"Civil Society" has become the new touch phrase in Pakistani politics. And it’s gotten to the point where people express the same kind of cynicism about it that is usually reserved for words like "Islamist", and "War on Terror", and, well, "Progressive Islam". A friend on one of our alumni mailing lists was getting pretty disgusted by Nawaz Sharif’s piling on to the Civil Society bandwagon.

Branflakes is the "Breakfast of Champions".

 ("Branflakes" is the myspace name chosen by the high school student who is starting up a philosophy message board forum)

It is good NEWs when young minds seek ancient ideas.

Please visit this brand new PHILOSOPHY CENTRAL forum and give your support:

http://plato.8.forumer.com/index.php

<p><a href="http://plato.8.forumer.com/index.php">Philosophy Central Forum</a>

And check out the chat feature for Philosophy at the myspace Forum section.

Please repost, thanks.

- Sitaram

http://www.myspace.com/literarydiscussions

Averroes tried to reconcile Aristotle's system of thought with Islam. According to him, there is no conflict between religion and philosophy. He held that one can reach the truth through two different ways: philosophy or religion. He believed in the eternity of the universe and the existence of pre-extant forms. In contrast with Islam and in similarity with Buddhism, he believed that the soul was not eternal, and that in fact all beings share one soul.

I was interested to see how our bloggers reacted to Katrina. Everyone comes at a disaster in a different way. Ginan demands answers from a God who always seems to enable the rich to short-shrift the poor and get away with it. Tubman doesn’t have a lot of time for theological questions or yelling at God over these things and wants to put her attention to the suffering at hand. Omer reminds us that in the sickening reality of things as they are, our responsibility is to turn and help each other. Qamar expresses a similar view to Harriet and Omer, but delicately adds a theological observation. He recalls God’s “presence” in the disaster and reminds us that the same presence calls us to be responsible toward one another. My own feelings are expressed in each of these perspectives. I utterly agree with Ginan that God is to be challenged and made to answer for His choices. Anyone who thinks that God is too delicate to deal with an angry and loving servant who feels betrayed, obviously doesn’t believe in a God who can destroy whole cities and kill the innocent alongside the guilty. Better start reading your scripture, because that is one aspect of God. God is the “Destroyer.” He is tough enough. But are we tough enough to listen to the answer? God is also the Merciful and the Caring. How does that play into all this? Our bloggers offer answers by engaging these two perspectives of God reminding us that we have hearts that call out for justice and compassion and our responsibility to uphold those divine characteristics in this world.

At the time of the Tsunami, I ended up writing some of my feelings about “the nature of things” in a list-discussion. My feelings aren’t very comforting. I am going to update that reaction below with some of what I wrote to Ginan last night personally after I read her blog. I follow Qamar utterly in his perspective, but my recollection of “the presence of God” in the matter is not as delicate as his. I do not have the gift of adab in speaking about God’s power. I’d rather just say, like Ginan did, He did it–but in a theoretical Sufi kind of way. I’d hope, like Qamar, talking honestly about the presence of God in these tragedies recalls us to remember our own responsibility as human beings towards each other and God.

Reflecting on unaccountable suffering and cruelty is an important part of what brought me to Islam. I wasn’t going to be happy with some theology of “love” when I could see very clearly that God loves and also destroys what He loves. I could not look away from that. Like Ginan, I demanded an answer from God and in none too friendly a manner. But God has been the only one in my life that I have ever trusted completely; and I trusted that an answer that satisfied my intellect and heart would come at some point. I just didn’t know when or how. I needed to see a theodicy that didn’t skirt the issue of God’s absolute role in all of the suffering and cruelty that has ever been experienced in this world. I needed to see a theology that balanced God’s love with God’s destruction. Then I needed to see an ethics of human responsibility that somehow followed from that inherent contradiction. I knew I had found it when I began studying Islam, in particular reading Ibn al-`Arabi.

I could have taken this route within Buddhism or Taoism, but I am a deist at heart. I could have taken this route within Judaism, but that choice is another story. I certainly could have found it in Nietzsche. The answers are there. It seems to me that the hard part is finding the answer that fits one’s own heart and mind perfectly. So here is a quick and dirty summary of the unvarnished truth that answered my needs.

God is Being Itself. The world is constantly recreated by God through His Being. We can see the manifest qualities of God’s Being in the world and in ourselves. The Qur’an calls them the Ninety-Nine most beautiful names of God, but they are infinitely manifest in subtle differences in every particle of existence such that God’s creation never repeats itself. The variety of life manifest through God’s names of Majesty and the names of Beauty is infinitely variable and dependent on the interplay of these qualities.

To make the point brutally clear, God’s Majesty is manifest in nature through earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, raging fires, and even viruses. And God’s Beauty is manifest in the same way, since it is only through death and destruction that life is possible. Even if that means a baby dies from a virus so that the virus might live. Even if that means the baby dies of the virus because her parents were too poor and lived in the “wrong” place and so were denied the medicine she needed to save her life. This is the simple fact of nature. God’s Being must be manifest in all its qualities.

From this perspective of God’s Being, we see His utter transcendence, His lack of regard for anything but His self-manifestation through the world and ourselves. My academic-shaykh, William Chittick, nicely summed this perspective of God up for his students by saying that creation is an image of God like your own image in a mirror. If the mirror were to shatter and the image were lost, would you care?

I personally love the report in which Muhammad says that God takes the seed of Adam, some in his right hand and some in his left hand. He says of those in the right hand, “These are for Paradise and it is no concern of mine.” He says of those in the left hand, “These are for Hell and it is no concern of mine.”

From our perspective, God’s making Himself known through creation is often heartbreaking. Tough. Like the Buddha said, “Life is suffering.”

But the Buddha also said that there is a path out of that suffering. The path out is found by balancing this distant perspective of God with an intimate one in which we experience God near to us and caring for us. From this perspective our own heartbreak over the world’s suffering is a reflection and manifestation of His own. God does not enjoy tidal waves and hurricanes or people who deny the poor simple medications, even though this is the nature of things.

Our heartbreak is a reflection of His own, because we are made in his image. We have the potential to manifest all that is majestic and beautiful with the destructive and life giving force of a hurricane or an earthquake. By accepting the Trust from God, we accepted the burden of carrying the Names within us as our human character traits. We thereby accepted the power to destroy and give life just like little gods. But accepting the Trust means that we took on the responsibility of using that power wisely and in a balanced way. The first step in taking responsibility is realizing those traits are given to us in Trust by God. They belong to Him. We are not little gods; and we have to look to His guidance to understand how best to manifest His traits in us. The Qur’an makes it clear that the balance of Majesty to Beauty in God is greater to the side of His Beauty and care for all things. So our balance has to be there too.

God has it all and He’s given His Names to us in trust. What do we do with this Trust? In the case of New Orleans, the nature of things played itself out with an awesome hurricane that killed many more and destroyed much more than it should have because some little gods chose to put money into killing Iraqis rather than into keeping the levees up, among other things. We doubled the force of God in nature with the power of the choices that God gave to us in trust. In a different reading of this hadith qudsi, we see very clearly that God is exactly with our opinion of Him. From this perspective, we choose in part how His Majesty and Beauty will be manifest in the world.

We have the choice of increasing the suffering of this world by using the Trust capriciously. Or we have the choice of finding a way out of it through taking responsibility for bearing its burden. It should be easy to say we know how to take responsibility for this Trust by following God’s guidance in the Qur’an and the Sunna, or by following His guidance through any of the 312 other messengers God sent to the world. But not so surprisingly, the history of religious interpretation is marked by both beautiful human beings who take on that responsibility with care and gravity, and little gods who suffer from the same self-righteousness and love of power that anyone else does. The history of interpretation is a human history and manifests all the infinite variation of these two modes of being in the world. Makes it damn hard for anyone to follow their Adamic nature. But this doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of doing it right.

Our mission as human beings is to take on the responsibility of our Adamic nature by pursuing justice and beauty through critique of and through actions against the little gods in ourselves first and then in our world, whether that be in the religious, political, or social realms. Disasters starkly remind us of this mission. Moments of crisis are thus moments of opportunity for self-examination and transformation. It is in the nature of things that life is born from destruction.

I'm going to reprint a few of my old blogs from team.pi.org. No need to archive that site. I'll just bring the 3 or 4 I am fond of over here every so often for safe keeping. God willing, they are still valuable.  You can find this reprint blog here in my reader diary.

Katrina, Blame, and Responsibility first published: 9/4/05

Provacative selection meant to get you to click through to read the whole thing: "I personally love the report in which Muhammad says that God takes the seed of Adam, some in his right hand and some in his left hand. He says of those in the right hand, 'These are for Paradise and it is no concern of mine.' He says of those in the left hand, 'These are for Hell and it is no concern of mine.'"

Allegations of sexism abound. Hurled by ducks (named Howard). Ordered clarifications forthcoming. Duck is for dinner.

1 – When Ali Eteraz used the slogan "Who has taught man the use of the pen" it was taken literally from Muhammad Asad's translation of the Quran. When Laury told him that the term used was "Insan" and not "rajl" he consented to either changing it to "humankind" or "humanity." As it will be upon future T-shirts.

Recently I've been branching out from reporting and analysis of religious issues into straight philosophy; the first result of this foray is now available for public consumption at Identity Theory. The essay evolved from a conversation I had with our own Bob 'Baraka' Doto a few months ago. Hyperpraxis is an idea I'd like to explore in more depth at PI—in relation to religion as a practice, as opposed to simply an idea—so I'm interested to hear what people think of the idea.

The ID link takes you to the front page; when my piece moves into the archives, a static version will be available at: