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 »

Burning Jesus

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

The most effective way to deal with the two-bit Florida ‘pastor’ planning to make a bonfire of Qurans on 9/11?  No, not string him up by his heels.  Something far more effective:  Ignore him.  Pay no attention.  Zip.  Nada.  Nothing.

But that won’t happen. The old TV newsroom adage is “Flames lead.”  A fire, an explosion, a bombing – all are ways to improve ratings, occasions to appeal to the arsonist apparently latent in the visual mind.  In the incendiary anti-Muslim atmosphere carefully built up over the past few months by ultra-right-wing bigots, no “self-respecting” newsroom director will dream for a moment of holding back.

Never mind that General David Petraeus warns that such an event could place American troops in more danger than ever.  Hey, if Americans die because of this, that’s even more news!  So there they are, all the news directors, salivating at the prospect of a huge, hot weekend:  the festive end of Ramadan and the solemnity of Rosh HaShana on Thursday and Friday followed by 9/11 on Saturday (and, just to add a bit of sentimental spice to it all, Grandparents Day on Sunday).

So the heat is on and the bigots are out in force.  The latest to wave his slimy flag:  Marty Peretz, owner of The New Republic and self-appointed champion of any right-wing Israeli government:

Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims…  So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Let’s not go into the ghastly vision of the state of Peretz’ gut.  Enough to say that white-collar bigots like him provide the gasoline for blue-collar nutcases like pseudo-pastor Terry Jones, a pathetic crackpot right out of a William Burroughs heroin nightmare, whose fifty followers (yes, all of 50) apparently believe that a dove is a bird of prey.

Peretz would never burn a Quran himself, of course.  He might get his hands dirty that way.  Might even burn them.  He leaves that to the gun-totin’ pastor, who has apparently never read the ‘red-letter words’ of the Gospels – the actual words of Jesus.  Ignorance is ecstasy for Terry Jones, who is blithely unaware that he might as well be burning Jesus.

But then that’s what Christian bigots do – they burn the cross.  On other people’s lawns, that is, prior to lynching them by the light of bonfires.  It’s what fascists did just a few years before, using ovens instead of bonfires.  It’s what Catholic clerics did in the Spanish Inquisition, roasting people alive on spits.  As the poet Heinrich Heine wrote: “Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.”

Could media restraint really hold this back?   The question is moot, because it won’t happen.  When I lived in and reported from Jerusalem, I saw American newsmen shove people to the ground to get a good shot in the aftermath of a bombing.  I saw them practically shouting for joy when there was a terrorist attack which would land them a front-page story or a lead-off spot on the nightly news.   Other people’s disasters were their chance for the limelight.  So they won’t hesitate to help make a nutcase like Terry Jones into an international name, to place naïve American soldiers in danger, and to make Christians the world over targets for retaliation.

All for ratings, all for vanity.  A bonfire of the vanities indeed.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, ugliness | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Quran Quotes for Bigots – I

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Tea Partyers are playing rope-a-quote with the Quran .  Not that they’ve read it;  they’ve just picked out ‘the good bits.’  So in honor of Ramadan, here’s the first in a series on what the Quran really says.  Try this for a start:

When God delivers the city into your hands, you shall smite every male with the edge of your sword… You shall save alive nothing that breathes, but shall utterly destroy them all.”

Oops, sorry, wrong book.  That’s Deuteronomy 20, from the peace-loving passage in verses 12 through 18.   Here’s the right one:

Slay the unbelievers wherever you come upon them.

Ah, that’s more like it:  Quran 2, part of verse 187.  Phew.  They really do want to kill us.

Or do they?  Here’s the quote in context:

Fight in the way of God with those who fight with you, but aggress not:  God loves not the aggressors.  And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you;  persecution is more grievous than slaying.  But fight them not by the Holy House unless they should fight you there;  then, if they fight you, slay them.

It helps to know that these verses are very specific:  they refer to the conquest of Mecca, from which Muhammad and his supporters had been expelled eight years earlier.   And they are bound about with conditions:  only if the unbelievers persist in aggression, for example, and only after a truce time expires, and only if they break pre-existing agreements.  Which might be why only eight people were killed.

Meanwhile, over in Deuteronomy 20, it continues this way:

Of the cities of these people which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them.  Namely, the Hittities and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.

That’s a lot of people.  And this is far from the only kill-em-all order in the bible.  There’s plenty more in Judges and Samuel, just for starters.   Look up the word “destroy” in a biblical concordance, and you’ll find one of the longest lists it offers.   The entry for peace is barely a quarter as long.

In short, there’s nothing on warfare in the Quran that hasn’t been said at far greater length, far more times, in far more detail and far worse terms, in the Holy Bible that the Tea Partyers hold so dear.

So one more Quranic quote (9:7) seems apt:

So long as they go straight with you, do you go straight with them.

Let’s try that: going straight with each other.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism, war | Tagged: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

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