Samir Selmanovic2013-05-24T15:11:52-04:00Samir Selmanovichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=samir-selmanovicCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Samir SelmanovicGood old fashioned elbow grease.My Neighbor's Faith: If Muhammad Had Not Spokentag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15015762012-05-31T06:25:12-04:002012-07-31T05:12:17-04:00Samir Selmanovichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/samir-selmanovic/
That's what happened to me.
When I became a Christian, my devastated secular Muslim parents recruited one of Europe's best psychiatrists and 50 relatives to take their best shot at helping me get over my infatuation with God. Even my former girlfriends were summoned to try to evoke sweet memories and prevail over my heart. My mom was on anxiety medication, and after a couple of months, her face looked strained by an unending stream of tears. For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry. Everything evaporated; their respect for Christian institutions, the good deeds of my church and the virtues of the Christian path were all deconstructed by a little army of people zealously researching the private lives of the members of my church. I was informed about which married Christian man had a woman on the side, who stole tools from the workplace and who did not pay back a loan to a neighbor. After two months of this agony, my body and my spirit were weakening, and seeing my family suffer so much jolted me like nothing else ever did. I was tired, hanging on solely to the cross of Jesus, the clearest expression of God's compassion for me.
My parents did not sense my weakness at the time. Like me, they were on the brink of exhaustion, so they resorted to desperate measures and asked a religious person for help. They invited Imam Muhammad, respected in the local Muslim community as a "holy man," to attempt to throw my Christian beliefs into disarray and stir me toward Islam, which in my parents' reckoning was the lesser of two evils.
When Muhammad walked into our home, somehow I felt safe in his presence. Besides being learned in matters of Scripture, he was the most environmentally progressive and socially conscious person I had ever met -- a vegan who walked to our home from a far part of the city, avoiding transportation on principle, to protect the environment. A small gray-haired man with a large smile, Muhammad was emanating peace and playfulness, something my family needed so much at the time.
After being introduced, he kindly asked my parents to leave the room so that he and I could be alone. In spite of his kind manners, I still expected an attack, something I had heard dozens of times before such as, "The Torah and the New Testament are an incomplete mishmash of texts redacted by humans, whereas the Quran was recited by God and is therefore perfect, correct in all ways, superseding and completing all previous revelations! Come to the winner!" Instead, after some initial small talk, he let time pass in silence, and I enjoyed this rare moment of rest. When I was ready, I raised my eyes and looked at him, dreading the inevitable argument. He stood up quietly, walked over to me, sat down and lightly touched my shoulder for a moment.
Then he said calmly, "I am glad you are a believer." And nothing more.
After sitting in peace for a little longer, we stood up, and he opened his arms to invite an embrace. I opened mine. He smelled like wooden furniture and soap -- old but fresh. Hugging him, I thanked God for giving me this break in life.
Neither my parents nor I knew what to do with what had just happened. After he left, my parents nicknamed him "Crazy Muhammad." My parents fell into a deeper despair, and word of Muhammad's foolishness spread in the family.
The grace and truth I had first met at the cross were embodied in this man, who was willing to be taken for a fool in order to help make me whole.
Would I be a Christian today without Muhammad's blessing?
If Muhammad had not spoken, God would have made stones talk to me, I believe. Largely because of this experience, however, I eventually got over my fantasy of Christian supremacy and signed up for the Kingdom of a sovereign God who is Spirit and who cannot be controlled and, like the wind, blows wherever it pleases.
This column is an excerpt from 'My Neighbor's Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation.']]>Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus: Experience Your Neighbor's Faith to Deepen Your Owntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11695052011-12-25T21:56:04-05:002012-02-24T05:12:02-05:00Samir Selmanovichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/samir-selmanovic/Click through the slideshow to look at photos from the Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus:
We are coming to a realization that religious zealots cannot be fought with indifference. Extremists of all nationalities and religious persuasion feeding on prejudice, legislating exclusion, and resorting to violence cannot be prevailed upon by people with less passion. Telling them to "cool down" and to "be moderate" will not do it. We must allow fires greater than theirs to arise. Our passion for a whole and interdependent word must rise above their passion for a segregated and zero-sum world.
In Faith House Manhattan, a non-profit inter-religious "community of communities," we believe that the time of isolated faith is over. We believe that to know who I am, I must also know who you are. For three years now we have hosted more than 60 Living Room gatherings where people can experiences the practices of another religion (or path, including atheism). We invite all to join our "co-laboratory" of interdependence: "Experience your neighbor's faith, deepen your own."
Our call is to get radical. Very radical. We hold that in today's world, religious people have to remap their reality to include -- in tension and in gratitude -- 'the other.' While our ancestors may have fought for independence, ours is the great struggle for interdependence. 'The other' is not over there, but all around us. While we have been conceiving of the world in vertical terms (whose party is better, whose institution is larger, whose nation is stronger, whose god is bigger), the world is becoming increasingly horizontal, and wonderfully so. Can we learn to be a part of the whole?
This past year, Faith House started a new program with four religious communities in Manhattan, who were part of a "Tour Bus" with reciprocal visits to each of our main religious gatherings. We brought people together to trespass imaginary boundaries while preserving the real ones. From an experience of worship at a Hindu temple, to a Jewish Shabbat service, to a Sufi Zikr, to midweek "Space for Grace" at a major Protestant church -- either as "Interfaith 101″ or an opportunity for seasoned pilgrims to be hosts or guests in their own setting -- this seven-week adventure was a unique New York City experience.
One of the participants, Bhakti Center monk and teacher, Chris Fici, summarized the experience this way:
Experience Your Neighbor's Faith, Deepen Your Own. This is a personal revelation a lot of us have shared recently on the Faith House Bus Tour, as the different sounds, colors, tastes and waves of devotion we have experienced together in our different houses of faith have made a deep communal resonance in our souls.
Too often (at least from my own perspective) our own practice can become caught in the mechanical. Living as a monk, in an intense and insulated environment, I often see how my consciousness during our morning meditation is directed towards how tired I am, or how I might be upset with this monk or that monk. The beautiful essence of our prayers and singing and dancing together remains lost to me.
As I was soaking up the whirling sanctity at our wonderful Bus Tour event at the Dergah of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, the pain of my own disconnection in my own practice became manifest, and that void was quickly filled by the wonderful and mystical people I saw around me, deeply absorbed in the love and vision of the Divine. I came to realize that what they were experiencing was something I had access to every day, if I chose to. I saw very clearly how we were all pearls on the same thread of God's mercy. I returned to my own community and practice with a sense of renewal that has stayed with me ever since.
The interfaith experience is very important for me, and I think for all of us as a common human family. The turbulence of our age calls for a communication between peoples of faith that transcends our superficial differences and allows us to drink from the immense well of wisdom God has given us, to give solace and take profound action to help cure our shared ills.
This turbulence also calls from us a tremendous maturity from our humility, from a recognition that we cannot possibly have the exclusive answers, that the pieces of the puzzle we need come from our brothers and sisters in faith. In Thomas Merton's journals of his final and fateful journey to India and Indonesia, where he breathed deeply of the eastern faiths that had always intrigued and inspired him, he related a realization in this regard that has deeply touched me.
He says that those who are mature in their faith are able to enter into the experience, philosophy, and practice of another faith and gain a practical wisdom which they can take back into their own renewed and strengthened spiritual life. This is the essence of my own personal adventure in interfaith. To be able to see of and hear of and speak about and taste of and move within the common thread of our faiths together is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in my life. It links me to the maturity needed to answer the spiritual call of our time, and I imagine it may do so for you as well.
I am always eager to point out to others that New York City is a deeply spiritual place. I want to encourage others to develop the vision of the great rivers of faith which run through this town, which are not always visible beyond the surface tumult and loosely organized chaos.
When you come to New York City, you can enjoy a Broadway show, walk the Brooklyn Bridge, check out that special night club you found on Google, enjoy this gastronomical paradise with more than 4,000 restaurants, but don't miss the rich undercurrent of spirituality you can find at every corner. The many religious traditions can help you understand yourself, and perhaps rekindle a passion for your own faith, an encounter that will change you forever. You might even come back to your home and do something radical like taking time to understand the faith of the other, whose life is now inextricably intertwined with yours.
Read articles and reflections about each stop on the Faith House tour here. ]]>Religion Needs Atheismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4980512010-03-13T19:07:18-05:002011-05-25T15:50:25-04:00Samir Selmanovichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/samir-selmanovic/Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, Australia represented 220 religions and featured 675 programs, 37 movie screenings, and 84 off-site events. For all this colorful diversity, the parliament did not have a meaningful presence of atheists in its program, neither as another religion (in the sense of a "system of meaning") nor as conversation partners. This coming weekend, the atheists of the world are having their own 2010 Global Atheist Convention entitled The Rise of Atheism in the very same convention center in Melbourne, and with a correspondingly apparent absence of anything religious. It is true that religious people and atheists are not historic partners or easy conversationalists and that they both need their identity-building convocations. Yet, this segregation is happening at the time when learning to live interdependently on our fragile planet has moved from being merely a virtue of neighborly love to a matter of survival. Interdependence is no longer a choice to consider; it is a necessity.
Atheists have their own challenges to finding a way to interact with humanity as it is, not as they wish it to be. Those of us who are religious have our own challenge: to involve atheists in our religious debates. In my recent book It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian, I have a chapter titled "The Blessing of Atheism." I recount my personal story of how atheism has supported me in becoming a better Christian and why I believe that atheists are a much needed voice in our religious conversations, service, and life. I believe that engagement with atheists is not only inevitable but will prove to be fruitful.
Rabbi Or Rose tells me that rabbis of old have long taught that the highest form of human discourse is Makhloket, or disagreement. First we recognize our own limits, and then we proceed to clarify our positions as best we can. When we sustain the tension between us, each pulling our own way, we create emptiness between us. In this emptiness, Rabbis say, God creates. As it was in the beginning, so it is today. In the presence of one another, in the moment when our positions of clarity are matched with humility, the possibility of a truly new idea emerges, a solution, a way forward. Creation continues, and we all gain.
In the last decade we have seen the resurgence of religious people who are willing to stand their ground with conviction but without the solemn realization of the limits of their knowledge, feelings, actions, and good intentions. They insist that life on earth is a zero-sum game and that to be right, others have to be wrong. They can hold to their formative stories as true only if other stories are proven to be lies. Instead of generating the empty space between, they endeavor to empty the space of all answers other than their own.
It does not have to be this way. In Makhloket, instead of disagreeing against one another, we learn to disagree for one another. There is no need to force others. When there is a sustained life-giving tension between people or communities, we all change, find our way to a place none of us has been before.
The maintenance of this pregnant space is the responsibility of all solution-oriented parties involved. All are welcome to this disagreement, including atheists. Especially atheists. They are not only welcome but desirable and necessary interlocutors in our human conversation about the meaning of our experience and the problems we face in our newly interdependent world. They are our brothers and sisters, partners and teachers, contributing members of our human household. Without those who doubt God, we would have religious people talking to each other in an echo chamber.
As with every other system of meaning, atheism has its history and moments, some constructive and life-giving, and some less so. Admittedly, there are fundamentalist atheists who have abandoned the practice of constructive disagreement and have resorted to mocking the other side, refusing to roll up their sleeves to help fix the world in synergy with others. But if we all were to abandon faith for reason and proclaim all mystery to be fantasy, one day we would all sit in straight chairs of scientism. Some atheists, instead of disagreeing, demand a new and clean public square where those who disagree with them will be no more. And they do it with apocalyptic urgency, without healthy self-doubt, with their zealous priesthood making money on human fear. Instead of promoting secularization, which fosters pluralism, such fundamentalist atheism promotes secularism, getting rid of the processes of exploration of what humans cannot understand, control, or subjugate. This is atheism at its worst, a mirror image of religion at its worst.
But there is such a thing as atheism at its best.
Seeds of such atheism were sown by towering figures of atheist prophets including Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, who called us out of our self-serving use of religion toward better faith and a better world. Arguably, they have done more to improve religion -- and with it, the world -- than some of our most admired religious leaders.
Atheism at its best participates. It refuses to stay isolated until billions of people cease to be religious. Instead of simply dismissing religion, it engages with it constructively so that the world is better for it. Atheism at its best is an expression of faith in humanity, even faith in religious humanity, for however misguided we religious people might be, we are human, too. Atheism at its best asks us to enjoy our faith life, but with the understanding that our religions are "God-management systems," an attempt -- however honorable and perhaps necessary -- to manage a reality that is larger and more complex than our own religions. Atheism at its best is a guardian of secularization, a process of creating a common and safe space where our worldviews -- including religious ones -- can share their treasures and expose themselves to the entire world as their ethical community. Atheism at its best insists that religious people learn to live on Earth. Religion that does not work on Earth, they argue, does not work at all. Good point. To us religious people, atheists are not only precious neighbors but also strangers who see what we cannot see and ask questions that we don't know how to ask -- all the while acknowledging the good that religion brings. Atheists are God's whistleblowers.
Atheism at its best offers ethics, a philosophy of life, and an enriching discussion about virtue. Does God have an ego that can be wounded by our disbelief in God's existence? Would God, if there were such a thing, prefer a world where humans love and care for each other and the planet, even at the expense of acknowledging God, or one where humans believe and worship God at the expense of caring for one another and the world? Their questions, pregnant with possibilities, go on.
Atheism does not have to be the end of the enchantment; it can be a new door towards a better religion. Religion does not have to be the opium of the people; it can be the poetry of the people. Both faith and doubt are the opposite of certainty and therefore part of the same whole. To end either of them would be to end the empty space between us, and with it, the possibility of truly new ideas, solutions, and ways into the future. U2, in their modern hymn "One," sum up these dynamics: "We are one. But we are not the same. We get to carry each other." If all sides can muster enough courage and grace to step out of their own boxes, we might find ourselves in a new open space of life-giving tension. ]]>