“For The Greater Good”

Posted on May 18, 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.”

Filed under: absurd, Christianity, US politics, war | Tagged: , , , , | 6 Comments »

The Battle of the Muhammad Movies

Posted on March 18, 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…

Filed under: art, Christianity, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments »

Pope Goes The Weasel

Posted on March 1, 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.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments »

What Happens When We Eat Together

Posted on February 24, 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.

Filed under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, sanity | Tagged: , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Mary: No Illusions

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

First, ignore the cover, which makes it look as though Colm Tóibín’s new novel is the usual sentimental rehash of the familiar Virgin Mary story.  I have no idea how Scribner’s could have gone with this cover.  Or why Tóibín allowed them to do so.  Because The Testament of Mary is quite the opposite.  It’s bitter, it’s angry, and it’s profoundly moving.

What Tóibín has done is what I would have loved to be able to do in my book Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography.  In fact when I finished that book, I did play with the idea of writing a gospel of Mary.  I’m glad Tóibín’s done it instead.  Far better a writer than I, he has made her so achingly human that even as you read, mesmerized, his clear, cold-eyed prose makes you want to weep.  I have no idea how he does this, but I’m glad he does.

He writes in the voice of Mary as she looks back, her own death nearing. You could say it’s the voice of a disillusioned Mary, but this woman has never had any illusions. Instead, she’s transcendently clear-eyed.

Among many other things, this short, almost terrifyingly lucid novel is a brilliant commentary on how “history” is constructed.  Mary watches in dismay as the disciples set about creating their own version of her son’s life and death.  They “interview” her as a matter of obligation, but can’t hide their frustration when she refuses to endorse their manufactured memories.  She sees them as almost threatening presences, enforcers of their constructed view of things.  She feels “the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief,” along with “their efforts to make simple sense of things that are not simple.”

But what carries this novel above all is the sheer beauty of the writing — the extraordinary voice, the lambent clarity of it.  You find that you want to read it as slowly as possible.  You start marking passage after passage.  Like this on the first page:

I cannot say more than I can say.  And I know how deeply this disturbs them and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdotes or sharp, simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.  I have no further need of smiling.  Just as I had no further need for tears.

or this, which is kind of perfect for this time of year, at least in the northern hemisphere:

Now that the days are shorter and the nights are cold, when I look out of the windows I have begun to notice something that surprises me and holds me.  There is a richness in the light.  It is as if, in becoming scarce, in knowing that it has less time to spread its gold over where we are, it lets loose something more intense, something that is filled with a shivering clarity.  And then when it begins to fade, it seems to leave raked shadows on everything.  And during that hour, the hour of ambiguous light, I feel safe to slip out and breathe the dense air when the colors are fading and the sky seems to be pulling them in, calling them home, until gradually nothing stands out in the landscape.

Like that light, this novel is extraordinary.  It has a luminous quality that I can’t quite explain.  But if the sentimentalization of faith sometimes makes you ache for the disillusionment of atheism, read this book.

Filed under: art, Christianity, women | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

In Love With The Bishop

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

There I was, agnostic Jewish me, eager as a teen music fan to meet an Episcopal bishop at Town Hall Seattle on Monday night, to shake his hand and thank him for his courage.

Then Hurricane Sandy intervened.  The bishop’s flight was canceled, so I went home and read his new book, God Believes in Love:  Straight Talk About Gay Marriage.

Which is how come I can now tell you that if you can read this book and not fall in love with Bishop Gene Robinson, head of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, then there is something seriously amiss with the state of your soul, let alone your heart and your mind.

Robinson was married – to a woman – for 15 years.  Now he’s married again – to a man.  This second marriage has lasted 25 years, and has led to multiple death threats against him, forcing him at times to wear a bullet-proof vest in public.  It’s also created an absurd rift within the Episcopal church.   And it’s brought out the big guns in his support.  There are only two blurbs on the back of this beautifully lucid book, but both are from Nobel Peace Laureates:  one from a guy called Obama, and the other from a guy called Tutu.

Robinson directly addresses ten FAQs on marriage equality, among them:  “Why should you care about gay marriage if you’re straight?”

His answer, and mine:  “It’s the civil rights issue of our time.”  Why did white activists put themselves in the line of fire in the 1960s?  They weren’t black;  they could always have claimed that it wasn’t “their” battle.  Except of course it was.  As Emma Lazarus put it – she of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” – “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

Besides, if you think gay rights don’t affect your straight life, you’re living in as alternative a universe as Mitt Romney.  As Robinson points out, “Orthodox Jews, conservative Muslims, and  fundamentalist Christians are just as likely  to raise a gay son or daughter as any other mother or father.”

Think about that:  Wherever you are as you read this, and no matter what you think about same-sex marriage, chances are that at least one person close to you – someone you know and love and wish everything good for — is gay.  So what do you wish for that person if you call the love they feel for someone else an abomination?  The only abomination involved here is in calling love an abomination.

Still think “This isn’t my fight” because you’re not gay?  Robinson has this to say:

No it isn’t.  Unless you care about the kind of society we have.  Unless you want the society of which you are a part to be a just one.  Unless you believe that a free society, not to mention a godly religion, should fight injustice wherever it is found…  Unless you care about our children.  Unless fairness matters to you.  Unless violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people concerns you.  Unless ‘liberty and justice for all’ is something you believe applies to all citizens.

Are you in love with him yet?

Filed under: Christianity, light, sanity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments »

Blood Brothers

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Once again, the extremists have fed each other.  Once again, with other people’s blood.

The blood is that of one of the best friends the new Libya could have had:  US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, killed yesterday, the evening of 9/11, along with three of his staff as they tried to evacuate employees of the American consulate in Benghazi.  The evacuation was necessary because protestors had been whipped into violence by a 14-minute farce of a video attacking the prophet Muhammad.  Or, as now seems possible, the protest was used as an excuse for a planned attack, since RPGs and automatic weapons were involved.

Al-Qaeda-type extremists are apparently the ones who pulled the trigger, using the insult to Islam as an excuse. But they could not have done so without the help of their partners — their Jewish and Christian brothers-in-arms right here in the United States. That’s who provided the ammunition, in the form of a shoddily crude and absurdly amateurish “movie trailer” portraying Muhammad as a fraud and his early supporters as a bunch of goons.

I’m deliberately not linking to the video here since I refuse to link to such tripe. This isn’t an insult to Islam;  it’s an insult to human intelligence. If you feel sufficiently masochistic, you can find it on YouTube by typing in the title, ‘Muslim Innocence’ (the director’s idea of irony).

You’ll see that it’s made by ignorant fanatics for ignorant fanatics. Nobody else would pay it the blindest bit of attention. In fact nobody else did (even the director, an Israeli-American who goes by the name of Sam Bacile, which may or may not be a pseudonym, admits that the whole movie has been shown only once, to a nearly empty movie theater in California). Nobody else, that is, until Florida’s tinpot Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones — the one who once hanged President Obama in effigy and will apparently do anything to get himself back in the news — decided to showcase the trailer as part of his annual 9/11 Islamophobic rant.

I’ll write more about this very soon (I’m just back from a trip, and jet-lagged). But for now, two things:

1. Rest in peace, Christopher Stevens.

2. As for Terry Jones and the man calling himself Sam Bacile: if such a thing as hell exists, may you both rot in it, alongside your blood brothers in Al Qaeda.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism, ugliness | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

Neanderthals in D.C.

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Don’t you just love it when politicians say: “I mis-spoke”?

Republican congressman Todd Akin’s breathtakingly Neanderthal assertion that women’s bodies automatically prevent pregnancy if they’re victims of what he calls “legitimate rape” — his argument against allowing abortion even in cases of rape — has brought suitably righteous wrath down upon him.  Today he says he “mis-spoke.”  Though he doesn’t say exactly how.

So here’s what I’m guessing is Akin’s’ un-mis-spoken version:

Look, we all know that women lie.  Jesus Christ, they lie all the time.  What’s a guy to do?  So she’s a little drunk, okay, and she’s saying ‘No,’ okay, but you know she doesn’t mean it, because women never do, so you give her what she wants and then the next morning what does she do but cry rape?  That, my friends, is what I mean by illegitimate rape.

To be legitimate, it’d damn well better be violent.  At knifepoint or gunpoint.  And those Wahhabi or Taliban types or whatever they call themselves out there in Afghanistan and whatnot have a good point:  either you’ve got four witnesses that she was violently raped or forget it, she’s just covering her ass by lying.  And she’s a little whore to boot.  Serves her right, is what I say.

Fact is, if she gets pregnant, you can be just about one hundred percent sure she wasn’t really raped, because I know some wonderful doctors who assure me that women’s bodies are like that:  you know, they’re such conniving bitches, they can control whether they get pregnant or not.  If they don’t want, they just shut down.  Something in their bodies just switches off.  Factory’s closed, know what I mean?

No I haven’t checked their medical credentials, and I can’t tell you their names off the cuff, but I can tell you they’re God-fearing Christian doctors, all highly recommended by one of the one hundred pastors who’ve endorsed my campaign for senator for this great state of Missouri — pastors like that good man in Florida, Terry Jones, total victim of the Muslim-loving bend-over-backwards politically-correct liberal east-coast media elite.

These doctors, they’ve got Christian ethics, so they’re not about to let some hysterical woman who went and got herself pregnant worm her way out of it with an abortion.  They know that if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant, she doesn’t.  If she does want to — well, there’s lots of guys out there who can testify to having been tricked into marriage by some bitch who went and got herself pregnant.  Am I right or am I right, guys?  Hey?  Y’know what I mean?

What’s that?  The Centers for Disease Control say that over 32,000 women a year get pregnant as a result of rape?  Well there’s big government for you.  The CDC will be one of the first government-funded institutions to be abolished when my pals Romney and Ryan get into the White House.  We’ll close that bunch of liberal pseudo-scientists down.

So yeah, those woman who really are raped — legitimately raped — I guess one or two might have their bodies let them down and somehow get pregnant.  But hey, nobody asked them to go and get raped.  And we can’t go allowing them to have abortions like a get-out-of-jail-free card.  That’d be wrong, my friends.  Wrong in the eyes of the Lord.

Goddammit they’re gonna have those kids and raise ‘em, whether they want to or not.  And don’t let them think we’re gonna help them.  We’re going to shut down all those programs that allow single mothers to freeload off decent hard-working Christian citizens of this country who have the good sense not to and get themselves raped.  We’re going to bring decency back to America, my friends.  We’re going to bring ethics back to America.  God bless America.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, ugliness, US politics, women | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Last Week, In Abu Dhabi

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Monday 7 pm:  Arrive Dubai in a dust storm, drive an hour and a half to Abu Dhabi.  It’s hot.  And that is British understatement. Realize I’m halfway round the world from mild Seattle.

Monday 10 pm:  Mint tea with Ghadeer, the manager of the Sheikha Salama Foundation, who is gorgeous, brilliant, and totally cool.  (It won’t be until Thursday evening that her father tells me she’s finishing up her doctorate in political science at the Sorbonne; she doesn’t mention it.)

Tuesday 10 am:  Rehearsal for first of two evening forums at the Saadiyat Cultural Center, near where the Louvre and the Guggenheim will be.  On the program:  Karen Armstrong, Imam Khalid Latif (chaplain of NYU and the NYPD), and… me.  Having a bit of trouble believing I’m here.

Tuesday 11 am:  Sheikha Salama and her daughter Sheikha Maryam float over the ground in gossamer-light black abayas.  Had no idea an abaya could be so elegantly beautiful.  More sari than burqa-like.  Wonder if I’ll float too if I wear an abaya…

Tuesday 10.30 pm:  Since it’s Ramadan, the forums are at night.   Tonight, all women.  Here and there, diamond studs flash in startlingly white teeth, and delicate feather-light ruffled skirts peek from under the abayas.  I’ve never spoken to such a superbly graceful and gracious audience.

Tuesday 11.30 pm:  In principle since I’m operating on an 11-hour time difference, I should be fine with night instead of day.  Turns out there’s a difference between principle and reality;  I feel totally surreal.

Tuesday midnight:  A woman who owns 34 prize camels says “You must come back for the camel races.”  I still have the scar on my hand from the one time I tried to gallop on a camel, in the Sinai:  it tripped and threw me, and I didn’t let go of the lead rope in time. Her camels, she assures me, do not trip.

Wednesday 2.30 am:  Raid hotel minibar for a shot of scotch.  Feel amazingly sinful and decadent.  Put sinful decadent feeling to rest by telling myself it’s a cure for jet lag.

Wednesday 1 pm:  Peacocks nesting on the beach with their fledglings.  Dust storm is clearing.  Incredible humidity closing in instead.  Am assured it’s not always like this.  Just in August…

Wednesday 10 pm:  Chatting in a huddle with dynamite student volunteers as we wait for the crowd to arrive at the cultural center.  Love their spirit.

Wednesday 11 pm:  The forum convenes again, this time open to the public.  Photo op with government ministers.  The audience open-minded and open-hearted — a whole series of great conversations afterwards.  A mathematician argues with great charm for clarity;  I argue with what I hope is equal charm for non-clarity.

Thursday 1 am: Meet up with TEDx Al Ain guys — wonderful energy!  We head for a Ramadan tent on the beach for shisha (waterpipe) and saj (flaky herbed pastry), and close the place down.

Thursday 1 pm:  My abaya question answered at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque.  It somehow fails to make me look like I’m floating over the ground.  I think it only does that for princesses.  But the shayla (the head shawl — so light it scrunches up into the palm of your hand) creates welcome shade.  (That’s Cosimo of Speakers Associates on my right, Mohamed our docent on my left).

Thursday 2 pm:  walking barefoot in 45 C. sun over the huge marble courtyard of the mosque.  The floor is cool underfoot.  I have no idea how.  Giant flowers and vines are inlaid on the marble.  I want to lie down on them but think it might be wise not to.  I trace them with bare feet.

Thursday 3 pm:  Sitting on the floor in front of the qibla staring up at the ceiling and talking space, infinity, mathematics with Mohamed.  Very heady.

Thursday 9 pm:  In the Marina mall to buy a shayla.  I pick one with a silver braided edge, then get ambitious and try on a few abayas before giving up:  there’s a secret to being elegant in one, and I don’t know it.

Thursday 10 pm:  It seems the hyper-air-conditioned mall is where half of Abu Dhabi heads when it’s this hot.  Bump into Ghadeer and her dad, and as we settle in for Turkish coffee, Mohamed the mosque docent passes by and stops to chat.  For a moment it feels as though I live here.

Friday 5 am:  Back to Dubai for the nonstop Emirates flight north over Iran, the Caspian Sea, and Russia, on over the North Pole, then down over Canada to the mildness of home, where I remember someone saying “Lesley, when you get back to Seattle, you’ll think back and wonder if you were really here in Abu Dhabi…”

Filed under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Middle East | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

Best Valentine of the Year

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Hallmark card lovers, avert your eyes.

This piece by the transcendentally gifted Rebecca Brown is in the Valentine’s Day issue of The Stranger.  It’s called “Make Clean Our Heart Within Us,” and it makes me laugh and makes me want to cry and kind of blows me away.

Bleach it. Scrub it. Sandblast or power-wash it, hose it down. Dip it in lye.

Please, be my guest.

Nothing I have tried has worked: It’s crusty, brown, and scabbed. A lump. It has been bit into, chewed up, gnawed on, spat ou—no—wait—not “out.” It can’t get out. It’s stuck inside. Beneath “‘dem bones” and skin and other stuff.

Tear open the skin, dig in and grab and break ‘dem bones and yank. Do it by hand.

Or leave it in and nuke it. I don’t care. I gave up that malarkey long ago.

It’s weirdly shaped. Like an octopus with not enough arms and also twisted with osteoporosis. Or a plastic child’s toy such as a baby shoe, doll, or action figure melted in the sun in that top part of the back of the car, made slowly soft and droopy, and burning, hot—it hurts to touch—until after the sun has gone away and it cools to a hardened blob.

One often thinks of it as red, but maybe it’s not if the blood’s seeped out. Maybe it’s kind of pinkish, even white in some places, almost translucent, as pretty as a pearl, almost. Except for what it is.

Did it look worse when beating? Like a gelatinous clod of something from a grade B horror movie (such as the mushrooms then the people, in Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People [1963], directed by Ishiro Honda, who also did the Godzilla movies, in which, after a storm at sea, a boat washes up on a mysterious island. Shipwrecked together are a wealthy playboy, a professor-psychologist, a famous sexy female singer, an ingenue, a couple of others, and of course the skipper of the ship and his loyal sailor, just like on Gilligan’s Island which debuted on American television the following year. Who giveth unto whom? Who taketh what?), pulsating, throbbing, burbling, its slick or dull or smooth or shiny but certainly pokeable surface expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing like miner’s lung or heaving cow or great pink scarlet bubble of Bazooka Joe bubble gum some rowdy kid is just about to pop.

St. Catherine traded hers with God.

I remember seeing a picture of it. She’s standing on the ground and He is hovering in the air a bit above her. He’s on a tasteful little throw rug of a cloud. Her hand is up and out to him. Can I see something red in it? A thing to be got rid of? Or to keep? A thing of want. His hovering hand is open, too, and heading down toward her, but I can’t see if his hand is full or empty. Her hand is white and His is very, very white! As pure and clean and pure and cold as snow.

Has he just given His to her? Does she give hers to Him? Did one or the other do it first? Or did they do it simultaneously? Who opened whom? Each other or themselves? There must have been a lot of blood. What happened to the blood? What happens when the traded heart does not fit in the other’s waiting hole?

Whose great idea was this, anyway?

If it was His, was he just—uh—uh—ribbing her? Not ever thinking she would take Him up on it and—uh—uh—do it literally. But then when she said Yes, she wanted, Yes she would, Oh please, and started clawing at her chest, whatever else was He supposed to do?

Or did she simply stick her hand inside and pull? Like those amazing Filipino healers? They don’t use anesthetics! Tools! Or anything! They rearrange or take the bad things out of you, a secret done with just their hands, and with some poor pathetic miserable fuck who’s desperate with belief. They also only do it to someone else, not to themselves the way St. Catherine did. Though, of course, St. Catherine was not a Filipina, but Italian, from Sienna. I went there to her church one time and saw her mummified head. (It looked like a giant raisin.) The rest of her body is somewhere else. Rome, maybe? I don’t know where the heart is.

Or if there was a tool involved, what tools would they have had back then in Italy? A knife, a sword, a saw? A pair of tongs? Did someone else, not Him, give her a hand? (“Give her a hand…?” Hmmm… Don’t go there.) Was someone passing by who saw her clawing at herself and crying, crying, crying inconsolably because she couldn’t, she just could not do it, could not get it right, she could not break herself, so then did someone (angel? Or Samaritan?) appear to help and if so, was this then a miracle?

Or had she asked a friend to help?  Though of whom could one ask a thing like that?

What’s too unclean to be made clean must be removed alone. For superpower Him, this would be easy. But not for her. No, not for her. She had to work at it.  This took her long.  This took her years.  This took her life.

Pull the muscle and meat away like pulling the fat from the rib of a pig.  Now, yank it out.  Now give it to Him.  It may be good, what’s given back, but by the time it does you’re halfway dead.

My hands were never white like hers.  And the other’s more than mere unclean;  it’s fucking filthy.

To try would render filthier.

At least that’s my excuse.

If this whets your appetite, as it were, for more of Rebecca Brown, check out two of my favorite books of hers:   ‘American Romances‘ and for the very brave (you have been warned!)  ‘The Dogs‘.

Filed under: art, Christianity, existence | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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