Wisdom and Ignorance

Proolmoted to the front page

My friends often look at me with an eyebrow raised when I am interested in the Shi'ah. I have been active for years on a few Shi'ah sites, partially because of their approach to faith and mostly because aside from ProgIslam sites, they're the only ones who will have me. As a queer, transgendered Muslim, I last on Sunni sites only as long as I remain closeted, and I closet about as well as an enraged ogre. I can't barely even get the door shut...

The Shi'ah community is in many ways often not unlike the Sunni community in its faults. There is a lack of sincere love for the divine, the kind of heart-wrenching experience that brings people to religion in the first place and continues to inspire faith. There is also a massive over-emphasis on rules: what rings with stones do we wear to be good Twelvers? What tiny and generally pointless rule of fiqh can we ruthlessly enforce on people, convincing them that, say, shaving or not shaving the moustache leads to Hell? What mind-deadening foolishness can we argue about international Zionist conspiracies and horoscopes.

Yet the Shi'ah, despite their theological difficulties, do have establish patterns of deep and abiding emotional experiences tied into the definition of the faith. To be Shi'i is to remember Karbala. To be Shi'i is to grieve for martyred leaders who might-have-been and should-have-been. The Shi'i year is a circle of gut-wrenching holidays from both joyous and mournful ends of the emotional spectrum. In addition, Indian traditions of emotional connection to God through song and poetry - bhakti - infuse many Shi'ah traditions, particularly the Isma'ili. Where I find the palette of emotions on Sunni websites and in the Sunni community to be a dull grey, the Shi'ah have a world full of deep and profound colour.

Much of this has to do with the nature of modern Islam. Post-colonial movements stripped the joy out of faith throughout the Muslim world: neo-Puritanism crushed the life out of mainstream Sunnism. It saddens me to see rote movements and a gloom-doom mentality - turn (to Islam) or burn (in Hell) - drown piety. True piety isn't asceticism, and that's what makes Orthoprax Islam so grey: do this, don't do that, and nary a word about the most important thing of all.

I always remind people that Muhammad's experience of the divine was, appropriately, a sense of beng emotionally and spiritually overwhelmed. He went home and wept in terror and awe under the skirt of his beloved wife. While the angel may not come to demand we "recite!", that same sense - awe - should inspire us, not fear of Hell. Hell is the bogeyman of the tiny mind. This world is not a practice run. True faith comes from love, awe, desire and our spiritual worlds must be rainbows.