootied whimper.

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File under: Christianity, fundamentalism | Tagged: Tags: Garry Wills, Hans Kung, Pope Benedict, Ratzinger, Roman Catholic Church, Roy Bourgeois, Stephen Colbert, Tony Flannery, Vatican | 11 Comments
  1. Saimã Abbasi says:
    March 1, 2013 at 12:28 pm

    Fundamentalists of all religious stripes, take note: this is how imposed orthodoxy ends — not with a bang, but with a red-bootied whimper…
    Love this line. Very well written.

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    March 1, 2013 at 3:43 pm

    Lesley, I believe I once said that I’d listen to you read aloud from the phone book, you have such a great voice and style of delivery. Well, I just realized that I am an incredibly lucky woman, because in my head, I can hear your voice reading your own work as these blog posts flow from the page/screen. And your own work is WAY more interesting than the phone book.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 1, 2013 at 5:28 pm

      I’ll take being more interesting than the phone book as a compliment, Nancy! Seriously, you’re the best. And thanks for the reminder — I haven’t yet posted this KUOW audio of my reading from ‘The First Muslim’ at Town Hall Seattle: http://www.kuow.org/post/muhammads-extraordinary-life-author-lesley-hazleton

  3. BeffaOmmaya WyldeMoon says:
    March 1, 2013 at 5:01 pm

    You’ve gone and done it again, Hazleton! I’m still chuckling…WyldeMoon

  4. Karla Goethe says:
    March 1, 2013 at 7:40 pm

    Lesley Hazleton, your post gives me sanity in an insane world. Thank you so much. Karla Goethe

  5. Gustav Hellthaler says:
    March 2, 2013 at 9:54 am

    I believe that Dorothy has the red shoes and that Toto has already pulled back the curtain of the meta-reality of religion.
    Gus

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 2, 2013 at 10:23 am

      I can see a doctoral thesis here: “The Theology of Oz.”

  6. Jerry M says:
    March 5, 2013 at 12:39 pm

    As a former Catholic I find the current state of the church amusing. They had a real chance to reform the church 50 years ago, but like most powerful and self-blind institutions they didn’t take that opportunity. They could have embraced change, I was in a Catholic high school when the then pope, Paul VI, published his encyclical on birth control. At that time the priest who taught religion in my high school assumed that the birth control ruling was going to change. It didn’t and that was the public end of any attempts at reform. In the last few years we have all learned about so many scandals regarding how the church treated the powerless that the pedophile scandal is just one of many. What is sad that those in power would rather protect power than help those who they have wronged.

    Ratzinger was a cipher. He was elected to do nothing (given his age I am assuming he was supposed to be an interim pope), and he did nothing. I don’t understand why any news agency is covering this. It is barely important. Given the number of Catholics I suppose it does merit a line or two, but that is all.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 5, 2013 at 3:12 pm

      The question being whether another John XXIII is even possible. Naive question, probably…

  7. Jerry M says:
    March 13, 2013 at 3:06 pm

    Oh well, they kicked the can down the road again. They voted on an elderly Argentinian bishop. I don’t know anything negative but he is hardly going to be strong enough to fix anything.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 13, 2013 at 3:53 pm

      The Catholic Reporter says he’s a “staunch opponent” of contraception, abortion, and marriage equality. How exactly this jibes with his avowed passion for social justice must presumably be considered one of the mysteries of the Church…

What Happens When We Eat Together

Posted February 24th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Let me say this upfront:  I’m lousy at interfaith gatherings.  They tend to have an oddly stilted feel.  There’s something of Tarzan and Jane about them: “Me Jew, you Muslim, we friends.”  Far better, I’ve long thought, to get together on a small scale, over the dinner table.  Cook together, break bread together, drink together, and allow the conversation to develop without that weirdly over-determined self-consciousness.

That’s part of what so impressed me in the response of New Zealanders Khayreyah Amani Wahaab and her husband Jason Kennedy to an Islamophobic rant (Muslims shouldn’t be allowed on airplanes, etc) by Richard Prosser, a New Zealand member of parliament:  as I reported here, they invited him to dinner.

And he came to dinner.  Here’s Khayreyah’s post on it last night on her Facebook page:

Tandoori-Chicken3Mr Richard Prosser has just left our house after having a lovely dinner of home-cooked tandoori chicken, salad and roti with raitha. He was very realistic about owning the words he said, but was very clear that whilst he is never going to apologize to terrorists, he is very apologetic and contrite about the hurt and whatever damage he has caused the rest of the Muslim community. He understands, accepts and recognises that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorist types and have the same fears, values and aspirations that he does.

We both agreed that aviation security is a wider issue that does need to be addressed [Kahyreyrah has a degree in aviation management — LH], as well as that of Muslims having a louder voice in condemning extremists and their actions. Jason and I both thanked him in the end, since if it wasn’t for his brash words written in a news column, then we would not have identified these needs, that ultimately will benefit the entirety of New Zealand. All three of us are willing to forge a way forward for Muslims in New Zealand in order to make it a happier, safer place, and leading the world in Islamic – Western relations.

Richard did say, interestingly, that of all the mail, comments etc he received from people following the article, our letter by far made him feel worse than all the others. He finds himself to be a person who can deal with anger and resentment being directed towards him but felt out of place dealing with outreach born of love and a desire for understanding. Ultimately both sides agreed that we need to see each other as a whole and not just what the media had chosen to portray, that we cannot expect fair judgement if only one facet of ourselves are exposed to said judgement. We ended the night with a short TedX video of Lesley Hazleton’s talk about being a tourist in the Quran and we promised to have future interactions with a view to improving NZ as a whole. — with Jason Kennedy

Glad to have played a small supporting role.

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File under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, sanity | Tagged: Tags: dinner, Islamophobia, Jason Kennedy, Khayreyah Wahaab, New Zealand, Richard Prosser | 7 Comments
  1. abbasij says:
    February 24, 2013 at 1:18 pm

    The moral is, we need to see each other as a whole and not just what media has chosen to portray.

  2. Muhammad Shukri bin Yaacob says:
    February 24, 2013 at 11:50 pm

    Ms.Hazleton,I watched and listened attentively to your talk on Quran,more than once.It is amazing and enrich my understanding.Thank you for your objective take on Islam.However,I think you should lay your claim on frontiers explored.What becomes of an explorer if after exploring the uncharted areas then just leave to others to benefit.You have found Islam,accept it.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      February 25, 2013 at 8:46 am

      Thank you, but… I respect your Islam; please respect my agnosticism.

  3. William Branch says:
    February 25, 2013 at 12:52 pm

    Sharing a community meal used to have a powerful symbology; it meant that all who shared were part of the same tribe. As sharing in a family meal meant that all who shared were part of the same family, in Semitic culture, within the boundaries of the “haram”. Worse yet if it involved sharing food that was not as “chalal/kosher” as what you normally ate. What if they were dressed or undressed in a strange way?

    This is a powerful challenge to our sense of self and of belonging (both of the ego), inciting the strongest prejudiced response in all people. How would you feel if some stranger entered your home without asking, sat down at your table, and proceeded to eat a meal with you using your supplies and his, in the presence of your own family members? That would take great forbearance for anyone to tolerate.

    How much more would it take to get beyond mere tolerance to a full embrace of “the other”? Though each society has its own way of de-fanging “the other” or its own children thru the customs of hospitality and parenting. Perhaps it is enough to realize that “the other” sees us just as much a stranger as we see them. Yet this is essentially the problem we have in a global village that we were unprepared for. Difference in metaphysics is small compared to our preference for the familiar.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      February 25, 2013 at 1:46 pm

      Made me think of the phrase “getting to know each other” — emphasis on “other.” The progression from ‘they’ to ‘you’ to ‘we.’

      • William Branch says:
        February 25, 2013 at 2:17 pm

        By Jove, you’ve got it! Human beings usually live with profoundly unconscious and unexamined reflexes learned in infancy and childhood … that much Dr Freud may be correct about. Usually our conscious beliefs are concocted to provide a rationalization for these reflexes, though usually profoundly simple (nudity, eating, touching et al), they are very hard to address with any skepticism, if we can be brought to think about them at all.

        Personal boundaries are a big assumption … starting with our own personhood and extending out to our many associates in complicated inter-related rings. A conversion experience if one has one, involves a profound reorientation of this whole architecture. We articulate in our thought, spoken language, and written language, a blueprint of all of this, from our own “north pole” position, as vast as our ability to attach labels to the sum of our human experience.

        The pronouns are among the oldest and most conservative words in any language (explicit or implicit depending on the language). I, thou, he/she/it, we, y’all (in my own dialect) and they. Sometimes these pronouns are “sexed” with two or more genders in languages more complicated than English (not a legitimate language, but a creole or pidgin), making this even more complicated. In some languages which pronoun you use even depends on your social class and the social class of the person you are addressing.

      • pah says:
        March 17, 2013 at 7:10 am

        belated reply
        i think ignorance plus arrogance is what truly separates us.
        and therin lies the problem, so your blog goes a long way to bringing us all together, so i agree with your progression from “me’ to “thee” keep up the good work, Lesley!

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  • Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic” February 10, 2016
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