Learning About Religious Tolerance Through the Recent Mosque Controversy

In recent weeks, there has been a controversy in New York City involving a Muslim center that is a few blocks from where the Twin Towers once were. This controversy highlights the misperceptions that many people in this country have about Muslims. Bob Hooper, a regular blogger in Everyday Citizen, wrote an informative blog about the prejudice and anger among certain groups of Christians towards mosques in various parts of the country. In a Jasper the Cat cartoon that I did last December, I wrote about the various things that I learned about Muslims in America. From what I learned, I believe that most Muslim Americans are patriotic and just as concerned about extremists as their fellow Americans. In this blog, I write of more things that I learned in these past few weeks.

Though a lot of the anger towards Muslims has emanated from Christians, many other Christians support the building of the Muslim center and have taken stands against the Islamophobia that seems to be prevalent in this culture. Interfaith United , for instance, is an ecumenical group that has tried to promote understanding between Christians, Jews and Muslims and has fought for justice issues. They recently protested a pastor who burned the Koran in Florida.

In the United Methodist Church home page is a report on the mosque controversy. In their webpage, it is written:

The United Methodist Book of Resolutions calls for “better relationships between Christians and Muslims on the basis of informed understanding, critical appreciation and balanced perspective of one another’s basic beliefs.”

Another resolution calls for United Methodists to denounce discrimination against Muslims and “counter stereotypical and bigoted statements made against Muslims and Islam, Arabs and Arabic culture.”

When it comes to the issue of allowing Muslims to build mosques, supporting their right to worship is not just in line with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, said the Rev. Stephen J. Sidorak Jr., the top executive at the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns. It’s also part of Jesus’ command to love our neighbor, which as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows, can include those of different religions.

“If we want to repair the breach that opened up between some Christians and some Muslims on Sept. 11, 2001, if we want to redeem the tragic events of that day, we must — as Isaiah said — come now and reason together,” Sidorak said. “That’s clearly the foundation of any interreligious work.”

The Methodist webpage cites a two year Duke University study of American Muslims and found that a strong Muslim community that is part of the mainstream of American society is a strong deterrent to radical Islam. David Schanzer, an associate professor at Duke and one of the study’s authors, wrote:

Our findings are that healthy, robust Muslim communities can be a bulwark against radicalization. We don’t know exactly why individuals radicalize. But most terrorism studies show that individuals who go down that path feel alienated. They don’t feel that they fit into (the) wider society in which they live.

The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, wrote a statement on the National Council of Churches USA website this statement:

On the eve of Ramadan on August 11, the National Council of Churches, its Interfaith Relations Commission and Christian participants in the National Muslim-Christian Initiative, issued a strong call for respect for our Muslim neighbors.

“Christ calls us to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matthew 22:39,” the statement said. “It is this commandment, more than the simple bonds of our common humanity, which is the basis for our relationship with Muslims around the world.”

The statement supported building Cordoba House “as a living monument to mark the tragedy of 9/11 through a community center dedicated to learning, compassion, and respect for all people.”

Now the National Council of Churches reaffirms that support and calls upon Christians and people of faith to join us in that affirmation.

The alternative to that support is to engage in a bigotry that will scar our generation in the same way as bigotry scarred our forebears.

Three-hundred years ago, European settlers came to these shores with a determination to conquer and settle at the expense of millions of indigenous peoples who were regarded as sub-human savages. Today, we can’t look back on that history without painful contrition.

One-hundred and fifty years ago, white Americans subjugated black Africans in a cruel slavery that was justified with Bible proof-texts and a belief that blacks were inferior to whites. Today, we look back on that history with agonized disbelief.

Sixty years ago, in a time of war and great fear, tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans were deprived of their property and forced into detention camps because our grandparents feared everyone of Japanese ancestry. Today that decision is universally regarded as an unconscionable mistake and a blot on American history.

Today, millions of Muslims are subjected to thoughtless generalizations, open discrimination and outright hostility because of the actions of a tiny minority whose violent acts defy the teachings of Mohammed.

On August 9, 2010, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Association sent a joint statement to New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg expressing strong support for the Cordoba Center. In their letter, they write:

The shortsightedness of the center’s critics is especially evident when one considers that, over the long run, the voices of moderate Islam hold the key to defeating extremism. These are the voices that represent the overwhelming majority of those within Islam, including the millions of Muslim American citizens, who disavow and repudiate violence. Accordingly, the mosque and community center near Ground Zero should be welcomed as an important effort by moderate Muslims to reach out to interfaith communities in New York and beyond. To demonize them is at odds with the geopolitical interest of the United States and our cherished — and constitutionally protected — tradition of religious freedom.

Many Christians have a mistaken belief that Islam and Christianity cannot live in peace. This belies the fact that for the past several decades, various Christians have built bridges with Muslim communities to communicate and better understand each other. In the 1960s, for instance, the Catholic Church produced the document Nostra Aetate. It gave the Catholic Church a new relationship with nonchrisitan religions, and it was the first step in a reconciliation between Christianity and Judaism and Islam. The document wrote in regards to the Church and Muslims:

The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, alms-giving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Muslims, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

Jewish leaders have come out in support of the Cordoba House. Rabbi Richard Jacobs of the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y said:

We need this Islamic center to preach love and respect in contrast to those who preach hate and destruction.

Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, co-chair of Rabbis for Human Rights, told AOL News:

Many people still think of Muslims as terrorists. My hope is that a center like this will help people understand that not all Muslims are violent.

Over a billion people in the world are Muslims and most are not terrorists. There are around six million Americans who are Muslim and most are not terrorists. According to an article in the November 9, 2009 edition of the New York Times, about 3,557 Muslims are in the American military, many of them being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of 2006, some 212 Muslim American soldiers had been awarded Combat Action Ribbons for their service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and several have been killed. In 2006, for instance, Petty Officer Michael A. Monsoor, a Navy Seal, won a Congressional medal of honor for pulling a member to safety during a firefight in Ramadi, Iraq. Petty Officer Monsoor died to save another American soldier. Captian Eric Rahman is an Army reservist who won the Bronze Star for his service in Iraq in the beginning of the war.

Muslims are like any other religion, with moderates and extremists both. Christianity has suffered through bouts of extremism as well, with the pogroms, inquisitions, witch trials and the current prejudices fanned by the Religious Right today. Muslims have shown a more tolerant, more generous side.

Last year Norman Gershman showed a photo exhibit of Albanian Muslims who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust

The book A VANISHED WORLD by Chris Lowney tells of a time in medieval Spain when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in peace.

Badshah Khan was a friend of Gandhi and a pacifist Muslim who fought for the independence of India and was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in 1985.

Hopefully Christian and Jewish leaders who have spoken up can counter the antagonism found in certain Christian circles against Muslims.

Jasper and the Nature Poem

In the past two months, I have discovered two poets who have been important voices for the environmental movement. These poets wrote about the beauty of nature and of its fragility in light of the destructive tendencies of human civilization. As someone who is trying to learn more about poetry and about the history of the environmental movement, it has been a joy for me to find two poets that intersect these two interests.

W.S. Merwin has had a long career of creating poetry with anti-war and environmental themes. Merwin’s first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was selected by W. H. Auden in 1952 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In the 1960s, his two poetry collections, The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders were filled with allusions to the Vietnam War. When The Carrier of Ladders won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, he gave the $1000 prize to antiwar causes as a protest to the Vietnam War. In 1976 Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. His life in Maui has a strong influence on his environmental beliefs, and this shows in later poems. His collection of poetry Migration: New & Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award, and his collection The Shadow of Sirius won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

This year, W.S. Merwin was named the poet laureate of the United States. The day after Merwin was named poet laureate, New York Times writer Dwight Garner wrote:

…Mr. Merwin’s appointment is potentially inspired. He is an exacting poet, a fierce critic of ecological damage humans have wrought. Helen Vendler, writing last year in The New York Review of Books, called him “the prophet of a denuded planet.” With the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becoming more dread and apocalyptic by the hour, Mr. Merwin may be a poet we’ll need. The pacifist in him may brood over the long war in Afganistan.

…Mr. Merwin has come the whole way, too, and now to Washington in spirit if not in actuality. The poet laureate’s job has mostly been ceremonial, benign, boring. But here’s to the hope, anyway, that there’s a bit of strange fire left in this august poet’s belly.

Robinson Jeffers was a poet of the early twentieth century whose poems celebrated the coastal beauty of the Carmel and Big Sur areas where he lived. Jeffers was strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s concepts of individualism, and Nietzsche’s philosophy led Jeffers to believe that human beings had a destructively self-centered view of the world, and felt that people had to develope a greater respect for the natural world. Among his many poetry collections were Cawdor and Other Poems in 1928 and Solstice and Other Poems in 1935, which brought Jeffers’ great knowledge of literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. During the 1940s, Jeffers was against the United States entry into World War II, and this stance led to a decline in his popularity as many people questioned his patriotism.

Here are poems from both authors.

THE WIDOW
by W.S. Merwin

How easily the ripe grain
Leaves the husk
At the simple turning of the planet

There is no season
That requires us

Masters of forgetting
Threading the eyeless rocks with
A narrow light

In which ciphers wake and evil
Gets itself the face of the norm
And contrives cities

The Widow rises under our fingernails
In this sky we were born we are born

And you weep wishing you were numbers
You multiply you cannot be found
You grieve
Not that heaven does not exist but
That it exists without us

You confide
In images in things that can be
Represented which is their dimension you
Require them you say This
Is Real and you do not fall down and moan

Not seeing the irony in the air

Everything that does not need you is real

The Widow does not
Hear you and your cry is numberless

This is the waking landscape
Dream after dream walking away through it
Invisible invisible invisible

THANKS
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

CHORD
by W.S. Merwin

While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests
while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through
the forests
while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of
their gardens dying far away on the mountain
while the sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives
while the tip of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to them
while he thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red flowers
while he dreamed of wine the trees were falling from the trees
while he felt his heart they were hungry and their faith was sick
while the song broke over him they were in a secret place and they were cutting
it forever
while he coughed they carried the trunks to the hole in the forest the size of a
foreign ship
while he groaned on the voyage to Italy they fell on the trails and were broken
when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons
when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down
and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language

SHINE REPUBLIC

by Robinson Jeffers
The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining; of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness
And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of western man.

There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord, its dangerous beauty binding three ages
Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have eclipsed but have never quenched it.

For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery;
But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther, Tacitus, Eschylus, one kind of man.

And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
You did not say “en masse,” you said “independence.” But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.
You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar.

But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep the spot sore. Be great, carve deep your heel-marks.
The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury.

THE PURSE-SEINE
by Robinson Jeffers

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;
daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the
phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off
New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the
sea’s night-purple; he points and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal
and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the
crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the
other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted
with flame, like a live rocket
A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the
narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,
sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could
I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful
the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our
children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers
-or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls- or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splin-
tered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that
cultures decay, and life’s end is death.

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:
The Reunion
Government and the Market Economy
Jasper Joins Two Protests
Bob the Nerd Vampire
Jasper Debates War
Jasper Finds His Way Home
Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage