by Eboo Patel
But after hearing the Dalai Lama and Kevin talk about Judaism and Buddhism, I started forming a different theory about my Buddhist meditation. Maybe, as Kevin’s study of Buddhist concepts had helped him understand Jewish concepts, my novice foray into Buddhist meditation had inadvertently returned me to Muslim prayer. The Ismailis are a spiritualist Muslim community with an emphasis on meditation, and one of our techniques is to focus the mind on a particular Muslim prayer word or phrase. Perhaps Buddhist meditation had brought the Muslim spirituality from deep within me to the surface. Perhaps this was God’s gentle way of telling me something.
When the Dalai Lama opened his mouth, it wasn’t to ask a question; it was to make a statement. “You are a Muslim,” he said. Brother Wayne must have told him. Or maybe the Dalai Lama’s brother, with whom we were staying in Dharamsala. Or, really, who knows how the Dalai Lama found out. I imagine Dalai Lamas know some things that the rest of us don’t.
“You are a Muslim,” the Dalai Lama repeated.
“Yes,” I said, then swallowed. The Dalai Lama giggled. “Islam is a very good religion. Buddhists and Muslims lived in peace in Tibet for many centuries. First, there were only Tibetan Buddhists. Now there are Tibetan Muslims, too. You should visit them.”
Kevin and I spent a few minutes talking about the Interfaith Youth Corps, how it hoped to bring young people from different religions together to serve others.
“This is very important,” the Dalai Lama said, suddenly growing serious. “Religions must dialogue, but even more, they must come together to serve others. Service is the most important. And common values, finding common values between different religions. And as you study the other religions, you must learn more about your own and believe more in your own. This Interfaith Youth Corps is a very good project.”
And then he turned slightly to face Kevin and me together. “Jew,” he said, and pointed at Kevin. “Muslim,” he said, and pointed at me. “Buddhists,” he said, and pointed at himself and his secretary. “This is interfaith. Now we have to serve others. But we”—the Dalai Lama pointed to his secretary and himself—“are not young. Can we still join?”
He sent us away laughing and floating and believing.
In The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz writes that many young people view religion as an old man saying no. Growing up, my “old man” was a woman—my grandmother, with whom I was now staying in Bombay. She would come to the States every few years and live with my family, occupying the living room from midmorning to early evening watching Hindi films. I avoided her as much as possible. “Are you saying your Du’a?” she would ask if she caught me before I managed to reach the back staircase. If she woke up earlier than usual and saw me at the breakfast table before I left for school, she would say, “Are you giving your dasond?” referring to the tithe that Ismailis give. She was disappointed that I had no close Ismaili friends when I was a teenager. “You will marry an Ismaili, right?” my grandmother would ask, catching my arm, as I was sneaking out. I am embarrassed to say it now, but I dreaded her visits and did my best to avoid her.
My view of her changed dramatically on this trip to India. She spent most of her days sitting on a simple sofa bed in the living room, clad in white, tasbih in hand, beads flowing through her fingers, whispering the name of God—“Allah, Allah, Allah”—over and over. She would cry during prayer, the name of the Prophet causing an overflow of love from deep in her heart. I told her all about the Dalai Lama, my voice filled with admiration. I am sure she wished that I spoke as excitedly about the Aga Khan, but she never said as much. Instead, she asked me to read stories about His Holiness to her and observed, “All great religious leaders are alike.”
She loved Kevin. Every morning, when Kevin and I were reading in our room, she would bellow for him from across the apartment: “Kevaauuun!” He would get out of his chair, pad across the living room, and put his head in Mama’s lap, and she would stroke it and whisper Arabic prayers over him, asking God to keep him safe and on the straight path. When we first arrived, she saw Kevin’s books on Judaism and asked, “You are a Jew?” Kevin nodded. “Masha—Allah,” my grandmother said, meaning “Thanks be to God.” Then she turned to me and said, “He is Ahl al-Kitab.” Muslims use this term, meaning “a person of the book,” to refer to their Abrahamic cousins, Jews and Christians.
Earlier in her life, it seemed as though my grandmother could speak to me about nothing but Islam, but now she rarely brought it up at all. Yet, through her interest in Buddhism, her constant Zikr (the Muslim term for remembrance of God through prayer), and her love for Kevin, I was getting a sense of what it meant to be a Muslim.
The most important lesson came in the most unexpected way. I woke up one morning to find a new woman in the apartment. She looked a little scared and disheveled, and she was wearing a torn white nightgown several sizes too big for her, probably one of my grandmother’s older outfits. She didn’t appear to be a new servant or a family friend.
“Who is she?” I asked my grandmother.
“I don’t know her real name. The leader of the prayer house brought her here. She is getting abused at home by her father and uncle. We will take care of her until we can find somewhere safe to send her. We will call her Anisa.”
I turned to look at Anisa, who was sitting on the floor with a plate of dal and rice in front of her. She returned my gaze, a little more confident than before. She looked as if she was easing into her new surroundings.
I turned back to my grandmother and said, “Mama, what if these crazy men, this father and uncle, come looking for her? Do you think it’s safe to keep this woman here? I mean, Kevin and I are here now, but when we’re gone, who will protect you and the servants if they come around?”
My grandmother looked at me a bit suspiciously, as if to say that she had little hope for protection from us. “We will check the door before we answer it. And God is with us,” she said.
I couldn’t restrain myself. “Mama, this is crazy. You can’t just take strange women into your home and keep them here for weeks or months. This isn’t the Underground Railroad, you know. You’re old now. This is dangerous.”
“Crazy, huh?” she responded. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“I have been doing this for forty-five years. That’s more than twice as long as you’ve been on earth. This may be the fiftieth, sixtieth, hundredth person who has come here and been safe.” She got up and walked slowly over to the cabinet and took down a box. “Come here,” she told me. She lifted the lid, and I looked inside and saw a mess of Polaroids. “I took pictures of them.” She reached into the box and picked up a picture. “This one was so pretty. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother died in a car accident. She was afraid that he would sell her into prostitution for money to drink. Some friends told her about me—Ashraf Ma-ji, they would call me—and she saved up some money, a rupee here and there from small sewing jobs, until she had enough for the train from Ahmedabad. It was the middle of the monsoon season. She was dripping wet when she came to the door. Barely seventeen. So scared, so beautiful. She didn’t talk for two weeks. But slowly, slowly she came around. We sent her to school to improve her sewing, and we found her a good husband. She lives in Hyderabad now. She has had two children and started a very successful sewing business.”
My grandmother started going through the other Polaroids. There was a poor woman with three young sons from the south of India who had heard about my grandmother and come for help. A woman from Calcutta who could neither hear nor speak and whose parents had abandoned her. Several girls whose fathers were sexually and physically abusive. My grandmother helped them find jobs or husbands, sent them back to school, or helped them locate family members in other parts of India. She had made little notes on the back of each Polaroid: name, birthday, current address. The more stories she told about the people she had saved, the more I realized how little I knew about my grandmother.
“Why do you do this?” I finally
blurted out.
She looked a little shocked that I would ask, as if to say that the answer was self-evident. But just in case it wasn’t clear to me, she said simply, “I am a Muslim. This is what Muslims do.”
6
The Story of Islam, the Story of Pluralism
I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
I knew perfectly well that it was dumb luck that I was heading across the ocean on Cecil Rhodes’s money in September 1998. My biggest concern was that I was going to be found out. My peculiar charm might have gotten me this far, but I knew it had no hope of working in England, land of stiff lips, dry humor, and endlessly wet days. It would most certainly fail to impress my fellow Rhodes scholars, who I was convinced were all budding Nobel laureates and Harvard faculty.
My first few months at Oxford confirmed all my fears. The other Rhodes scholars all seemed to speak multiple languages and be on a first-name basis with their home state senators. They spoke confidently about their careers—Yale Law School, a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship, a few years making bank in the corporate world and then a turn to politics, which would probably end in being a state governor. If they chose to stick with the law, they had their eyes set on the federal bench. I was astounded at their absolute conviction that they were meant for global leadership. When a student arrived at the University of Illinois, people talked about how far the Fighting Illini might go in the NCAA tournament that season. Apparently, the messages were different at the fancy private schools where so many Rhodes scholars had been educated. There, it seemed, people were crawling about whispering in undergraduates’ ears that the world was just waiting for them to take over.
Somehow, all my fears coalesced around The New Yorker. It was the magazine I most often saw the other Rhodes scholars reading. I had never even heard of it before I arrived at Oxford. At the University of Illinois, reading the Chicago Tribune made you more knowledgeable about world affairs than just about anybody else. Every week for the first few months I was at Oxford, I went to the newsstand on Little Clarendon Street and bought The New Yorker. Then I walked back through the rain to my coffin-size room and stared at it. That only seemed to heighten my anxiety. I couldn’t even decipher the damn cover; how was I supposed to understand the articles?
I was tempted to tell myself the story that middle-class midwestern kids like me were all about keeping it real and that the Ivy League snobs I had been shipped here with were so full of a sickening sense of entitlement that they weren’t even worth talking to. But I knew that was a lie born of fear and prejudice. Moreover, it undermined the whole reason I had applied for a Rhodes in the first place. If I was going to dismiss my fellow Rhodes scholars so easily, I might as well have stayed home.
Self-righteousness and feelings of inadequacy are close cousins. Once I admitted to myself that winning a Rhodes was a fluke and that everyone around me was smarter and more deserving, I figured the only thing I could do was accept my luck as God’s grace and try to make the most of the experience. I joined a reading group that met at Holywell Manor, a residence for graduate students near the center of Oxford. We read mostly twentieth-century work—Jhumpa Lahiri, Philip Roth, Vikram Seth, Zora Neale Hurston—and talked about the books in relation to the issues around us. I was determined to absorb the erudition of the other Rhodes scholars. Whenever someone mentioned a philosopher I had never heard of, I looked up his or her articles. When a topic was raised that I was unfamiliar with, I went out and bought a stack of books on it. And I finally stopped trying to figure out the cover of The New Yorker and started to read the articles.
Professor Geoffrey Walford was not my idea of an Oxford don. There was no pipe in his mouth, and he did not walk around in black robes. He was rail thin, wore blue jeans every day, insisted on his students calling him Geoffrey, and, unlike many professors, was totally committed to helping me both to complete a quality dissertation and have a good experience in graduate school. I remember my first meeting with him. He had his glasses on and my file open on his desk. “American,” he said, and looked up. I nodded.
“Rhodes scholar,” he continued. I was hoping that would impress him. Something about his arched eyebrows told me that getting impressed wasn’t really his thing.
“I’ve supervised other American Rhodes scholars,” he told me. “The problem with your type is that you tire of libraries and computers quite quickly. You are always off trying to do something, being involved in ‘the world’s fight’ I believe you call it. Whatever you want to do is fine with me really. Let’s just make sure you don’t waste your time here. You should get a doctorate in a topic that will actually hold your interest and ideally connect with your career. That means one thing if you want to be an academic and another thing if you are going in a different direction.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. The biggest horror story I’d heard from friends of mine in doctoral programs was that their professors thought the academic life was the only life worth living. Too often, graduate school is like one long hazing experience intended to turn you into a clone of your academic adviser. Yet here was a professor, a don at Oxford no less, basically encouraging me down a career path of social change and offering to help me get a doctorate on a topic that interested me on the way.
“Well, the thing I’ve been thinking about most is the relationship between religious identity and interfaith cooperation,” I said. Geoffrey listened with interest. His own current research was on the growth of faith-based schools, both Muslim and Christian, in Europe. As a qualitative sociologist, he had spent a significant amount of time as a participant-observer in these schools and interviewed several key players. He suggested identifying an educational space that nurtured both religious identity and encouraged interfaith relations. And, because the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford was working in partnership with several Ismaili institutions, Geoffrey knew about the recent developments in Ismaili religious education. He suggested that I explore those.
The first time I met Azim Nanji, I got the sense that he was a man who would play a key role in my life. A well-regarded professor of Islamic studies who had chaired the Department of Religion at the University of Florida, Azim had recently been appointed by the Ismaili Imam as the director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. I went to see him in the fall of my first year at Oxford and told him that I was interested in doing a doctorate on Ismaili religious education programs. He nodded his approval. Ismaili religious education had gone through a profound change over the past two decades, transforming from a casual affair that essentially imparted the rites and ceremonies of one ethnic group of Ismailis into an intellectually challenging, broad-ranging program that explored the history, aesthetics, and ethics of Islam. Azim and the Institute of Ismaili Studies had been at the center of this transformation.
But Azim knew that I was interested in something more significant than a doctorate. I was embarking on an intensely personal journey. The perspective I brought to Islam had been shaped by my admiration for Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama, as well as my friendships with Kevin and Brother Wayne. I loved the spirituality and social justice in Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism. I had had no interest in Islam until my most recent trip to India, when I had found Muslim prayer surfacing in my Buddhist meditation, when the Dalai Lama had told me to be a good Muslim, and when I had seen my grandmother model what that meant. Now I wanted to learn about the tradition behind her spiritual equanimity and service ethic. Were there heroes in my faith like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr.? Did it have poets like Tagore and Blake? Philosophers like Maimonides and Aquinas? Had my faith helped free countries the way that Gandhi’s Hinduism had? Did it have mouth-widening beauty, like the Sistine Chapel? I knew nothing of Islam except that it lived in my bones. I desperately wanted it to be magnificent.
Without my expla
ining any of this directly, Azim somehow understood that this was the animating impulse behind my dissertation topic. He looked at me intently as I explained what I wanted to research, then said, “So many of us begin our careers by studying our history and then locating ourselves within it. My own dissertation was in a similar area. You are living at a time when Islam can go in many different directions, and it will be young people like you who are shaping its next steps. Having an understanding of the humanistic dimensions of Muslim history and how to teach them most effectively is about as important an education as you can get. I want you to know that my door is always open to you.”
The early influences on our religious path make all the difference. That truism is shockingly illustrated by the example of Yusuf Islam.
When I was a child, my father and I spent a lot of our time together listening to music. For my tenth birthday, he got me Led Zeppelin II and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads. About that time, he started taking me to concerts. I remember singing along to “Gypsy” by the Moody Blues and chanting with the crowd for the Kinks to do an encore. I learned to love live music. Whenever my dad put on a new record, I would ask if we could go see the musician play. Often he would tell me that the band had broken up because one of the members had died, as in the case of John Bonham and Led Zeppelin or Jim Morrison and the Doors. But I never quite understood his explanation for why we couldn’t go see Cat Stevens, my favorite singer-songwriter.