To laugh or cry?

I rarely get angry. But something that really, really ticks me off is injustice. Yes, you guessed it, I have been reading again! Today's topic is Patriarchy, the book is called "Women in Moslem Paradise" and it is written by my new hero Fatima Mernissi. She explains how independent analysis and questioning is encouraged in Islam, with the founder of the Maliki Madhab (the Maliki school of thought, Sunni Islam), Imam Malik, having said "This science is a religion, so be careful of whoever is handing it down to you." (the book states the source to be: Imam B, 'Abd Al Barr: Kitab Al-Intiqaa Fi-Fadl Al Aimma Al Faqaha. Dar Al-Kutab Al Ilmiya, Beyrouth, date not indicated. Page 16.) So far, common sense, right? Only, it is not God running our governments, it is people. Men to be specific. And they have earthly interests in preventing people from questioning and analysing. We all know what consequences that has for females in Muslim countries. Other religions have the same problem of course, but those governments tend to be less hypocritical about their spiritual interest.
She also goes on to say how blasphemous it is according to Islam to confuse the divine with the profane. That is, that all humans are fallible and only God is not, and not to confuse God's "word" with humans'. So, staying true to Islamic teaching, we can gather, as Mernissi already did, that those who hold authoritarian positions in Islam, Imams especially, go against teaching in order to impose their own will and exercise power. This is what has kept women in a subordinate position in Muslim societies. This is why it is still social suicide among Muslims to question a cleric or the Hadith (the Hadith is a collection of recounts by people around the Prophet Mohammed about his sayings and his behaviour, used by Muslims as an example of best practice). In fact, this abuse of trust and divine message was apparent so early that only a small percentage of the Hadith was classed as Sahih (true, genuine), after scrutiny. I read somewhere but cannot be entirely sure that the supposed requirement of veiling for women was one of those recounts that did not make the Sahih-box. It makes sense to me but to be fair, I have not been able to find the Hadith in an English translation. However, the odds are not in its favour since Imam Bukhari established that in his lifetime there were 150 times more false Hadith than genuine ones. That is more than 99% false ones! And Imam Bukhari should know, he devoted multiple volumes to false Hadith testing. Ironically, as far as I know, those false Hadith are grouped together with the genuine ones, and usually not called false but rather "of uncertain lineage/source", though in my experience the credibility of the lineage or source is hardly ever mentioned nor questioned. Scary? I think so. Infuriating? Maybe not unless you are female in a Muslim society and are experiencing first hand what that means. Generations of millions and millions of women are directly suffering as a consequence of this perverting of divine message. I am not angry for myself so much, I am angry for my mother, my grandmothers, their mothers and grandmothers, for my sisters in Muslim countries for over a millennium back. I really really want to be rid of my anger but when injustice is the only thing that infuriates me, is the world not better off if I keep it? Complacency and indifference only paves the way for more injustice to happen every day.

As an example of the ridiculous perversions of Imams and their imagination, Mernissi explains how some of them colour in passages in the Quran. In the description of Paradise in the Quran, it says that every man who is granted access to Paradise is given Houris (beautiful virgins) as lovers and friends. The Quran does not state how many, but not only do Imams specify how many (two, 70, 73, or in the case of Imam Qadi: 4,900! Qadi also imagines each houri has 1000 maidservants to look after them, probably so that they don't get lazy and lose their looks like us boring human women, or is it so that the men wont be burdened with caring for the houris in return?), but some also explain that the men's libido increase to match. If that was permitted in Paradise, why forbid it here? In fact, these Imams seem to be giving divine backing to men being sexually irresponsible and promiscuous. Anyway, I myself cannot see what the point is with pleasures of the flesh where is no longer any flesh. Or did I get it wrong, are they trying to tell me Paradise is a physical place where men are still in physical form? I thought sex drive was related to hormones, which only exist in physical form. These images of Paradise makes me feel rather failed as a woman. Nobody told me it was all about my ability to please men. I have been wasting all my time trying to further my soul. I guess I wont be going to Paradise if it was up to Imams such as Qadi, which may be why there were no equivalent rewards for us women.

Graphic stories

I have been enjoying graphic novels lately, and can you believe I read Crime and Punishment in graphic form? Hey, I never did pretended to be high-brow. Anyway, that book was not that great. Perhaps only the original is worthy of its reputation, but I am no hurry to find out.
A brilliant book, however, is one called Deogratias. It is the story of a boy, Deogratias, in Rwanda during and right after the genocide. It is an incredible book, I really urge you to read it. It is so heart-warming and yet so horrifying at the same time, and the true reality of wars and colonialism hit you in the face like a hard punch in the end of the book. Devastatingly good. Although I was about 9 at the time of the genocide, I still remember seeing the piles and piles of dead bodies on the news. It remains the genocide that the world stood by and watched happen (and supplied guns and ammo for). I believe the country is still paying off their debt to the west for the weapons sold at the time. At least, that was the case a few years ago.
Another good one is Incognegro, about a "high-yellow" (very pale skinned) black reporter in 1930's USA who goes incognito in the south and reports on the hanging of black people, which no longer makes the news by mainstream media due to it being so common. Being so fair skinned he passes for a white man and barely gets away with it. It is loosely based on a real reporter under the alias of "Incognegro" at that time. The book is definitely worth finding and reading.

Eastern vs Western thinking

I am quite into the Tao and while reading about it I found these wonderful paragraphs. So I am sharing it with you. The bold part in the beginning of the text is my own emphasis of the part that I found important. The text comes from here.

Nevertheless, broadly speaking, Western society strives to find "the truth", while Eastern society is more interested in balance. Westerners put more stock in individual rights; Easterners in social responsibility.

The symbol of the Tao (above) is an affront to the idea of truth in the common Western way of thinking. White lies inside black, black inside white. They are part of one another, constantly changing (indicated by the swirling shape), interdependent. There is no clear truth and therefore opinions have little value.

A Western version might look more like this:  O O  White circle - black circle. Static, separate. It is hard to say how much Eastern thinking was influenced by the Tao and how much the Tao was a product of a pre-existing thought.

Science

In the last 40 years, scientists have become increasingly aware of the idea of uncertainty. Chaos Theory, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Fuzzy Logic all helped destroy the earlier mechanistic view of the universe, that God created a universe that ran on tightly define principles that could be measured and predicted by science.

On Rumi - and what is God anyway?

The other day while I was researching Turkey for my upcoming trip, I came across something interesting. As I am dramatically bent, I felt it was worthy of sensationalizing by sharing it with your honorable selves. This was about Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the famous Mystic who lived in Konya, my own birth province in Turkey. He is known in Turkey as a great humanist with a deep love for humanity and his poetry inspires tolerance and love to the reader.
Let me illustrate my findings first with this poem:

when the monuments to institutionalized religion lie in ruin
.....then my beloved,
then we are really in trouble!

He is known as a poet, cuz he wrote amazing stuff like that, but really he was a spiritually enlightened man. this little poem made me jump in my seat. This legend of Islam, so clearly expressing that no matter the problems of institutional religions, they keep us in check against greater trouble. Or did I get it wrong? anyway, it seems to also express a great tolerance for other religions. However, what was truly thought provoking was anoher part of this text (available at http://www.allaboutturkey.com/mevlana.htm). About Semseddin Tebrizi, who was a significant teacher to Rumi and a spiritual master himself, it said this:

Sems, who must have reached rarefied spiritual heights, was a fearless man who would make no concessions to the prejudices, of the masses or the learned, either in behavior or in speech. So he made a great number of enemies and was not at all popular in Konya.

So the knowledge gained by the spiritually advanced was dangerous even then! Granted, Konya is a very fundamentalist place, traditional in its deep religiosity, but Rumi was after all popluar. So it seems the difference was just that Rumi was more diplomatic in his speech and offered cryptic poetry which offered insight according to your own level of understanding. He stayed true to himself while keeping it safe, in other words. Religion was separate from spirituality even then, it seems. I thought it wasn't so, since religious scholars such as my ancestors where taught spiritual awakening on a regular.


But finally, the text also goes on to say this about Rumi:

According to him everything in the universe, every being, even matter itself - all are but manifestations of God and exist in God and are united in the Absolute Being. Thus Mevlana views all existence as a united whole. In a sense, one could call his vision that of Unity Consciousness.

This is what mystics and spirituals everywhere are still saying! We know that all matter and non-matter is energy, and we know that energy has consciousness, and religions may call that consciousness God, spirituals may call it whatever, but it is all the same. So atheists and religious people may both be perfectly right. God is not a patriarch with an anger management problem, anyone surprised? The founders of established religions tried to convey this, but it seems somewhere things went wrong. In Christianity they say god created people in his image, this corresponds to the spiritualist view as all individual souls being sourced from the greater soul, though there is no real separation as everything has a soul and consciousness permeates everything, even what seems like empty space to us. In Islam they say that God is everywhere. so it seems great spiritual minds think alike but yet again our man made speech and language create barriers between us that don't really exist. When people say they do or dont believe in God, what do they really mean? What do they perceive this God to be which they do or dont believe in? When people ask you if you believe in God, you should be asking them to please define God very precisely, lest you give them the wrong answer.

On an unrelated note: This pic must be quite accurate cuz by reading his face he has all the attributes one would expect from him: The very wide and high forehead indicating openmindedness and out-of-the-box thinking as well as clear-sightedness. His large and round eyes speak of abundance of love and emotion.

The Blatte-fication of a people

For those who were in the dark about this, I grew up in Sweden. The Sweden I knew and loved to some degree, was a xenophobic one. In their defense, it is less so now, but that is irrelevant for this. Anyway, I would like to give you a little background:

Little Emine grew up on a segregated suburb of Stockholm which was mostly occupied by immigrants. There were many Iranians, Somalis, Eritreans, Lebanese, and dozens of other cultures in the mix, including Kurdish, which was Emine's proud heritage. She was told how the Kurds were an honorable people with no thieves or rapists among them, but so great was their intolerance of immorality, that they felt no shame in murdering whoever fell into it. And as Emine later learned, only females could fall into it, by choice or otherwise. (Now do you see where my rage for injustice comes from?). Anyway, let me try to stick to the story. Emine grew up happily in a very mixed environment, where everyone had a heritage and most were proud of it. Iranians spoke of the Persian empire, Somalis spoke of their wealth and status before the war broke out, and Emine spoke of Mesopotamia and Sumeria, where the first civilization and script appeared. But Husby, as this suburb was called, was really a poor part of the city, which housed the people systematically unwelcome in other parts of Stockholm (apart from other similar or poorer suburbs, of course). And so her parents gathered some currency and moved into a posh side of town, where there were no crime (apart from neo-nazi teens killing time), and coincidentally, that was when Emine started high school in a very Swedish, very white school. It seemed all good at first, the school was the top ranking in the country in terms of entry requirements of marks, and it had some of the best teachers in the city. But Emine suffered a shock at discovering she was (or rather, had been) a Blatte. Blatte is a derogatory term for anyone non-European looking, derived from a regional word for dung. The term is very popular among fascists. She noticed that security guards in shops no longer followed her and her friends, now that they were Swedish rather than African. She noticed how her schoolmates looked at her clothing tags to check where she shops. She noticed that the teachers were respectful and kind. She noticed people were treating her with respect when she was in a crowd, and with pity when one to one. Although there were many exceptions, all these things were new. She was used to being treated like a second class citizen and considered that normal, until she tasted respect and saw the discrimination that her people (all immigrants) were experiencing. Fast forward to present, and one day when she was speaking to a friend in Sweden, she noticed how they both referred to themselves as Blatte. So deeply ingrained had that discrimination become that they accepted the Swedish view of them as Blatte's, as people reduced to an inferior appearance of dark hair. They knew what they were to society and they accepted it as the only reality they could have in Sweden.

My friend lives in Sweden and so is not as aware of the depth of discrimination they face, yet they pay more for it. I myself am happy in London where my background is an asset or irrelevant at worst. But I do still catch myself expecting discrimination from the English, or indeed any European. And I feel like an alien when in Sweden, finding myself reverting back to the pathetic cheerfulness towards the cashiers or clerks or indeed anyone Swedish, expecting the suspicious looks from the past. Stockholm has changed but I cannot forget the identity it gave me, and needless to say, it was difficult enough to make me happily leave that country. When friends here comment on how Swedish I am in my thinking or behaviour, I know that it is not really Swedish, it is the Blatte-fied Swedish of my people, the very diverse group of immigrants from all kinds of proud backgrounds who merged their cultures with their new realities as second class Swedes and created something new and unique for themselves.

Now, in my work, I have had the honour to meet some amazing Swedish people who do not mind and even appreciate our differences, and I just want to thank them for making me love my country again. They have taught me a great deal and inspired me in life. Sweden is blessed to have them.