This morning as the sun was coming up, I watched the Middle Atlas Mountains change from an almost navy blue to splotches of rusted red and green where the rosemary on the mountain’s edge became more visible in the sunlight. There’s just something majestic about staring at a distant mountain in the sunrise. It’s so far away and so larger-than-life, but when the sun paints its little rays in morning light on the eroded rock in the distance, you can make out every single detail of the mountain. Makes it seem closer than it really is. It makes you think that sometimes, even when the big picture seems too big to fathom, we get to catch a glimpse of it in detail, and those moments when that happens are the ones we have to soak in and treasure the most.
I’ve always thought that, anyway, about mountains and oceans, and those are two of my favorite geographical features in the world. I don’t know which one I’d choose if I had to settle for one over the other. There’s just something about the vastness of them both that makes me feel so insignificant and humbled on the one hand but so blessed and loved on the other.
Standing there staring at the Middle Atlas in the rising sun this morning, though, it wasn’t just the backdrop of the rugged, endless skyscape before me that overwhelmed me in a sense of awe. The foreground, also, was an arid desert cemetery dipping into a deep riverbed flourishing with palms and olive and fig groves, as well as bean fields sharply contrasting the brown nothingness that sprawled everywhere else. A donkey or two stood tied to a mud-brick house and one man sat atop another donkey moving quietly in the direction of the fields below. He seemed so foreign and distant to me, like the mountain, but I could make out his every detail at the same time. And the faster the sun rose into the Ramadan sky, and as my dry lips smacked the reminder that I’d have to wait another fifteen hours or so before I would drink water again, I felt a connection with him, the man on the donkey who viewed the world so differently than I. The man on the donkey just trying to muster through another day with his own set of hopes and dreams and confusions and certainties. Another thirsty man in “the cold country with the hot sun.”
Perhaps it wasn’t just the sunrise or grand mountains and deserts that had me looking on at the world deep in thought; I’d been pensive ever sense I finished watching ‘The Help,’ a movie (and book) I’m to understand has really taken hold in America as of late. Without getting too into the plot of the movie, ‘The Help’ reminds us that the Civil Rights era and the struggles of racism, especially in the Deep South, are a significant part of our recent, collective memory. For all the times racism may have seemed in America a “thing of the past,” that past wasn’t really all that long ago. And racism has changed names but hasn’t gone away.
Where the film really hit hard was in that very realization, that only a few decades ago, there were hate-driven laws on the books that not only “separated” us from one another but did so in a way that many “Christians” deemed as morally appropriate, if not absolutely necessary. At one point in the movie, one character even pridefully denies charity in the name of Christ.
While the film doesn’t really focus heavily on the shock-and-awe of the Civil Rights era, one real take-away from the film is that racism is sometimes, very often in fact, subtle, reminding us that words do hurt (maybe even more with longer-lasting effects than sticks or stones). That is, we don’t encounter the KKK in the film or burning crosses. We hear about violence against African Americans but never see any murders or real physical violence. It’s even suggested by one character in the film that the “real racists” are the violent ones, as if to imply that the Christian folk employing “the help” at minimum wage (or lower) are doing the African American community a favor (as a reminder, Michele Bachmann recently suggested something similar about slavery). It should all be a scary reminder that, even within recent memory, tragedy and hate are very much a part of southern Christianity and that hate can still mask itself in the name of love. That should probably cause us to be a bit more critical, if not even skeptical, when it comes to Christian notions of love.
So much more could be said about racism. Racism of the 1960s. Racism of today. We’ve come a long way, sure, but injustices are still everywhere. Even in modern America, people are having to fight hard for equal rights, rights that are often denied them because of a sectarian view of the Bible. From my own perspective, that of someone living and working in the Muslim world, I’m constantly asking myself questions about injustice toward Islam, and as someone who has come to see the Muslim people as our own kindred, the idea that they are less or that they should have fewer rights, especially when those ideas come from Christians, is so incredibly insulting to me. I’ve blogged about this multiple times now.
I’ve always been someone, after all, who probably annoys the daylights out of people, because I think it’s important to name injustice, to speak truth against it, when I encounter any form of bigotry (and while I’m willing to dish out a little grace with truth, I’m usually looking for a recognition of wrong-doing first). I’ve lost a few Facebook friends here or there when they insisted that they didn’t want a “black” president (“black,” not Democrat) or when they whined that Martin Luther King’s Holiday was nothing more than a “black guy who finally gave them a reason to get off work.” I don’t stand for that kind of bigotry. I don’t tolerate it. I don’t pretend in any way, shape, or form that it’s okay or that I should look the other way. But I have a lot of friends who do, or know a lot of people, at least, who think it’s best not to waste time arguing with those we disagree with; you can’t change their opinions, so just let them be that way, they say.
Maybe they’re right that we can’t change minds. But in a society where laws are popping up on the books today that could harm Muslims in states like Tennessee, staying quiet doesn’t work anymore, and speaking up is absolutely essential. Someone has to do it. Educating against ignorance is one of the most important things we can do today.
But would doing so make me a fundamentalist? I’m unwilling to entertain the idea that such laws or words spoken against Muslims are anything short of bigotry. Am I just a dirty liberal with his head in the sand? Have I become a sympathizer to terrorism? Did I stay in the Muslim world too long this past year that my brain has been awash with lies? I, of course, don’t think so. In fact, I know that’s nothing short of a terrible thing to suggest. I don’t doubt a smidgen of the hospitality and love I’ve received here. But it’s scary to think that some people back home, maybe even some of my old “friends” would wonder those awful things about me.
One of my biggest fears is coming home to an America where some people who think that my love and respect for Islam makes me “one of the bad guys,” that to some, rather than being able to offer a rational voice about a beautiful religion, I’ve instead become “one of them” – or at the very least, some liberal extremist, or just another fundamentalist. Why do we always try so hard to paint the world in black-and-white, in such dichotomous categories? Sure, there’s a few bad apples here or there in every culture and every religion, but let’s not go associating a few apples with the whole orchard. Nor am I naive enough to think that we will suddenly stop stereotyping and judging; I’ve done my fair share of that throughout my blogs. Part of it is just how we construe of the world around us. But isn’t there a difference between judging people for being hateful and judging people because we hate them? I’d prefer not to judge or stereotype at all, but if I’m going to, I’d much prefer to stereotype about the good in people than the bad. But given how much I dislike fundamentalism of any kind, the notion that I might be a fundamentalist about something scares me a little.
But then I think of that man on his donkey this morning – so like me but part of such a different world. He has a field to water, perhaps. A family to feed. A God to pray to. And the mind about him to love a little. I could never let someone suggest that he’s anything but human, just like you or I, and I could never let anyone suggest that human beings deserve anything less than equality. That’s not judging or stereotyping. That’s educating against ignorance. If my unwillingness to view the world differently makes me some kind of “liberal fundie,” then so be it.
Or maybe, just maybe it’s not about politics or religion or fundamentals but just about figuring out what it really means to love each other. And where love starts for me … is the realization that we’re not all that different, after all.
