Ingrid Mattson – 2016 Cole Lecture Day 1
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Good evening, one and all.
My name is Emily Towns, and I'm the
dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School, and it's
my pleasure to welcome you here this evening.
Also, to those who are watching us livestream
and will also see these lectures
in the archives.
Welcome to you as well to the 2016
Cole Lectureship.
This lectureship was established
in 18/93
by Colonel E W Cole of Nashville
to bring distinguished
lecturers to the campus
in, as the indenture of this lectureship says,
defense and advocacy of the Christian religion,
close quote.
As we have now turned into the 21st
century,
we are broadening this once again to include
engagement,
conversation,
and shared deliberation
that abounds in the concerns that the Christian
traditions might share
with other faiths.
Among the distinguished church leaders and theologians who
have delivered the Cole Lectures over the last
123
years
are Harry Emerson
Fosdick,
Paul Tillich,
h Richard Niebuhr, Fred Craddock,
Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza,
Albert Raboteau, Gustavo Gutierrez,
James Cone,
Ed Farley,
David Buttrick,
Juergen Mokman,
Peter Gomes,
Jim Wallace,
James Lawson,
Elaine Pagels,
and then last year, we had a poet,
Nikki Finney.
This year's Cole lectures are part of the
transformative
Justice,
Culture, Race, and Movement series, a partnership between
Vanderbilt
Divinity School and Skerritt Bennett Center that offers
laity and clergy the opportunity
to explore different
ways to combine leadership development
through justice making,
through lectures
by poets
and writers, workshops
on social change,
other artistic media,
and even a civil rights immersion.
This partnership
draws on expertise of both institutions
and their historic commitments to offer people of
faith
resources for building a more just and faithful
culture.
Doctor Ingrid Matson
is the London and Windsor Community
Chair in Islamic Studies at Huron University.
Excuse me.
My watch is beeping at me
and telling me there's an emergency.
There is no emergency.
Excuse me.
Doctor Madsen was educated in Canada and the
United States,
earning a PhD from the University of Chicago
in 1999.
From 1998
to 2012, she was professor
of Islamic Studies
at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut,
where she developed and directed the 1st accredited
graduate program for Muslim Chaplains
in America
and served as director of the McDonnell Center
For the Study of Islam
and Christian Muslim
Relations.
From 20 10 2001
to 2010,
doctor Matson served as vice president, then as
president,
of the Islamic Society of North America,
USA,
the first woman to serve in either position.
Her writings,
both academic and public,
focus primarily
on Quran interpretation,
Islamic theological ethics, and interfaith
relations.
Her book, The Story of the Quran,
is an academic bestseller
and was chosen by the US National Endowment
for the Humanities
for inclusion in the Bridging Cultures program.
Doctor. Matson is a senior fellow of the
Royal
Al I Bayat
Institute For Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan.
From 2,009
to 10, doctor Matson was a member of
the Interfaith
Task Force
of the White House Office of Faith Based
and Neighborhood Partnerships.
In 2008,
she was on the council of global leaders
of the C100
of the World Economic Forum
from 2 and from from 2 from 2,007.
In 2,008,
she was a member of the leadership group
of the US Muslim Engagement Project.
Doctor Madsen is the recipient of numerous awards
as well as honorary doctorates
from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut
and the Chicago Theological Seminary.
She is frequently consulted by media
and has served as an expert witness.
Among her many awards and recognitions
are Newsweek Magazine's
People to Watch in 2007,
the El Haj Malik El Shabazz Award, presented
by the Washington
Washington Academic Leadership Institute,
the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association,
and the Muslim Society Network,
January
19, 2009.
The Medal of Independence of the First Order
for contributions
to the field of Islamic Studies,
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
2010,
and Jordan's Royal Institute
For Strategic Studies,
as well as the 500 influential
Muslims
in 2009,
2010,
2011,
and 2012.
We welcome doctor Mattson
as this year's co lecturer
and anticipate
a vibrant
conversation.
Tonight, the title of her lecture is The
Landed Muslim
at Home on the Earth.
It is my great honor and joy to
welcome you back to Vanderbilt
and Vanderbilt Divinity School,
To this time and place and space with
us,
please join me in welcoming doctor Ingrid Madsen.
Oh, good evening.
May God's peace and blessings be upon you.
It is such an honor to be
here back at Vanderbilt. I was here a
year ago
at an event sponsored by the Center For
Faith and Culture
called Who is My Neighbor?
And saw what
a welcoming and lovely place
Nashville is.
We all have our
prejudices and our stereotypes, and, you know, a
lot of people in the north have certain
impressions of people in the south or of
the Southern US,
and I think many people when they come
to Nashville,
they realize that,
we all have to
take a second look at our assumptions about
people in different parts of the world. So
I found nothing but warm welcome here, and
and I'm I'm so happy to be back.
I'm so honored to be
part of this lecture series, the Cole Lectures.
Thank you so much,
Dean Emily Townes, for inviting me to be
part of this.
Greetings to all of you. Greetings, people of
the future who will be watching this
on the Internet at various times. Who knows
what our world would be like in another
year or another 2 years?
I
feel a little bit nervous about that, frankly.
I don't know how you're all feeling, but,
seems
sometimes like we're living in a time of
great
anxiety and disruption
and upheaval.
So it's such a blessing from God when
we have the opportunity to come together
and talk
about our desire
to be together, to come together,
to care
about each other, to care
about
those people in need, to try to find
a way forward that is faithful, that is
loving, that is generous.
We need to be those people. We need
to keep these spaces
vibrant and alive,
so this kind of language and this kind
of discourse
can continue.
And when I was here last year,
I I spoke in particular about the challenge,
one of the main challenges
in our time, which is that
it's so difficult to simply meet each other
as neighbors,
because we have many preconceptions
about who the other is.
It's not that we never had that in
the past, but perhaps
naive encounters
or,
you know,
honest kind of just fresh encounters
with new people who would come into
our neighborhood or our community
was easier when we weren't
inundated
with
the persistent news stream
of bad news. Of course, you know, news
is about what's frightening, what's scary, what's
alarming, what's a threat,
and
we notice that.
Our brains have been have evolved
to take notice of threats
more than of benign news. We remember
frightening things
more than we remember the happy things.
Just try to remember right now
about,
say, some dreams you had as a child.
How many of those dreams were nightmares
that you can remember until today, and how
many of those dreams were just pleasant.
We remember frightening things. We remember scary things,
and it distorts
our perception
of reality.
There is so much research today about prejudice
and bias, Why does it exist? How can
it be overcome?
The New York Times, just yesterday, I believe,
had a had a piece on implicit bias,
and how we are all biased.
We all know about confirmation
bias.
So we're starting to learn
more
about how we perceive the world and the
gap between
reality and perception.
And to that extent,
science is helping us,
and it's nice that at least in this
area, perhaps
science and religion can come together, because sometimes
it seems that there's a a an inherent
conflict or a clash, at least
from some I ideologues
in the 2 communities.
But
here in this way, how our minds work,
how we
perceive the other, how we form group identity,
how
we
filter reality through the prism
of the news
is something that science can help us with.
But science can't give us the ethics,
the ethical imperative,
for saying that it's necessary for us to
overcome these biases.
Science cannot
tell us that it is a matter of
justice
to
have to refuse
to act on our stereotypes,
to act on our prejudices,
to act on our biases. And and so
here is the role for the faith community.
Here is the role for the social justice
community.
We have to bring our ethical voice
to this knowledge, to this scientific
these scientific discoveries about the way the human
mind works, and say,
it's not okay to simply say and shrug
our shoulders,
well, we all have biases.
Yes. We all have them,
but we know as people of faith, people
of social justice, people who believe in the
equal and god given human dignity,
that that's just the first step.
The next step is we have to say,
how do we organize ourselves?
How do we listen to each other? How
do we open ourselves up to each other
so that we can better achieve the recognition
of the god given
dignity
of the other, to welcome the stranger, and
to live in harmony
with our neighbors.
I have
two favorite stories
from the Muslim tradition about Jesus, who is
a beloved prophet
in Islam, who is
a role model
for
the Muslim community
in a different way than for Christians, but
certainly he is
the guided
word of God in our tradition.
And 2 of these stories that come out
of the oral tradition, they're not in the
Quran, but they are narrated by the prophet
Muhammad
about his predecessor in the prophetic tradition,
Jesus,
and both of them tell of a conversation
between Jesus and his disciples
as they walked down a road together.
In the first story, Jesus and his disciples
pass a pig standing in a garden.
Jesus says to the pig,
peace be upon you.
His disciples,
no doubt as observant Jews repulsed by the
sight of a pig, asked, why did you
say that?
Jesus said,
I do not want my tongue to become
accustomed to harsh words.
In the second story,
Jesus and his disciples pass by a dead
dog lying at the side of the road.
Jesus points to the canine carcass,
which of course, again, according to Jewish law
is unclean and says,
look what nice white teeth he has.
Some people say that religious people are too
idealistic,
or that people involved in interfaith activities
are Pollyannas.
This is wrong.
We know
we know there is much evil in the
world.
Life is a struggle
and often
very, very sad.
But what Jesus and the righteous throughout the
ages have taught us is to see beauty
in the midst of ugliness,
and that how we respond to
and speak to
and about the less than pleasant things in
the world
determines
who we are.
In this regard, the Quran says,
do not let the hatred of others towards
you,
let you
deviate
from
justice.
Do not let the hatred of others for
you
let you deviate from justice.
I remember in,
it was 2,001
or 2,002,
I was inter interviewed by Krista Tippett,
who has a radio program. Now it's called
On Being, and in those days, it was
called Speaking of Faith.
And she asked me,
what were my anxieties and concerns about the
future for the Muslim community in the wake
of 911
and everything
that happened after that?
And,
of course, there are many things to be
concerned about, but I told her what I
was most worried
about
was the fact that inevitably
inevitably,
there would be an increase in
hatred or discrimination
against Muslims, and we've seen that.
It's much worse now than ever was before.
But it's not that hatred
that I was so worried about. I was
more hurried,
worried about what that would do to us.
Because
when you are attacked,
when you are
unjustly,
accused of actions
for which you're not responsible.
When you regularly
experience
discrimination, especially as a young person in in
your formation,
it can't help but affect your perception of
who you are.
And the most natural reaction is to strike
back strike back.
You know, someone hit someone strikes you, and
you wanna strike back.
Someone attacks you, and you want
to lash out against them.
You know? Someone yells something ignorant
at you as they're driving down the street,
and you
loosen your tongue,
and a few choice words are raised
in the wake of that
truck that's driving
quickly away.
It concerns me, and that it concerns me
that,
indeed, what has happened is that
there has been
such pressure
and such
a need to defend ourselves
that in in in some cases,
it doesn't
give us the space to think about
the ways in which
we
also need to perform ourselves. We need the
time for self reflection.
We are not
always
the the
the person in the room who has
it most difficult,
and we all have
multiple aspects to our being.
I'm gonna talk more about this tomorrow, and
we in the
lecture I'm giving about
perspective,
but I've certainly noticed this because
I'm not just a Muslim,
I'm a white person.
And what
I have noticed, and what I've learned
that all white people need to to learn,
is that yes, we too have a culture,
and we too have
a series of identity markers.
Although we try very hard
to project ourselves as neutral,
but there is no neutrality
in humanity.
And it's very interesting to me that,
yes, in some cases, there may be an
initial slight
against me as a Muslim.
I wear a headscarf,
so I'm identifiable
as a Muslim,
but in most cases,
after that initial
unspoken encounter, when I begin to speak to
people,
I They see me as one of them,
and
white identity
is very,
very powerful.
It's almost powerful enough to wash away
some of the
religious prejudice,
or some of the cultural prejudice.
So that's a very sobering lesson to me,
because I have to then
make the second move of examining myself, not
only
seeing my identity
through the collective identity of my religious community
and say, I need to defend my community.
I need to stand up for my community,
but I also need to recognize
I am part of another collectivity
that
is in a position of extreme privilege
and
also
*,
in many cases.
So it is
humbling indeed.
I am,
by nature, a very calm person,
but in the last
15 years as the news rolled in,
news of terrorism
and torture,
I found myself
often
so very angry.
The only way to describe how I feel
even today about the terrorist attacks of 911
is is white hot rage.
I was in New York on September 10th
this year, and
just thinking about what happened, I was living
in Connecticut in 2,001,
made me so very angry.
But over the last 15 years when the
heat of my anger would dissipate,
I would think, now what? Now what do
I do
about that?
The truth is that whenever I was moved
to act whenever I was moved to act
on that anger, I would often find that
others had already be begun responding.
Terrorism in the name of Islam,
so offensive to me to take the thing
that is most precious
to me and my
faith, and to use it to justify
murder,
and terrorism,
and genocide.
How horrible, how
shameful.
But when I'd look around, I would find
many colleagues,
From the most distinguished Muslim scholars
across the world, to
my friends, and
moms, and dads, and young people
doing anything they could to denounce this sickness,
issuing statements,
organizing
groups.
But then what to do about
the reaction to this?
What about
US sponsored torture?
Which, you know, I had just
a sick feeling in my stomach every time
I read about what happened.
Well,
again, God's grace came
forward
and brought someone like
Princeton professor George Hunsinger,
who founded their National Religious Campaign Against Torture,
who launched a vigorous and sustained ethical response
to this issue,
every time
I would hear something,
you know, about a mosque being burnt
or a Quran
being burnt or thrown in the trash,
my Christian and Jewish colleagues from across the
country would * would hold press conferences denouncing
the action,
and even
would hold Quran readings in response,
courageous
and generous acts of love.
Some people complain that interfaith programs are too
much about people being nice to each other.
My response is that there is much substantial
work that has been done
in the name and through interfaith engagement.
And besides,
perhaps being nice is somewhat underrated.
In the last decade,
vulgar, mean, and slanderous attacks, whether politically partisan
or religiously informed,
have become all too acceptable.
A kind word, a smiling face, the benefit
of the doubt,
a listening ear,
these are the postures the faith community should
retain and continue to model for the rest
of society.
The Prophet Muhammad said that when one stays
in the company of people who are
speaking in a
vulgar and bad way.
It's like being in a smoky, sooty, blacksmith
shop.
One walks away feeling
a little dirty and smelly,
but when one stays in the company of
people
who are speaking in a good way about
good things,
with language full of love and compassion,
It's like being in a room filled with
incense,
and the pleasant scent lingers
on one's person throughout the day.
I'm not
all that delicate,
but sometimes
I think it really stinks out there.
Like the perfumed handkerchief a Victorian lady might
hold under her nose as she walked around
the open sewers flowing through the streets of
London.
The pleasant,
kind, and loving religious congregations who have opened
their doors to me in the last decade,
have made it possible for me to breathe
and continue to move forward.
So some people believe that
there is a choice only between fidelity to
one's faith tradition
and deep fellowship,
or one's faith tradition, or leaving faith altogether,
but I believe that's a false dichotomy.
Deep fellowship with people of other faiths is
another layer of identity
that we can add onto
our religious identity.
I think of it
like a family.
I have a large
new family, not large nuclear family,
7 siblings in my
my house,
but we also have a large extended family.
I've got lots of cousins and aunts and
uncles, and I don't even know whether they're
second or third, or
you know, once, twice removed, or what what
what it is.
But I just know there's an awful lot
of of them.
And while I spend most of my time
with
my brothers and sisters born from the same
mother and father,
I also go and visit
those other families sometimes,
and I also have some things in common,
not as much, but some
things.
And we know that somewhere back there, we
all come from the same place.
Why did god
give
us all of this diversity?
You know, religious diversity,
cultural
diversity, linguistic,
ethnic.
Are our collective identities
necessarily
a source of
conflict?
Would it be better if we were all
just the same?
Well,
which same would that be then?
Whose same would get to be the one
we all are?
That's the problem, isn't it?
I really find so much inspiration
in the Qur'anic view
of diversity.
The Quran
came as a revelation to humanity, and it
also came as a revelation to a people,
a specific people in a specific time and
place, and spoke,
you know, in addition to universal human needs,
to the needs of those people at that
time.
7th century Arabia
was a time
when
collective identities were a source of great strength,
but also a source of great conflict.
If you belong to a member of a
tribe, you knew who you were. You knew
who your people were. You knew what you
had to do.
You knew that
they would always have your back,
and that
you would do anything to defend them.
But the problem was,
what about people from that other group?
Without
any
overarching
or unifying
sense of human rights or human dignity,
it meant you could do whatever you wanted
with them.
There were no limits whatsoever.
What do we do with each other?
When it comes to religious diversity,
the Quran,
some could say, is
very
strongly in favor of religious diversity, and I
think there could be no better proof than
the passage of the Quran that mentions
in a few places, in a similar way,
the statement,
those who believe
in God
and the last day,
the Jews, and the Sabians, and the Christians,
Those who believe in god in the last
day and do right righteous deeds, they will
have their reward with god. They shall not
fear nor shall they sorrow.
The recognition the Quran came with the recognition
that there are different religious communities
didn't come to wipe the slate clean,
to get rid of all other
faiths or beliefs,
but to
come into that world of religious diversity, to
uphold it, and to be part of it.
Many people say religion is the source of
the greatest conflict in the world.
They're incorrect.
I Historically, it's just not true.
It can be a source of conflict, but
it can also be a source of strength,
and we know
what the purpose is because God tells us
in the Quran, for each, we have made
a law and a creed. If God had
wanted, he could have made you a single
community.
But it is his will to test you
regarding what has been revealed to you. So
compete with each other in good deeds.
To god is your return, all of you,
then
we, god using the royal
we, will inform you about those things about
which you differed.
So there's a point
to our religious diversity.
The point is that
through the other, we can see
in a spirit of, kind of, friendly competitiveness
where we're falling short,
only compete in good deeds, not in a
bad way,
and within the limits of this world that
god has
set for us.
We're never gonna know all the answers, and
this is why we have that faith that
God will inform us in the end about
all these matters that we differed about.
Our job is to do good things,
to compete and to cooperate
in good works.
There are those who have interpreted the Quran
other ways,
who have made religion into a form of
tribalism like other forms of tribalism,
who see religious identity
as
another identity
that we simply engage in the political sphere,
the,
you know,
competition
over who's best, over who's right.
The question is, is this inevitable?
Does religion always have to devolve
into this kind of
unsightly and unpleasant conflict?
Some would say that
what's necessary is that we embrace a theological
pluralism
or a perennialism
even.
That unless
we
absolutely accept that every religion
is an equal path to God,
then we'll always be in conflict. And I
don't know. I think that's a, you know,
it's a factual claim.
Can there be people who
have a theological
exclusivistic
outlook and still uphold
equal human dignity,
human rights, and citizenship?
I wonder.
I had a I remember assigning,
an essay
to my students one time, and in the
classroom I had a woman who was,
an evangelical
Christian,
who certainly believed that there is only one
path to salvation
with God.
She was a lovely student.
She participated so nicely in the class.
At the beginning of the essay that she
wrote for me, she said
she said, well, certainly,
it's true that
Muslims,
they're on the wrong path,
that there is salvation
only through Jesus Christ,
and
unless those Muslims
embrace
Jesus
in this way as their lord and savior,
that they're
gonna be in hellfire forever. It's a brave
student who would start
an essay
that way.
She said, but in the meantime,
in the she said, you know, that matters
for God. In the meantime, we need to
try to live together
as
peacefully
and in as much harmony and understanding as
possible,
and I just laugh so much. I love
that essay. I just love that essay,
because you know what?
She was a nice person. She is a
nice person,
and she got along with everyone,
and I don't think she ever would
take away my civil or political rights.
So maybe it's possible
to have,
you know, that kind of theological position.
It's probably easier
if there's a greater harmony between
our
theological
view of
humanity and and political perhaps,
but some would say it's easier just to
get rid of religion altogether.
But again, I ask you
in a world where
many nation states have adopted a
secular ideology.
In the 20th century, when we review the
wars and conflicts,
when we think about the genocides
that have taken place?
Nazi Germany,
Rwanda,
how many other places?
How often were those done in the names
of ethnic purity,
racial purity.
Secularism,
nationalism
hasn't erased
prejudice or ended warfare
or ended torture.
We still have all sorts of things
going on in the world. Group identities
that are
simply oppressive that have nothing to do with
religion.
So group identity
is a double edged sword. There's good and
there's bad in it.
Think about the various groups to which we
belong,
not just religious,
but national or professional,
neighborhood associations,
civic organizations,
political parties,
all have some benefit.
They give us a cause greater than ourselves,
and, really,
here is this existential
dimension that,
as human beings, we know that we have
a limited time on this earth.
We all want some measure of
living forever,
some measure of eternity, some measure
of
ourselves continuing on. And so
we see
our aspirations, we see our identity conflated with
these groups
that will continue
will continue
the actions,
the ideas
that belong and that shape this group identity.
This can lead to such a problem.
The problem is that it becomes
really what we worship,
where our group becomes
the idol
at which we sacrifice
everything.
The pre Islamic
Arabs
before Islam came knew about this.
They had very strong group identity.
They knew that the most important thing was
to sacrifice the self for the sake of
the group.
There were no rights
outside of those granted
by
the leaders of the tribe.
Safety for anyone else was only negotiated
and contracted, not innate.
It was might that made right.
And in a world where might makes right,
it is the warrior who is the most
celebrated.
That is
why the strong,
mature man, the adult male,
is the one who had all the privileges
in
this tribal culture,
in this warrior culture.
And it was that man
who
would use force and violence
to make sure that they were
the dominant ones.
There have always been those who have spoken
about winners and losers,
That those who succeed are the winners.
That
being right
just means that you were successful.
And what does that mean for all of
those
who are not in that group or those
who are within the group, but unable
or
not permitted
to perform at that level?
Women,
slaves,
the unaffiliated
person, the stranger, the migrant.
But we argue
we have an identity in our group, and
we
we love our group. We love our people.
We love our community. We love our nation.
Mohammed Iqbal, who was a,
19th century
19th into the 20th century Indian,
Muslim philosopher and intellectual,
he was one of the people who advocated
for the establishment
of Pakistan
as a
nation state, as a modern nation state.
And it wasn't because of religious prejudice
that he did this, but because they were
a minority in India.
The Muslims were a minority, and he
felt that it was
so important to really uphold the,
not only the security of that group,
but
to celebrate and pass on the traditions and
culture. He said, I love the communal group,
which is the source of my life and
behavior,
which has formed
me, what I am by giving me its
religion, its literature, its thought, its culture,
and thereby recreating its whole past as a
living operative factor in my present consciousness.
Well, Pakistan was formed,
and
having that communal identity did not end the
problems.
Like every other nation state, and indeed,
the founding of nation states based on identity,
based on these
mythic
collective
histories and memories
has only exacerbated
in many places the injustice,
because
you never have a land
that is homogeneous,
you know, only with one kind of person.
How do we get around this?
We have to remember that
these collectivities
are not ends in themselves.
These identities
are not
the thing that we
worship.
We cannot let our religion become another form
of tribalism.
It's beneficial
in many ways,
but it is always
creates the possibility
for
an ideological
collectivity.
The Quran addresses
human diversity, not only
religious diversity, but all of these other
forms of being in the world that
are at the
border of our
conflicts
and our pain and of our oppression.
The Quran says,
and among his wonders is this, meaning god's
wonders, he creates you out of dust, and
then low, you become human beings ranging
far and wide.
And among his wonders is this, he creates
for you mates from your own selves,
so that you might incline
behold, our messages for people who think, and
among his wonders
is the creation of the heavens and the
earth,
and the diversity
of your tongues and colors.
For in this, behold, there are messages indeed
for all who are possessed of innate knowledge.
The diversity of our colors, our languages,
all of these things
are created by god as it's just simply
part of the natural world.
We have to accept
that we are part of this nature.
Yes. We are not only human beings, but
we're also created beings, and like other created
beings,
are all subject to the command
of god.
The Quran says, behold people, we have created
you out of a male and a female
and have made you into nations and tribes
so you so that you may come to
know one another
so that you may come to know one
another.
Our diversity
helps us understand who we are. We see
ourselves reflected in the other,
And when I meet you
and I treat you
in a way that is loving and caring,
I come to know myself as a loving
and caring person. And when I meet you
and I meet the other,
and treat the other in a way that
is dismissive,
that is aggressive,
that is discriminatory,
I come to know something
about myself too.
We can never escape being in these
collectivities.
We need them. We need to gather together.
We need to support each other,
but they're not in the end
ends in themselves.
In his final sermon, the prophet Muhammad said,
all humanity is from Adam and Eve.
An Arab has no superiority
over a non Arab,
nor a non Arab has any superiority over
an Arab, and also a white
has no superiority
over a black or a black over a
white. We hear that,
and we know that, yet it's so hard
for us to do the right thing still.
We are flawed human beings,
and we need to
be open to that criticism, to understand
when we have simply
fallen back to the safety and security
of our group.
The American poet, Daniel Ladinsky,
translates a poem of the great 14th century
Persian master poet, Hafiz.
He says this,
burn
every address for God.
Any beloved who has just one color of
hair,
one gender,
one race,
the same suntan
all the time,
one rule book.
Trust me when I say that man is
not even half a god,
and we will only cause you grief.
We make gods out of our collectivities.
But in the end,
even though we gather in certain lands,
and we come to love those lands and
the people around us, the reality is that
human dignity
is tied to mobility,
to displacement,
to breaking up our collectivities
and coming and being open to joining with
new people,
and
working for their safety and security in the
midst of the dignity of all humanity. The
Quran says, we have conferred
dignity
upon the children of Adam
and born them over land and sea,
and provided them sustenance
out of the good things of life, and
favored them above much of our creation.
Humanity
has always been on the move
from the time that our ancestors
first moved out of Africa,
and all across into Asia,
and across into Europe, and across into North
America, and South America,
and the Pacific,
and Australia,
and New Zealand.
We're always moving, and we're always finding ways
to expand ourselves, and we're always coming into
contact with new kinds of people.
And it can be anxiety producing.
We want to just go
back to the warmth of our
our home,
our
mother's house, our place where we grew up.
We have as human beings
landscapes of the soul.
This is an expression that
my professor,
my Ukrainian
professor of classical Arabic poetry,
Yaroslav Stakevich,
wonderful,
brilliant man
at the University of Chicago. He he
he spoke about and wrote about in one
of his books. He talks about Arcadia,
that for the Greco Roman poets of antiquity
is the landscape of the soul.
So too,
in every culture and in every community,
there is that
that landscape
that's tied to memory and family,
homeland,
and it becomes a symbol of the purity
of youth. It becomes a
symbol of
the warmth and comfort of home,
and that's natural,
But we have to grow up.
We have to grow up and remember that
there is no
way back
onto our mother's lap. We have to become
adults,
and it's time for us
to take responsibility
for building
new homes,
and
to for us to be the one who
cooks for the neighbor
and invites them in.
There are a lot of challenges today.
You know, it's not a difficult time,
but I'm sure that people who lived a
100 years ago,
or 200, or 500, or 1000 years ago,
if they heard us complaining, they'd say, boy,
oh boy, you think you've got it tough.
So at the same time, we have to
be so grateful,
so grateful to God
for the time
we have, for the resources we have,
for
what our ancestors
have built,
civil rights, human rights,
all of the things that so many have
fought for so that we could come to
this place today and still deal with our
humanity.
Still deal with it.
We're never over. We're always in the process
of becoming the people who we need to
be,
and it'll never be we will never be
perfected
until, God willing,
we are
in the
presence
of the divine and most compassionate
and loving
source of all being.
But in the meantime,
let's try to reflect
that compassion
and reflect that kindness
and be like
the prophets.
Address what's wrong,
but don't let it change us, and we
become
distorted mirrors of ourselves.
Thank you.
I believe we have a little time,
for discussion
now,
and miss Chateka is going to bring around
microphone
if you wish to make a comment or
ask a question.
And just because I said we should we
should be careful how we speak, You can
be
you can say something,
if you have a hard question
or something
that's
disturbing you, please feel free to speak. It's
a safe space space for discussion.
Salaam. Thank you. So,
a lot of what you talked about was
the process through which,
particularly looking at the Muslim community, how we
should not respond to hate with hate.
I had recently read,
or reread,
Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail where
he says the the first step,
in this case, particularly for nonviolent noncooperation
is,
self purification.
Mhmm.
So now I I can say, okay. My
my my first step is not to respond
to hate with hate, but how does that
then actualize in in a process of self
purification?
Yes. That's a great question.
Here,
and I'm gonna speak about it a little
bit more tomorrow.
It really is,
I think one of the most effective things
is
is to shift perspective.
So
to look at to look at ourselves,
who we are in all of our being,
and there's not one of us
that is not in a position of power
or dominance
over someone or something.
Right? So when we feel
when we suffer
from
from the dominance of others or from the
oppression of others,
that is a lesson
in a human state that we all
occupy
sometimes.
And so rather than seeing the evil only
outside ourselves, we have to examine ourselves, closely
examine ourselves,
what in me
is
also part of that
way of being in the world.
You know, we are parents,
we are employers,
we are
pet owners,
We
are people who,
are empowered in the world.
No matter
how much of our reality is about being,
you know, or we perceive
to be
dominated by others.
And so when we
look
that way, when we take this action, the
prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, when
you see someone who has more, look to
someone who has less.
So it's this double action.
I see the one who has more
more power,
more voice,
more dominance,
and then I make the shift.
I look this way, and I turn the
other way, and I say, who has less
than me?
Because there will be always someone who has
not only more stuff,
but more power than me, more privilege than
me, more voice than me, and I have
to turn the other way and look for
those who have less. And when I do
that,
what I'm probably gonna find is a deeper
level
of structural violence,
a deeper level
of structural injustice
that
is,
you know, that provides the foundation
for all of us,
to be in this state where we're not
able to realize our full humanity and dignity.
And so it's not a question of pragmatism
that I'm just making an alliance with another
group
in order to strengthen my group, right, in
order to strengthen the voice of my group,
but to really understand at a at a
much deeper level
that we're all participating
in forms of of violence that we need
to dismantle at the deepest level.
Thank you. Maybe just on that last point,
doesn't conflict
begin
when brother rises up against brother?
Even before we break in to different groups
right in the very core
of the family, you have
Cain and Abel in in the bible. I
think in
Islamic tradition, it's,
you know, very early on,
there is
that kind of fratricidal
splitting, factioning.
Isn't that at the origin even of the,
you know, the,
Shiite and
so I just wonder to what extent
your comments which are, you know, extremely
attractive and, you know,
the need to accept difference, is that going
to address
the roots of violence
where even same and same are already in
in a conflict situation
with one another.
Right. Abs absolutely.
I mean, you this
you're getting to the heart of what it
means to be a human being, A human
being who
who in the end
is aware at some level,
maybe only unconsciously,
that
that we don't have control. We don't have
power.
And
and this is, I believe, the root of
violence. The root of violence is the need
to feel empowered because in the end,
we're all losers
if
winning means
to
to be in control because we'll all die.
Right?
So this is why the, you know, the
question about what the goal of our existence
is is is so
important. In the Puranic story
when
the 2 brothers
of or the 2 sons of Adam
are in disagreement,
the one who ends up being killed says
to his brother, if you will
stretch out your hand towards me in violence,
I will not stretch my hand out towards
you.
He did not want to take on that
sin, and so this this accords with this
Quranic passage that do not let the hatred
of others
let you
swerve
from,
justice.
So to be just yourself that this is
the most this is the primordial
challenge.
You know, we feel not only disempowered,
but we feel that
that
people don't recognize
our dignity.
And
if we if we go back even deeper
or earlier
than than the sons of Adam, we could
go to Satan
and Adam,
the very creation
of the world, the creation of sentient beings.
So in the quranic story,
what is
why is Satan so angry?
Satan is angry
because
he believes that god unjustly,
unfairly
gave
humanity, gave Adam
precedence in creation
when he was better. So in the Quran,
Satan says, I'm better than him.
I am better than him. Now
the problem is that,
you know, our very beings, of course, wouldn't
exist without God's creation. So it's this sense
of
being entitled
to
life, being entitled
to power, being entitled to position,
where when in in the at the very
beginning, at the very foundation,
we wouldn't even have existence
if God hadn't willed us into existence.
So so the sense of entitlement
and the and the feeling that the the
recognition
that
in the
end, none of this is in our control
are the 2,
basic stages that bring us
to to acts of violence.
And let me just just say finally, this
is why,
you know, the the comment about self purification,
we hear very often, we hear sometimes
people
say, no peace without justice.
Right?
Or no justice without peace.
Certainly the spiritual position
is that while we work for justice,
it does our peace does not depend on
justice.
The root,
you know, the the basic root for Islam
is related to
peace. It's it's a surrender to the reality
that god has determined.
And so while we
while we struggle for justice,
it is always within the limits of what
it means to be a person at peace
with,
what god has determined
in the universe.
And so that really,
you know, it's not anything that any
any Muslim person should be chanting.
That's a real deviation, and I think that
comes out of a kind of
activist politics
that is that is devoid
of this of spiritual training and our spiritual
tradition of self purification,
which has often been lost in the modern
world and is so important to be regained.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Every year,
when we have
the, Cole lectures,
we create a poster
for the lectureship
and
And we have it framed
for the speaker.
Now you do not have to carry this
back on the plane.
We will, in fact, ship it to you.
But
So beautiful.
I I admired it coming in. I didn't
know I was gonna get a coffee. No.
I just smiled to myself and said, oh,
wait till you sit get to the lecture.
Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you so
much, doctor Matson.
And,
I invite all of you to the reading
room which
is thataway for
refreshments.
We have light hors d'oeuvres
and
drink.
Tomorrow morning at 10 AM, we'll hear the
second of the Cole lectures for this year.
I invite you to return and bring some
folk with you.
Take good care, and we'll see you tomorrow.