Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

East is East and West is West

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

November 5, 2006

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Til Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat,

But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ballad of East and West,” from which that famous first line comes, is one of his admiring tales of English soldiers and Muslim resistance fighters in British-occupied India. Of course he calls the Muslims bandits, not resistance fighters—from the perspective of the occupier the insurgent is always an outlaw. The two strong men of the poem are a “bandit” who steals a regimental Colonel’s favorite horse and the Colonel’s son, who goes to get it back. They have a harrowing chase and each passes up the chance to kill the other. In the end they are “blood brothers,” bonded by courage, fighting prowess, and bravado in the face of death. East and West meet and become comrades.

Is battle really the only ground where this meeting and transformation of foes into comrades can take place? If so, I fear for the future of our world. The field of battle these days is much more dangerous than it was in the nineteenth century; nowadays before the Colonel’s son and the insurgent ever met, someone would have been blown up without any epic horseback pursuit or any opportunity to learn to admire each other.

We need a better meeting place for East and West, and the state of the world makes it obvious that it’s pretty urgent we find one sooner rather than later. That’s part of the reason I decided to offer a discussion class around Islam, using Karen Armstrong’s short history of Muslim religion and culture as a text for our exploration. Most folks took the class for similar reasons. We learned many things together. I feel like I’ve got a much better grasp on the history of the Muslim world now, and that gives me a much more informed understanding of why the present situation is such a mess. I strongly recommend that you read this book, and then pass it along to someone else who wants to understand Islam better—or to someone you hear saying insulting or ignorant things about Muslims.

For me one of the most reassuring discoveries has been the confirmation that Islam is still a religion in evolution. The world’s 1.3 billion Muslims have many different notions about how their spiritual path is to be followed. Islam’s response to the demands and hazards of the modern world is still taking shape; there are liberal and moderate voices within Islam just as there are in the Western religious world.

It was striking how little many of us—including myself—really knew about Islam. Unitarian Universalists believe that all world religions have important truths to share, but it seems we’ve had a harder time finding those truths in Islam. That was one of my personal goals for the study.

Language is one barrier. Huston Smith points out that it’s often hard for Westerners to appreciate the power of the Qur’an for Muslims. English writers such as Carlyle and Edward Gibbon dismissed the Qur’an as tiresome and incoherent, and contemporary English-speaking people often find the Qur’an in translation heavy going. Yet for Muslim readers the Qur’an in Arabic is the most beautiful writing imaginable; most agree with Muhammad, who called it “that incomparable Book, one piece of which puts all your golden poetry to shame.”

The spoken word in Arabic has a music and rhythm of its own that does not translate well, but there’s also a difference in content. For Muslims, to hear the Qur’an is to listen to Allah speaking. As Smith says, “Muslims express disappointment in finding that [the bible] do[es] not take the form of Divine speech and merely report[s] things that happened. In the Qur’an God speaks in the first person. Allah describes himself and makes known his laws. . . . By contrast the Jewish and Christian Bibles seem more distant from God for placing religious meaning in reports of events instead of God’s direct pronouncements.” We need to keep learning to hear the Holy in each others’ words.

Learning more about Islam didn’t take all my discomforts away. I am uneasy with a way of thinking about women and men that doesn’t feel like equal respect and freedom to me. Even setting aside the most repressive customs that are based more on ancient tribal culture than on the Qur’an, there are assumptions in Islam about appropriate gender roles that I can’t accept uncritically.

I’m also uneasy with a sense of democracy that assumes the presence and priority of God in political decision-making. If democracy does take root in the Arab world, it will probably result in Islamic republics, not secular states, and that worries me. The Qur’an prescribes tolerance for religious minorities in an Islamic society, and I now know that in the medieval world it was far safer to be in the religious minority in a Muslim country than in Christian Europe. Still, as a Westerner I mistrust the guarantee of religious freedom that any religious state can offer; I fear that unspoken or blatant limits will be imposed on social, political, and economic participation by religious minorities.

Muslims have reason to be uneasy with modern Western culture, too, and with our Unitarian Universalist ideas of what religion should be all about.

One of the things that struck me in our class was the description of the pre-Islamic cultural context in which Muhammad’s first revelations arrived. Islamic tradition calls the time before Islam jahiliyyah, the chaos. Mecca, Medina and the rest of the Arab world were divided and disorganized. Mecca was a nominal democracy, but its real social order was focused on personal and family wealth, prestige, and power. It was a violent, materialistic, and self-interested culture where community loyalty and cohesiveness were very low. I can’t help but think that, modern American culture, at least at its worst, has a lot in common with that pre-Islamic society, and I wonder sometimes whether our resemblance to a new jahiliyyah has something to do with the mistrust so many in the Muslim world feel for America.

I can imagine them looking at us and thinking, is it even possible to be religious in America, to live a faithful life?

But it’s not just our weaknesses that may seem dangerous to Islam. Think about what a good religion looks like to Unitarian Universalists: We like our religion because it has no iron-clad doctrines, no prescribed set of spiritual practices for everyone. For some of us God is the center of everything, but others wouldn’t imagine using that language. Some of us maintain daily prayers, meditations, or other spiritual disciplines, but most don’t, and even if we do they aren’t the main point: For us, making justice, offering compassion to others, and seeking knowledge about the Holy are the real tests of a religious life’s authenticity. Does this seem like a religion at all to a Muslim who keeps faithfully to the Five Pillars? The Pillars aren’t incidental to the greater good of living a faithful life, they are basic requirements for a faithful life.

With all these areas of uneasiness, is there a meeting ground for East and West? Is there wisdom in Islam for Unitarian Universalists to seek? Can the Flaming Chalice look to the Crescent and Star for light to navigate by?

One meeting place has long been Sufi poets such as Rumi, Kabir, and Hafiz. They offer a wonderful sense of the closeness and availability of the Divine in our lives, which is very much akin to our Transcendentalist view that the Divine Spark flares within each of us and that everyday nature and experience is permeated with holiness, if we can only learn to see it. We like their tone of delight and rapture, too.

“ Come, come, whoever you are; wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving—ours is no caravan of despair; though you have broken your vows a thousand times, come yet again, come!”

That’s Unitarian Universalism, isn’t it—whoever you are, welcome; though you have often fallen short of the mark, a place is still waiting for you!

But to truly learn from another faith tradition, I think I have to go beyond the beautifully phrased insight that gives me a new way of expressing what I already believed. I need to look for the deep wisdom of Islam, the gift powerful enough to transform lives. For that, I need to risk looking at where Islam challenges my comfortable certainties and preconceptions. I need to seek out insights that disturb my habitual ways of thinking and living.

The discipline of the Five Pillars is one of those. It pushes me to question my own commitment, my own discipline. What concrete ways are there for Unitarian Universalists to show our faith? When do we declare our belief? What part of our life shows that we are willing to make the Holy more visible and more welcome in our lives? Most of us probably wouldn’t pray in certain ways at certain times of the day—although we could. Perhaps each of us would have our own Pillars. How about a discipline of appreciation, saying “thank you” to the people around us and to the Universe? I would benefit from a discipline of loving thoughts and speech, stopping five or ten times a day to remind myself that all the people in my life are a gift. In these last few days before Election Day I hope we all can embrace a discipline of activism, making sure that we have done everything in our power to keep our state from affirming hate over love. For some, this has been the holy month they set aside to work toward justice every single day. Discipline can be a meeting ground—if we’re as serious about ours as Muslims are about theirs. What would your Pillars be? Are they strong enough to build a spiritual life on?

The core of Islam, the idea of submission, really challenges me. We think of submission as self-abasement, but as Muslims understand it, it means changing your life to meet the demands and invitation of the Divine. That might be a meeting place, too. As I grow to understand and articulate what is holy in my life and in the world, do I really give my life to it? If I believe that the Holy is an all-encompassing Love, what would a life of submission to that power look like? Can I embrace that life with total commitment—or will I hold something back, will I retain the right to be hateful or sarcastic on special occasions, will I insist on keeping exceptions to the rule of Love?

Finally, what do I have to learn from a faith that says life, community, and faith must be completely intertwined? The Muslim ideal of Tawhid , Unity, teaches that ultimately everything is wrapped up in Allah, the Source of All. This already seems like common ground to me. Doesn’t my Unitarian Universalist faith also teach Unity, that the Universe is woven in a single and sacred fabric? No exceptions. No crossed fingers. Everything is part of a single great Unity that is holy. Now if that’s true, shouldn’t I be striving always—that’s jihad, striving in faith—to make that Unity more apparent, more visible, more generously available in my life and in the world?

Can East meet West, and West meet East? I believe that liberal religion has something of value to offer to Muslims as well—but in order to enter a genuine dialogue, we have to be as serious about our faith as they are about theirs. When our two faiths stand face to face with one another, letting ourselves be challenged by each others’ strongest truths, then perhaps the twain shall meet, to learn from each other and to grow in understanding together. The world will be better for it.