Jihad-e-Zindagi

This blog is about my Jihad (struggles) of Zindagi (Life). In a way it is a memoir of who I am, why I am, how I am and where I became or becoming, what I am. It consists of reflections of my thoughts, decisions, actions, readings and take away from every struggle of my life. This blog also consists of excerpts from my readings and photographs of the places where I have been at different times of my life.

[jihad-e-zindagi]

When My Spirituality Was Liberated - August 15, 2015

It was an incredible day, an emotional day with surprises and blessings. It was a long day that ended well and marked the formal beginning of spiritual path that over the years was coming into my life like tremors. It was a matter of time when the day would come when I would formally accept it. Or rather I should say when formally the Ultimate Authority, The Creator would mark the day for me. Interestingly, on August 15 India got her freedom from colonial rule 68 years ago while on August 15, 2015 I freely chose the path of my spirituality by submitting myself to the love for Creator. I chose to follow Islam since it was resonating with the inner dimensions of my heart.

First, I want to express what happened on that day or how the day unfolded for me. After that I would like to reflect upon my journey upto this day in another post. It was a typical Saturday. In the morning Waleed could not talk to me properly. I sensed he was not well for sure and needed rest. I was anxious about him and kept remembering Allah. In the afternoon I talked to my Islamic studies professor Kirk Templeton, for almost one and a half hour. He is recovering from surgery of bladder cancer. Allah was gracious in blessing him with successful surgery. I told him about my desire for Shahdah. He replied he was not surprised as he could see the progression in my seriousness and sincerity in following Islam. He wished me best for my Shahdah and after talking to him I got ready for the mosque. 

The bus stop is 150 yards from my house. As I was walking towards the bus stop, hardly had I covered approx. 50 yards and I saw bus was approaching. I began running towards the bus stop. Driver saw me running and kept the bus on hold till I got into the bus. I was huffing and feeling absolutely grateful. It was so gracious of her to hold the bus for that time for me. I sat in the bus and got down at Valley Care center bus stop on Las Positas blvd. Mosque (MCC East Bay, Pleasanton) from there is more than half a mile away. I was walking on the sidewalk. I may be half the way when a car stopped by. The lady in that car offered me a ride. I thanked her and replied that I was fine since I just needed to go to the mosque and I was almost there. But she insisted citing that it was blazing hot in the Sun and temp. crossing 100 degrees. It was around 4 pm in the evening. She also told me that she was just returning from the mosque. I accepted her request and as I was making myself comfortable in the car seat I told her that I was going to take Shahdah if it could be possible that day. As she heard that she was stunned. She kept saying O Allah! how blessed she was to stop by and to offer me a ride. She was exhilarated. She started making calls frantically to her colleagues in the class as she just left the class at the Mosque about developing deeper understanding of the Quranic language. In no time we were in the courtyard-cum parking of the mosque. As she parked the car she cried out to other two women standing there, pointing towards me that she wanted to take Shahdah. She requested them to stop the teacher who was still there in the mosque. The two women ran fast into the mosque to tell the teacher. I entered the mosque along with her.

As I entered I saw almost 10-11 women in the mosque along with the teacher (Hafiza) Iffat Hasan. They were all surprised and staring at me. Teacher took my hand into hers and asked me what was my name. I told her Seema Duhan. Then she said, “Mashallah! Many Muslim women have their name Seema.” I replied, “I am aware of that.” Then we sat down in the classroom. There were desks and chairs. She asked me did I know anything about Islam. I replied, “I was a student of Islamic studies. I know about the history of Islam, about the three foundations on which the Deen was based – Islam, Iman and Ihsaan, but I did not study Arabic therefore my understanding was from the English texts that I studied.” Everyone sighed and they whispered “Alhamdullah! Mashallah!” Then as teacher began the proceeding for Shahdah, she asked me if anyone had forced me to accept the Deen, or if I was under the influence of any person or money. I replied, “No, It was my personal journey and my private relationship with Allah. I fasted during Ramadhan and offered five times prayers. I consider this ritual as a formal entry into the religious fold but I was practicing it for sometime now.” She was satisfied with my reply and she invited me to recite after her, “Allah Hu Akbar! Ashhadu anna la ilaha illallaho, wa ashhadu ana Muhammadan abduhu wa Rasuluh.” I recited it three times and then she repeated it in English. After that all sisters welcomed me in Islam and asked what made me chose Islam. I briefly told them about my family background that I was born to Hindu parents but thankfully they never pushed religion down our throats. I also told them that it was hard to pin point one particular incident that changed my heart towards Islam, because I think it was gradually entering into my life. Since my early twenties I was a fan of Sufi music. Though, as I was growing up I was more of an atheist-agnostic person. But Sufism was an exception. I enjoyed leaning about Sufi concept of love. However, not all my Muslim friends liked Sufism. Then I met the love of my life – Waleed Hussain, who was also into Sufism. Among many things that was one connecting point for us. In 2012, I came to United States to study Philosophy. Gradually, I became interested in Islamic Philosophy and I started learning more about the history and Philosophy of Islam. After that my teacher indicated towards a woman literally sitting besides me and told me that she also had a similar story as mine. I looked at her and she had tears in her eyes. I was moved. 

After that small ritual, the cohort invited me to come again to the mosque following Saturday as they wanted to celebrate my Shahdah. I was immensely touched. My teacher blessed me and wished for me and my love Waleed Hussain a happy married union. I thanked her and with wet eyes, I told her that on the Eid, I went to the mosque in the morning to offer prayers. I was so moved to see women of so many ethnicity standing besides me bowing down at the same time in the love for Allah. That thing was so beautiful to observe that despite differences there were certain things that bind us all together. Sisters and my teacher uttered Mashallah! Mashallah! One sister said, “Thanks for reminding us. We need such small reminders from time to time.” As we all were parting, the teacher said, “Seema, you will be a very good Muslimah.” I suddenly felt an added sense of responsibility and yet very touched. 

A month ago I celebrated Eid after fasting for the month of Ramadhan and almost a month after on August 15, 2015, the auspicious day of formally embracing Islam came into my life. I am not sure, what is going to change in my life hereafter. But whatever change will come by the grace of Allah, I am ready for that. I do feel a certain sense of empowerment now because I know my status as a Muslim. Earlier, even while practicing, I was always confused whether I should make it as a part of my identity or not. Thankfully, now all confusion is erased and my spirituality can breathe openly in the body of Islam. For rest of my life I want to devote my time to learn about deeper meanings of Ishq and Ilm. Within in that context I also see myself continuously engaged with the issues of women and ecological ethics in Islam.

More details about my journey towards Islam, I will etch out in next post. May Allah grant peace to everyone and may all of us find our purpose in this embodied world and leave this world in better shape for our beloved future planetary generations.

 As-Salam Walaikum

[jihad-e-zindagi]

Muhammad – The Prophet and The Messenger

Excerpts from the Introduction essay by Karen Armstrong

For the past couple of days I have been going through a seething struggle with my readings, learning, and confusions. Since, it is the beginning of conception of the work that I have taken to task. The task is writing thesis on the values enshrined in Islam as guidance for humanity to protect, preserve and carefully use the gifts of nature. It was a love at first sight when I read certain revelations (ofcourse the translations). However, this post is in line of academic struggle but not about the values and reverence for nature.

This post is about the last Prophet of Islam, a source of unity, and for me personally the first thought of this morning. To know more about his life and mission woke me up and I started searching, thinking what material do I have on my laptop, internet or Kindle. As I was looking for various works available on his life and teachings, I could see tons of scholarly work on his life on internet. Then I decided on one of the books listed among hundreds of books. The book I have chosen is Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Time by Karen Armstrong. I chose the book written by her over many other scholars because of two reasons:

1)   I have read her work in the past and she is an amazing scholar of history and theology on Abrahmanic religions

2)   She is a non-Muslim and I expect more objective view from her. It is not that other Muslim scholars who have written were not objective. But as we know name becomes significant source of identity to our prejudiced minds, therefore Karen was to go for me.

3)   Personal history of Karen Armstrong. The struggles she had faced for being a woman who was a nun and wanted to study religion in a conventional university. Her life is a story of woman empowerment.

 This post consists of excerpts from the introductory essay by Karen Armstrong. While reading her introduction I felt so related to her account being a non-Muslim but interested in delving deeper in the values that Islam has to offer to humanity. Often, it is asked and argued that what is the need of all those traditions, fables and religious teaching in the contemporary “world” or the “modern world”. Often “modern” is used as a synonym of “progressiveness and liberal values”. However, in this post I am not going into the debate about the progressiveness of the modern values. But the emphasis is on knowing what are the messages for humanity that came through the last messenger of one of such lineage of traditions.

Here is a link to Karen Armstrong one such lecture: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_wish_the_charter_for_compassion?language=en#t-1058034

As Karen writes, “The history of a religious tradition is a continuous dialogue between a transcendent reality and current events in the mundane sphere. The faithful scrutinize the sacred past, looking for lessons that speak directly to the conditions of their lives…..The pragmatic personalities shed light on the often dark conditions in which most of us seek salvation in our flawed world. They tell us what a human being can be.”

“Muslims have always understood this. Their scripture, the Quran, gave them a mission: to create a just and decent society (a value of Islam – my addition), in which well being of the Muslim community was, and is, a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it is almost insuperably difficult to fulfill, but after each failure, Muslims have tried to get up and begin again. Many Islamic rituals, philosophies, doctrines, sacred texts, and shrines are the result of frequently anguished and self critical contemplation of the political events of Islamic society.”

“The life of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632 CE) was a crucial to the unfolding Islamic ideal as it is today. His career revealed the inscrutable God’s activity in the world, and illustrated the perfect surrender (in Arabic, the word for “surrender” is islam) that every human being should make to divine. A little more than a hundred years after Muhammad’s death, as Islam continued to spread to new territories and gain converts, Muslim scholars began to compile the great collection of Muhammad’s sayings (ahadith) and customary practice (sunnah), which would form the basis of Muslim law.”

“At about the same time, in the eights and ninth centuries, the first Muslim historians began to write about the life of the Prophet Muhammad: Muhammad ibn Ishaq(d. 767); Muhammand ibn Umar ‘Umar al-Waqidi (d. c. 820); Muhammand ibn Sa’d (d. 845); and Abu Jarir at Tabari (d. 923). These historians were not relying on memories and impressions, but were attempting a serious historical reconstruction. They included earlier documents in their narratives, traced oral traditions back to their original source, and, though they revered Muhammad as a man of god, they were not entirely uncritical. Largely as a result of their efforts, we know more about Muhammad than about nearly any other founder of a major religious tradition.”

“The work of Muhammad’s first biographers would probably not satisfy a modern historian. They were men of their time and often included stories of a miraculous and legendry nature that we would interpret differently today. But they were aware of the complexity of their material. They did not promote one theory of interpretation of events at the expense of others. Sometimes they put two quite different versions of an incident side by side, and gave equal weight to each account, so that readers could make up their own minds. They did not always agree with the traditions they included, but were trying to tell the story of the story of their Prophet as honestly and truthfully as they could.”

Before revelations occurred to Muhammad, “he was a relatively obscure figure, and nobody thought it worthwhile to make note to his activities. Our main source of information is the scripture that he brought to the Arabs.” The Quran, “does not contain a straightforward account of Muhammad’s life, of course, but came to the Prophet piecemeal, line by line, verse by verse, chapter by chapter. Sometimes the revelations dealt with a particular situation in Mecca or Medina.” “As each new set of verses was revealed to Muhammad, the Muslims learned it by heart, and those who were literate wrote it down. The first official compilation of the Quran was made in about 650, twenty years after Muhammad’s death and achieved canonical status.”

“The Quran is the holy word of God, and its authority remains absolute. But Muslims know that it is not always easy to interpret. Its laws were designed for a small community, but a century after Prophet’s death, Muslims ruled a vast empire, stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. Their circumstances were entirely different from those of the Prophet and the first Muslims and Islam had to change and adapt. The first essays in Muslim history were written to address current perplexities. How could Muslims apply the Prophet’s insights and practice to their own times? When the early biographers told the story of his life, they tried to explain some of the passages in the Quran by reproducing the historical context in which these particular revelations had come down to Muhammad. By understanding what had prompted a particular Quranic teaching, they could relate it to their own situation by means of a disciplined process of analogy.” “From the very start, writing about the Prophet Muhammad was never a wholly antiquarian pursuit. The process continues today. Some Muslim fundamentalists have based their militant ideology on the life of Muhammad; Muslim extremists believe that he would have condoned and admired their atrocities. Other Muslims are appalled by these claims, and point to the extraordinary pluralism, which condemns aggression and sees all rightly guided religions as deriving from the one God”

“We have a long history of Islamophobia in Western culture that dates back to the time of the Crusades. In the twelfth century, Christian monks in Europe insisted that Islam was a violent religion of the sword, and that Muhammad was a charlatan who imposed his religion on a reluctant force by arms; they called him lecher and a sexual pervert. This distorted version of the Prophet’s life became one of the received ideas of the West, and Western people have always found it difficult to Muhammad in a more objective light. Since the destruction of World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, members of the Christian Right in the United States and some sectors of the Western media have continued this tradition of hostility, claiming that Muhammad was irredeemably addicted to war. Some have gone so far as to claim that he was a terrorist and a pedophile.”

“We can no longer afford to indulge this type of bigotry, because it is a gift to extremists who can use such statements to “prove” that the Western world is indeed engaged on a new crusade against the Islamic world. Muhammad was not a man of violence. We mush approach his life in a balanced way, in order to appreciate his considerable achievements. To cultivate an inaccurate prejudice damages the tolerance, liberty, and compassion that are supposed to characterize Western culture.” “We (Westerners) appeared to have learned nothing from the tragedy of the 1930s, when this type of bigotry made it possible for Hitler to kill six million Jews.” Further, “I realized that many Western people had no opportunity to revise their impression of Muhammad, so I decided to write a popular accessible account of his life to challenge this entrenched view.” “In the wake of September 11, we need to focus on other aspects of Muhammad’s life. So this is a completely new and entirely different book, which, I hope, will speak more directly to the terrifying realities of our post-September 11 world.”

“As a paradigmatic personality, Muhammad has important lessons, not only for Muslims, but also for Western people. His life was a jihad: as we shall see, this word does not mean “holy war”, it means “struggle.” Muhammad literally sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia, and we need people who are prepared to do this today. His life was a tireless campaign against injustice, and arrogance. He realized that Arabia at a turning point and that the old way of thinking would no longer suffice, so he wore himself out in the creative effort to evolve an entirely new solution. We entered another era of history on September 11, and must strive with equal intensity to develop a different outlook.”

“Strangely, events that took place in seventh century Arabia have much to teach us about the events of our time and their underlying significance-far more, in fact, than the facile sound bites of politicians. Muhammad was not trying to impose religious orthodoxy­– he was not much interested in metaphysics–but to change people’s hearts and minds. He called the prevailing spirit of his time jahiliyyah. Muslims usually understand this to mean the ”Time of Ignorance,” that is, the pre-Islamic period in Arabia. But, as recent research shows, Muhammad used the term jahiliyyah to refer not to an historical era but to state of mind that caused violence and terror in seventh-century Arabia. Jahiliyyah, I would argue, is also much in evidence in the West today as well as in the Muslim world.

“Paradoxically, Muhammad became a timeless personality because he was so rooted in his own period. We cannot understand his achievement unless we appreciate what he was up against. In order to see what he can contribute to out own predicament, we must enter the tragic world that made him a prophet nearly fourteen hundred years ago, on a lonely mountain top just outside the holy city of Mecca.”

  It is here I end this post. More reflections on Prophet’s life in the future posts. 

[jihad-e-zindagi]

I join anti-Modi protest because:

He is a mass murderer. It doesn’t matter whether the apex court would ever find him guilty or not, but I believe that there is a higher court of justice which keeps record of our dealings and actions. I am sure whenever that higher court of justice will do justice, he will be found guilty of murdering 2000 Muslims along with his accomplice in 2002

It doesn’t really matter to me that there are millions of people who are fan of his administrative skills and consider him panacea of all the problems that India is facing, because I have a firm belief that he is making fans by poisoning minds with hatred for each other and especially against Muslims, Christians and Dalits

It doesn’t matter to me if then entire India Inc. and many economists are ga-ga about this economics because I understand that in the name of attracting foreign investment he is selling India inch by inch

It doesn’t matter to me if within 100 days of holding the office of Prime Minister of India he has been either on foreign visits or has been receiving foreign heads of states to prove himself as a statesman, because he knows it very well that only good PR can get him that otherwise his power-mongering self does not have any ability to be a statesman

He is a fascist and his ideology is dividing people on the basis of majority and minority, and to instill a false sense of pride and fear in them by spreading heresy

He is plundering the resources and minds of Indians in the name of providing development

He is a glib liar and has twisted the arm of law in order to cover up his and his accomplice deeds

[jihad-e-zindagi]

No god but God - Part 1

These are the excerpts from the introduction of Reza Aslan's book that I found quite fascinating. I am using blog to write all those excerpts because I think blog is an effective way of preserving my reading in a more effective way with less virtual space. 

So here they are - 

"Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence. Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into a primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion."

He further writes about the significance and reformation of Islam, and the struggle of Islam or Muslims with the process colonization. I think this is the most valuable part of Reza's introductory essay for his book. 

He writes, "This, Then, Is the story of Islam. It is a story anchored in the memories of the first generation of Muslims and catalogued by the Prophet Muhammad's earliest biographers, Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), Ibn Hisham (d. 833), and al-Tabari (d. 922). At the heart of the story is the Glorious Quran–the divine revelations Muhammed received during a span of some twenty-six years in Mecca and Medina. While the Quran, for reasons that will become clear, tells us very little about Muhammad's life (indeed Muhammad is rarely mentioned in it), it is invaluable in revealing the ideology of the Muslim faith in its infancy; that is, before the faith became a religion, before the religion became an institution."

I found his reflection on what is mythology and how it should be read and understood. He further says, "Still, we must never forget that as indispensable and historically valuable as the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet may be, they are nevertheless grounded in mythology. It is shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature, myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility, whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammed, is to ask totally irrelevant questions. the only questions that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is "What do these stories means?" 

"The fact is that no evangelist in any of the world's great religions would have been at all concerned with recoding his or her objective observations of historical events. They would not have been recoding observations at all! Rather, they were interpreting those events in order to give structure and meaning to the myths and rituals of their community, providing future generations with a common identity, a common aspiration, a common story. After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid. However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others. And as the Jewish philosopher and mystic Moses Maimonides noted so many years ago, it is reason, not imagination, which determines what is probable and what is not."

"The way scholars form a reasonable interpretation of a particular religious tradition is by merging that religion's myths with what can be known about the spiritual and political landscape in which those myths arose. By relying on the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet, along with our understanding of the cultural milieu in which Muhammad was born and in which his message was formed, we can more reasonably reconstruct the origins and evolution of Islam. This is no easy task, though it is made somewhat easier by the fact that Muhammad appears to have lived "in the full view of history." to quote Ernest Renan, and died an enormously successful prophet (something for which his Christian and Jewish detractors have never forgiven him)."

"Once a reasonable interpretation of the rise of Islam in sixth and seventh century Arabia has been formed, it is possible to trace how Muhammad's revolutionary message of moral accountability and social egalitarianism was gradually interpreted by his successors into competing ideologies of rigid legalism and uncompromising orthodoxy, which fractured the Muslim community and widened the gap between mainstream, or Sunni, Islam and its two major sectarian movements, Shi'ism and Sufism. Although sharing a common sacred history, each group strove to develop its own interpretations of scriptures, its own ideas on theology and the law, and its own community of faith. And each had different responses to the experience of colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, that experience forced the entire Muslim community to reconsider the role of faith in modern society. While some Muslims pushed for the creation of an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment by eagerly developing Islamic alternatives to Western secular notions of democracy, others advocated separation from Western cultural ideals in favor of the complete "Islamization" of society. With the end of colonialism and the birth of Islamic state in the twentieth century, these two groups have refined their arguments against the backdrop of the ongoing debate in the Muslim world over the prospect of forming a genuine Islamic democracy. But as we shall see, at the centre of the debate over Islam and democracy, is far more significant internal struggle over who gets to define the Islamic Reformation that is already under way in most of the Muslim world."

"Thus far, the Islamic Reformation has proved no different (from terrifying process of Christian Reformation - my addition). For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West–ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations." 

"This book is not just a critical reexamination of the origins and evolution of Islam, nor is it merely an account of the current struggle among Muslims to define the future of this magnificent yet misunderstood faith. This book is, above all else, an argument for reform. There are those who will call it apostasy, but that is not troubling. No one speaks for God-not svn the prophets (who speak about God). There are those who will call it apology, but that is hardly a bad thing. An apology is a defense, and there is no higher calling than to defend one's faith, especially from ignorance and hate, and thus to help shape the story of that faith, a story which, in this car, began fifteen century ago, at the end of sixth century C.E., in the sacred city of Mecca, the land that gave birth to Muhammand ibn Abdallah ibn Abd al-Muttalib: the Prophet and Messenger of God. May peace and blessings be upon him." 

(To be continued....)