Ingrid Mattson – Muslim Traditions on Mourning
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Well, good afternoon.
It's a deep honor to be back here
at Saint Paul's Chapel after last week. Last
week, we spoke
about trauma
and this is the second part in our
3 part series. Today, we speak about mourning.
My interlocutors
in this 3 week discussion
are seated beside me, and I'd like to
introduce them
now before I begin to speak.
On the far left is doctor
the Reverend Serene Jones. She is president and
Roosevelt professor of systematic theology at Union Theological
Seminary.
Reverend Jones is the 16th president of the
historic Union Theological Seminary in the city of
new New York.
The first woman to head the a 174
year old non denominational seminary,
doctor Jones came to union after 17 years
at Yale University,
where she was the Titus Street Professor of
Theology at the Divinity School
and Chair of Women, Gender,
and sexuality studies in the graduate schools of
arts and sciences.
Professor Jones' most recent book is trauma and
grace, theology in a ruptured world.
A book that has so much relevance for
our discussions,
in this series.
Beside Reverend Jones is rabbi doctor Bert Burton
Visotsky,
who is the Appleman professor of Midrash and
inter religious studies and director of the Louis
Finkelstein
Institute for religious and social Studies at JTS.
He is engaged in inter religious
dialogue in many exotic locations around the world.
In
2007, he was master visiting professor of Jewish
studies at the PENTIVICO Gregorian University in Rome.
He's been adjunct professor at Union Theological Seminary
since 1980
and his most recent book is Sage Tales,
Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis
of the Talmud.
And,
for some reason,
Bert and I seem to be in a
series of trilogy, a number of trilogies. So
we also are
now planning for our 2nd year
in a,
3 year series on Jews and Muslims in
America
between the Jewish Theological Seminary and and Hartford
Seminary.
So
very honored to be here today with them.
I'll begin by opening with a few remarks
of my own about mourning
and then I will invite each of them
in turn to come up and make a
few
introductory remarks to frame the debate or the
discussion, not debate.
Once we complete our opening remarks, then we'll
have a discussion with each other
about some of the issues raised and,
look more deeply into some of these very,
very sensitive issues.
Following that, we'll have a short
break and then we'll move on to the
musical composition.
As I was thinking about what to say
about mourning, it struck me that
this is such a sensitive and personal issue.
It's one of those things that is very
difficult to speak about
in a normative way without
without making other people feel that somehow
they're excluded
or being judged
or somehow
touching on other people's sensitivities.
When we speak about
from each of each of us from our
own tradition
about mourning
and
how we do mourn, perhaps how we should
mourn,
I think it's important to recognize that
certainly from my perspective,
I'm speaking
about a very
limited perspective I have on such a grand
and universal issue.
I don't think any of us could be
comprehensive
or even fully sensitive to all the aspects
of this
enduring
and difficult aspect
of the human condition.
Perhaps the way to introduce you
best to the
Islamic
views on mourning practices and beliefs
is to set it in some contrast
to the pre Islamic period into which the,
the Quran and the example of the prophet
Mohammed
came to
both correct,
support,
and be in dialogue with those existing traditions.
And as Muslims throughout the generations
continue to interpret and understand the relevance of
these
these forms of revelation to our daily lives,
we come to learn more. We learn more
through the scientific study of human beings,
how
mourning affects us physically,
how human societies are affected by mourning,
and how,
historically,
our societies
continue to integrate
aspects
of our experience
that will form us from the very beginning,
our culture of mourning.
So when
when Islam was first
being preached in the pre Islamic
Arabian Peninsula,
it encountered a tribal society that did not
believe in an afterlife.
The pre Islamic Arabs
were
materialists
who believed that
this life was all that there was,
but they weren't bound by any common ethic
or values
so they
could not even refer to a secular value
system
that would give them a common sense
of purpose
as a community.
And so for them,
death was the end, and it was for
this reason that mourning
took on incredible significance into this society.
Ritual mourning
was perhaps one of the most highly developed
aspects of pre Islamic Arabian society.
It really was the end, and it had
to be demonstrated
by the people culturally
that this was a disaster.
Now, given that there was no continuity to
life, and in fact, there were really no
collective institutions
to which
even
the idea of good works
that could continue in charity and that generations
could build upon,
given the absence of those,
how did a human being respond to the
sense
of finality of death?
The only way, the only way to have
continuity
was to have your name live on.
The way your name would live on
was through the stories
that others would tell about you.
Subscribed,
infamy was as good as
fame.
Whether you were remembered
for the most notorious
acts of banditry
or you were remembered
for the most generous
acts
of kindness,
in the end, it was all the same
because you would be remembered.
And
poems were made
describing the exploits
and the activities of both kinds of people.
And so those people who were able to
exercise power
for good or for bad were able to
find a measure
of
continuity
even after their death.
But, of course, the more people there were
to remember your name,
the better
because there was a higher probability
that people would talk about you and relate
tales of your exploits.
And that meant that whatever you could do
to expand
your tribe and your followers, you would do,
even if that meant stealing other people's wives
to make them your own,
stealing other people's children to make them your
own.
The Quran
talks about this when it
it it it,
there's a verse in the Quran that says,
You compete in piling up things even to
the point of visiting the graves
so that they would even count the number
of their dead
as a as a sign
of what a great person they were. I
have not only more living, but more dead
than you. So this idea that
there was no limit
on what you should do in order to
be remembered.
Now, where did this leave
the person who was not memorable?
Where did this leave
the wanderer,
the homeless,
the slave,
the one who was
detached and
separated from
a great tribe.
They were Their lives were of no value
because they had nothing
glorious that would live on.
And so the message of the Quran came
to change this.
To say that first,
it's not only important that you are known.
Indeed, it's not
important whether you are known or not known.
What is important is what you do with
your life,
that you do acts of value,
of kindness, of charity, of goodness.
And it doesn't matter
whether others know you or not because god
will always know you,
and god will always know your name.
Next life, and
the most,
and the
most
in the most glorious company of God because
of their pure and sincere heart.
So this really changed
not only how people lived,
but how they
understood what death meant.
It meant that for the ordinary person,
that death
was not the end
to a life
of marginalization
and suffering,
but it could be
the beginning of the true life of eternal
life.
And it
meant that
the living
were not
Especially the living who were
the vulnerable and the dependent
were not supposed to have all of their
value subsumed
to making sure that the great
powerful men
would live forever. Now,
we know in ancient Egypt
and in other ancient civilizations
that slaves and servants and others were buried
when the pharaoh died
to serve him in the next life. Presamic
Arabia didn't have that,
but it required women
to mourn
their male dependence to such a degree
that if they didn't demonstrate
complete and utter devastation
that they were considered
to not
have shown
honor and respect to the dead because their
own worth was completely dependent
on the value of this great person.
And it's one of the reasons, sometimes misunderstood,
why Islam
restricted this practice of excessive mourning.
Because
although it seems like a natural expression of
emotion, in fact, we know that
emotions are culturally
formed
and there are cultural expectations of emotion
and the requirement
or the expectation
of having to lose everything
when
your male relative died
to kind of give everything up and a
hope for life
meant a devaluation
of the living.
And so, I think this is a this
is a universal tension in some ways.
Those of us who have lost someone who
we have loved,
we
want to honor and value them. And like
the pre islamic
poet would say,
and this was a very common refrain in
the morning poems of women. They would say,
do
not be distant. Do not be distanced.
You know? And we feel that to the
extent that we mourn and we show mourning
and we hold on to mourning,
we will not lose that loved one. They
will not drift away.
But if we turn our attention
to life, we feel that they're gone,
that we're losing
them somehow.
And we even see sometimes we hear children
or young people who have lost, a parent
start to feel guilty at times when they,
after a year or 2, will say,
I'm starting to have trouble remembering
their face,
you know, what they were like.
And so I think
the
the tension that we face
between turning to life and to living
and the guilt of
letting our loved ones start to
be settled in the next life while we
continue in this life is a very difficult
one.
And perhaps, that's one of the
wisdoms
of the cycle of life that
sometimes as our loved one becomes more settled
and distant in
the afterlife,
we start to become unsettled in this life.
And perhaps by doing so, we start to
approach
one another.
But it's something that is
very difficult
for people to manage. I Just yesterday
was the death anniversary of my younger brother.
And
every year I remember him, he died in
a tragic
drowning accident when he was young.
And when I called my mother and I
said,
I'm remembering
my brother on this day.
And we talked for a little while. And
then at the end of the conversation, she
said to me, thank you for remembering him.
Just to remember, just to know that he
is not completely gone.
But although it may
seem in some ways
heartless, I want to say in many ways,
it is more
comforting
to think about this.
We believe that
all things, all people
eventually
will be at one
with the divine.
And
it is inevitable that no matter what we
try to do, no matter
how often we try to tell the stories,
no matter
how deep we inscribe the names on stone.
Over time,
over generations,
we
will fade from memory
and the ones who cared about us will
have joined us.
But there's also comfort in that.
There's also comfort that
we are part of something