Volunteers of Sikh organisation Khalsa aid helping Rohingya refugees at Teknaf, a border town in Bangladesh (Express Photo)

Despite only making up a small percentage of the global population, Sikhs continue to serve at the forefront of humanitarian crises, from hurricanes and tsunamis to floods and terrorist attacks.

Why is this the case? Their altruism comes from the tradition of seva, a practice of justice work that is at the very core of the Sikh tradition. This piece will explain and explore how seva is articulated and formulated in Sikh teachings, how Sikhs use it to conceptualize justice and activism, and the ways we can witness seva in the world today.

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The Ideas That Ground Seva

The numeral 1 is the first character in the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh scripture), and it is the cornerstone of Sikhi (the Sikh religious tradition). 1 points to the oneness of the world, the connectedness of reality, the intermingling of creator and creation.

The opening numeral is tied to another character, oankar, and together, the characters form 1 oankar, referring to a single divine force. This logic leads to a concept of divinity that connects all that exists.

The Sikh view is that divinity permeates every aspect of our world. Perhaps the most relatable way of understanding this concept is to think on an atomic level: if everything we know is composed of atoms, then think of each atom as being infused with divinity. In the Sikh worldview, all is divine and pure. Nothing is inherently profane or evil.

The logic of this outlook is clearly expressed in a scriptural composition by Bhagat Kabir, a renowned devotional poet of early modern North India.[2]

ਅਵਲਿ ਅਲਹ ਨੂਰੁ ਉਪਾਇਆ ਕੁਦਰਤਿ ਕੇ ਸਭ ਬੰਦੇ ॥
ਨੂਰ ਤੇ ਸਭੁ ਜਗੁ ਉਪਜਿਆ ਕਉਨ ਭਲੇ ਕੋ ਮੰਦੇ॥੧॥

ਲੋਗਾ ਭਰਮਿ ਨ ਭੂਲਹੁ ਭਾਈ ॥
ਖਾਲਿਕੁ ਖਲਕ ਖਲਕ ਮਹਿ ਖਾਲਿਕੁ ਪੂਰਿ ਰਹਿਓ ਸ੍ਰਬ ਠਾਂਈ ॥੧॥ ਰਹਾਉ ॥

First Allah created the light and all the people of the world.
If the whole world is born from the one light, then who is good or bad?
O Siblings, don’t be deluded by doubt —
The creator is in the creation, the creation is in the creator – deeply embedded in all space.

The vision of divine interconnectedness extends to a view of all people as divine. There is no such concept as original sin, nor is there any space for social discrimination based on notions of purity. The idea of divine presence is central to the Sikh principle of absolute equality.

The goal of Sikh life is to go beyond any egocentric way of seeing the world and to realize the oneness of the world. Sikh teachings refer to this state of realization with many words, including simran (remembrance), anand (bliss), and sahaj (equipoise). Sikh teachings describe this realization as a form of deep love that is joyful, self-effacing, and all-consuming.

This notion of love as the end-goal appears throughout the Guru Granth Sahib. For example, the fifth Sikh guru, Guru Arjan Sahib, writes:

ਰਾਜੁ ਨ ਚਾਹਉ ਮੁਕਤਿ ਨ ਚਾਹਉ ਮਨਿ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਿ ਚਰਨ ਕਮਲਾਰੇ ॥

 

I don’t want power, and I don’t desire salvation. All I want is to be in love at your lotus-feet.

A Sikh aims to live with love through a daily practice of experiencing love and oneness within one’s own life.

Oneness and love are the two building blocks of Sikh living.

Seeing the world as divine informs the ways that Sikhs aim to interact with the world. One can honor the creator by honoring the creation. One can serve Vahiguru by serving those around them. The two are one in the same.

Service, for Sikhs, becomes a way to express love. Service is prayerful action. Service is worship manifest.

As I already mentioned, the Sikh tradition has a specific term for this work, seva. Except, Sikhs will say that “service” and “activism” are not adequate translations of that term because they fail to sufficiently capture the logic and spirit underlying it. Thus, Sikhs have generally translated seva into English as “selfless service,” which does a better job of articulating the distinction between activism and seva.

At the risk of being overly simplistic, let me put it like this: activism is about the action itself, whereas seva takes into account the motivation as well as the action. In the Sikh tradition, it’s not the action alone that constitutes seva – the intention is just as important. True service is motivated by love.

ਏਹ ਕਿਨੇਹੀ ਚਾਕਰੀ ਜਿਤੁ ਭਉ ਖਸਮ ਨ ਜਾਇ ॥

ਨਾਨਕ ਸੇਵਕੁ ਕਾਢੀਐ ਜਿ ਸੇਤੀ ਖਸਮ ਸਮਾਇ ॥੨॥

What kind of a servant is that in which fear of the master does not dissipate?
O Nanak, the real servant is the one who always remains connected with the master.

Serving with love is not just about eliminating fear. It is also about eliminating the sense of self. This is what Sikhs mean when they describe seva as selfless service. It ties directly to the idea of realizing divine oneness by effacing human ego. To truly serve with love is to not see a distinction between the self and the other.

ਚਾਕਰੁ ਲਗੈ ਚਾਕਰੀ ਨਾਲੇ ਗਾਰਬੁ ਵਾਦੁ ॥
ਗਲਾ ਕਰੇ ਘਣੇਰੀਆ ਖਸਮ ਨ ਪਾਏ ਸਾਦੁ ॥
ਆਪੁ ਗਵਾਇ ਸੇਵਾ ਕਰੇ ਤਾ ਕਿਛੁ ਪਾਏ ਮਾਨੁ ॥
ਨਾਨਕ ਜਿਸ ਨੋ ਲਗਾ ਤਿਸੁ ਮਿਲੈ ਲਗਾ ਸੋ ਪਰਵਾਨੁ ॥੧॥

 

If a servant performs service with ego and anger and excessive speech, the master will not be happy.
If one performs seva while removing the sense of self, the honor is obtained.
O Nanak: One who serves with love receives honor and is truly accepted.

The tension here, of course, is that this love is not just about loving the other. It is also about loving the self. So how can we define service as selfless when it is also, in a way, self-serving? Sikhs answer that question by flipping its attendant assumption – when one sees the world through a lens of interconnectedness, then what is the difference between the self and the other?

When one sees no difference between the self and the other, it becomes crystal-clear that our experiences are interconnected. And if my liberation is tied to your liberation, and if your suffering is tied to my suffering, then the only way forward is through loving, selfless service – or seva.

The Sikh idea of seva, then, brings together the realms of spirituality and justice. This concept is so central to the tradition that Sikhi coined its own terms to articulate this worldview. For example, some of the first vocabulary words I learned as a child included seva-simran (service-remembrance), miri-piri (political-spiritual), sant-sipahi (saint-soldier). Every Sikh is expected to live in a way that holds together these seemingly disparate aspects of life; every Sikh is expected to cultivate their own spirituality while also serving the communities around them.

As with all ideologies, this worldview sounds theoretically sensible but one might want to ask “Is it achievable? How does it play itself out in the real world?” Like many other religious communities, Sikhs look to the lives of their prophets to see how these ideas manifested themselves by exemplars of their faith.

One striking example is that of Guru Nanak (d. 1539 CE), the founder of the Sikh tradition. One of the first anecdotes (sakhis) that Sikhs learn about his life recounts that, as a boy, young Nanak’s father gave him some cash to go invest in the town. Nanak then walks to the town and on his way comes across a group of spiritual mendicants (sadhus). He gives this group all of his money with the understanding that they need it more than him. He returns home, and his father becomes furious upon learning that his son had wasted all his money. Young Nanak simply replies by asking, “What could be a better investment than giving to those who need more than us. This is the true investment (sacha sauda).”

This memory of Guru Nanak as a young boy continues to be invoked by Sikhs to share the importance of charitable giving and of recognizing one’s own privilege. And the term Guru Nanak is purported to have used – sacha sauda – remains a common term in Sikh vocabulary to refer to a form of generosity tied to a feeling of connectedness and love.

Another example central to Sikh memory comes from the life of the ninth guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur (d. 1675 CE). According to Sikh traditions, Hindu hill rajas came to seek his help when they were being persecuted by the Mughal state, which at the time was under the leadership of Aurangzeb (d. 1707). Sikhs were not, themselves, being oppressed, but Guru Tegh Bahadur recognized the persecuted Hindus as siblings in humanity. He protested the state’s attacks on Hindus, and for his troubles he and other Sikh disciples were detained, executed, and tortured.

Sikhs remember Guru Tegh Bahadur’s death as a form of martyrdom, in which he gave up his life defending the Sikh ideals of religious freedom and the elevation of all humanity (sarbatt da bhalla). These ideals are built upon the cornerstone of love and oneness.

Before his death, Guru Tegh Bahadur wrote a composition called Salok Mahala 9. Among other things, he discussed in it the interplay of love, fear, and action. He wrote:

ਭੈ ਕਾਹੂ ਕਉ ਦੇਤ ਨਹਿ ਨਹਿ ਭੈ ਮਾਨਤ ਆਨ ॥

ਕਹੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਸੁਨਿ ਰੇ ਮਨਾ ਗਿਆਨੀ ਤਾਹਿ ਬਖਾਨਿ ॥੧੬॥

 

One who neither fears anyone nor causes anyone else to feel fear – Nanak says, o listen my heart-mind, recognize this person as wise.

For Guru Tegh Bahadur, a divine life has no space for fear, particularly because it causes one to see division rather than oneness. A true servant, as we said before, is one who is motivated by love.

I frequently reflect on these models and others like them as a way to shape and guide my own justice work. I try to ground my own activism within the core ideals of oneness and love, and I do what I can to practice other Sikh principles that emerge from them – like fearlessness and standing up for the oppressed. Perhaps the most obvious example of this has to do with my work in confronting racism and Islamophobia. I continually stand up for Muslims based on the hate they receive despite the negative consequences I have endured for doing so. While it might be easier to redirect the anti-Muslim hate I encounter towards our Muslim sisters and brothers, I – and many other Sikhs I know – have made the choice to stand with them, despite possible harms, because we believe it’s the right thing to do.

This response is not necessarily a natural or intuitive one. Rather, it is a purposeful decision that Sikhs around the world have made on the basis of our principles and the examples set by our gurus. How can I justify not working for the equal treatment for those who are oppressed and marginalized when Guru Tegh Bahadur ultimately gave his life to ensure equal rights for all? And as we learned in the example of Guru Nanak above, what better business is there than serving those who need it most?

In a context where we are interrogating the inequities embedded within our own systems, it seems prudent that we keep in mind how the Sikh gurus imagined the world and created structures that helped enact these values while challenging existing inequities.

In understanding the Sikh model of justice – seva – through the lens of Sikh traditions we arrive at a better understanding of the Sikh worldview, one in which service emerges as a natural expression of oneness and love. This is a critical point for knowing who Sikhs are and why they act the way they do.

Moreover, the logic that underlies the beautiful spirit of seva is not owned by Sikhs alone. Any Sikh would tell you that they believe that these ideas are universal; Sikhi does not lay any exclusive claim to this worldview they welcome others to take freely from it.

I draw another important lesson from the lives of the gurus that informs my own activism today. The gurus were not shy about social and political critique, particularly when it was focused on issues related to discrimination and inequities. Rather than simply pointing the finger and simply criticizing everything they encountered (as we are often inclined to do), they followed up their critiques by offering practical solutions that empowered the marginalized.

They rejected poverty and caste hierarchies and established the institution of langar, where all people would sit together as equals and be served food. They eradicated last names, and instead gave collective surnames – Kaur for women, Singh for men – that reflected a shared familyhood. These names were drawn from traditional royal names in South Asia, and also indicated to each individual that they were powerful and sovereign.

The Sikhs gurus were builders. The spirit of oneness and love infused their seva – and this enabled them to build institutions beyond divisions, hierarchies, and supremacies.

And this is where the difference between seva and activism becomes significant. I believe that in order to build a more just society, we must build our structures upon the foundation of oneness and love. Seva is about the ethic as much as it is about the action; the inspiration and intention matters just as much as the act itself. Therefore the model of seva helps ensure that we are not simply creating new movements or institutions that carry the same fissures and cracks that we see so clearly today.

The notion of oneness allows us to celebrate diversity while being inclusive and intersectional. To see our own lives as intersecting and being bound up with people we do not know and may never meet – this is what compels Sikhs to do what’s right, whether it is rallying for racial justice or creating community food banks. It is in this spirit of authentic generosity that seva has become the signature of Sikhs all over the world.

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[1] The Sikh volunteers have continued this work, despite the fact that some of the refugees they are serving have mistaken them for members of the Islamic State.

[2] While the Guru Granth Sahib was compiled by the Sikh gurus, it is not exclusively comprised of their writings. The scripture is an anthology that includes writings from more then a dozen other spiritual figures of diverse backgrounds.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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Simran Jeet Singh is a professor of religion at Trinity University and Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization based in New York City. This year, Simran serves as the Henry R. Luce Fellow for Religion and International Affairs at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. He frequently contributes opinion pieces to various news outlets, and he has become a consistent expert for reporters around the world in television, radio, and print media. Simran is also on the board for Religion Newswriters Association, the premier organization for religion journalists in America,

The post Why Sikhs Serve: The Tradition of Seva as Justice Inspired by Love appeared first on The Revealer.

It’s OK to feel confused this time of year. Perhaps, depending on where you live, the weather seems a little disorienting, with spates of balmy sunshine upending your normal expectations of winter. Perhaps the displays and merchandise in stores in your area turned over to Christmas themes earlier than usual, or at odd intervals, resulting in a bewildering mishmash of cues as to which holidays Capitalism thinks everyone should be celebrating, or at least anticipating. Or perhaps Daylights Savings simply threw you for a loop you still haven’t gotten over. Our body clocks mark time not just by reference to the rising and setting of the sun, but by social cues scientists called zeitgebers ­­– calendars, clocks, holidays, more. December in America, where temporality is attenuated by so many competing and overdetermined markers, is always a month when time can feel a little out of joint, a little dysphoric.

The signals coming from the bully pulpit of the highest office in the land aren’t helping. This past November’s National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony was the ninety-fifth Tree Lighting event since President Calvin Coolidge instituted the tradition. Yet to hear Trump tell it, the Presidential celebration of Christmas lapsed into obscurity long ago. As he told the Values Voters summit this past September, “You know, we’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore. They don’t use the word ‘Christmas’ because it’s not politically correct…Well, guess what? We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” Fulfilling his pledge of “stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values,” Trump, who says the Bible is his “favorite book” but has had a hard time saying anything specific about it (beyond that he likes the idea of an eye for an eye) officiated at what the White House’s press office described as “reviv[ing] the tradition’s religious spirit.” And he laid it on thick accordingly.

Of course, this is all nonsense – the only real faith at play here is bad. The narrative that previous administrations have been forces of anti-Christmas sentiment, like the idea of a “War on Christmas” itself, is a longstanding canard, just so much cheap culture war bait. Barack Obama, for one, wished Americans Merry Christmas all the time.

Trump’s particular fixation on his predecessor’s supposed lack of respect for the holiday has always been a transparent synecdoche for his broader program of insisting that America’s first black President was racially and religiously suspect. It’s never been subtle – as when, in 2011, Trump accused Obama of honoring Kwanzaa but ignoring Christmas (spoiler: Obama actually began his Christmas Tree Lighting that same year by wishing America Merry Christmas no less than two times in a row).

Who knows what Trump actually believes about Obama and Christmas. He’s still, it’s been reported, putting stock in birtherism (at least when talking to his confidants). But the paradox of Trump will always be that, for a man who appears to have no filters when it comes to broadcasting his internal monologue on Twitter, his actual interiority remains as impenetrable as the black box of an airplane wrecked miles beneath the ocean. His actions and beliefs will always exist in some indeterminate no-mans-land between grandiose self-delusion and cynical pandering. The more interesting question is what to make of the people whom he is pandering to, whose belief in an American Christianity under siege his fact-free utterances confirm and fuel, no matter how much fact-checking or even video tape evidence is provided to the contrary.

What’s at stake here is what the philosophers of science (drawing on the work of CS Peirce) would call the question of “fixation of belief” – the question, put crudely, of how we adjudicate evidence for our beliefs about the world, and how we decide what counts as evidence in the first place. Assessing the durable fixation of a belief (“Barack Obama Waged War on Christmas”) despite abundant evidence otherwise, two possible explanations suggest themselves (and they’re not mutually exclusive).

The first is to blame a poverty (or echo chamber) of evidence that is misleading or incomplete. Consuming “news” tailored to highly partisan audiences, this interpretation runs, people simply have never gotten the data about what Obama actually said or did. The matter, in other words, is about information silos, and a hermetic fracturing of information about a shared empirical world. In a moment of ever-more totalizing news market segmentation, this certainly is a problem.

But the more radical and more troubling prospect is that evidence really doesn’t matter – or rather, that what constitutes “evidence” is itself configured quite differently for people in different positions. What critics might offer as “evidence” to “correct” this putatively mistaken belief (that Obama ignored Christmas) takes the order of reasoning backwards. For some, Obama’s supposed anti-Christmas impiety isn’t a conclusion to be drawn from a stockpile of evidence; it is a conviction that evidence can only confirm, or that, at worst, exist as a supplement to. The evidence, in other words, merely proves the rule (“Obama didn’t celebrate Christmas, this video of him saying ‘Merry Christmas’ is just a sideshow”) or, even worse, underscores and expands it (“Obama didn’t celebrate Christmas, and this video of him saying it, when he clearly doesn’t mean it, is actually him disrespecting it even more”).

We enter here into a realm of what the Classicist and historian of Greek religion, Paul Veyne, would call “the realm of plural truths,” or “multiple truth-plans.” In his magisterial Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, Veyne not only answers the eponymous question (yes, of course they did) but also unpacks the thornier question of how they believed in them. Veyne flags an obvious problem: the same Greeks whom Europeans so often praise as the inaugurators of Western Reason, the first creators of traditions of inquiry from geometry to philosophy to arithmetic, also seemed perfectly comfortable with talking, in a quite matter-of-fact way, about things that were decidedly unreasonable. And not just Zeus turning into a shower of gold to impregnate a princess, or a snake-haired Medusa transforming men into stone, but heroes – mortal men – standing ten feet tall, killing oxen with a single punch, and likewise. A Greek might admit that they had never seen Zeus or the Medusa, Veyne observes, and so could plead out of stipulating what might be plausible for their powers to entail, but they had certainly seen plenty of their fellow mortals, and knew from experience that none had powers such as these.

Rather than attributing to their belief in myths a merely figurative status, or seeing Greek authors as all hiding a secret skepticism, Veyne takes them at their word and postulates that, for the Greeks, their gods and superhuman heroes were real, as real as their everyday lives, but in way where those realities complemented and coexisted with each other rather than existing in contradictory tension. For the Greeks, Veyne writes:

[There existed] a horizon of collective memory a world that was even more beautiful than that of the good old days, too beautiful to be real. This mythical world was not empirical; it was noble. This is not to say that it incarnated or symbolized “values.” The heroic generations did not cultivate virtue any more than do the men of today, but they had more “value” than the men of today. A hero is more real than a man, just as, in Proust’s eyes, a duchess has more value than a bourgeoise.

Veyne, for his part, does not restrict this capacity for a fungible notion of reality to the Classical era; he sees it operating in his contemporaries in modern Europe. And with this in mind, we could also say that, for some Americans, a similar perspective holds. The “truth” of Obama’s failure to celebrate Christmas isn’t, for them, an empirical matter; it is an ignoble one. As a villain, he is more real than the person who appears in videos of him; he has more existential value and urgent meaning as an anti-Christian icon than he ever could as a flesh and blood man.

Our discourse does not, of course, like thinking about Americans’ perceptions of reality as being at once so straightforward and yet so alienated (and alienating). Suggesting the real-world, politically significant existence of simultaneous plural realities is the type of thing that gets one labeled a postmodern cultural relativist, a trainwreck of a label that will cause most people’s eyes to glaze over and a small, elite minority to go into conniptions.

The more common impulse is to, instead, speak in the quasi-pathologizing language of “derangement syndromes.” The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer inaugurated this move back in 2003, describing what he called “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Krauthammer defined Bush derangement syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush.” One of the prominent Patient Zeros Krauthammer fingered as suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome was then-Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean, who had who had voiced (elliptically) an “interest” in supposed Saudi warnings to the Bush administration pre-9/11. Make what you will of Krauthammer’s mockery of Dean’s fuzzily conspiratorial suspicions, which crudely refracted what remains a murky chapter in US-Saudi relations. But Krauthammer also used the idea of Bush Derangement Syndrome to discredit, among others, journalists and commentators like Bill Moyers – a move which now looks transparently sleazy. Indeed, while in 2003 Krauthammer dismissed Moyers as “ranting,” events since then have proven Moyer’s skepticism about the Iraq war entirely justified, and his warnings about a “right-wing wrecking crew” now seem downright prescient. Krauthamer’s piece may not have aged well, but since it proved an effective rhetorical cudgel, the concept of a “derangement syndrome” stuck. Indeed, under the Obama years, takes about Obama derangement syndrome were ubiquitous, even though a running theme seemed to be trying to talk around how many Americans simply despised Obama because he was black. You can find “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takes around now, too – in no small part because, whatever its status as a nosological category, Trump himself seems to still suffer from an acute case. The hothouse ecology that is early twenty-first century American political life seems to be a petri dish for such maladies.

But glib diagnostics of “derangement syndromes” aside, the distressing problem of what to make of our coexistence in a nation of plural realities – some shared, some opposed, some complementary – abides. It is a queasy feeling to realize that, mutatis mutandis, your disgust or antipathy for the current President may be just as intense, as visceral, and as taxing as your political opponent’s feelings towards the previous one. Your hate may be the one that’s pure, as Alexander Cockburn would famously put it, but this is grim consolation when taken in context. Indeed, it may well be that the function of American politics now consists precisely in mobilizing such feelings of all-consuming intense partisan hatred in four-and-eight year cycles of triumph and exhaustion, the better to perpetuate an underlying state of affairs which we would rather not confront. Which suggests, beyond the debates and debunking, and beneath the seasonal and temporal dysphoria, a deeper consensus, and a longer-term trajectory. Because after the dust from this latest round of nonsense over the war on Christmas has settled, we will enter yet another year of an America at endless, and very real, war.

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Political Feelings is about political affect and the politics of affect in America. You can read previous installments here.

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Political Feelings: Derangement Syndromes appeared first on The Revealer.

James Martin knew that his book, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LBGT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity, would trigger strong reactions. We live, he points out, in a world where maintaining civility among those who disagree seems increasingly difficult. “Not too long ago, opposing factions would often interact with one another politely and work together for the common good. Certainly there were tensions, but a kind of quiet courtesy and tacit respect prevailed. Now all one seems to find is contempt.” Martin, editor at large at America: The Jesuit Review, would like the Church to be different, for it to be “a sign of unity.” He knew that arguments were sure to surround his book, but he hoped that the participants would take to heart the values of “respect,” “compassion,” and “sensitivity,” values the Catechism of the Catholic Church demands with regard to “homosexual” persons.

Since the book’s publication, Martin has been accused of spreading confusion, ignoring “intrinsic evil,” and advocating “homosexualism.” Fantasies of him being beaten “like a rented mule” by a Dominican have been tweeted into the ether. His sexual orientation has been questioned, and he has been called “pansified” for protesting this kind of abuse. All of this has been done to him by self-identified Catholics.

That’s not to say that the Catholic response has been universally negative. The cover of the book carries positive blurbs written by two cardinals and a bishop. Since then, more prelates have come to Martin’s defense. Others have been respectful, but less friendly. Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments wrote a carefully worded critique, singling out, among other things, the book’s failure to clearly articulate the official church teaching on same-sex acts and its silence about Catholics who are “same-sex attracted” but choose to live in chaste celibacy as the Catechism demands. Sharper criticisms were made by Thomas Tobin, bishop of Providence, who likened the book to “a bridge to nowhere.” (Bishop Tobin is not to be confused with William Tobin, cardinal archbishop of Newark, who celebrated Mass for a group of LGBT Catholics this summer).

Given these sorts of reactions, you might be forgiven for expecting Martin’s book to be universally praised by LGBT Catholics. That has not been the case. Jamie Manson, books editor at the National Catholic Reporter, who is lesbian, complained that, “for some Catholics, particularly longtime LGBT activists, certain sections may… read like fiction.” She noted that Martin holds a privileged position in the church, enjoying relationships with “many cardinals, archbishops, and bishops,” and that he claims that all the members of the hierarchy in his circle of acquaintance “are sincere in their desire for true pastoral outreach” to LGBT Catholics. Manson sees this as an attempt to convince LGBT Catholics that, “in their lack of access to the power center of the church, [they] are simply ignorant of what’s really going on in the hearts of these men.” Her response is a detailed list of recent episcopal activity, collective and individual, including renewed efforts to defend “traditional marriage” and “religious freedom,” the firing of church workers if they legally marry their same-sex partners, discussions of “the problem of ‘transgenderism’” at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, and moves to deny the Eucharist and Catholic funerals to people in same-sex marriages.

It’s not immediately clear what the media storm surrounding Martin’s book says about Catholics in the pews, but it does show that the online presence of Catholics is no less divided, divisive, and vitriolic, than the culture at large. If the book has not always succeeded in inspiring the kind of civil dialogue Martin envisioned, it might be because he underestimated the complexity of the contemporary Church in two important ways. Framed as a two-sided conversation between the “institutional church” and LGBT Catholics, Building a Bridge virtually ignores the role played in that dialogue by what is arguably the most prominent group of contemporary Catholics: married heterosexuals. Martin’s book scarcely mentions them, except in so far as they count among the “families, friends, and allies” of LGBT Catholics. Nor does it seem that Martin anticipated the out-sized role played by a few prominent converts in arbitrating the boundary between the Church and the non-Catholic culture. The issues that matter to these two groups – married heterosexuals and converts to Catholicism – are interrelated in unexpected ways that have a serious impact on the place of LGBT Catholics in the Church.

It would be wrong to deny that some Church leaders are genuinely concerned about the opinions and well-being of LGBT Catholics, but the truth is that the latter only make up a small portion of the total U.S. Catholic population. U.S. bishops have much more to fear from dissenting married heterosexuals. Figures released by PRRI in February 2017 showed not only that a majority of lay Catholics support the legal right of same-sex couples to marry, but that they are more likely to do so than the general population. More troubling still for the Church leadership is that young Catholics are no exception to the general rule that Millennials (71%) are more likely to support same-sex marriage than their elders. In an essay condemning Martin’s harshest critics, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego noted that, “When we survey the vast gulf that exists between young adults and the church in the United States, it is clear that there could be no more compelling missionary outreach for the future of Catholicism than the terrain that Father Martin has passionately and eloquently pursued over the past two decades.” It’s hard to miss the point. Whatever McElroy’s feelings about LGBT Catholics, his most urgent concern is that heterosexual lay people, by and large, no longer share the vision of human sexuality promulgated by the bishops, who risk becoming increasingly irrelevant in the future.

That most Catholic lay people support civil marriage for gay and lesbian couples does not, of course, mean they support the sacramental blessing of those marriages in church. (To be clear, the book never advocates that practice.) The rules governing marriage are a tender subject in the Church, since they often serve as a mark that distinguishes Catholics from the “World.” Any alteration in that discipline is bound to trigger negative reaction in some parts of the Catholic media. Two years ago, for example, when the Synod on the Family considered permitting some Catholics who have divorced and remarried without the annulment of their first marriage to receive Communion, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recalled the role the divorce and marriage of Henry VIII played in the split between Rome and the English church, and warned of potential schism, possibly under the leadership of pope emeritus Benedict XVI. The more the practice of marriage among Catholics looks like secular marriage, the less real the distinction between the “Church” and the “World” seems. If offering the Eucharist to divorced and remarried Catholics inspires talk of schism, it is not hard to imagine what the blessing of same-sex marriages would do.

It’s no coincidence that Douthat is a convert from Protestantism, one who has publicly stated that Catholicism attracted him by its claims to historical continuity. It’s an old trope, one echoed by R.R. Reno, chief editor of First Things, who likened the Anglican Church, which he left for Catholicism, to a “ruin.” While neither Douthat nor Reno has personally weighed in on Martin’s book, First Things has published at least five items on Martin and his approach to LGBT issues since July, none of which can be called a ringing endorsement. Less well known perhaps is Dwight E. Longenecker, an American who was raised evangelical, ordained in the Church of England, and converted to Catholicism, saying that “the Anglican Church and I were on divergent paths.” Writing for Crux, Longenecker rejected Martin’s criticism of the term “same-sex attraction,” arguing that “Catholics believe every person is greater than their sexual inclinations” and that “it is degrading to identify a person only by their sexual urges.” He also took Martin to task for not recognizing the work of Courage and EnCourage, ministries intended to help Catholics attracted to the same sex to live a chaste celibacy. His arguments are consistent with the promotion of Rome as a bulwark against change.

For converts like Reno and Longenecker, resistance to any softening of Church attitudes regarding LGBT Catholics is part and parcel of a fight that began in the Reformation. There is, however, a certain confusion in the sense of Catholic identity they promote, suggesting as it does, on the one hand, that the “cultural Catholicism” of cradle Catholics is somehow lacking, while encouraging a kind of Catholic cultural tribalism on the other – a tribalism that defines itself, in part, as opposition to the increasing acceptance of same-sex relationships in “secular” society. Ironically, this vision of Catholicism even attracts some people who would otherwise identify as LGBT. About a month before the release of Building A Bridge, Daniel Mattson published, Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace (Ignatius Press, 2017), with a forward by Robert Cardinal Sarah. The cover design seems to make a sly joke at the author’s expense. It shows a headshot, presumably of Mattson, his face hidden behind a sticky name tag, as if he even now he does not want to be recognized. The story he tells, however, is revealing. Sexually attracted to men at a young age, Mattson eventually had a relationship with a man, but now claims to find serenity in a life without genital activity, one that follows the official teaching of the church. While converts like Douthat, Reno, and Longenecker praise of the constancy of Rome in the face of contemporary decadence, Matson taps into an older, more essential concept of “conversion” – the renunciation of one’s own sins.

It’s a claim sure to find objections from many LGBT Catholics, but it would be unfair simply to dismiss the book as a maneuver in Sarah’s controversy with Martin. One does not have to capitulate to official Catholic teaching on sexuality to admit that sin, a very traditional Catholic word, has infiltrated and distorted the institutions of queer life, just as it does all human institutions. Where the church has failed LGBT Catholics is not in telling them that they are sinners – as Catholics, they are already inclined to believe that – but in treating their sins as essentially different from those of heterosexuals. Martin cites as a positive thing the statement in the Catechism that “homosexual persons” should be protected from “unjust discrimination,” but overlooks the obvious implication of that claim, namely, that some discrimination is “just.” Many LGBT Catholics refuse to live with this double standard. According to Mark M. Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), LGBT respondents “raised Catholic” are significantly less likely to call themselves Catholic as adults than their heterosexual counterparts. Not surprisingly, those who do stay are less likely to attend Mass frequently. When trying to explain retention data for the population at large, Gray often turns to a “life-cycle” theory in which late adolescence and college bring about the disruption of “childhood pattern(s)of affiliation and worship.” Religious practice often picks up again when individuals marry, start families, and approach the end of life in old age. Needless to say, marriage, the raising of families, and end of life are precisely the moments when LGBT former-Catholics are most likely to run into official resistance from the church.

An honest refusal to discriminate would force the Church to articulate an ethic for all sexualities, rather than the present incoherent mix of natural law (understood strictly as procreation ethic) and romanticized gender complementarity that is belied at every turn. Martin’s attempt to focus on LGBT Catholics is a refreshing departure from the norm among clerical authors, and has the potential to move the conversation in that direction, (though saying this might encourage more hatred and anger from those who see no need for change). This potential is most manifest in the third section of the book, a series of scriptural meditations in the Ignatian tradition, intended to guide LGBT Catholics and their family, friends, and allies in prayer. At the end of the first meditation, Martin asks LGBT Catholics, “When you think of your own sexual orientation, what word do you use? Why? Can you speak to God about this in prayer?” For many Catholics, naming one’s sexuality before God might be a new and powerful idea. But so long as the same questions are not put to Catholics who are not LGBT, their LGBT siblings will remain a shuttlecock in the tense entente between celibate clergy, married heterosexuals, and the “World.”

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Michael Pettinger is a scholar and writer, working in patristics, the history of Catholicism, and issues of sexuality. Along with Kathy T. Talvacchia and Mark Larrimore, he was co-editor of Queer Christianities. He has taught at the New School in New York, and John Cabot University in Rome. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Siege at the Bridge: James Martin and the Fight Over LGBT Catholics appeared first on The Revealer.

The two councils sent their decrees to the Apostolic See and the decrees quickly came back. The cause is finished; would that the error were as quickly finished.—Augustine, early 5th century, Sermon 131:10, at the time of the Pelagian Heresy

The Catholic Church’s enormous global influence over healthcare is currently under threat due to, of all things, a dispute with board members of a civil corporation in Belgium.

If I sound overly dramatic, it’s for a good – and hopeful – reason.

The Brothers of Charity is a global order of Catholic men that sponsors 15 psychiatric hospitals in Belgium. The Brothers of Charity Group, not to be confused with the order of Catholic men, runs the hospitals, but only three of its fifteen board members are actual Brothers.

When the hospitals’ board declared last spring that it would permit euthanasia in its facilities, the three Brothers of Charity members asked their colleagues to reverse the decision. The board refused, and the Brothers appealed to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which declared the board’s decision a violation of Catholic doctrine and, in October, summoned the board to the Vatican.

For years I’ve been an alarmist—justifiably, I still believe—about the role of the Catholic Church in the delivery of health care. More than 600 hospitals and hundreds more elder or assisted living facilities in the US are sponsored by the Church. Although the majority of patients served at these facilities are not Catholic, Church sponsorship of hospitals influences everything from access to women’s reproductive health services like abortion, tubal ligations, and access to the morning after pill for rape victims. Several lawsuits attacking the Affordable Care Act have permitted Catholic organizations (and private evangelical corporations) to deny women contraceptive coverage. And the most vocal opponents of aid in dying movements in states across the US are Catholic institutions and organizations. Patients seeking access to aid in dying will not find it at Catholic hospitals.

For just as long I’ve been trying to call attention to the fact that aid in dying has the potential to define, and re-define, the Church’s role in the delivery of health care.

Women’s health care rights will not do so; they continue to be eroded by the bulwarks of misogyny that render women’s needs secondary and egregious. But patients’ access to aid in dying, a service requested by both men and women, has successfully addressed patient suffering more broadly and has won some momentous victories in the past decade, providing necessary social and medical protections for patient autonomy.

This advancement of legal aid in dying has the potential to put Catholic facilities in a bind.

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Catholic sponsorship of a hospital can mean anything from name-only to bishops’ direct oversight, depending on a facility’s history. In the US, Catholic hospitals receive, on average, only about 3 percent of their funding from Catholic sources, yet their services can still be the purview of the local deacon. The challenge for Catholic hospitals—and the Church—comes when laws require their participation in legal medical practices that are considered problematic by the Church. Which is exactly what is happening in Belgium. The Catholic Church has consistently opposed the legalization of aid in dying, even as eight countries, largely in Europe and South America, and seven US states have legalized it in some form.^[1] Belgium and the Netherlands are the only two countries where non-terminal and mentally ill patients may use euthanasia to end their lives. If the board does not give in to the Vatican, the Church may withdraw the Brothers of Charity’s sponsorship of the hospital.

The visit of the Brothers of Charity Group’s board to the Vatican has not yet been scheduled, but reporting about the case has highlighted greater conflicts within the Church. Not all of these conflicts are substantial or even real, but the media’s partisan portrayal treats them like they are. As US media has polarized over the past decade, so has Catholic media.

America magazine, for instance, reported that, “A Belgian religious congregation is defying Pope Francis’ order to stop allowing euthanasia in its psychiatric hospitals, saying that its decision to do so is fully consistent with Catholic doctrine.” Such stories make it sound as though it was the order that defied the Vatican when, in fact, it was the 12 non-Catholic hospital group board members who were defiant. Stories like this wrongly throw the Orders’ board members under the wheels of the conservative Catholic bus along with the lay members.

Before issuing its summons, the Vatican ordered the board to return to compliance with Church law, prompting Herman Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime minister, former president of the European Council, a devout Catholic, and member of the hospitals’ board, to tweet: “The time of ‘Roma locuta causa finita’ [Rome has spoken, the cause is finished] is long past.” In response, Conservative Catholic publications chose headlines declaring things like: “Pope Attacked on Twitter about Euthanasia.”

Worth noting too is the social media flame war the election of Donald Trump has caused between conservative Catholics who allied with evangelicals to give Trump the White House and traditional Catholics who found Trump to be an abominable violation of Church morality.^[2]

However repugnant Ross Douthat, the hyper-conservative New York Times columnist, may be, he provided us with this adroit summation of Vatican politics in 2015, in the aftermath of the Pope’s second synod on the family:

The entire situation abounds with ironies. Aging progressives are seizing a moment they thought had slipped away, trying to outmaneuver younger conservatives who recently thought they owned the Catholic future. The African bishops are defending the faith of the European past against Germans and Italians weary of their own patrimony. A Jesuit pope is effectively at war with his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the erstwhile Inquisition — a situation that would make 16th century heads spin.

Douthat’s right to point out the way social media has compounded and fortified largely false notions of the Pope’s liberal effects.^[3] But what are facts in today’s polarized media climate, where Douthat’s juvenile expressions of exasperation will garner more than 600 comments in The New York Times?

The Vatican’s rifts are also evident in the endless scrapping over changes at the Pontifical Academy for Life, casting them as a tragic turn away from morality. Three months into his appointment, Archbishop Vicenzio Paglia ended the lifetime tenure of the academy’s 172 members, all John Paul II appointees and resoundingly, politically “pro-life.” Paglia also removed a loyalty pledge that was inaugurated by John Paul II with the Academy’s formation. Luke Gormally, a former member of the academy, told the National Catholic Register that Paglia’s removal of a fidelity pledge “means the academy would no longer have a ‘useful role” in providing an umbrella for the Catholic pro-life movement, which takes the ‘church’s authoritative teaching on contraception as foundational.’”^[4]

And just last month, an event organized by the Pontifical Academy for Life again highlighted discontent in the Church. It was timed to coincide with the first ever World Day of the Poor. The World Medical Association descended on the Vatican to discuss end of life issues with the Pope.

Conservative Catholic outlets covering the event focused on the pope’s condemnation of “overzealous treatment” of patients whose lives are ebbing. “It is morally licit to discontinue therapeutic measures when disproportionate,” he stated. (The Pope’s entire letter is here.) Not all conservatives are comfortable with such explicit support for removing dying or brain dead^[5] patients’ physiological support—certainly not after powerful conservatives in the US and around the world have invested so much over the past few decades into embedding their efforts in Church dogma and questionable but emotionally compelling cases—like that of Terri Schiavo or the child Charlie Gard.

But what non-Catholic and “secular” publications emphasized from the event last month was the Pope’s call for more equality in health care delivery around the world, at a time when US lawmakers are using every resource, including their hideous tax plan, to end any accessible form of insurance. “Pope denounces health care inequality in rich countries,” wrote Reuters. And, “Pope to lawmakers: protect all people with health care laws,” wrote the Washington Post

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The board that runs the fifteen Brothers of Charity hospitals decided to permit euthanasia in the wake of a 2016 lawsuit in Belgium that fined the St. Augustine rest home for preventing a woman from being euthanized. The Brothers of Charity order have already said that they may cease sponsorship of the hospitals if the board does not reverse its decision.

And this is why I am hopeful that Catholic sponsorship of hospitals may be vulnerable.

Undoubtedly, the political, medical, and religious climate in Belgium, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, is very different from here in the US. But those watching the Brothers of Charity case have long seen a moment of reckoning coming over the divergence in general medical practice and Catholic health care provision.

In the US, the majority Catholic Supreme Court (with its new resident expert on euthanasia, Neil Gorsuch) and a bevy of evangelical and Catholic Republican legislators (who employ a “pro-life” litmus test to prop up their legitimacy) protect Catholic sponsored hospitals from providing all medical services. Under the guise of “religious freedom” certain Christian entities, like Catholic hospitals, continue to operate in ways that harm or challenge those who have different views, lifestyles or beliefs. And yet, the Brother’s case could establish a new model for this longstanding relationship—one that may translate to our US climate.

It’s a hope. After watching patients’ rights suffer for decades because of our failure to separate a particular kind of Christian ideology from humane medical practice, any such hope is worth celebrating.

***

^[1] Aid in dying, euthanasia, and assisted suicide have definitionally and politically complicated uses around the world. Both opponents and the practice’s most strident supporters tend to use the terms interchangeably. While aid in dying (predominantly used by supporters in the US) refers to the legal ability of a doctor to prescribe lethal medication to a terminal patient, laws here require that the patient ingest the medication themselves. US opponents prefer the term assisted suicide because it best associates their understanding of the practice with suicide. Euthanasia is the predominant term used elsewhere in the world. It often implies that doctors may administer the lethal medication.

^[2] I am playing with the use of “traditional” here in an attempt to remind us of a time, some 60 or so years ago, when a significant number of Catholic adherents and leaders sought to modernize the faith and employ its social justice teachings for the betterment of all.

^[3] Don’t miss Douthat’s August column, “The Vatican’s America Problem,” for yet more explicit doomsaying.

^[4] According to Paglia, the pledge was always optional.

^[5] Since the early 1980s brain death has been the definition of death in the world medical community. Patients and families have, since the time of the court decision on Nancy Cruzan’s case, been legally able to remove or deny physiological support. Yet Catholic and evangelical conservatives have fought to remove patient autonomy by arguing that physiological support is largely therapeutic, “comfort care” and have used the emotional power of some prominent cases to erode medical ethics.

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Patient Body: “Rome has spoken, the cause is finished” appeared first on The Revealer.

By Haroon Moghul

How to be a Muslim: An American Story is a coming-of-age story about the ways in which a young, second-generation Pakistani-American struggled with everything that makes us human: Faith, romance, heartbreak–and hope. After a major life crisis, Haroon Moghul traveled to Dubai, desperate to find a reason to keep living. There, at rock bottom, in the middle of the sacred month of Ramadan, he headed to a mosque to hear a celebrity imam–who never showed up. 

WHO SHOT THE SHATRI

Abu Bakr Al-Shatri was famous, for which reason there was almost no chance of him leading prayers in American mosques, which were too small and too strapped for cash to afford such a mellifluous Qur’an reciter. But in Dubai? On Ramadan’s fifteenth night, my brother and I navigated our way to Rashidiyya, a neighborhood not far from DXB, and parked his SUV in a sandlot under the elevated Green Line. There with time to spare, I was so enthusiastic I was jittery; to be led in prayer by someone who’d for me thus far existed solely digitally? I wore a powder-blue kandoura with a kaffi yeh in silver and cream.

There was an openness in Dubai you could not find in the West, and even less so now. (Try walking around in New York City in shalwar qamis.) In Dubai, though, nobody cared. I had accumulated Punjabi kurtas, whimsical Turkish T-shirts, and the ubiquitous flowing garments that might’ve been what people here wore centuries ago, when they could not pore star-struck over prayer schedules, eager to find out when their favorite reciter would be at which mosque. I had spent much of my dwindling income on kaffi yehs. I’d learned to tie them in the local style, and had every conceivable color scheme. I spent extraordinary sums of money, relatively speaking, on the local colognes. I dabbed my fi nest on me that night, so overjoyed was I that I might be able to experience Islam in a way I never had before. But once prayers began, we had a problem: our imam was not Shatri.

This was the right night, I told myself, based on the fliers we’d consulted. And certainly we could not have gotten the mosque wrong. There were too many thousands of people packing the space. Never before had I experienced a religiously induced traffic jam; I liked that here, God caused gridlock. Maybe, my brother guessed, “Shatri will lead taraweeh,” what we’d really come for. How desperately I clung to this hope. I’d been enjoying a Dubaiian spin on Ramadan. Every mosque is in immaculate condition. Every reciter would command celebrity in America. They even perfume the mosques here: you walk out smelling better than you ever have. Given all this, and that this was my only Ramadan in a Muslim country thus far, Shatri’s absence was heartbreaking. Because once taraweeh started, it was the same imam. The wrong imam. The not-Shatri. While I appreciated this other imam’s mastery of Qur’anic craft, I hadn’t left an hour in advance, braved unfamiliar roads and nigh-comatose post-iftar drivers promiscuously drifting between lanes at unhealthy speeds while pondering the afterlife to listen to someone I’d never heard of.

His name, I found out much later, was Idrees Abkar. Maybe you like him and now don’t like me very much. But consider my point of view. I was frustrated I’d apparently missed my shot at Shatri and then I was more frustrated because I couldn’t stop feeling frustrated; focus on the prayer, I urged myself, and I focused so much on focusing that I lost it entirely. This was the fifteenth night, where the hell was Abu Bakr al-Shatri, why does my Islam suck, and why do things never work out and where did Zhaleh go and why did I ruin things for Hafsa and me and I totally just went to a bridge and almost jumped. After taraweeh comes witr, which is just Arabic for “odd.” Three cycles of prayer. (God, as One, is odd.) In the final cycle, before the penultimate prostration, the imam leads the congregation in audible supplication. Typically this involves the regurgitation of a series of prophetic pleas sung in a style nearly indistinguishable from Qur’an, though they are largely not of such provenance. Most such duas I’d been through were perfunctory affairs, me racing to translate the Arabic of each supplication in time to know whether I should say “Ya Allah!” or “Ameen” before the imam started on the next entreaty. Not this time.

In a postmatch interview, a top-ranked tennis player once described what it was like to lose to Rafael Nadal. “I am one of the top players in the world,” this athlete said, not to brag but to underscore what came next. For, he admitted, he had no idea what had happened on the court, except that all his considerable talent had come to naught, he was crushed by some kind of magic he had never before encountered, and to which he had no response. I do not, to this day, know what Idrees Abkar did. Except I was there for it. In his spoken supplication, the dua right before witr’s end, Abkar started talking to God, in a manner that suggested he not only forgot but didn’t care we were in the room, or maybe it was him yearning for the thousands behind him to ascend briefly to where he permanently resided.

If we could be inside his heart, if we could be offered transportation to the Rock, to fly from our Jerusalem to his heaven, this is what we might have absorbed. Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God and we happened to be behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly find places for our foreheads on flawless plush carpet. We were realizing that he was realizing, in the course of his supplicating, that he was talking to Him, and this nearly did him in. “I am speaking to my Creator.” “I am speaking to Him because He created Me.” What kind of person, given a gift, complains about it? Abkar started crying. Bawling, truly. What, after all, does it really mean to say “Allahu Akbar” and begin a prayer—talking to the One who made you? It would be bewildering. And amazing. “You. . . .” He whispered. Then he mumbled it. Then he screamed it. Then he tried it again because he could get no further. “You,” he managed, in between roiling sobs, “brought us from nonexistence into existence.”

This thought entering him stabbed us too, but he kept on, no rest for the bewildered, him tearing us open and fi ring a water cannon of tears into our hearts. Grown men began to weep. We were broken. But we knew it. We felt it.

We couldn’t resist it.

Abkar made what was foundational into what was conclusive, thundering it, panhandling for it, returning to it, swearing by it, running a giant circle around us and spinning us around with him. “You created us,” he said, and then what he said next I will never forget. “La ilaha illa anta.” “There is no God but You.” He said it, over and over again, until not one of us was not shaking, breaking, struggling to stay on our legs, held up perhaps just because there were so many of us, but that was only where he began, for with that out of the way, he asked, and how he asked, how painfully and unashamedly he described the miserableness of our souls and the griminess of our deeds and the insufficiencies of our actions that we felt there was no veil. Why should there be? We were supposed to be absolute monotheists, the people who keep our one finger raised come what may. In the months to come I would look on the music of drunken Sufi s and the poetry of intoxicated saints in an entirely new way. Their sins reflected a piety far greater than our modern puritanical fidelity could summon. They lived a life immersed in God. I experienced the seminal principle of Islam in a way I could have never imagined. The direct and unhampered access to God of His creation, given by the Lord of All the right to speak to Him, and the means to it.

When I was growing up, I had a fantastic and formative Sunday-school teacher, a part-time doctor who was a full-time community leader. “Imagine if you were to describe to an unborn child the world that was coming,” he said to me. “She would not be able to believe you.” That, he said, was the challenge facing Muhammad in trying to describe what happens after death. When Abkar’s supplication concluded and the prayer ended, nobody moved. For fear of breaking the spell that, we knew, would have to be broken. For every ascension to God, there is a return to the world. If this did not end, if this connection were not snapped, then we would be in paradise. We sat nervously still. Some of us sniffled. Wiped away tears. Were surprised to realize they were ours. Stared at the floor, like it might tell us, Yes, that just happened.

Shatri came the next night. I went out for shisha.

Excerpted from How to Be a Muslim: An American Story by Haroon Moghul (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with Permission from Beacon Press.

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Haroon Moghul is the Fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He’s appeared on all major media networks, and has been published at the Washington Post, TIME, CNN, Guardian and Foreign Policy. In 2016, he was honored with the Religion Newswriter’s Award for Religion Reporting Excellence. Haroon is the author of three books, including How to be a Muslim: An American Story, which the Washington Post called “an extraordinary gift,” and “an authentic portrayal of a vastly misunderstood community.” Haroon was a Fellow at Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security and the National Security Studies Program at New America Foundation. He is on the Multicultural Audience Development Initiative at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and graduated from Columbia University with an M.A. in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies. He kind of wants to move to Los Angeles. 

The post (Excerpt) How to be a Muslim: An American Story appeared first on The Revealer.

First, something feel-good, our current post-doctoral fellow, Simran Jeet Singh and his mom went viral: Sikh professor’s mom hilariously shuts down her son’s racist Twitter trolls

And last year’s fellow, Patrick Blanchfield, wrote about The Brutal Origins of Gun Rights for The New Republic

These early cases of gun violence belong to a history of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing. As the writer and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues in her brilliant new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, America’s obsession with guns has roots in a long, bloody legacy of racist vigilantism, militarism, and white nationalism. This past, Dunbar-Ortiz persuasively argues, undergirds both the landscape of gun violence to this day and our partisan debates about guns. Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well.

And about the Ghosts of 2012: What have we learned about ‘gun violence,’ as a phenomenon and as a political cause, over the last five years for n+1

The massacre at Sandy Hook and the killing of Trayvon Martin are two sides of the same coin. Mainstream American ideology tells us that children are innocence embodied, that they represent precious human potential. But as with so many sentiments that aspire to the universal, the reality is much less lovely. Only some children get to be innocent and full of potential; others never even get to be children at all. The same discourse that anoints the twenty child victims at Sandy Hook “angels” also contains the impulse to label a teen like Martin a “thug,” to scour his school record and pronounce him no angel at all. That the victims in Sandy Hook, in one of the nation’s most wealthy zip codes, were almost all white cannot be understated in explaining the symbolic traction of their deaths. The contempt heaped upon Martin by so many conservative voices is equally racialized—transparently, unequivocally, and unforgivably so.

And we’ve really enjoyed having Juan Pablo Meneses with us at the Center for Religion and Media as he works on his latest project which you can learn more about in Buying God: A Conversation with Juan Pablo Meneses and Bernardito García at The Los Angeles Review of Books

Cash journalism transforms the act of buying into a new narrative tool. The author buys what he wants to write about. I’m interested in using consumerism as a literary strategy to tell a story. For this trilogy, first I bought a cow, then I bought a soccer player boy to sell him to the clubs in Europe, and now I’m in the process of buying a god and building a church for him here, in the United States. The Bible says that we were created in a trilogy: body, spirit, and soul. To recreate this, I first bought an animal, then a human being, and now a divinity. I’ve decided to go shopping to understand better this market world that I have to live in.

And do spend some time with Randy R. Potts‘ story of How Ms. Sage Chanell Learned To Shake Her Shells at Into 

Like any gospel song at any spirit-filled church the pace is set by Spirit, and Spirit alone: two spirits: man and woman spirit: two spirits which, in concert, become Spirit. A stomp dance is all night long; an individual dance, five minutes — or twenty. An individual dance can mourn lost warriors or it can — merrily, cockily — sing about cock: what does cock do in the world? cock finds its place. A stomp dance is a holy place: at the Tvlahasse Green Corn stomp dance danced in early July — when the first green corn has borne its first silky strands — the dancers haven’t tasted corn all year; alcohol has not passed their lips for four days previous and won’t for four days following. A stomp dance is a holy thing a stomp dance is a joyful thing: songs lifting up the hunt, the battle, the dead, the future, the place of a man and the place of a woman: call, and response: shells shaking, shaking, shaking: ch-chiiih, ch-chiiih, ch-chiiih. Man, woman; man, woman; man, woman: call and response, shells. As Sage transitioned, where would she — a former warrior — fit?

Photo by Randy R. Potts

We don’t know Laurie Penny personally, but we sure are happy when we see her byline. This month, she gave us Witch Kids of Instagram: Taking the measure of the boom in online occultism for The Baffler

Today, witchcraft is back in vogue, a heady brew of nineties nostalgia, goth revivalism and plain, arcane fun sloshing around social media. Days after Donald Trump won the U.S. election, videos of women “hexing” Trump went viral around the world, encouraging budding magical practitioners to burn images of the president-elect to bring his works to ruin. Meanwhile, an entire explosive industry of witch-paraphernalia is boiling out of the cauldron of digital consumer culture. You can buy your crocheted bat-bunting and your broomstick-decals on Etsy, while a couple of clicks away anonymous web artisans peddle laptop stickers declaring the owner, with more or less accuracy, a daughter of the witches they weren’t able to burn.

Commodification is usually a poisoned apple for movements like this, but there’s a proud legacy of repurposing the witch-aesthetic for radical ends.

Which (pun intended) we’ll be sticking on a syllabus right alongside How witches took over Tumblr in 2017 by Kaitlyn Tiffany very soon.

Tumblr content insights manager Amanda Brennan offered some speculation, telling The Verge in a phone call, “As people are dealing with the political climate and watching the world feel like it’s falling apart, a lot of them are drawn to finding this deeper connection with the physical world, and this idea of magic being something that exists outside of them, but that they can have a little bit of control or influence over.”

She says a lot of the growth in the #witchblr tags can be read as reactionary, particularly when it comes to Tumblr users who are embracing witchcraft as a hobby, rather than a strictly religious practice. “It’s like ‘Uh, I feel like I can’t do anything. I’m calling my senators, and it doesn’t do anything. Let me take some time, focus on what part of the world I can control, and take a little piece of my narrative back through this idea of magic.’”

Speaking of Syllabi, maybe check out a few new ones that some other folks have been gracious enough to put together for us:

#IslamophobiaIsRacismSyllabus

Sanctuary Syllabus from Public Books

A Hillbilly Syllabus from Chitucky

Okay, let’s see, what else have people been talking about? We don’t know anyone who isn’t talking about the #MeToo movement. So, here is a selection of the incredible and necessary work that has been published in the last month about sex, assault, harassment, abuse, sexism, gender, patriarchy, misogyny, money, power, labor, and more. 

Emily Bazelon, Anita Hill, Soledad O’Brien, Laura Kipnis, Lynn Povich, Amanda Hess, and Danyel Smith do an amazing job at laying out the issues and the stakes for them in The Conversation: Seven Women Discuss Work, Fairness, Sex and Ambition at The New York Times

Laura Kipnis: Here’s a historical and political way of looking at the current moment. There have been, roughly speaking, two divergent tendencies in the struggle for women’s rights that come together in the issue of workplace harassment, which is why I think this all seems so significant. If you look at the history of feminism, going back to the 19th century, you’ve got, on the one hand, the struggle for what I’d call civic rights: the right to employment, the right to vote, to enter politics and public life. On the other side, there’s the struggle for women to have autonomy over our own bodies, meaning access to birth control, activism around rape, outlawing marital rape and the fight for abortion rights. What we’re seeing now is the incomplete successes in both of these areas converging. We’ve never entirely attained civic equality. We’ve never entirely attained autonomy over our bodies. Which is why the right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace is the next important frontier in equality for women.

You can hear more from Kipnis in Kick Against the Pricks for The New York Review of Books

Looking for political analogues, I found myself leafing through my old copy of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, a useful handbook for aspiring revolutionaries. Social upheavals like the current one—chaotic and improvised, yet destined—happen when certain echelons retract their consent to existing conditions and make new demands. Gramsci calls it “war of position.” Toppling power isn’t about storming the Bastille these days, it’s about changing the way people talk and think. If our upheavals come dressed in different garb, creating a crisis of authority for those in power is still how the world changes.

And there was a lot of conversation about Claire Dederer‘s essay What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? in The Paris Review

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.

They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.

Not just monsters, but also:  The Predator and the Jokester: Power shows its ugliest tentacles most clearly in the figures of the predator and the jokester by Lauren Berlant in The New Inquiry

You can know something at high speeds; you can learn something at slow ones. The joke might be, as Ralph Ellison wrote, a yoke.³ But there could also be a difference among a disturbance, a tweak, a good surprise, and a harm. Sometimes, like now, a whole set of various “we’s” are tired of being better in the situation than the person or community that fouls us is. Sometimes, like now, revenge is the only efficient justice people feel they have, after all the gossip and HR fails. But reflexive revenge will surely not solve the problem of scaling social jostling, casual play, violence, intimacy: or sex. It’s a time to organize social ways of derailing toxic environments, along with the thrilled aha, scorn, and whatever else continues to see sex as a dirty appetite that other people have.

Then there’s Who We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Weinstein by Wesley Morris for The New York Times

It’s strange. The country is in the grip of a sexual counterrevolution. Suddenly, stories of abuse and harassment are being believed, abusers and harassers are being toppled. Yet at the same time, one of the top movies in the country right now is “Daddy’s Home 2,” which has a biggish, comedic part for Mel Gibson. He’s the man whose anti-Semitism and racist rants became part of the cultural lore. He’s the man who pleaded no contest to a domestic abuse charge. This past winter, that same guy won a best director Oscar nomination for “Hacksaw Ridge.” “Daddy’s Home” is more than a title. It names a taunting moral perversion.

We know many of our readers are academics, so, let’s not leave out: Things That Male Academics Have Said To Me by Susan Harlan in Avidly — read the comments…

“You work almost as hard as a man”

If you’re an academic and have a story to share, this is a good place to start: Sexual Harassment In the Academy: A Crowdsource Survey from The Professor Is In. There are 1,886 entries as of publication.

And Sarah Jaffe‘s very important There Are No Safe Spaces: A series of sexual harassment allegations has vindicated the demands of student activists for The New Republic

When the flood of #MeToo stories, inspired by the work of anti-violence organizer Tarana Burke, hit social media, many professed surprise to see how common such violence was, including those who had spent their valuable column inches decrying students’ desire for places of safety or for the much-mocked “trigger warnings.” Some of them may have been truly unaware of the pervasiveness of sexual violence and harassment—or that it was happening in their places of employment. But it’s worth remembering that the repeated mocking of students as spoiled “snowflakes” underscored the idea that they could not seriously need safety from anything. These articles marshaled fatuous “free speech” claims to defend an oppressive status quo and even defend the rights of white nationalists and misogynists—those with a track record of using their platforms to harass, out, and endanger students.

Lastly, may we all be Brave Enough to Be Angry by Lindy West for The New York Times

Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it. Close your eyes and think of America.

We are expected to keep quiet about the men who prey upon us, as though their predation was our choice, not theirs. We are expected to sit quietly as men debate whether or not the state should be allowed to forcibly use our bodies as incubators. We are expected to not complain as we are diminished, degraded and discredited.

In better news, Ceclia Bartoli Just Became the First Woman to Perform in the Sistine Chapel reports James Bennet on WQXR

Which is a good lead in for some recent articles on Christianity.

First, something else to appreciate even if it took a long time: Radical Abolitionist Benjamin Lay Reclaimed by Quakers 279 Years Later by Marcus Rediker for Verso

 The recognition represented a profound, heartfelt act of retrospective justice, because Lay had been unjustly disowned in the first place. It was a symbolic rejection of what a previous slave-owning generation of Quakers had done and it was simultaneously an affirmation that Benjamin Lay’s values matter to the Abington and North London communities. I learned during my research that Lay dearly loved his fellow Quakers—at least those who did not own slaves—and that his exclusion was terribly painful to him. It was therefore deeply touching, 279 years later, to know that he has been brought back into the fold. This act would have meant everything to him.

And Fecal Fridays: Martin Luther on the Toilet by Ed Simon for Queen Mob’s Tea House is a rollicking masterpiece

If Freud remains an inadequate explanation for the anal expulsions of an entire epoch, than what accounts for the veritable coprophilia of that age? When both More and Luther could dwell in the sewers, peasants could sing of the reformer’s shit-filled mouth, and wealthy German burghers could wipe their ass with papal polemic? Freud and his student Erikson built one totalizing theory, but yet another Teutonic prophet might provide another. I’m speaking of Marx of course, or at least a variety of Marxian materialist consideration. For it’s all good and easy to talk about feces as a transcendent abstraction, but excrement is not just a symbol. Shit is very much real. 

Next, A Mind-Bending Translation of the New Testament: David Bentley Hart’s text recaptures the awkward, multivoiced power of the original by James Parker for The Atlantic

Again and again,” he insists, “I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation; many of my departures from received practices are simply my efforts to make the original text as visible as possible through the palimpsest of its translation … Where an author has written bad Greek … I have written bad English.” Herein lies the fascination of this thing: its deliberate, one might say defiant, rawness and lowbrow-ness, as produced by a decidedly overcooked highbrow.

Meanwhile, Far from the Museum of the Bible, these artists use the Good Book as their medium by S. Brent Plate Rodriguez-Plate

Asked whether he and artists like him are engaged in the desecration of sacred books, Laramée countered, “I’m sacrificing them, and like in any true sacrifice, the victim becomes sacred precisely because it is killed.” 

And on the subject of books, do have a look at, Signs, Serpents, Salvation, a selection of work by Lauren Pond at The Oxford American. Pond’s book, Test of Faith can be found here.

“Test of Faith puts us into the midst of vibrant, purposeful people who struggle and sometimes fail, who grapple with doubt and loss and every other affliction that human beings endure, and who forge ahead with creativity, love, and fellow feeling. Their radical worship practices are fascinating and, to someone like me, frightening. But that is only a part of the story Lauren Pond tells in her exploration of their lives. I do not fully understand the world I observe in these pictures, but I cherish its complexity. These are people that I would like to know.

As I write these words, we are in the month of March 2017. Our political tumult has not settled down. In some moments the entire country seems awakened to the fragile ideals and messy processes of our democracy. In others, subtle voices goad us to mistrust one another, while the din and clatter of unruly actions distract us from the work of hard debate. I remain unsure of how to talk to my fellow citizens. But I am certain that, whatever I say, I must also listen. Test of Faith offers a useful primer in how to begin.”

Now, some stories about “the people of the book” 

Let’s start with the easy stuff (there is not easy stuff), Can Robots Be Jewish? by Emma Davis for Tablet

Abramowitz also wondered about the many halakhic commandments requiring a human body. “Are [robots] able to be circumcised? I mean, you wouldn’t just cut the plug off your toaster oven—it would ruin it.”

Okay, well, maybe there’s fun stuff? Jen Doll introduces us to The Bar Mitvah Party Starters for Topic

Most of the motivators I spoke to came to the work almost by accident, responding to casting calls that turned out to be for event companies that planned bar and bat mitzvahs. At their auditions, they danced and performed and ad-libbed and most of all, exuded personality, which is probably the number one key to the job. (Tiffany Haddish and Paul Rudd both worked in the business before they were household names, if that gives a hint as to the charisma required.) Along the way, the motivators got hooked—to the rush, the partying, the strange but lovely experience of being part of someone else’s family for the day, and helping to make that day better. “I don’t think anyone gets into this thinking it will be my career, but you get into it and love it,” says Fischer, who’s booked through 2020. Or, as Harary told me, “You hear a crowd roar, and that will pulsate through you… that thud of unison, everyone clapping on beat. That experience when the bar mitzvah boy feels like he’s the rock star. It’s really special when you realize you’ve done this for a family.”

Photo by Daniel Arnold

Or, at least funny stuff? Jeremy Dauber asks Are Jews Funny? for The New York Times

In “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History,” the Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber skates through more than 2,000 years of material without ever settling on one overarching theory. Instead, in the manner of a field biologist, he lays out a detailed taxonomy of Jewish humor: seven categories to cover everything from the Book of Esther to “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with one chapter devoted to each category. There’s a chapter for humor about anti-Semitism; one for satirical humor; one for highbrow wit and wordplay; another for theological or philosophical humor; and a vaguely defined catchall subgenus, the comedy of disguise, that somehow covers all the work of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, the Marx Brothers and Jerry Seinfeld.

And some serious stuff: Why Trump’s decision to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital hurts both Jews and Palestinians by Oded Na’aman for Quartz

The goal of security and independence for the Jewish people has been demoted; Jewish sovereignty over the land has taken its place. Let it burn, for it is ours and ours alone, seems to be the position of those who want a declaration at the cost of violence.

While David Shulman asks Jerusalem: Why Should Things Not Get Worse? in The New York Review of Books

Quite apart from the clinical picture, there is Israel’s spiritual crisis—though “spiritual” is a word I rarely use and have, in fact, banned from my university classes on India. But I do not know what else to call the abject failure of the imagination and ever greater hardening of the heart on the part of so many. For half a century we Israelis, as a people, have treated Palestinians, both inside and beyond the Green Line, with arrogance, malice, and a coercive selfishness that makes a mockery of our common humanity. It would be good if we could acknowledge even a little of this history, sadly rationalized by the religious right in the name of supposed Jewish themes such as the sanctity of the Land of Israel or the sorry chosen-ness of the Jews or the God-given enmity of our enemies. Someday, I believe, we will be able to see this, but it won’t happen very soon.

And some goopy stuff: The Goopification of Shabbat: Jewish Rituals Are The Hot New Thing In Wellness by Mattie Kahn for Buzzfeed

In cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, a new generation of Jewish millennials who get their meals from Sakara Life and and their aesthetic tastes from the Coveteur are on a quest for spiritual fulfillment. On the Upper West Side, the cult-ish congregation Romemu hosts “Shabbatasana yoga and meditation” before formal services, which include contemplation and ecstatic dance. Om Shalom Yoga, a class that fuses vinyasa movements, Jewish text, and electronica-inflected chants, draws several dozen practitioners in Los Angeles each month.

We’re almost done here, but if you’ve had enough reading and want something to listen to as you travel (or don’t!) for the holidays, we highly recommend the Heaven’s Gate podcast hosted by Glynn Washington.

Thank you for reading along with us this year — it’s been rough, but we’re grateful for everyone we’ve read and everyone who’s read along with us. We look forward to seeing you here again next year!

Happy Holidays & New Year!

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

***

You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

The post In the News: #MeToo, Goopification, Polemical Flatulence & much more! appeared first on The Revealer.

This article draws on a decade and a half of engaged organizing and research alongside Waheedah Shabazz-El and Faghmeda Miller, which we are in the process of turning into a book-length manuscript. Waheedah and Faghmeda are both Muslim women living with HIV. Each were diagnosed at dire moments in the AIDS epidemics in their respective countries––the United States for Waheedah and South Africa for Faghmeda. Both women have gone on to transform their personal struggles to access treatment, care, and support into public lives of meaning for thousands. As such, Waheedah and Faghmeda’s lives and work not only shed light on the complexities of resistance in the midst of extremis; their stories also illuminate the complex interplay between HIV vulnerability and forced removal, between Muslim women’s leadership and traditional religious authority, between public figures and private selves. In this essay, written in close collaboration with Waheedah and Faghmeda, I explore questions of women, religion, and activism through their lives and witness. I begin with the moment of their diagnoses, set amid the disassemblage of apartheid and the scale up of mass incarceration and develop––though our connections with one another––a portrait of the complex nexus of HIV, gender, Islam, and activism in the African diaspora between Philadelphia and Cape Town.

Faghmeda Miller did not get to vote in the first democratic elections in South Africa on April 27, 1994. That day, she boarded a plane to Malawi with her husband, Juneja. They had been married just days earlier in the Cape Flats neighborhood to which her family had been displaced under Apartheid’s Group Areas Act. The liberatory celebration of the rainbow nation touched Faghmeda personally: she was about to begin a life she had long imagined with a man she loved dearly. Those most intimate of freedom dreams, however, never materialized. Less than seven months later, on November 18, 1994, Faghmeda was made a widow. Her husband had died from what she would later learn was the steady deterioration of his immune system due to undiagnosed and untreated HIV.

About a month after the community gathered to make the janaza funeral prayers for Juneja, Faghmeda could tell that something was wrong with her health. Her parents insisted she fly back

Faghmeda just after her diagnosis
(photo courtesy of Faghmeda Miller)

to Cape Town. When her health continued to deteriorate, she was admitted to the hospital and then released to her parents’ care for recovery on the condition that she return in a month for a follow up visit. At that visit, the physician who admitted her was confused as to why Faghmeda’s health was still not rebounding. That physician called in colleagues for consultations. Those doctors one-by-one hovered over Faghmeda discussing her case as if she were not present. One took her blood. When Faghmeda asked why, the doctor did not answer. It was not until her admitting physician inquired that Faghmeda learned that her blood had been taken to do an HIV test. Two weeks later, her physician called her at home and insisted she come into the clinic. Stunned, with an HIV diagnosis in hand, Faghmeda’s mind turned to her late husband. Juneja went fast; Faghmeda assumed she would, as well. But she kept waking up, day after day, alive.

Across the Atlantic, the United States was a breeding ground for an epidemic of prisons. Amid the massive contraction of the neoliberal state, prisons had become a “spatial fix” for a people stripped of employment possibilities and welfare support. The population behind bars soared––about fourfold overall, but eightfold when just women were counted. In 2003, Waheedah had been caught up in a narcotic sting for a drug problem that itself had been the result of surviving an abusive relationship and having no social service support to help her heal. Legally, she was blamed both for the abuse and for the way she coped: six months in the Philadelphia Prison System was her state-ordered “treatment” plan.

That sentence removed her from the Philadelphia neighborhoods in which she had been born and raised––streets where she had found Islam through the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his son Warith Deen Muhammad… streets she had also had to flee when she fled her abusive husband. That flight took her away from the Muslim community that was her safe haven and spiritual home. In the barracks of the women’s jail on the far northeast of the city, she found several Muslim sisters she had known back in the day and again took her shahada with them. Supported in this way, she began to advocate for other women inside, especially around health care, which was her chosen profession. In conversation with the city health workers, she agreed to take a free HIV test. Then, in a room with no curtains, she was given her results. HIV positive. Waheedah was crying and everyone was walking by. That day, Waheedah vowed she would tell no one. In truth, she willed herself to die. But she, too, kept waking up alive.

***

I first met Waheedah the day after she was released from prison. I was doing outreach with a new coalition of ACT UP and mental health activists dedicated to protecting the health of people behind the walls. Our call to action came after a series of deaths from medical neglect in the Philadelphia Prison System. We joined together in anger and through direct action to force independent oversight of the city’s prison’s operations. Once that was in place,we had to know where else to put pressure. And to do that, we had to know what was happening inside. We devised a simple outreach strategy: talk with family members before and after visits with their loved ones. There was only one bus that went to and from State Road where the sprawling prison complex was located, and it only came every twenty or thirty minutes. That gave us a lot of time to talk with families. Sometimes we also met people like Waheedah, who had been released directly from court by a judge and were on their way back up to the prison to retrieve their property.

Waheedah Shabazz-El
(photo courtesy of Waheedah Shabass-El)

This story, like the vignettes of HIV diagnosis that open this essay, helps to put a point on an important distinction between HIV risk and vulnerability. While HIV attunes us to the ways in which structural conditions impact health and wellbeing. Central to both Waheedah’s and Faghmeda’s stories of HIV infection are profound social and political ruptures from systems that trafficked in land dispossession and forced migration. In Faghmeda’s case, the Group Areas Act uprooted people from their homes and scattered them throughout constructed ghettos. In Waheedah’s, mass incarceration had precisely the same effect. What happens when people are removed from their communities? When social networks are disrupted? When resources are extracted? When services disappear? What do you do when no matter how hard you try the ends just never seem to meet?

Amid these profound social disruptions that drove vulnerability to HIV and a whole host of other health issues, the HIV epidemic was still too often understood in terms of individual risk and personal blame. Waheedah and Faghmeda both learned early on that the way you were supposed to tell your HIV story was to foreground the event of HIV diagnosis, not the life you lived before or after. Describing the moment of diagnosis put gut wrenching pain on display; it also separated the storyteller from her social context. The diagnosis story was a surrogate for the infection story. That is, it was a way for listeners to figure out without asking: “How did you get it?”––and also for storytellers to offer the proper scaffolding for that invasive question. In that moment, the observer could serve as judge and jury. Both Waheedah and Faghmeda knew that, and both were exceptionally well rehearsed at telling their respective stories. HIV infection was carefully sutured to the violations experienced in the moments of testing and diagnosis, to the complex and often contradictory layers of a life before, to the crippling pain in the wake of diagnosis, and to the curious fate of accepting (even willing) death while instead being given life.

Waheedah was a convert to Islam, who made the transition from the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam during the Second Resurrection. Her addiction history carried shame within the Muslim community, as all consumption of alcohol and drugs has been prohibited through progressive revelation and centuries of legal argumentation. In her narration of her diagnosis story, Waheedah, thus, cast herself as a believer who had strayed and then returned. That return was dynamic. She retook her shahada in jail and immediately started mentoring other women in Islam. After her diagnosis, she kept all of her HIV literature in her Qur’an, because it was the one thing that no one would touch––out of respect for her and for Islam. Seeded in this narrative were small and great refusals of the stigma that was heaped onto her by people determined to let one blood test eclipse her decades of work before and after that event. There was also a no less forceful probing of her religious commitment.  

Walking with Waheedah through her journey after release drove me to undertake training in Islam. That is how I met my teacher, South African Islamic Liberation Theologian, Farid Esack. While studying with Farid, I became acquainted with Faghmeda’s story of being the first Muslim woman anywhere to come out publically as living with HIV. I then traveled to Cape Town in 2015 to work with her in documenting her life and work. At face value, the contrast between Faghmeda’s and Waheedah’s stories could not be greater. Faghmeda was a self-described “shy woman” who was married amid the disassemblage of Apartheid governance. When she was given her HIV diagnosis, Faghmeda’s doctor pointed to her hijab in shock: How can devout Muslims contract HIV? The implication was that there was something that Faghmeda was not sharing about herself or her community. What was putting Muslim women at risk for HIV? In conversation, Waheedah, Faghmeda, and I began to ask what we could learn about gender, HIV, and Islam at the intersection of their stories.

***

“HIV is a curse from God.” That dictum has been repeated over and over again by the world’s religious leaders seeking to label and condemn entire communities on the basis of so-called disordered desire, be that from sex, sexuality, gender, or substance use. This one-for-one relationship between desire and God’s judgment is what led prominent Muslims like Malik Badri to double down in the wake of a global AIDS pandemic and claim that Islam itself was HIV prevention (a position Amina Wadud vehemently critiqued at the Second International Muslim Leaders’ Consultation on HIV/AIDS in 2002 and Farid Esack has worked to build a global theological response against).

John Bell and Waheedah Shabazz-El
(Photo courtesy of Laura McTighe)

The juxtaposition of supposedly being cursed by God and nonetheless continually waking up alive was theologically generative for Waheedah and Faghmeda both. How can you continue to be alive when God has cursed you? What does life even mean? What exactly is being condemned? Those questions were not meant to be answered in some hermetically sealed space of theological reflection. They were worn and reworn through the grooves of everyday life in which Waheedah and Faghmeda both had to figure out how to survive their diagnoses. Both went to the only places that they could find where people living with HIV were gathering. Faghmeda joined a support group run by Christians, because there was nothing of the kind in the Muslim community. Waheedah found her way to the gayborhood, and specifically to the inside/outside HIV in prison organizing program my dear comrade John Bell and I were running at the time.

There are things that become possible when the direct pressure of suffering relents, even just a little bit. When alone and terrified, Waheedah and Faghmeda both underscored how any support was soothing. However, when buttressed by support and coached through their darkest moments by people who had already fought those battles in Christian and gay communities, both Waheedah and Faghmeda began to imagine building the Muslim sisterhood they wish they had had when they were first diagnosed––sisterhood they still both desperately needed. To build that sisterhood, Waheedah and Faghmeda both had to publicly “come out” as women living with HIV.

There is something so profound about the will to expose one’s own pain so that others might feel less alone in theirs. And it is also is important not to romanticize the need to do so. For both Waheedah and Faghmeda, going public was born out of an everyday battle for survival. It was also a decision that would bring great personal and social cost––the more exceptional forms like becoming lightning rods for public shame and stigma, but also the more mundane ones like being expected to always be strong and to always carry so much. Nevertheless, a simple question undergirded both women’s brave work to render their suffering visible: When do we get to live and thrive, not just survive? That question pressed Waheedah and Faghmeda beyond the particularities of their own pain and into the structural contexts that prefigured their vulnerability to HIV.

***

After her release from the Philadelphia Prison System, Waheedah started doing work with our prison health care coalition to fix treatment and conditions for the women she had left behind and those she would never meet. She walked advocates who were not formerly incarcerated through the everyday context in which healthcare was delivered in the labyrinth up on State Road, helping us all to identify the links in the chain where possibility soared and injustice festered. With her guidance, the work of this Philadelphia County Coalition for Prison Health Care (PCCPHC) became a deliberate and willful process of nurturing the ties that save in order to sever those that kill. One of those life-giving and life-sustaining ties inside was “Dr. D,” the prison’s infectious disease specialist. She moved mountains for her patients, especially those who were newly diagnosed. And she did so with a keen sense of how to keep HIV status under wraps amid the always present systems of surveillance in which information was currency.

PCCPHC decided to present Dr. D with an award as part of an annual black AIDS luncheon––both to honor Dr. D’s work and to show her how many people on the outside had her back. Waheedah wanted to be the one to present that award, and she wanted to do so anonymously as a formerly incarcerated woman, not one of Dr. D’s former patients. The award ceremony was carefully curated. Waheedah spoke on behalf of the coalition and to a room filled with familiar faces and strangers alike. With a precision learned as a woman leader in the Nation of Islam and in tenant organizing battles, Waheedah indicted the health care inside and celebrated Dr. D as a soldier in the struggle. Her voice cracked. Looking into Dr. D’s eyes, award in hand, she turned to the audience and called her own bluff. “I cannot stand here like I don’t know this woman. My name is Waheedah Shabazz. I am a woman living with HIV. I was diagnosed in the Philadelphia Prison System in a room with no curtains. Dr. D saved my life.” Later, Waheedah would describe how she felt as “light as a feather” when the burden of that secret was lifted.

Faghmeda Miller recently
(photo courtesy of Faghmeda Miller)

For Faghmeda, too, it was the community she found after diagnosis that paved the way for her public disclosure. At first, she told no one but the members of that Christian support group. Gradually, this community coached herthrough how to tell her parents. “You need to give them space and time to get used to this idea.” Her mother told her sisters and brothers, even though Faghmeda had asked her not to. It was terrifying in the moment, but, she says, it ended up being a blessing when her family worked through their fears together so that they could came together around her in unwavering support. By then it was the end of 1995; Faghmeda had survived her first year living with HIV. She started to reach beyond herself, to wonder what this life would be.

About a month before World AIDS Day 1996, her Christian support group held a public gathering. Faghmeda’s parents came with her. A member of the Islamic Medical Association, Ashraf Mohammed, was also in attendance and approached Faghmeda’s father. In a brief exchange, Faghmeda’s father’s explained that he was in attendance to support his daughter. Faghmeda was standing near her father and listened carefully while Ashraf explained his desire to host a World AIDS Day segment on Cape Town Islamic station, Radio 786.

After the event, Faghmeda discussed going on the radio show with her parents and then with her siblings. Every Muslim in Cape Town listened to that program, including her extended family members. To go on the air would mean disclosing her diagnosis to her entire community; the weight of not speaking openly was starting to tear at her insides. And so, the week of the show, Faghmeda decided she would go on the air to talk about Islam, AIDS, and herself. She was terrified the moment her scripted portion stopped and the phone lines opened. But then people started calling in, sharing their experiences with family members who died from AIDS-related illness and how much pain it still caused them when they thought about the stigma these family members endured… Faghmeda was blown away by the outpouring of support from her community, and also extremely hurt that none of her own family members had called in. When she walked out of the recording booth, her mother was sitting in the lounge. She hugged her tightly. That evening, Faghmeda cried about having HIV for the first time

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These moments of disclosure laid bare the precarious and nonetheless durable intimacies through which worlds

otherwise could grow––worlds in which it might be possible to live and thrive, not just survive. What would happen if relationships like Waheedah’s and Dr. D’s were able to take root and come into bloom? What if the fleeting exchanges between Faghmeda and radio show callers-in could be extended into the everyday lives of families, communities, and the nation? How did the work to nurture the ties that save help sever those that kill?

Refusing to vanish is bone-deep, religious work. As Waheedah explained, “For me, it all ends up on that day, when I have to account for what I did in this life. I want to be able to account that I praised God, that I worshipped God, that these are the things that I did.” By rendering visible the complexities of HIV and gender injustice and daring to build community otherwise, Waheedah and Faghmeda understand themselves to be embodying the most fundamental ethical principle in Islam: the obligation to command good and forbid evil.

How did this slow and steady work of two Muslim women living with HIV bring into being new horizons for being and belonging together? What new meanings of Islam, gender, and AIDS were being made in the process? Faghmeda could see the ripples of their work on the greatest and most intimate scales. “We are both Muslim women, we are both African, we have been oppressed by our own religion. And the fact that we were actually given a platform? Yes, we were rejected by some people, but we continued to talk about what matters most to us and that is HIV and AIDS… Many of our people still believe as women, you don’t have a voice. But we know better. We do have a voice and we are making use of that voice.”

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The post Refusing to Vanish: Muslim Women’s AIDS Activism appeared first on The Revealer.