The Dignity of Difference

Arches National Park - Utah

The Most Noble Sanctuary

"O Mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into separate nations and tribes, that you may know one another."

~ Qur'an 49:13

During the process of my philosophical reawakening, I made a surprising discovery; my love for Islam.  I know many westerners cringe at the thought.  Most only know Islam from what they see on television today.  The traditional homeland of the faith suffers from unremitting hostility fueled by extremist fundamentalism and totalitarianism.  The result has been some of the most heinous human rights violations imaginable.  Unfortunately, the very same was said of Christianity during Europe’s Dark Ages.  I tell you now, Islam is in its dark age.  If they are to be judged solely on today, it stands to reason Christianity should never have been allowed to survive to the modern day.  But we knew Christianity to have a solid foundation in Jesus and his chosen apostles.  Likewise, Islam has a foundation every bit as impressive.

It is a familiar and unfortunate human failing to discredit and malign our enemies.  Centuries of unremitting hostilities during the various Crusades, the Spanish Reconquista, the trade wars of the renaissance, and the Western colonial expansion period have left us with a confusing legacy mixed with lies and half truths intended to substantiate and strengthen the Western cause.  Western theologians and historians have only recently begun reexamining Islam in an attempt to separate fact from fiction.  Some of their “discoveries” are astounding and bare testimony to the continuity of the human spirit as our similarities far outnumber our differences.

Muhammad lived in a violent, desperately brutal society and he managed to bring peace to that world. Now this may come as a surprise to some, but he did it through peaceable means not by force.  Suffering persecution in his native Mecca, he was invited by the neighboring waring clans of the large agricultural oasis of Yathrib to mitigate an end to more than a century of devastating tribal blood-feuds.  Drafting the Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna, Muhammad established a peaceable and diverse democratic federation encompassing the eight Medinan tribes and the Muslim immigrants from Mecca.  This alliance included Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Christians, and pagans... each vested citizens of this new society.

This was an absolutely astounding achievement for its day and did not go unnoticed by Muhammad’s rivals.  For six years, he fought a war of survival against Mecca.  The Meccans, who correctly perceived a threat to their long established power as droves converted to Islamic monotheism and trade began to shift to Medina, were intent on exterminating the Muslim community.  Once the tides of war clearly and irrevocably shifted to the advantage of Medina, Muhammad did the unthinkable.  Instead of bringing Mecca to her knees by an inevitable victory through violence,  Medina switched to a campaign of nonviolence that was not too dissimilar from that practiced by Gandhi and other inspiring leaders. For two long years, they persevered.  Finally, Muhammad rode into Mecca with a thousand unarmed followers and sued for peace... a peace favoring Mecca.  So shocking and contrary to millennia of tribal custom, word spread throughout the region, igniting a social revolution.  Within a few years, Muhammad and his followers were welcomed back into Mecca, not as enemies but as allies.

This isn't to say atrocities were not committed by all sides during the conflict.  They were.  But Muhammad had a lesson to teach.  Compassion was the only avenue open for lasting peace.  This set the tone for Islamic expansion for centuries to come.

Because he comes so much later and there is so much more documentation, we know more about the founder of Islam than we do of almost any other major tradition.  His first biographers really tried to document history, maybe not quite history as we know it today, but they certainly presented the prophet in the most realistic light possible.  The al-sīra and hadith collections are biographies and accounts of the verbal and physical traditions of the prophet... providing a very humanizing glimpse of the man who's name means "praiseworthy." 

They reveal Muhammad sometimes having very real and familiar trouble with his wives. People often assume that he had a harem selected for their beauty and subservience designed to cater to his every indulgence.  Far from it!  The wives were often a headache and undertaken for political reasons.  Many were vibrant, intelligent, and, dare we say, insistent.  Surprisingly, his views of family and marriage more closely match our 21st century ideal than what was common in the 6th and 7th centuries.  He attempted to bring more equality and security to women and tried to overturn millennia of tribal custom.  He viewed his wives as both a challenge and a blessing.  He felt it his duty to learn to love, cherish, honor, and respect them as he knew Allah did.

They show Muhammad playing often with his adored grandchildren, even putting little Hassan and Hussein on his shoulders and running around with them.  They recount him weeping over the deaths of family and friends and speak of the comfort and advice given his beloved daughters.  In short, they detail his struggles, vulnerabilities along with the careful striving and literal sweating to craft and utter the astonishing words of the Qur'an. The poetry of the Qur'an is mostly lost in translation, but the Arabic, I'm told, is an exercise in absolute unsurpassed beauty.  Listening to it, I have no doubt.

Muhammad taught that not only Abraham, but Moses, Jesus, Adam are all revered great prophets.  You cannot be a Muslim and deny the truth they taught.  Your Islamic spirit must include an appreciation of these other traditions.  The People of the Book; Jews, Sabians, Christians, and Muslims are indelibly linked.

It is common for the mystics of Islam, the sufi, to exclaim in jubilation that they are no longer a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian; that they are equally home in a mosque, synagogue, temple or church.  They reason once we touch the divine such man-made distinctions become meaningless and we can leave them behind.  This is both extraordinary and inspiring.

Instead of seeing other traditions as, at best, a mistake, sufism inspires us to see them as positive and enriching.  True Islam can give us a blueprint to explore other spiritual traditions and to draw what inspiration we can from them.

"If God had willed he would have made you one nation. But He did not do so, that he may try you in what has come to you. So, compete with one another in good works; Unto God shall you return; altogether; and he will tell you the Truth about what you have been disputing."

~ Qur'an 5:48