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 Another Inconvenient Truth >> Aki Nawaz “Go Join Hezbollah!" >> Amina Nawaz So, You Wanna Change the World? >> Sarah Waseem 10 Books To Read Before Going To University >> Mujadad Zaman Still Learning to Tread on Hallowed Ground >> Omar Fraser A Prophet for All >> Abdul-Rehman Malik Emerging from the Rubble: A Letter from New York City >> Zeeshan Suhail and Muntasir Sattar Istanbul’s Illuminated Ramadan Nights >> Abdal Hakim Murad The Pain of Panjshir >> Chris Sands A People Coming Apart at the Seams >> David Lepeska A Cynical Plan to Rebuild Islam >> Louay Safi Suffer The Little Children >> Tasneem Osgood Dangerous Denial on Darfur >> Muhammed Abdelmoteleb Is the Glass Half Full of Hope or Despair? >> Fozia Bora The Mother of All Muslim Organisations >> Mullah Charles Bala Subramaniam Narasimha Rao A Pious Mole >> Mudasser Ali Living on the Edge >> Tauhid Pasha The Silly Season >> Dal Nun Strong Walk in the Old Paths >> Daoud Rosser-Owen A Modern-Day Ibn Battuta - A tribute to Thomas Omar Abercrombie (1930-2006) >> Shiraz Sheikh “How can you hear a million words from a million mouths at the same time?” >> Shan Khan A Triumph of Myth >> Abdul-Rehman Malik The Timbuktu Charter: “We will be like ferocious lions” >> Muammar al-Gaddafi Updike’s Terrorist: An(other) American Folly >> Raneem Azzam A Crooked Commission >> Sunny Hundal Aural Remembrance Whitewashing White Terror Veil-Gate - The End of Tolerance? Organic Iftars, Unholy Garbage iPod vs iMuslim Formula One Fatwas Vox Populi |
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Still Learning
to Tread on Hallowed Ground Page 57 Omar Fraser finds Eliot Weinberger’s
telling of the Prophet Muhammad’s life unsatisfying – a sometimes
atmospheric literary collage which places beauty and drama ahead of
explanation and profound understanding. For Europeans, whose interest in Christianity has long been flagging, it is not always easy to understand why the war party in America finds its most consistent support in Bible-believing Evangelical churches, although some politicians, such as the late Francois Mitterrand, did show an awareness of the importance of Christian Zionism in shaping America’s policies towards the Muslim world. But in the US, where religion is powerful and growing, the spectacle of a genuinely crusading President has provoked consternation among the country’s beleaguered liberals. For some time in the aftermath of 9/11, liberal hatred of the evangelicals and their literal-minded reading of the Bible was fearfully quiescent amid charges of faintheartedness and lack of patriotism. But with the war in Iraq, which the President himself now ambiguously describes as a “catastrophic success”, some liberals are raising their heads above the parapet, and worrying publicly about the theocracy that their country has effectively become. If church figures close to the Administration are recurrently using an end-time rhetoric about Israel, Babylon, and Armageddon, then at the very least, America’s insistence that the Muslim world attempt a separation of religion from politics seems to have been fatally undermined. Directly challenging this grassroots American Christianity in a season of war is of course out of the question. Yet liberals are trying to find ways of mitigating the more dreadful implications of Washington’s attempt to expand the Bible Belt to encompass the entire world. One of these is sarcasm, and Eliot Weinberger has deployed this effectively in a series of critiques of the administration’s public statements about the Iraq war, published in the London Review of Books. But he is clearly not satisfied with the merely secular and political content of that polemic, which has little chance of reaching the baptized. So in this new publication, a tiny volume entitled simply Muhammad, he writes with a more populist agenda, his evident intention being to undermine the front-line American conviction that the War on Terror is a war to ensure global Christian triumph. This, he seems to hope, is a volume that can be pocketed by the interrogators at Abu Ghraib (all the alleged torturers were members of evangelical churches), or the Bible Believers who, according to former Muslim chaplain James Yee, dominate the culture of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Unfortunately, Weinberger is not in control of his subject. Like too many others drawn into the vortex of the Evangelical war on Islam he is too recent in the field to know how to tread on another’s hallowed ground. To explain the Prophet to America needs more than his fifty-six thin pages. His method is to paraphrase quotations from medieval devotional texts to create an atmosphere which may conflict with what Christian Americans have been told. The first section of these is atmospheric enough, although the reader will have no way of knowing which of these sometimes elaborate tales are accepted by Muslims themselves. There are useful antidotes to the evangelical claim that the Prophet worked no miracles. But the overall sense of the book is disappointing. What is the moral significance of the Prophet’s life? Colourful stories about the Mi’raj are fine and helpful; but what of the Evangelical claim that he brought war and not peace? Muslims of all kinds know that he brought an end to centuries of tribal conflict in Arabia, and united his people where previously there had only been hatred. In the context of just war theory this is surely not difficult for Westerners to respect. Yet Weinberger’s Prophet seems to have no political context. There is only a vaguely Arabian backdrop, but nothing resembling real explanation. Linked to this is the reader’s disappointment over the entire section which he devotes to the Prophet’s wives. Knowing how they married him is helpful; although in fact Weinberger gives us very little sense of them as people. But knowing that, as Montgomery Watt asserts, every one of his marriages healed a rift between warring tribes, would have been more helpful still. Sadly, too, this section is marred by the inclusion of much apocryphal material, including Shia material hateful towards Aisha; the reader is given no means of knowing how to deal with this. Weinberger is a poet. Not all poets, as the Quran reminds us, are rightly-guided. In this book he has regularly succumbed to the temptation to put drama and interesting beauty before explanation. The little icons that he offers of the life of the Best of Creation do not add up to an explanation, but rather to a moderately-successful literary collage. Perhaps it is unfair to expect better from America at war. Given the endless susurration of anti-Muslim messages to which every New Yorker is subject, a fully objective account of the symbolic heart of America’s imagined ‘enemy nations’ is unlikely to be forthcoming. The author’s lack of religious musicality, of a capacity to see a large picture of the Prophet’s sacred genius, is probably also at fault. But perhaps somewhere, among the demoralised members of non-evangelical churches, or in the Jewish community, there is a voice, unbelieving yet profound, willing to explain the deep love with which this figure is regarded by a quarter of the human race? Could such a voice be able to provide, at long last, a non-Muslim reciprocation of the Quran’s moving account of Jesus’ birth? If he or she comes forward, then perhaps the crusaders and their bewildered flocks will at last be awakened from their hypnosis, and the myth of a basic conflict between the ideals of the great religions will be finally laid to rest. Muhammad by Eliot Weinberger is published by Verso (London and New York: Verso, 2006) |