How to be a Muslim in America

Lecture by: Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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n the name of God, the Infinitely-Good, the Most Merciful When I was asked to give a lecture tonight, the title was chosen by those who invited me: How to be a Muslim in America. My comments are therefore based on the thesis that there is a will to be a Muslim in America. As for those who do not want to be a Muslim in America, what I will say here does not address them. The question is: One wants to be a Muslim in America. How to be so? For the sake of clarification, I have chosen the metaphor of space for my talk tonight: Space, not only in its physical space of the Cartesian co-ordinates of x, y, z not only the geometric space that we experience during daily life ; but space in its symbolic sense. In order to for a human being to function, he or she needs space. In American English, it is common to say: I need my own space. That means psychological, mental, spiritual as well as physical world within which one can function and this is especially true of religion. Not only to be a Muslim, but to follow any other religion, one requires a particular religious space. Now, to be a Muslim in particular, brings about many challenges; because we do not live at the present moment in an already created space into which we might be born had we lived in any part of dr-al-islm as our ancestors did. Our situation is very much like the first generation of Muslims who went to China in the first century A.H or those who migrated to Sindh in the second century A.H. There are many examples like that. Now, the question is: how to create this space? I believe that there are five kinds of spaces of which we are in need. Each of which must be discussed separately.

1- First of all, there is what I would call the spiritual and inner space. A human-being needs an inner space: space within himself or herself to function; and especially a Muslim needs that inner spiritual space. 2- Then, there is what I would call the ritual space: there is need for space within which to perform ones rituals which does not mean only the carpet upon which one prays but also other ways of being able to move about including the Hajj and Sawm and other practices of Islam the ritual aspects which all require space to make it feasible and possible. (2:54) 3- There is a need of one could call a legal and social space which would embrace in the Islamic sense the Sharih which is extremely difficult to apply and to live by in a world which is not in fact an Islamic world. 4- There is what one would call the intellectual space. We are thinking beings and surely we arrive at the goal through which we think and about which we think. It is thought that really conducts us in life to wherever we want to go. Therefore, the intellectual space is extremely significant. 5- There is the aesthetic space because we are also creatures who make things and the aesthetic space in the vastest sense of the term which embraces all forms of art and all the different forms with which we surround ourselves from what is closest to our body and soul our clothing to the space of our house, to the larger spaces within which we move. Now, in order to live as a Muslim in America, we ideally require the Islamization of all these five spaces. This is very difficult at the present moment, because they are not automatically done for us. We must start with ourselves. We have to face certain challenges which are very different from the challenges of the young man or woman living in Cairo or Tehran or Karachi or somewhere else; and even different from being a minority in a country like India or China, where Muslims have lived for

a thousand years and with the status of minority, they have nevertheless created the space within which they live. So what do we do now that we live in America? Really we are the first generation of Muslims who join now the mainsteam of American religion; which is itself a remarkable fact. Just before your eyes during the last 10-15 years, Islam in a sense has moved from being an exotic feared marginal religion to being a mainstream religion, and very rapidly this is going to become a recognized fact even in small towns of Aiwa and Mississippi not to talk about the big cities on the two sides of the continent, the Eastern and the Western coasts.

First Space: Inner/Spiritual Space

Lets turn now to the first of these spaces, the spiritual and inner space. Without that, of course, there is no possibility of living as a Muslim. To be a Muslim, we must first of all transform our inner space. It is this inner space which involves first of all faith (al-imn) that is that invisible link between us and God. Jalal-al-Din Rumi says:

That is: A relation, without comparison, and without analogy relates every soul to the Lord of that soul, to God That inner relationship has to do with our inner space. If that were not there, the other four spaces would be irrelevant. The person in whom that relation has not become manifest (i.e. his/her inner space is not filled with the love of Allah and His Prophet, with the instructions of the Noble Qurn), this address would not be for him for her anyway. So, the first important step is to Islamise the inner space and that in a sense, although the most essential, is also the easies; because external circumstances do not have a way of totally controlling our

inner space. You could be riding on a train to a suburb of New York, amidst all the noise, and inwardly be with God. You could also travel on a camel in the middle of a desert and forget God. Our inner space possesses a certain independence from external circumstances which is precisely why God holds us responsible for our actions wherever we are. It is a secret and a great mystery: why is that whether we are living in a holy city like Qum or in an unholy city where you can do anything promiscuous by just walking in the streets, we are nevertheless held responsible for our actions. That responsibility comes from the possibility of our living in this inner space independent of whatever the outward contingencies are. And fortunately from this point of view living in America affords very positive possibilities. The freedom which exists in this society much of which is negative, I shall turn to this very soon -, makes it very easy who has the desire, who has the propensity to make the inner space an Islamic space. One does not have to be rich, one does not have to own a big garden, one does not have to buy an expensive Persian carpet to pray on, one does not have to have a great deal of time to read difficult books it involves the essential reassertion of our eternal link with the Divine who has created us upon the fitrah (i.e. primordial nature/creation which we bear within ourselves and which Islam insists upon) and that also is supported by the fact that in Islam we are all our own priests. There is no separate priesthood in Islam. All men and women are priests and priestesses if you use such a term taken from other religions, because the word does not exist in the context of Islam in the same manner-, by virtue of this direct role which we play as priests towards our own soul (our own inner being). The spiritual space of course also involves all our inner spiritual development, our quest for the Sacred, our flight towards the One, the expansion of the wings of the soul and all that in the context of traditional Islam has been included as Islamic spirituality, that has manifested itself in Sufism, in certain aspects of Shism, even in certain

aspects of external laws of Islam but always related to the purely spiritual message which in the Islamic tradition is connected with the inner nature of the Prophet (upon whom be peace) and also especially with the transmission of that to Hazrat Ali (upon whom be peace) who is thought to be the father of the inner Path for both Sunnis and Shites in the Islamic world. After that space, we need a ritual space.

Second Space: Ritual Space

To be a Muslim in America requires the creation of a ritual space. That does not mean only having a corner of our room which is clean and we can say our prayers in. It does mean that. That is quite important. That is \very significant. But it also means: to live in such a way that the spaces around which we move during the day include the possibility of being able to pray, and living in such a way as to be able to fast, if one is not sick, during the Ramadan. These are two fundamental rites because the rite of the Hajj is only once a lifetime and that can always come when one is prepared. But the most important of these ritual acts is of course the daily prayers and in addition to that all that has to do with the chanting of the Qurn and prayers which have been traditionally transmitted from the Prophet, great Saints, in the case of Shism, from the Imams such as the Al-Sahifa Al-Sajjadiyah and other works of this kind. These prayers complementing the Qurn are themselves forms of ritual. Great challenge begins here. How can we do so, living in a society, in which spaces are not always provided, the ablution is not always to make, time is devoured in a very demonic way? I always say jokingly that anything you save in the world, it usually increases. If you save money, the amount of money in your saving account increases. But the modern world is based always on timesaving devices. Where is all the time that we have saved? There is no time. That is the demonic situation we are living in. With all these, time

saving devices, where is the time that we have saved? The time is not there. It takes a great jihad to be able to create these islands in the middle of the day to be able to pray. This is one of the greatest challenges that Islam also faced in other societies when it went there. But the big difference is that those societies also had a rhythm of life based upon the primacy of the sacred, of prayer, of ritual. Lets say, Muslims lived in Hindu India. All the Brahmans would get up and sing the Bhagavad-Gita for two hours from 6-8 A.M and during those two hours the Muslims could say their prayers. It was not like this society where what remains of Western religion is pushed into a couple of hours in Sunday morning. Even that is difficult for some people to go. Religion is marginalised. Normal times are not set for ritual. One of the great geniuses - elements of genius- of Islamic civilisation was to create a rhythm of life during the day which was always based upon the prayers. Everything else was around that. We have no power to be able to create that rhythm in the world in which we live in America. But, as God has foreseen what would happen in this time of history, He has made the rituals of Islam remarkably easy to perform; including the fact that the Prophet sometimes performed his prayers on horseback without getting down from the horse, in the middle of war. This can be interpreted to mean that if one is really in the middle of a war, one can say the prayers inwardly. That does not have to be war of the sword but one is sometimes in war with ones boss or ones job or something like that. I do not see why that cannot be done because the Prophet has practiced that at certain times. Anyway, there is this great jihad of being able to create this ritual space. Now, this also to some extent, the Islamic community is moving towards achieving. The fact that all American cities have mosques in some places. I am not saying that the Muslim community has achieved this completely. Let us mention the fact that all American cities now have mosques in some places. There are many places, for example in

US Army, in prisons, including the Senate, and congresses and places like that there are prayer rooms and places also being set for Islamic prayers. And I am sure, very soon if the Islamic community puts the right pressure in right places, in airports there will be not only a chapel for Christians to pray in but also a little place where you can put your prayer mat and say your prayers. This remains a difficult task especially for young people because each human being has to create a rhythm in his or her own life to be able to create its ritual space. Society does not do it for them. So, the responsibility remains upon our shoulders. I know that there are many Muslims who do not pray anymore. Many of them have excuses of all kinds in order not to do so. Thats between them and God. According to any authentic understanding of Islam, it is the attestation to Islam that makes the person a Muslim. The degree of practice and the inner intention is between that person and God. And one hopes and prays that they will begin to say their prayers, because of the significance of these daily prayers which make us stand face to face before God five times a day which break this monotony of forgetfulness of God. What we call everyday life is the stream of the forgetfulness of God. It (prayer) breaks that categorically in order to put us face-to-face with Reality which we are going to face at the moment of death anyway when we are pulled out of this stream of time with which we associate reality. As I said, this will remain in the years to come, a major challenge, until Islam is well enough known in Islamic society that a person working in a factory, in an airport, in a shop, etc, will be afforded the times a few moments morning, afternoon, evening to be able to say his or her prayers. But the creation of ritual space is the mark of the establishment of Islam, at least in its ritual aspect, in this new world which is America. The third space is much more difficult.

Third Space: Legal/Social Space

Islam is a religion which is not only based on purely spiritual injunctions but upon a divine law. The Sharih, from the point of view of Islam, is the embodiment of Gods concrete will and in this we are much closer to the Jews than to the Christians. Christianity does not have a Sharih in the same way. Judaism does. It has the Halakha. That helps the Muslims. For example, there are Jews who do not eat non-Kosher food. In the 19th century, people mocked them. What is this? What is the difference between drinking milk and eating meat like this? It was incomprehensible. But they persisted and persisted. Now, thanks to them, oftentimes in a conference you can get kosher food. The Muslim hall food still has not entered the mainstream. But to try to at least have some elements of the Shariah promulgated is a very difficult task. There is no hope for Islam as a minority in this country to be able to implement the Shariah fully. It is difficult enough in the Islamic world itself through all the changes that were brought in the 19 th century, by the introduction of European law, the Belgian law, the Napoleonian law, the Tanzimt, changes of law in Egypt and Persia, British law in the Indian sub-continent and Nigeria. Much of the battle that is going on in the Islamic world today is the question of the reimplementation of the Sharih. All of you know that. In countries where they wanted to implement it, like in Iran, there is still a great deal of problems. There are banks which still charge interest. The ideal for many of these countries in one way or another is to be able to go back to Shari law. Now if that is difficult in that part of the world, it is surely much more difficult here. Here, the whole question comes: more social and external aspects of the Sharih: Its economic laws, for example. How to live in a society which is based completely upon interest and usury, without participating in it? What are the decisions to be made? Anywhere that you work, you pay taxes and the taxes are collected by the government. That government may do something which is not your liking , insofar as the Islamic world is concerned. What if the next time,

they drop bombs and they kill another fifty thousand Iraqis or fifty thousand soldiers? Is our share in the taxation helping that or not? These are very difficult issues. I am not going to answer these questions tonight. This is a very long story. On the other hand, the Sharih always tells us that wherever we live, if it is a society which is not Islamic, we must follow the qnun (the regular/secular law) of the society - that itself is part of the Shariah. That is a very important edict that has been given by many of the great ulema. That is if we are living in Madagascar and in Madagascar you cannot cross the street except at 9:00 AM, - and that has nothing to do with the Sharih to follow the law of the land is incumbent upon you as a Muslim, unless it goes against the Shariah. This is a very important principle that will have to developed later on by jurists who are Muslims in this country and of Europe which has many similar problems. But some questions are extremely complicated. So what do we do? The Shariah is composed of two parts: the abadt (worship, acts of which we have excuse before God), mumilat (transactions). God does not ask of us what we cannot do. There are things which are beyond our control. We cannot say we will not cross the bridge here to San Francisco and back because we do not know what they use the toll for. It might be for some un-Islamic end. Some people have gone to those extremes and have paralysed themselves and the Islamic community. I believe that Islam has put very practical means of being able to live in a society which the Shariah does not exist and at least have a surrounding of the Shariah as far as our personal life is concerned, to the extent that it is possible. I give you another example: Any devout Muslim does not eat pork. That is very easy not to eat pork. And now again, thanks to Judaism, - which also forbids eating pork - most often there are choices. Even if there are no other choices, we would not die of hunger if we do not eat pork. But there also pork derivatives added to all kinds of things, like things that you wonder what they have to do with pork. But if you read, there is a very little line that says: pork fat added. So, you do not buy that

either. But there are many other places where nothing is announced. We get to a point where one does not know what to do. There again, I think excessive sensitivity to these makes it very difficult for us to practice the religion as God expects us to practice it. I believe that the United States affords us the possibility of at least practicing the Shariah in our immediate life and living the rest in the hands of God. It is very important as Muslims not to forget tawakkul which we forget all the time. We cannot solve all the problems of the world. God does not expect us to do anymore than we are able to do. He knows our weaknesses much better than we know. But He does expect us to do what we can do. Thats the other half of it. It is very important to make a correct balance in this. As far as social space is concerned, without doubt Islam will create a social space for itself. As again, Catholicism did when it came in the 19th century and it was at first detested by the Protestants. The first Italians who came here were as much hated as some Muslims were hated in the 70s and still are. Jews did the same thing in the 30s, and all these groups. All these religious communities gradually created for themselves a kind of society within society. I have said this and I was criticized very severely by some secularised compatriots of mine in Los Angeles that very strange city, where all kinds of things of said, because there are so many people of different views-. Ive said that in the US, no community has survived without a religious centre. There are no exceptions. The Greeks: the first thing that they established was the Greek Orthodox Church. Of course, then they established Greek schools, Greek restaurants, etc. but at first it was around religion. The Swedes, the Lutherans, when they came in the 17th century, did the same. The Germans, the same way. Italian Catholics, the same way. Irish Catholics, the same way. Jews, the same way. We cannot be the only exception. It is not going to work out. It is possible to create a sense of community, but it must be based not on ethnicity but on Islam. There is no chance for the various ethnic

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groups from the Islamic world who come to this country and survive qua ethnic groups without a religious identity. I dont believe thats not possible. The history of 300 years of the white mans living in this continent, since 1636, has shown it. If one begins with a religious centre, one can gradually create a social structure around it. And here of course the most precious and dear unit is the family. How blessed are those whose family structures survive. Especially for the immigrants for the first generations, it is extremely difficult. Because all the ideals of the Islamic family are negated in the world in which we live in America. Lets just take the world, teenager. Why is this world so important? It doesnt exist in Arabic. It does not exist in Persian, it Turkish, in Urdu, in other Islamic languages. Why are the youth always a problem? When I was a child being brought up in Tehran, to be young was not a problem. It was part of life. The idea that you have to rebel, the idea that must to show disrespect to your father and mother in order to do your thing, this idea of atomisation of the family that first of all the cousins and aunts drop out, and then grandmother and grandfather drop out. Now the single unit is breaking up. Father and mother are too many. One father or one mother is enough!! How many children in this country are brought up in single-parent homes? These are great tragedies. This is breakup of the social structure which did not exist a generation ago in the U.S. This is going on right before our eyes. The funny thing is that people who are its propagators are trying to teach the rest of the world how to do this, which is really absolutely absurd. When I talk this to some of my American friends, t hey say: Why does not the rest of the world follow us? I said: Look! You are carrying out laboratory experimentation in social engineering. Lets wait and see what comes out of it. Now that you are arresting boys of six for sexual harassment of girls of 5 (!!), and boys of 9 are shooting boys of 6 (!!), we dont want to emulate you. Lets wait and see. But for our children, our families who are in this country, this poses a tremendous challenge.

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There is no way for the family structure to be saved without imn, without faith. All of the Persian families, I talk about my own compatriots I say nothing about Arabs and Pakistanis -, who have tried it something becomes unglued; because the younger generation begins to emulate the society around itself. And the idea of rebellion becomes one of the factors for the building of character. This is inculcated in American education: to rebel to do your own thing makes you be a strong character. Thats not necessarily so. Civilisations have survived for millennia without this being a necessarily a condition. For us, who live as Muslims in America, there is no way of creating a social space without in fact the family. We must try to keep the family in its traditional Islamic sense: extended family. We must try to sense the utmost to keep relationships with all the brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, - despite its tremendous difficulty and despite the fact that this is a great jihad against the current of things. It will take a little more time to create a larger community beyond the family and that is also opposed by a very strong wind which blows through American society of economic motive. Oftentimes, you live ten years in a city, then you get a job which gives you 2000$ more a year and the company transplants you 2000 miles away, it is extremely difficult to have permanent relationships. It needs economic sacrifice. It has been done by other communities. For two centuries, in the Chinatown of Boston and of San Francisco which were the oldest Chinatowns in this country, soon followed by New York, the Chinese stayed in these Chinatowns. It was not the case that they were all poor. They could have gone to other places. But they sacrificed a lot of economic advance in order to cling together as a Chinese community. Also, when the Jews came to America, they wouldnt go out of New York city for long time, there were no Jews anywhere else; until, they became strong enough a community to be able to go to Miami and other places where they have a very great presence at the present moment. It needs quite a bit of sacrifice. It is strange with all these Muslims whom we have in major cities like Los

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Angeles, New York, Washington, here (San Francisco), we have not been able to create a sense of community yet. There are reasons for that. One is that ethnicity has become interwoven with Islam in the minds of those who have migrated to this country. Thats very natural. A Persian might think the same way, An Arab, A Pakistani the same way. American Muslims, black or white, have a lot to teach these immigrants from this point of view. These groups must become integrated together. Including Sunni-Shia division, various schools of law, Ismailism, what to do with all of these. On this point, Im very far from being pessimistic. Gradually, these walls are being lifted. I hope in the next decade, we will have an Islamic community, not only people who come together to say prayers but bonds and links outside the mosque or the madrasah/school. Now let me turn to the last two spaces/ and the most difficult. Now, let us discuss the fourth space.

Fourth Space: Intellectual Space

It is impossible for a religion to survive without having sacralised the intellectual space of its followers. Thats obvious if a person studied the history of religions. Thought is not neutral. There is no thought that is neutral. Every thought has an effect upon the soul. Islam created a major intellectual tradition. The Islamic intellectual tradition is one of the great intellectual traditions of the world. It is one of the richest in philosophy, theology, sciences, logic, literary criticism, grammar, you name it. And for the last 1300 years, (one century after the rise of Islam, when its intellectual schools were formulated in Basra, Baghdad, Kufa, Khorasan, other places) the intellectual space of the Islamic world was always filled with forms of knowledge with ultimately led to God even if they had to be quadratic equations solved by Omar Khayyam in algebra; from pure mathematics to theology and everything in between. There was no secular knowledge.

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Islam did not accept the category of secularized knowledge. While producing some of the greatest science, astronomy, others everything functioned within a sacral universe. The West divorced knowledge from the Sacred at the time of the Renaissance and created the first civilisation in the world in which knowledge goes its own way without necessarily referring to theology or religion. Western theology began to retreat. Rather than combating, it began to retreat. It first of all gave up the cosmos. By the time the Galileo trial was over in 17th century, The Catholic Church gave up any Christian knowledge of the universe. Whereas we read in the very first verse, which was chanted very beautifully this evening: All things in heaven and earth praise God. You cannot have a science of heaven and earth that is the world - which is totally impervious or indifferent to this reality. And then gradually Protestantism showed total indifference to the world of nature. Then in the 19 th century, the science of the soul (the psyche) was secularised by Sigmund Freud, an atheist who detested religion and detested God. Even though coming from a Jewish background, Freud even hated Moses and he has written unbelievable things against his own prophet. Therefore, this domain (psychology) was also taken out from the hands of religion. Now, many people are going to go back to it and other domains, one after another. A young Muslim when he comes to university, especially higher education, but even in elementary and secondary school is faced with what appears to neutral knowledge which is not neutral at all. He is faced with an intellectual space which might not talk about either for Islam or against Islam, for Christianity or against Christianity, but by making God a redundant hypothesis creates a space which cannot be accepted by Islam. This is perhaps the greatest challenge for Muslims to be able to integrate modern knowledge into an Islamic worldview. That is a very difficult order. Today, in this country, although many Christians are also fighting for it, there is a secularised pseudo-religion

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which in the name of opposition to religion inculcates people to irreligiosity. I just give you one example of it. The theory of evolution is not a scientific fact. It is a biological materialist ideology of the 19 th century which has not fallen down. Now that Marxism is gone, Freudism is gone, Newtonian physics has been changed: This is the last materialistic ideology of the 19th century it posits that everything in the world, including us, is the result of changes of material forces from the original soup of molecules at the beginning of the history of the world. Anything else which is added to evolution is what we call in Persian, Sher - that is poetry in its negative sense. Its just sentiment. It is nonesense. Theistic evolution and so forth has nothing to do with evolution. That is just well-wishing. This is the logical scientific gist of it. Now, it is unproven. Of course, it is unproven and it can never be proven. But why is that people fight for it with such religiosity; because this is the prop of the modern world. Once this is pulled out, the entire tent will fall down. Children are not given a choice. They are taught in fact the irreligion in the name of science. No physicists or mathematician will take you by the tie or by your shirt if you oppose to some theory in quant mechanics or have a new formula of mathematics, but if you are a biologist and you say that, usually you get kicked out of university, things are written against you, you are considered to be a quack, and so forth and so on. We live in an educational system in which it is very difficult to create an intellectual space which is properly Islamic. Islam is not going to survive in this country for long if it is not able to create its own Intellectual space. Islam was able to do that in the other major cases where it was a minority; especially in China and in India. That is in two civilisations which had a highly developed scientific tradition. They were not simply illiterate people roaming around. They were extremely literate and extremely learned. Islam brought with it actually an intellectual tradition which challenged acted and reacted vis--vis both Hinduism and Confucianism and created great works. This is a

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challenge that has to be carried out. Fortunately, during the last 30 years, a great deal of Islamic intellectual works are being translated and reformulated into the English language. You do not have to be a master of Arabic or Persian in order to read these works. Not enough has been done but something has been done. And the young people who are sitting here in this room tonight are in a much better position that when I was their age, 30 or 35 years ago. A great deal more needs to be done. It is useless to talk about: How to be a Muslim in America? without asking the question: How to create an intellectual space? This means having to provide for example books for our young from an early age until they go to college, presenting sacred history, life of the Prophet, ethics, the relation between God and the Universe, - and when they grow older, philosophies and theologies that have grown out of Islam. This is so that they will have a sense of belonging without having an inferiority complex. As long as the young feel an inferiority complex they will abandon what they have. There is no doubt about it. And having abandoned their intellectual view of the universe, gradually the faith is weakened because it becomes a kind of luxury which does not fit into the whole world-view. There is both a great advantage and a great disadvantage at the present moment for those who want to live as a Muslim in America. The disadvantage is that even religion in America (both Christianity and Judaism, which were once very strong) is now becoming weaker and weaker very rapidly. The advantage is that the secularist worldview, with the help of which religion was weakened, is falling apart from within and dying very rapidly. Thats why you have this plethora of many views of search for spirituality, religion, including pseudo-religion, and pseudo-Sufism. Its home is the Western Coast of the United States, because the air is somehow special. You know better than me. This, at the same time, affords a situation less pressure than 1896. If you studied in 1896 in Paris or in Berlin (which were the great centres of learning in that time) or in this country (California was not discovered yet) - The certitude that the Western post-Renaissance view had of

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itself, and its success in conquest of the world, was so strong. It was very difficult to oppose it. Today it is not so difficult. You can take any American or British poet and see what they have written of what the world is like. Everything you found in Western philosophy, someone has written its opposite. The pressure-cooker has released some of its pressure. Nevertheless, the creating of an Intellectual Ambience remains great challenge. This should not be identical with the Islamic intellectual ambience of Istanbul, Tehran or Cairo. It has to take into consideration the fact that these groups of Muslims are living in American society and they are not living in a totally Islamic society. It also provides a great advantage. There are many important debates that cannot be carried out in the Islamic world because of the political reasons. The Islamic community in this country can carry out certain intellectual enterprises which will have the deepest repercussions if done back in the Islamic world correctly. I once said jokingly that in the Islamic world, usually you have two types of governments: those that are Islamic and those that are anti-Islamic. The Islamic ones have their own limited interpretations of Islam and if you say something other than that, you get into trouble. For example, in Saudi Arabia if you begin to praise Al-Ghazzali rather than Ibn Taymiyyah, you have to resign from the university and else something will happen to you. In those governments which are anti-Islamic, like in Tunisia, they do not like you to discuss Islam at all. What do you do if you teach in a university in Tunisia? This is a very peculiar situation that has never occurred in the history of Islam before. This is because the Muslims in exile play a very important intellectual role in being able to openly discuss major issues. An authentic conclusion, not just pseudo conclusion, will have the deepest effect on the Islamic world. I always say: The test of authenticity is that if some Muslim thinker in the West , said something (not only to please an American audience but to tell the Truth), is that if he goes to Bazaar of Isfahan and says the same thing, people will not throw tomatoes at him or stones at him. A lot of things which are said by Islamic scholars (esp. those who are

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invited all the time here and there) they are invited to say things that the audience wants to hear and not what the Islamic people believe in. That is why you have some outrageous interpretations which are also coming out. But let them come out. It does not matter. The important thing is that the possibility of this intellectual activity is present.

Fifth Space: Aesthetic Space

Many of us belittle the significance of the aesthetic element. We forget that the Prophet (upon whom be peace) said:

God is beautiful and He loves beauty. The name Al-Jamil (the Beautiful) is one of the names of God. Nowhere has Islam gone without creating an ambience of beauty. It is very significant that evil and ugliness are referred to by the same word in Arabic (qubh). Beauty and Goodness are the same word in Arabic (husn). Beauty is goodness. Ugliness is evil. This indifference that many of both modernised and puritanical Muslims have towards beauty is a sign of our own spiritual decadence. It is nothing less than that. Look at the history of Islamic civilisation: All the way from the Alhambra in Granada to the Taj Mahal in India and much farther in the East I will not mention them. Many of you may not know about all about the famous mosques in Sumatra or in other places. Anyway, wherever Islam has gone, it has created an ambience of beauty. Its not only the mosque. It started with another important art: the art of the dress. The Islamic dress was always beautiful: both male and female dress. At the same time, it was closely allied to the Islamic ritual: both the ablutions and the prayers. I always say this very

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jokingly: You really have to be one of the Saints of God to wear a Western dress, and to make ablutions all the time, and pray without your wife fighting against you every night because you have wrinkles your pants and she has to press them and then next morning, you do it again. This dress that I am wearing tonight is not made for the Islamic prayers obviously. Whether we are going to have the genius of developing an Islamic dress in America, I do not know. Of course, in this country it is now so easy. You can wear anything in the street and nobody says anything. The Western form of dress has broken down. But all the way from the art of the dress to the art of decoration of the house (which is the next close thing to us) to the art of the city (urban design and architecture) were imbued with beauty. We in America are not as yet in a position to create a whole city. They have tried that in England twice. And in America, dar-al-salm was built in New Mexico by the great Egyptian architect Hassan Fathi. That is a magnificent site. But it is not worked very well because on top of that there are few families living there. For the long time to come, we are not able to create an Isfahan in America. We should be practical. So what should we do? Again we have to start from where we are. I think the creation of an aesthetic ambience is both possible and extremely significant in the preservation of the reality of Islam for those living in America. Let us start, first of all, with music. It is not correct to say music is harm. Music is not harm. Only certain kinds of music are harm, as many of the ulema have said. Ayatollah Khomeini himself gave that famous fatwa. Music which incites passions towards evil is haram, as certain ulema have said. But whether halal or harm, we are living in a society in which music is everywhere. Most of this music comes from the lower psyche: The very lower levels of the psyche which incites the animal passions. It is not that difficult with all the new gadgets and electronic means that are available today to make accessible the classical music of the Islamic people to the young. Classical music of Islamic people (whether it is Persian classical Muslim, Arabic, Turkish music which comes

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from the Mevlevi order-, North Indian) is imbued with love of God. It is absolutely impossible to enjoy traditional Persian music and be an atheist. Thats a psychological impossibility. At least in the moment you are hearing this music, either you are acting and you are not enjoying it, or if you are enjoying it there is something that draws one to God. Whereas if you listen to a Beethovens symphony, (I have great respect for Western music and I listen to a great deal of it; there are many beautiful things in it) or even to Johann Sebastian Bach (who only wrote religious music), there are many people who are atheists and who listen to the mass of Bach. When the B Minor mass is performed, four thousand people come to the church. When the mass itself is performed on Sunday morning, a hundred and twenty people come. In Washington, it is like that. I do not know what it is like in San Francisco. Because you can in a sense have an Intellectual appreciation. Whereas in the classical music of the Islamic people, there is the love of God that is within that music and all of the singing and chanting is always nostalgia for the Divine. Its either Sufi poetry which talks about the Beloved, Her beautiful face, which really means the love of God. Even the word habibi or Layla or things like that in Arabic music refer to the Love of God. Habib is a name of the Prophet who is the Habib (Beloved) of Allah. Habib is not only the person I am going to get married to next month but she herself symbolises the divine love. It is possible to create an acoustic ambience of an aesthetic nature which is not so difficult but about which most Muslim parents are unfortunately very lackadaisical. They do not think this is too important. Then we come to the Visual Ambience: It is extremely significant to make the Muslim home look Islamic. This is not something trivial. (47:00) It is not correct to say that religion has to do with the soul, and this is related to the body and it is external. We are not dismembered souls. We are joined to our bodies. Especially in Islam, in the same way that tahrarah (purity, cleanliness) of the body is so important. We cannot say: Why God does care whether we wash our body or not? He wants our soul. That is not true. Our body is the extension of our soul.

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Thats why when you make the wudu, your soul also feels lighter. It is not like diving into a pool of water. The visual aspect of that which surrounds us, the carpet, what we put on the wall, the kind of furniture that we have, if it reflects Islamic art, it will always be a reminder of the reality of the Islamic revelation. It is impossible to walk in a traditional Islamic city and not be reminded God. It is not only because of the adhn that comes every few hours. The architecture, the calligraphy, the tile work, the spaces, the interrelationship of the spaces, - it goes all the way to the esoteric relations of architectural space in a place like the Isfahan mosque and bazaar, which is one of the greatest work of the human art. This is present. If we cannot do it in the macro-scale, we must at least do it in the microscale. All the mosques that Muslims are building in this country should be based on an Islamic model, not the passions and individualism of an individual who happens to have the name of Ahmad rather than John. That does not make Islamic architecture. Islamic architecture is not creating a box and putting a minaret on top of it. There is no excuse under the sun on why we are spending millions of dollars creating these ugly mosques across the US. Thats really a very great tragedy. We have to go back the Islamic architectural traditions. We have to apply that to the American ambience. In the same way that when Islam went to India, it took Persian Islamic Architecture and it went to India. Thats why the Padshahi mosque in Lahore looks like a Persian mosque and it does not look like a Persian Mosque because it took that element and applied it to the new ambience of the Indian subcontinent; or the beautiful mosque of Mali (one the greatest masterpieces of art that we never hear about), it took the principle of the Medina Mosque and applied it to the new ambience. If we can create these five ambiences, we can live successfully as Muslims in America.

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Four Major Challenges

There are four major challenges which I believe we will face and we are facing now; which I want to mention briefly and come to a conclusion - in case you want to ask some questions. First of all, in America, more than Europe, Muslims (as well as everyone else) live in a society with a tremendous amount of freedom but a freedom which is almost always in the downward direction. It is also possible with this freedom to also move upward, but all the temptations and tendencies are in the downward direction. Almost all of this freedom is against the teachings of the Islam and the Prophet. For example, to be content with what one has. Sadi says:

That is: To be content with what we have is what will make a man rich. This is blasphemy in the modern religion of capitalistic economics. If everybody were to be satisfied with what he or she had, what do they do with all the junk that they sell to us in consumerist society? : The idea of creating artificial need all the time (artificial need) which are really taken to absurdity. We do not do any exercise anymore because even our toothbrush is now electrical and we do not need to move our hands, and it does for you. Then we pay money and we go to the spa and we go one two three four because we are not doing any exercise. Cutting off the normal functions of life from life and then introducing an artificial means of compensating for it. We have a lot of freedoms but most of this freedom is like going down. We get exhilarated like a rollercoaster going down. Actually it means the fall of the soul. It is always easier to fall than to go up. Like in these streets of San Francisco, when you go downhill, it is easy. But once you decide to go

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up, it takes much more energy. The great challenge is: What to do in a society in which there is so much freedom? This was not the challenge in the old days. Islam migrated to China. The Muslims in Turkistan-eSharqi (Eastern Turkistan, which is now called Xinjiang by the Chinese) they did not have the freedom to go out in miniskirts into Uighur country, into Kashghar; or write outlandish poems against the Prophet of Islam or against Confucius or anybody else. There were certain things you could not do. Now, there are a lot of things that we can do. And this excess of freedom without control, of idea of rights without responsibility, poses a tremendous challenge to all people of religion and especially Muslims. In Islam, all of our rights come from our responsibilities towards God. There are no innate human rights because we did not create ourselves. We cannot create a fly. We did not create ourselves. Our rights come from our responsibility towards God. There is huquq-al-nas (rights of people), huquq Allah (rights of God) in classical Islamic texts. The rights of man are based upon the rights of God. What do we do in a society in which the rights of God are zero (are meaningless), and the rights of man are extended to unbelievable exaggerations?! Which are now threatening human existence itself as you see in all these absurdities which society presents itself. (2) The second challenge is living in a society dominated by a materialist ethos, of consuming all the time; because you cannot be a good Muslim (putting aside the question of economic justice, of serving the poor, of helping others) but simply live in luxury. Islam is always based on simplicity. It hates excessive luxury. Not that there has not been excessive luxury in the Islamic world. Of course, there has been; but thats human weakness. The teachings of Islam have always discouraged excessive luxury. The saying of the Prophet:

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Poverty is my honour This does not mean only economic poverty. This also means spiritual poverty, like Christ said: Blessed are the poor in Spirit. But at the same time, it means that the Prophet remained always on the side of simplicity. In Shism, Ali, for example was known for his simple life, for his shunning of luxury. It is very difficult to be devout and always be in luxury. It is possible but it is difficult. In the old days, you had a few very saintly and pious men who were also very rich. And there is a Hadith whether it is mutawtir or not, is being debated - that says wealth is like a ladder you can either climb up the ladder to heaven, or you descend it to hell. It was not the case the whole of society encouraged wealth. This is one of the great challenges that living in America poses. (3) The third which is a very painful challenge is to live in a state that is a super-power; that it oftentimes does things in the rest of the world and especially in the Islamic world which all Muslims believe is against the interest of Islam. Muslims are not well-organised, they have no political pressure. Fifty of our cousins, the Jews, count more than five million Muslims in any issue. This is a disgrace that comes back to us. We cannot blame Uncle Sam or Israel or the Jews or England or 19th century policy of the Great Britain for this. It is the fault of the Islamic community. Nevertheless, it causes a great challenge. If we were living in Brazil, it would not matter what Brazil does; because Brazil doesnt have much power in the Islamic world. But we are not living in Brazil. We happen to be living in a country whose actions and decisions have a very important role to play in the future of the Islamic world itself. This situation calls for channelling of the energies of the community here, to do things in the future which has not been to do until now. This is pitiable. This is absolutely pitiable. 60 people are killed in the middle of the third holiest Shrine of Islamic world, people taking up with their shoes and socks, shooting people with the machine gun and then what happens? Nothing. That is a very important and painful situation which of course is a challenge; because we cannot go on and on and pretend that this does not exist.

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(4) The last great challenge is for Muslims in California. The loss of traditional religious world in the West, the breakup of what had replaced it (i.e. secularist philosophies of Renaissance, rationalism, age of enlightenment) and this freedom have together joined hands to make possible the creation of an incredible number of pseudoreligions and pseudo-spiritualities especially in the State of California. They are sometimes called California religion. This is extremely

dangerous especially for the Islamic community. Until the 1960s, the corruption and dilution of authentic oriental spirituality was limited to India and Japan, especially the Vedanta and Zen. In the 1960s, when I used to come to here from Tehran, there were all these young men who were Zen and they did not know how to sit for 10 minutes on the ground. But they considered themselves Zen because they thought they could reach illumination without believing in anything, doing anything, this sort of thing. Then, things shifted to Neo-Vedanta and Ramdas and all kinds of things. Then, unfortunately, it came the turn of Islam: Sufism, One of the great spiritual treasuries of Islam which a number of ruthless people began to exploit by first of all divorcing it from Sharih and from Islam. As if you could grow pistachios without the pistachio tree and without the shell. If you know a tree that gives just the nut of pistachio, please let me know. This totality absurdity, you have begun to got very dangerous deviations which most of them die out after a while; but they can also misguide and mislead. Just this last year, - like two years before it -, the poet who sold most titles of books of poetry in America was Jalaluddin Rumi. It was not Shakespeare, nor John Milton, nor Keats, - it was this great poet of the Persian language: Jalaluddin Rumi. But this whole phenomenon is oftentimes divorced from the tree that made Jalal-al-Din Rumi, Jalal-al-Din Rumi. That is the tree of Islam. Rumi never missed a prayer all of his life. You cannot even think of it. This idea of distortion of spiritual treasury of Islam. People who began to interpret Islam as if they are great ulema without being able to read three words of Arabic or Persian. They give they own fatwas saying: I am going back to the Qurn myself . There

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should be 1.2 billion schools of law corresponding to the number of Muslims in the world. This is something of course very dangerous and dispersive. It is true that differences in Islam have to be overcome, including the divergence between Sunnism and Shism. It is enough that anytime the price of oil is in danger of going up, there is a Sunni or Shite riot in Lahore and a few people get killed especially in the Persian Gulf, and few more million dollars go from where to where. And there are many people who are unhappy about this and they want to bring back the unity of Islam. Each act needs an actor suitable for that act. Not everyone could play the role of Rustam. You have to be a Rostam to be able to battle Esfandiyar, as we read in the Persian mythology. And this idea that we have people who have very little knowledge of anything, they simply take Islamic law (the traditions, the Hadith, the commentaries) into their hands and interpreting them and calling themselves new groups. They might have good intentions. One prays for them. But that is against the unity of Islam. Unity of Islam is not the uniformity of Islam. If God wanted Islam to be uniform, it would have been uniform. The Prophet would not have said that the difference of opinion among the ulema (scholars) of my Ummah (community) is from the mercy of God. This is a very important challenge. The very freedom and the very breakup of the traditional modes of religious thought, the challenges that are posed to Christianity, of feminism, of homosexuality, all kinds of different things that are coming to the fore are posed for the Islamic community. Despite all of these challenges, there is no doubt that to be a Muslim in America today is something much more significant than many people might think. Because the five or six billion Muslims in this country are destined, I believe, by Allah to play a very important role not only in their own lives (it is difficult enough to live as a good Muslim) but also for the rest of the Islamic world. They are bound to play an extremely important role, as a pressure group, as a source for guidance, as help, as bridge for the understanding the West and the Islamic world for the vast Islamic world which is in a very critical moment of its history,

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which is under certain pressures of economic and political kind, which oftentimes it cannot respond the way it should to the great challenges that pose it. Therefore, the question: How to be a Muslim in America is not only significant for those people in this room and similar rooms in this country but also for over a billion people who have accepted the La ilaha illa Allah. Muhammadun rasul-Lah and who try to live and die as people devoted to God, and who surrender to His will. Thank you.

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