Have you ever felt awestruck by a towering evergreen, waves crashing against rocks, or the vastness of a desert canyon?

You’re not alone. Across time and cultures, humans have felt a spiritual connection with nature.

New UBC research gives this connection a name—ecospirituality—and reveals it could help reduce polarization on environmental issues that threaten the planet.

Measuring ecospirituality

The researchers from UBC and Oxford Brookes University developed the world’s first questionnaire to measure ecospirituality.

They asked participants to indicate their level of agreement with eight statements, such as “I feel intense wonder toward nature,” or “There is a spiritual connection between human beings and the natural environment.”

A survey of more than 6,000 people in Canada, the U.S. and Singapore showed that ecospirituality doesn’t depend on political or religious orientation. Even atheists, who usually score low on spirituality measures, scored above the midpoint for ecospirituality.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash.

Conservatives were approximately as ecospiritual as liberals. The researchers say this deserves further investigation, because ecospiritual people were also found to have more concern for the environment. Ecospirituality could be a pathway to better care for the environment regardless of one’s politics.

How can ecospirituality reduce division?

Matthew Billet

“If you have family or friends with different political views about environmental issues, try finding common ground by talking about the ways in which nature is sacred, awe-inspiring, and a place for spiritual refuge,” suggested the study’s first author Matthew Billet, who is pursuing a doctorate in social psychology at UBC.

Whether it be at the personal or policy level, this research shows the potential for shared ecospiritual beliefs and experiences to smooth difficult conversations between people of different religious and political orientations.

Journalists may request an interview with a member of the research team by emailing Erik Rolfsen at erik.rolfsen@ubc.ca.

I find its attitude to what we would now call “race” fascinating, because on several occasions it speaks positively of the differences of skin color as signs of the beauty of God’s creation.

Let’s begin with two verses from Chapter 30 of the Qur’an, “Rome,” which says

21 “Among His signs are that He fashioned mates for you from yourselves so that you may find tranquility in them, and He created between you love and compassion. In that are signs for a people who reflect.

22 Among His signs are the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and complexions. In that are signs for those who know.”

So this is a list of the good things God has created for human beings. It is a long list, but I’m just quoting two verses. The first celebrates marriage and the love of a wife and husband. The second begins by pointing to how beautiful the sky is, and all the good things that come from the earth. But then it abruptly mentions as “signs” i.e. miracles of God the diversity of human languages and skin color. All the signs mentioned in this passage are positive things.

The Qur’an is saying that some people being Black while others are brown or fair is a miracle, and a good thing, a miracle of God. We should, it says, value that diversity and its beauty. Likewise with the various beautiful languages people speak.

This principle becomes even clearer in another passage, in Chapter 35, “The Creator” (al-Fatir)

27 “Have you not seen how God sends down rains from the heavens? “Then We produced thereby multi-colored fruit. And in the mountains are veins of white and red of various hues, along with black basalt.”

28 And among the people and animals and livestock are also a range of colors. Only the learned among His servants fear God. God is Almighty, Forgiving.”

So this is another celebration of the good things God has created for us. He sends rain, the text says, which allows fruit to grow, of a variety of colors. That the fruit is multi-colored is a good thing, like the rain itself, and is beautiful.

Fruits mentioned in the Qur’an .

Then the passage goes on to speak of the beauty of mountainsides, which show red and white layering and black basalt. In western Arabia and up into Transjordan there are a lot of sandstone hills, and past volcanic activity had produced black mountains as well. In Petra, in Jordan, people carved into them to make buildings:

h/t Pikist.

But not only is a variety of colorful fruits beautiful, and not only are the colors in a mountainside beautiful, but so too is the “range of colors” in animals and in human beings. And this variety in skin tones is mentioned as one of the signs or miracles of God for which people should be thankful.

A gathering of differently-colored human beings is therefore sort of like a lovely still life painting of a fruit bowl, a sign of God’s creativity.

Then we come to the Chapter of the Chambers, 49.

13 “People, we have created you male and female and made you nations and tribes so that you may come to know one another. The noblest of you in the sight of God is the most pious of you. God is knowing and aware.”

Here we are not simply called on to marvel at God’s signs in the creation but to learn something from it. The differences between the sexes and among various peoples are there not only because they are inherently beautiful but so that we can be enriched. The Qur’an is saying that men have things to learn from women and that a pious woman is more noble than an elite male who is a sinner. But likewise people of various ethnicities are to learn from one another and to measure themselves not by nation but by how good a human being they are.

Another passage from The Chambers (49) addresses the pathologies name-calling and bigotry:

The Chambers 49:11–12:
“Believers, let not one people ridicule another, for the latter may be better than they; nor should women ridicule other women, for the latter may be better than they. Do not insult each other, or call each other names. A depraved epithet is a miserable thing after faith. Whoever will not repent, those are wrongdoers. Believers, avoid too much suspicion, for some suspicion is sin. Do not spy on others nor should some of you backbite others. Would any of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brethren? Fear God, for God is forgiving and merciful.”

People of faith, the passage says, don’t engage in name-calling with regard to other groups. Backbiting and slandering other people is not only wrong, it is likened to a sort of spiritual cannibalism. When you take away someone’s self-esteem, it is like eating their body parts.

I wrote about some of these passages in my recent book

These sentiments are not unprecedented in world scriptures. In the New Testament, Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, 3:11, says “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” He doesn’t explicitly mention skin color, but it is pretty clear he thinks such differences should not matter to the fellowship of Christians (and he was angry when Peter treated Greek Christians differently than Jewish ones).

And the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible says (Isaiah 2:3-4)

Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

The long competition for souls between the missionary religions of Christianity and Islam, geopolitical struggles like the Crusades or the Ottoman Wars, the age of colonialism in which European Christians ruled hundreds of millions of Muslims, and the recent outbreak of strains of Muslim radicalism and the Bush war of aggression on Iraq — all these historical events have given the Qur’an a bad name in the Christian-heritage world. The book is also astonishingly badly translated across the board, which puts off readers.

What is remarkable to me is the way the Qur’an specifically mentions skin color differences among people as something to celebrate, as a sign of God and as beautiful, and insists that differences among peoples are no there to foster hatred or insecurity but to provide opportunities to learn and enlarge the self.

Alas, people aren’t very good at actually implementing their scripture. Most white Christians haven’t behaved as though they actually believe in Colossians 3. And there is a race problem among Muslims. But ideals aren’t there because we already have attained them or because they are second nature or easy. The world scriptures teach ideals as values we have to discipline ourselves into, as stars for which we have to keep reaching.

(Aeon) – Ibn Tufayl, a 12th-century Andalusian, fashioned the feral child in philosophy. His story Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the tale of a child raised by a doe on an unnamed Indian Ocean island. Hayy ibn Yaqzan (literally ‘Living Son of Awakeness’) reaches a state of perfect, ecstatic understanding of the world. A meditation on the possibilities (and pitfalls) of the quest for the good life, Hayy offers not one, but two ‘utopias’: a eutopia (εὖ ‘good’, τόπος ‘place’) of the mind in perfect isolation, and an ethical community under the rule of law. Each has a version of human happiness. Ibn Tufayl pits them against each other, but each unfolds ‘no where’ (οὐ ‘not’, τόπος ‘place’) in the world.

Ibn Tufayl begins with a vision of humanity isolated from society and politics. (Modern European political theorists who employed this literary device called it ‘the state of nature’.) He introduces Hayy by speculating about his origin. Whether Hayy was placed in a basket by his mother to sail through the waters of life (like Moses) or born by spontaneous generation on the island is irrelevant, Ibn Tufayl says. His divine station remains the same, as does much of his life, spent in the company only of animals. Later philosophers held that society elevates humanity from its natural animal state to an advanced, civilised one. Ibn Tufayl took a different view. He maintained that humans can be perfected only outside society, through a progress of the soul, not the species.

In contrast to Thomas Hobbes’s view that ‘man is a wolf to man’, Hayy’s island has no wolves. It proves easy enough for him to fend off other creatures by waving sticks at them or donning terrifying costumes of hides and feathers. For Hobbes, the fear of violent death is the origin of the social contract and the apologia for the state; but Hayy’s first encounter with fear of death is when his doe-mother dies. Desperate to revive her, Hayy dissects her heart only to find one of its chambers is empty. The coroner-turned-theologian concludes that what he loved in his mother no longer resides in her body. Death therefore was the first lesson of metaphysics, not politics.

Hayy then observes the island’s plants and animals. He meditates upon the idea of an elemental, ‘vital spirit’ upon discovering fire. Pondering the plurality of matter leads him to conclude that it must originate from a singular, non-corporeal source or First Cause. He notes the perfect motion of the celestial spheres and begins a series of ascetic exercises (such as spinning until dizzy) to emulate this hidden, universal order. By the age of 50, he retreats from the physical world, meditating in his cave until, finally, he attains a state of ecstatic illumination. Reason, for Ibn Tufayl, is thus no absolute guide to Truth.

The difference between Hayy’s ecstatic journeys of the mind and later rationalist political thought is the role of reason. Yet many later modern European commentaries or translations of Hayy confuse this by framing the allegory in terms of reason. In 1671, Edward Pococke entitled his Latin translation The Self-Taught Philosopher: In Which It Is Demonstrated How Human Reason Can Ascend from Contemplation of the Inferior to Knowledge of the Superior. In 1708, Simon Ockley’s English translation was The Improvement of Human Reason, and it too emphasised reason’s capacity to attain ‘knowledge of God’. For Ibn Tufayl, however, true knowledge of God and the world – as a eutopia for the ‘mind’ (or soul) – could come only through perfect contemplative intuition, not absolute rational thought.

This is Ibn Tufayl’s first utopia: an uninhabited island where a feral philosopher retreats to a cave to reach ecstasy through contemplation and withdrawal from the world. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would be impressed: ‘Flee, my friend, into your solitude!’

The rest of the allegory introduces the problem of communal life and a second utopia. After Hayy achieves his perfect condition, an ascetic is shipwrecked on his island. Hayy is surprised to discover another being who so resembles him. Curiosity leads him to befriend the wanderer, Absal. Absal teaches Hayy language, and describes the mores of his own island’s law-abiding people. The two men determine that the islanders’ religion is a lesser version of the Truth that Hayy discovered, shrouded in symbols and parables. Hayy is driven by compassion to teach them the Truth. They travel to Absal’s home.

The encounter is disastrous. Absal’s islanders feel compelled by their ethical principles of hospitality towards foreigners, friendship with Absal, and association with all people to welcome Hayy. But soon Hayy’s constant attempts to preach irritate them. Hayy realises that they are incapable of understanding. They are driven by satisfactions of the body, not the mind. There can be no perfect society because not everyone can achieve a state of perfection in their soul. Illumination is possible only for the select, in accordance with a sacred order, or a hieros archein. (This hierarchy of being and knowing is a fundamental message of neo-Platonism.) Hayy concludes that persuading people away from their ‘natural’ stations would only corrupt them further. The laws that the ‘masses’ venerate, be they revealed or reasoned, he decides, are their only chance to achieve a good life.

The islanders’ ideals – lawfulness, hospitality, friendship, association – might seem reasonable, but these too exist ‘no where’ in the world. Hence their dilemma: either they adhere to these and endure Hayy’s criticisms, or violate them by shunning him. This is a radical critique of the law and its ethical principles: they are normatively necessary for social life yet inherently contradictory and impossible. It’s a sly reproach of political life, one whose bite endures. Like the islanders, we follow principles that can undermine themselves. To be hospitable, we must be open to the stranger who violates hospitality. To be democratic, we must include those who are antidemocratic. To be worldly, our encounters with other people must be opportunities to learn from them, not just about them.

In the end, Hayy returns to his island with Absal, where they enjoy a life of ecstatic contemplation unto death. They abandon the search for a perfect society of laws. Their eutopia is the quest of the mind left unto itself, beyond the imperfections of language, law and ethics – perhaps beyond even life itself.

The islanders offer a less obvious lesson: our ideals and principles undermine themselves, but this is itself necessary for political life. For an island of pure ethics and law is an impossible utopia. Perhaps, like Ibn Tufayl, all we can say on the search for happiness is (quoting Al-Ghazali):

It was – what it was is harder to say.
Think the best, but don’t make me describe it away.

After all, we don’t know what happened to Hayy and Absal after their deaths – or to the islanders after they left.

Marwa Elshakry & Murad Idris

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Marwa Elshakry is associate professor of history at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (2013). She lives in New York.

Murad Idris is assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He is currently working on two book projects, one on Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and another on constructions of Islam in language. His latest book is War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (2018).

Edited by Sam Haselby

via Aeon

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

UNCA Ramsey Library Video Production: A Glimpse of the Mystery of Mysteries

Paris (AFP) – Transcendental meditation — the practice of effortless thinking — may be as effective at treating PTSD in conflict veterans as traditional therapy, US researchers said Friday, in findings that could help tens of thousands deal with their trauma.

Post traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating condition that can lead to psychosis, bipolar disorder or suicidal and homicidal thoughts, affects an estimated 14 percent of US veterans who serve in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The most common treatment for PTSD is a process known as prolonged exposure psychotherapy, which forces sufferers to re-experience traumatic events by confronting their memories of the conflict.

Researchers from three US universities decided to look into whether more everyday techniques, which help civilians lower their stress levels and increase focus and productivity, would work on traumatised veterans.

They trialed 203 former servicemen and women with PTSD, most of whom were receiving medication for their symptoms, and randomly assigned them courses of transcendental meditation, prolonged exposure therapy or a specialised PTSD health education class.

They found that 60 percent of veterans who did 20 minutes of quiet meditation every day showed significant improvement in their symptoms, and more completed the study than those given exposure therapy.

“Over the past 50 years, PTSD has expanded to become a significant public health problem,” Sanford Nidich, of the Maharishi University of Management Research Institute, told AFP.

“Due to the increasing need to address the PTSD public health care problem in the US, UK and worldwide, there is a compelling need to implement governmental policy to include alternative therapies such as transcendental meditation as an option for treating veterans with PTSD.”

Transcendental meditation involves effortlessly thinking of an idea or mantra to produce a settled, calmer state of mind — scientists call it “restful alertness”.

Unlike exposure therapy, meditation can be practised at home, takes up relatively little time, and researchers say it would be significantly cheaper than current treatment techniques.

It also avoids forcing combat veterans to relive their trauma in a bid to get better.

“Transcendental meditation is self-empowering, and can be practised just about anywhere at any time, without the need for specialised equipment or ongoing personnel support,” said Nidich, who was the lead author of the study published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

– ‘Gave me my life back’ –

The main problem with existing PTSD treatment, according to Nidich, is that forcing veterans to relive their trauma means many never finish the courses.

Exposure therapy, although officially approved as a treatment by the US Veterans’ Association, is ineffective in up to 50 percent of patients and drop-out rates range from 30-45 percent.

“New treatments, including options not involving exposure to the traumatic experience, are needed for veterans who do not respond to treatment or drop-out due to discomfort,” said Nidich.

One study participant, a 32-year-old navy veteran whom authors identified only as Ms. K, said learning the meditation technique had “given me my life back.”

After being diagnosed as having suffered sexual trauma while on military service, her symptoms worsened until she drank to excess every night and sought to avoid human interaction.

After the transcendental meditation course, “I began to come out of my nightmares and face the battle I had ahead,” she said.

She added she had since applied for a job in a hospital.

Researchers said further studies were needed to see if meditation could be a long-term aid for PTSD sufferers.

Featured Photo: AFP/File / Javier GALEANO. An estimated 14 percent of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD.

Bangladesh has been plagued by extremist violence for years, but the violence and hostage-taking in Dhaka on Friday and on Saturday morning was a whole new level of disruption.

Why Bangladesh? Here are some reasons:

1. Bangladesh is a multicultural state, where some 9 percent of the population is Hindu. The birthdays of Buddha and Krishna are official holidays. Radical Sunni Muslims, like the US Ku Klux Klan, are about a single ethnicity being exalted above all the others in a society.

2. Among the Muslim majority, large numbers of the Muslims are Sufi mystics. Bangladeshi Sufism had tended to be tolerant and universalist. Many Hindus frequent shrines of Sufi saints. Radical Sunni Muslims want to destroy Sufism and to herd Muslims into the hard line ‘protestant’ Salafi trend.

3. Large numbers of Bangladeshis are secular-minded. There is a significant Communist Party and the secular nationalist Awami League controls the national government. Indeed, it could be argued that of all South Asian countries, Bangladesh has the most secular government now that the fundamentalist BJP is ruling India.

4. Bangladeshi nationalism is grounded in national identity rather than fundamentalist religion. Bangladesh was forged in the crucible of 1971, when Bengali Muslims there signaled that they were disillusioned with the Pakistan project and would seek their own Bengali nationalism rather than subsume it under a South Asian Muslim identity. Radical Muslims hate ethnic nationalism and want to make fundamentalist Muslim universalism the keystone of identity.

5. The Bangladeshi government has been prosecuting Muslim fundamentalists who have committed violent crimes in the past, even executing two former leaders of the fundamentalist Jama’at-i islami. Hard line fundamentalists think they are above the law and insist that violence committed in the name of religion is licit. The radicals are thus ‘haunting’ the Federal government.

Bangladesh shows that a Muslim society can evolve toward Sufism or secularism rather than Salafi puritanism, and as such the country stands as a rebuke to the fundamentalists and hard liners. They know only the language of violence in attempting to provoke social change, and have deployed it in Dhaka. It will not make them more popular.

—–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

NDTV: ” Dhaka restaurant attack: 5 bodies found, 18 hostages rescued”

The poems of Rumi, the thirteenth-century teacher, scholar, and poet known simply as Mowlana in the Muslim world, have shaped Islamic culture for centuries. They still stand just as vital after eight hundred years. Rumi speaks to us of unchanging spiritual realities and the universal quest for inner peace. His poems make a convincing argument for the central role of love in Islamic texts and traditions. Rumi found in mystical poetry a vehicle for the expression of the endless spiritual bounties of love. This became the center of his faith and practice and his connection with the divine. He pronounced love to be the goal of his life and the only form of true worship.

Love Is My Savior: The Arabic Poems of Rumi

This new volume of Rumi’s works, in Arabic and English, the first-ever English translation of his Arabic poems, will be exciting for the newcomer as well as to readers already familiar with his mystical philosophy. The poems take the reader on a journey of spiritual exploration, erotic longing, ecstatic union, cruel rejection, and mystic reconciliation. Rumi reveals his soul and welcomes everyone witness his spiritual journey.

Rumi’s Arabic verses are straightforward, and his metaphors are intense. It might be thought that in the Arabic we discover the free spirit of Rumi, unbound by the polite and romantic traditions of Persian verse. Many of these poems may appear, to the Western reader at least, to be surprisingly erotic. But those familiar with Rumi’s poems will not be surprised to find frank and open expressions of physical love and sexual desire. The poet fully embraces the language of sexuality to express his love for Shams-e Tabrizi, his dervish teacher, his mystic guide, and his companion, as a metaphor for his love for the divine. In some instances, Rumi’s verses are full-bodied and intimate, as the lover addresses his beloved Shams. All of Rumi’s poems are equally transgressive, celebrating love, wine, drunkenness, madness—even death—as paths to the spirit.

Here we give as an example, the poem “Drunken Brothers”:

You! who make the full moon stand ashamed,

come here and shine your brightest light on me.

You! who pour out nectar for the soul.

Come here! Make me as drunk as drunk can be.

Don’t stop! More! Give me all the wine I claim,

till you and I two drunken brothers be,

back and forth, vying over ecstasy.

Now, I’m so drunk I can’t recall your name

or find your face. I’m filled with mystery,

wine that saves me from spite and misery.

Or these lines from “A Dream,” that celebrate Rumi’s love of fellow mystic Shams al-Din Tabrizi:

You flashed your eyes. O Moon! They pierced my chest.

You spoke the words, and so my heart was blessed.

You filled me with desire, gave me a taste.

When you drew near, I smiled at your embrace.

A beggar, I gave thanks to be so base.

My master, you gave me your noble grace!

Rumi invites us all to his celebration with this poem, “We Are All Drunk”:

Come by our place today! We are all drunk.

Our cups are full of wine, and we’re all drunk.

The cup God gave us, it’s running over.

Give thanks, give thanks—thanks for this charity!

Come by our place. It’s a celebration!

Our longing now made plain for all to see.

Our lovers came to us in the dark of night—

in our hearts they left no shame, no anxiety.

Each held in open palms a generous sea,

and scattered jewels for us abundantly.

—–

Translated by Nesreen Akhtarkhavari and Anthony A. Lee; Rumi’s Love is My Savior is available here

Pope Francis continues to preach environmentalism as he addresses crowds in Latin America, a challenging message in poor countries where over-exploitation of natural resources is a constant temptation. These are also countries and populations, however, most at risk from pollution and the ravages of climate change.

Pope Francis’s proof text when he spoke at the Catholic University in Quito was Genesis 15: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” Francis underlined that there are two commandments here– human beings are to till the garden, i.e. to shape their physical and spiritual environment. But, less stressed in the Western tradition, he said, is the second commandment, to “keep” or “guard” the garden.

The garden (i.e. nature), he said, is a gift, something bestowed upon us. But it is not a static gift, meant solely to mirror the divine. It is a sphere in which humans are meant to share with the divine in constructing it. Nor is nature the only consideration here– we are also keepers or guardians of each other. That was the error Cain made when he was asked where Abel was, whom he had killed, and he said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Genesis clearly envisaged human beings as keepers or guardians, both of the natural world and of one another.

Francis pointed to the intellectual and technological potential of the university to fulfill this double charge of guardianship, and he praised the role of the youth in fulfilling it. But he stressed that abstract ideas are not enough– we must turn, he said to the concrete.

He slammed a purely technocratic approach to nature and society, based purely on power and utility. He warned that the good and the truth do not sprout spontaneously from technological and economic power. He urged them to consider urgently the issues of “tilling” and “keeping” our natural resources. He admitted the benefits of individual initiatives, but said in the end we are called to consider the whole and not just the fragments, and to include everyone in our progress. There is, he said, no right of exclusion. We have to be able to answer the question, “Where is your brother?”

Although Pope Francis was speaking somewhat abstractly here, Ecuador’s poor and its indigenous Quechua people took it that he was speaking at least partly about their marginalization.

Given the pope’s encyclical on climate change and the need to move quickly away from hydrocarbons, his message is somewhat challenging for a poor country with a growing oil industry.

But the consequences of not moving quickly away from hydrocarbons for this country could be devastating. Ecuador could well face a water crisis a its glacier coverage declines because of global warming:

Latinamericanscience.org notes:

“Between 1996 and 2008, for example, Ecuador’s glacier coverage went down by 28%. Cotopaxi, one of the most active volcanoes in the world—and one of the main sources of water for the Ecuadorian capital of Quito—saw a 30% reduction in glacier coverage between 1976 and 1997.

Empresa Eléctrica Quito, in turn, confirmed that the amount of water available to the capital was reduced by 50% between 1978 and 2008. Between 2050 and 2100 we expect glaciers to retreat at least 55% in the Andes in tandem with an increase in temperature between 2 and 8°C in the Amazon region.”

Communities of the [pdf] Jubones river basin in the south of Ecuador are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Many also feel that artificial fertilizers have caused environmental damage and are returning to composting in the traditional way. These are among the communities that Pope Francis was sticking up for.

Despite its oil industry, Ecuador has a very low carbon footprint and nearly 60 percent of its energy is generated by renewables, mainly hydro. It is also, however, moving ahead with wind and solar installations, being rich in both energy sources. It may be that the young engineers and entrepreneurs at Catholic University will take away from the pope’s message a new urgency in implementing a renewable energy revolution in the country.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Vatican: “Pope Francis in Ecuador – Meeting with representatives of schools and universities”

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — The grounds of the Carmel Convent in Bethlehem, home to blue-shuttered stone buildings on a hilltop facing the Nativity Church, are adorned with the image of Mariam Bawardy, one of two Palestinian nuns canonized by Pope Francis in Rome on Sunday.

Tucked away from the traffic-filled streets of central Bethlehem, the serene convent founded in 1876 is a testament to the life work of the Galilee-born nun, now home to 15 sisters from Palestine, Europe, and Latin America.

A portrait of Mariam Bawardy hangs in the Bethlehem convent she founded.(Charlie Hoyle)

“She was a very humble person, full of love and vitality, a complete human being,” one of the sisters at the convent told Ma’an, a sense of pride in her voice.

“She worked for people who had nothing, for justice. She had a difficult life, full of poverty, but it serves as a great message for people today.”

Her room at the convent has been well preserved by the sisters, with a white prayer gown hanging on the wall and the remnants of her bandages kept behind glass – the nuns say she suffered from stigmata, the wounds of Jesus Christ, until her death at the age of 32.

The historic ceremony at the Vatican, attended by an array of regional church leaders and President Mahmoud Abbas, celebrated for the first time the veneration of two Palestinian saints – Mariam Bawardy and Marie Alphonsine Ghattas, who was born in Jerusalem in 1846, then under Ottoman rule.

Giant portraits of the women hung high in St Peter’s Basilica facing the crowds, including 2,000 Palestinians, who had gathered for the canonization, with Pope Francis calling the two Palestinian women a “luminous example” for Catholics to follow.

Bawardy was born to a Greek Catholic family and lived in Egypt, France, and India before moving to Bethlehem. Orphaned and illiterate, she suffered dire poverty and tragedy in early life.

While living in Alexandria at the age of 12, she rejected her uncle’s attempt to marry her off and had her throat slit after she refused a servants’ demands to convert to Islam, with her recovery prompting her to enter the church and provide charity to poor families across the Middle East.

Ghattas, known for her piety and love, set out on an educational mission and founded the Congregation of the Holy Rosary, leaving behind a network of convents, schools and religious centers in the Middle East.

She is said to have performed many miracles in her life and to have seen the Virgin Mary in several apparitions.

A giant poster of the two new Palestinian saints, who lived under Ottoman rule.(Charlie Hoyle)

‘Palestine on the map’

The historic recognition of the first Palestinian, and indeed Arabic speaking, saints came only days after the Vatican announced the first bilateral treaty with the State of Palestine since official recognition two years ago.

With a stalled peace process, a decidedly right-wing Israeli coalition, and internal Palestinian division, the recognition of two Palestinian saints – the highest honor bestowed by the Catholic Church — has been interpreted as a positive intervention by the Vatican in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“This is a strong message from the Holy See, from his holiness, that he cares for Palestine and the Palestinians,” Ambassador to the Holy See Issa Kassissieh told Ma’an.

“We see it as a religious ceremony but it has a national message. After all, the two nuns are Palestinian Christians and we are proud that we have two saints from Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus Christ.”

Rifaat Kassis, a prominent political community activist and coordinator of Kairos, a local Christian group, says the canonization is significant on many levels, notwithstanding the recognition that Palestinians under Ottoman rule were part of a diverse, productive society, contrary to the mainstream sidelining of Palestinians from the region’s history.

“This puts Palestine on the map, among not only the catholic world, but the whole world, and I think this will also help people to understand Palestine and the occupation,” he told Ma’an.

Whether the Vatican recognition of the saints was politically motivated or not, the event signals a desire by Pope Francis to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kassis added, something he views as a “positive sign.”

A wooden icon of Mariam Bawardy inside the Carmel Convent.(Charlie Hoyle)

‘New hope for peace’

The treaty announced last Wednesday will deal with the “life and activity of the Catholic Church in Palestine,” according to the Vatican’s website, and essentially covers issues such as Vatican property, taxes and protocol at holy sites.

The treaty also made reference to diplomatic relations with the State of Palestine, as opposed to the PLO, a clear shift in direction.

“This a step forward for a two state solution, or a solution. The Vatican now recognizes the state, and this will make it easier for others to recognize it and forces Israel to make peace,” Yusef Daher, executive secretary of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Centre, told Ma’an.

“We are very proud that our dear land has produced two important persons, humble poor persons who became sanctified by the Vatican.

“Recognition of the (Palestinian) state is also a good answer in the face of tyranny to peace that the Israeli election produced.”

A representative from the media office of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said that the canonization of the two Palestinian saints is at heart a spiritual event which could have a social impact in teaching Palestinians about how to “live with serenity in the midst of all our problems,” an existential inspiration rather than a political influence.

It is also a message to the world that the Middle East is not just about media headlines on IS and irrational violence, that the Arabic speaking people have a rich history and there are diverse communities in the Middle East, such as the Christian minority whose presence dates back to the time of Christ.

“It shows that this land is not a violent land, that there are people working for peace and tolerance. It is a land which stands for serenity too,” the Latin patriarchate representative said.

“The canonization is a new hope for peace in this land.”

Via Ma’an News Agency

Carla Power

Great journalists invite us to be companions with them on their journeys to extraordinary places. Carla Power offers such an invitation in her new book, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran (Holt Paperbacks, 2015).

The daughter of professors, Carla Power grew up in the Midwest and the Middle East & Asia, and later went back overseas to work as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek. Living in Iran, Afghanistan, India and Egypt shaped her global outlook and openness to the diversity of cultures and religions around the world.

Educated at Yale, Columbia, and Oxford, Power currently writes for Time and other publications. Her essays have appeared in a range of newspapers and magazines including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue and Glamour.

In her book Power describes how and why she embarked on an intensive one-year course of study of the Quran with distinguished Islamic scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi.

“As a journalist,” she writes, “I’d spent years framing Muslims as people who did things – built revolutions, founded political parties, fought, migrated, lobbied. I craved a better understanding of the faith driving these actions. I’d reported on how Muslim identity shapes a woman’s dress or a man’s career path, a village economy or a city skyline. Now I wanted to explore the beliefs behind that identity and to see how closely they matched my own.”

If the Oceans Were Ink is a beautiful story about how the sacred words of the Quran can bring two people together in study, understanding, and joyful friendship. Carla Power discusses her new book in this interview.

How did you choose the title of your book? Does it hold special meaning for you?

It’s from the Quran: “If all the trees in the earth were pens, and the ocean, with seven more seas to help it, were ink.” Allah’s words would not be exhausted. I chose it not just for its beauty, but because I like its message of limitless words — fitting, I thought, for a book about a year-long conversation between friends!

How did you come to meet Sheikh Mohammed Akram Nadwi? Was he the first person to teach you the Quran? How did his teachings inspire you?

The Sheikh and I were colleagues at a think-tank in Oxford more than twenty years ago, when we were both in our mid-twenties. We worked together on an atlas on the spread of Islam in South Asia. I had read bits of the Quran in college and grad school, but it was only with the Sheikh that I was able to bore down into parsing crucial verses.

I wanted to try to understand how he read it, as both a believer, and as a classically-trained Islamic scholar. My real interest was not in doing an exegesis, but in watching how the text shaped his life and worldview on issues, whether gender or migration, or sex or the Islamic State.

Your book description says you engaged in debates with the Sheikh “at cafes, family gatherings, and packed lecture halls, conversations filled with both good humor and powerful insights.” Was your Quranic education with the Sheikh mostly outside the classroom? Did you travel – “go on tour” – with the Sheikh and where did you go? What were some of the highlights?

The Sheikh and I are sitting outside the Oxford Kebab House, the Persian-owned café in North Oxford where we often met for lessons. (photo courtesy Carla Power)

Writing the book, I was a bit like the Sheikh’s groupie: In addition to meeting him for one-on-one discussions of the Quran at Oxford cafes and kebab houses, I trailed him around the United Kingdom for his lectures and classes. On weekends, he teaches 8 hours a day, Saturday and Sunday. It was fascinating seeing the wide range of people that gathered at his lectures. One time a fiercely political and slightly menacing crowd came to hear him speak on jihad and sharia in East London.

When he lectured on jurisprudence related to women, the teenage girls were desperate to ask him about whether they could wear nail polish and pluck their eyebrows. His regular Quran classes in Cambridge were full of young professionals and families, who posed questions on everything from hellfire to the Arab Spring.

Part of the book’s aim — combatting flattened stereotypes of Islam — meant portraying him as a rounded human being. So I’d shadow him doing other things, too — heading for the gym, going to buy sewing supplies with his wife, letting his daughter go shopping in the Oxford mall…

My favorite trip was following him back to his village in Uttar Pradesh, India, where I stayed in his parents’ home, and I gave a lecture to an all-male crowd at a madrasa he’d built there. We also spent a few days in his beloved Lucknow, visiting his alma mater, the famous madrasa Nadwat-al-Ulama, and taking a roadtrip to see his old friends, and his old haunts – including where he used to go shooting quail on Friday mornings. Seeing the Sheikh’s highly conservative familial home, was a reminder of just how far he had come, from a tiny village to being a world-class scholar, and champion of Muslim women’s rights.

Perhaps my favorite outing in Britain was a day at Heathrow Airport, seeing him and a group of students off to Mecca and Medina on pilgrimage. Standing at Heathrow, it was amazing to witness mix of the sacred and logistical — of the students discussing whether their baggage allowances would allow for bringing back water from the famous Zamzam well in Mecca, or watching the Sheikh recite a poem about pilgrimage amid the bustle of Terminal 5.

As a non-Muslim, I couldn’t get a visa to go with them, but just by being there, and by trying to recreate their trip through interviews, I got to witness how a pilgrimage to Mecca, while at its heart is a spiritual journey, is also a matter of making sure the Ramada Inn has your reservations!

Some say the Quran preaches violence, not peace, and oppression of women, not respect. How would you respond to these “experts” and the people that believe them?

I think there’s great confusion in the Western media between what some Muslims do — or in the case of the oppression of women, how many Muslim-majority societies function — and what the Quran and hadith say. I would refer them to what Sheikh Akram always stressed: context! context! context!

In his view, the verses that jihadis and Islamophobes alike love to cite about killing infidels refer to very specific moments in early Islamic history. They are to be read through the prism of the moment they came down to the Prophet Muhammad, according to the Sheikh, and are not blanket injunctions.

In the case of Islam’s treatment of women, the Sheikh believes many modern Muslims have forgotten the basic rights Islam gives them. When societies feel scared and weak — whether because of political or economic enfeeblement — they don’t give women and minorities justice.

Why is the Quran so controversial? Is it more controversial than say the Bible or the Torah?

Both the Old Testament — and Christian history itself — contain explicit examples of religiously sanctioned violence. But the Quran is uniquely controversial today because of the way it’s being used by a tiny minority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims — as providing a religious justification for violence. Extremist readings of Islamic tradition — along with scores of other reasons, including the scars of imperial meddling in the region, both past and present — are helping fuel the conflicts shaping the world today.

How much were non-Muslims’ perceptions of the Quran informed by 9/11, terrorism, and the “clash of
civilizations” rhetoric that followed?

The loudest voices, both from within Islam and outside of it, tend to be the extremist ones. The men dropping bombs or beheading make news, so it goes that their interpretations of the Quran gain traction. The Californian mystic poet,the Iranian quietist, the French human rights activist — we don’t hear their interpretations of the Quran.

While ultra-conservatives have occasionally frowned on the Sheikh taking one-on-one questions from women students at breaks in his lectures, he makes himself readily accessible to all his students. (Photo credit: Cambridge Islamic College)

While ultra-conservatives have occasionally frowned on the Sheikh taking one-on-one questions from women students at breaks in his lectures, he makes himself readily accessible to all his students. (Photo credit: Cambridge Islamic College)

What did you learn from Sheikh Akram about the hadith?

As blueprints for the Prophet’s Sunna, or morals and habits, the hadith are central to Sheikh Akram’s life. It was fascinating to see someone try to live in the way of the prophet from a row-house in Oxford — taking his cues from hadith on everything from how to eat to how to greet guests, treat his wife, or raise his six daughters.

With a wife and six daughters he must have learned a lot about women. What is the Sheikh’s view of the role of women within Islam? Do his views derive from his interpretation of the Quran or his interpretation of the hadith? Or, are his views cultural?

He tries as much as possible to adhere to textual, rather than cultural interpretations. Indeed, when he’s pointed out that practices like the niqab or, for men, skull-caps worn for prayer, are cultural rather than textual, he’s ruffled feathers in various Muslim congregations! That said, I’m aware that the Sheikh’s adab, or gentle etiquette, means that he’s very sensitive to trying to force change on a community, just because he knows many of their practices aren’t Islamic, but cultural.

I saw that first-hand when I followed him to his home village, Jamdahan. Though he’s been seen as the Muslim community’s great religious authority there since he was a teenager, he still is careful not to disturb the status quo. Here’s a man who’s literally written the book on women’s freedom to attend worship and study in mosques and madrasas, and yet, when I spoke in his madrasa, I was the only woman there! All the women of the village remained in purdah! (‘Purdah’ is the custom of Muslim and Hindu women being screened from men who aren’t close relations, either by a veil, or by keeping separate, all-female quarters in a household.)

How much are religious scholars’ views on social issues and law informed by the Quran, the hadith, and the culture in which they preach?

That’s very hard to answer: it varies from scholar to scholar and culture to culture! What I can say is that more and more Muslims, with better literacy and education than their grandparents often had, are going back to the basic texts, and working to strip away the cultural layers that have accumulated around them. That process of challenging the old authorities has produced a whole range of new voices, from violent extremists to feminists. It’s a time of ferment, as a new generation of Muslims seek to interpret classical texts.

What is the importance of Sheikh Akram’s book, Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam (2013)? Is it influential outside of scholarly circles?

Al-Muhaddithat is the first volume of a 40-volume biographical dictionary of Muslim women scholars. When the Sheikh began work on it, he figured it would be a slim pamphlet — a matter of 30 or 40 women since the 7th century. Now, his findings number more than 9,000 women. But it’s not just about numbers: he’s found women were riding camelback on lecture tours throughout Arabia, who were issuing their own fatwas, who taught caliphs and male scholars. His work — most of which, sadly, remains in his computer hard-drive to this day — not only suggests the rights and freedoms earlier generations of women enjoyed. It also sheds new light on how much more inclusive Islamic scholarship was than it often is today.

On both counts, it’s crucial, and needs wide dissemination! Currently, his students are trying to come up with the money to have it published or to persuade him to publish it online. It is known outside academic circles. Increasingly, the Sheikh is being asked to speak by Muslim women’s groups around the world.

How has your book been received and what’s your next project?

I’ve been delighted by the reception, particularly from book clubs and on university campuses. It came out at around the same time as some headline-grabbing treatments of Islam — ones whose takes were polar opposites to my own. It’s a quieter book, but one with, I hope, some staying power. I’m still deciding on what my next project will be. It will either be Islam-related, or a biography of an amazing New Yorker who championed migrant rights.

One of my favorite childhood games involved guessing the thoughts of the veiled women I saw in busy streets in Muslim cities. Here I’m standing in a crowded bazaar in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a curious burqaed lady turns toward the camera as she passes by. Later, as a journalist, I had returned to Kabul and wore a burqa in order to remain undetected as a foreigner, and I reported on life under Taliban rule. (photo courtesy Carla Power)

What was it like to grow up partly overseas and how did it affect your career decisions ?

A childhood spent shuttling between St. Louis and Muslim countries put both American and foreign cultures in relief. I keep thinking of the old quote from Kipling, which goes something like: “What do they know of England, if only England know?”

I’m also conscious that being in Afghanistan, Egypt and Iran in the 1970s was to witness the region at a crucial time. Even as educated Americans, interested in the cultures we found ourselves, and indignant at the despotic repressions we witnessed in places like Iran, my parents were clueless of the magnitude of the tensions roiling beneath the surfaces of society.

We knew something was wrong with the Shah’s go-go modernization drive, but vastly underestimated that Islam, harnessed to public anger, could tow a revolution.

In Kabul in 1978, we rolled out of a Little League game into a line of tanks — which proved to be the leftist coup that toppled Afghanistan’s king, paving the way for Soviet invasion. That invasion, like the Iranian Revolution, changed the West’s relationship to Islam.

Where the Islamic societies of my father’s generation had been relatively distant and self- contained, various events — the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and mass Muslim migration — mean that the Islamic world is no longer ‘out there.’ It’s us; we’re them.

Ever since I studied Edward Said’s Orientalism as an undergrad, I’ve been eager to investigate the forces that go into how the Western world defines the Islamic one.

How has your Quranic journey changed your life? Would you recommend this journey to other people?

Aside from motherhood, it was the most profound journey I’ve been on. It was not the text itself that I responded to — I found the Quran itself a real challenge. The best thing about the journey was getting the chance to have an extended conversation with someone so different from myself.

Here I was, an American feminist, the daughter of a lapsed Jew and a non-practicing Quaker, with carte blanche to ask a conservative madrasa trained Indian male Muslim any question under the sun.

Sometimes, the Sheikh and I held informal lessons while walking around Oxford. Here, we’re near the Sheikh’s house. (photo courtesy Carla Power)

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Joseph Richard Preville is Assistant Professor of English at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tikkun, The Jerusalem Post, Muscat Daily, Saudi Gazette, and Turkey Agenda. He is also a regular contributor to ISLAMiCommentary.

Julie Poucher Harbin is Editor of ISLAMiCommentary.

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Via IslamiCommentary

Carla Power: If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran