Note: The following thoughtful piece is an excerpt from a longer article published in the May/June 2008 issue of Tikkun Magazine, which featured a number of articles reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the national of Israel. The full article is available here.

By Dr. Omid Safi

I begin my reflections on the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the modern nation state of Israel, alongside the events commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba (The Catastrophe), with a reminder of an event that at first sight might seem unrelated: Barack Obama’s March 2008 speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” that called for addressing racial issues in the United States.

In this speech Barack Obama, a Christian spiritual progressive who would surely find a home among many committed to the Tikkun ideals, spoke about how there is no way for us to immediately and magically get beyond our racial divisions. There is, however, a way for us to begin addressing issues of racial justice by confronting systematic injustices inflicted upon black communities as well as the real economic anxieties of white communities.

Obama stressed that we can “address our past without becoming victims of our past.” It is in this spirit that I wish to address the Palestinian/Israel situation/tragedy. Jews have historically been persecuted and marginalized as few other communities in the history of the West have been. The rise of Zionism in many ways was a response to this persecution. While Zionism did begin with European Jews, it is in many ways part and parcel of the same milieu that saw the rise of other nationalist movements. For many Jews, the desire to return to what they have seen as their ancestral homeland is also real, and was a joyous cause for celebration after centuries of exile. Furthermore, there is little doubt that the establishment of the state of Israel has had a positive impact on the survival of Judaism—and Jews—in the Western world that for far too long had attempted to eradicate them. Furthermore, the concerns of the Israeli civilian community for genuine and meaningful security are real, and must also be addressed.

And yet part of our attempt to see with two eyes, hear with two ears, and yet feel with one heart is to recognize and remember that the same establishing of Israel is remembered differently, radically differently, by Palestinians. Going back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, there has been a history of colonial support for the creation of Israel that remains for many Arabs and Muslims a painful reminder of centuries of oppressive foreign occupation and domination. The establishment of Israel in 1948 involved the forceful and violent ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homelands (see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld 2006). The homes and lands of these indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine were confiscated and handed over to Jewish immigrants. In a matter of two generations, Palestinians who had made up 90 percent of the inhabitants of Palestine were forced to become a persecuted minority in their own homeland, or perpetually homeless exiles, much as Jews themselves had been for centuries before. The other major act of injustice on the part of Israel has been the forty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, combined with draconian measures that inflict collective punishments upon Palestinians, in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. These systematic injustices too are real, and the subhuman condition that many Palestinians live in must be addressed if words like justice are to rise above being hollow mockeries of their lofty reality.

All of this is well known. And yet our point is quite simple: if we are to have a common future for all of us in this sacred land, there must be a just and compassionate way to atone for these atrocious realities of the past and the present.

I write these words not as a nationalist, but as a person of faith who remains convinced that the Divine qualities of al-Rahman and al-Rahim, the Compassionate and the Forgiving Merciful, are the two greatest Divine qualities that human beings can and should embody. I write as one of many who are certain that forgiveness and reconciliation are indeed possible, as they were in South Africa, so long as the reconciliation is an exercise in Truth and Reconciliation. The truth must be told, as bitter as it might be for some of us to speak it, and as unpleasant for others of us to hear it. Yet if we are understand one another’s realities, we have to grant that the same truth that brings joy to some members of humanity has caused immense pain and suffering for others....

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To download and read the remainder of this article as published in Tikkun Magazine, click here.

Labels: islam, israel, obama, omid safi, palestine

There was a particularly ignorant and shamefully inflammatory op-ed published by the New York Times on May 12, 2008. The piece, by Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides a good example of what can go wrong when people who have no specialized training in religion (Luttwak is a historian most known for writing about military history) try to draw wooden, deductive conclusions from selected pieces of ancient religious traditions and apply them willy nilly to the contemporary scene.

Luttwak writes:

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings.... [Muslim law also] prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

Eboo Patel has provided a thoughtful, sane response to this inexcusable mistreatment of the broader Muslim tradition.

In "Obama and the Muslims," Eboo writes on his blog, The Faith Divide:

For a minute, I thought I was reading the script for a late-night cable B movie. Aliens abduct a brilliant, charismatic American president, saying that he was once one of theirs before he treasonously defected to the other side. Despite heroic negotiation efforts by both his wife and his former opponent for the Presidency (gotta give Hillary a role somewhere), they successfully behead him in a giant stadium (think Gladiator), to the wild applause of their fellow blood-thirsty aliens.

When I realized that the aliens in the script were referred to as ‘Muslims’, I figured that perhaps this was an article on some right-wing, Muslim-hating blog. What those guys lack in credibility, they certainly make up for in imagination, I thought to myself. If their funding ever dries up, and they don’t mind doing a nude scene or two, they could work for Cinemax.

What I didn’t want to admit was that this article was in the national paper of record, supposedly the most prestigious platform for news and views in the world, the paper I’ve counted on to bring me intelligent perspectives on global affairs since I was twenty years old.

Suddenly, I became a late-night cable B movie script writer. I started wondering who kidnapped the editors of The New York Times OpEd page, and replaced them with Muslim-hating lookalikes. (If you’re interested in that plot line, Cinemax, we should talk. But you should know up front, no nude scenes.).

Or maybe, I wondered, the conspiracy theorists were right. Maybe the gatekeepers of opinion in America do hate Muslims. I mean, think of how often Ayaan Hirsi Ali gets to spew her Islamophobic poison in those pages.

Thankfully, the OpEd in question – an absurd piece of trash claiming that Islamic law requires Muslims to view Obama as an apostate because his father was born a Muslim, leading to Obama being assassinated with the tacit support of Muslim states – generated a set of intelligent responses by people who actually know something about Islam, which The New York Times OpEd page printed (apparently, the aliens returned the original editors).

Ingrid Mattson, the President of the Islamic Society of North America, wrote, “Islam is not an ethnic affiliation, nor is it passed through the gene pool … Islam does not consider Barack Obama ever to have been part of the Muslim community. Apostasy has no relevance here.”

Zaid Shakir, a respected Muslim scholar and teacher at the Zaytuna Institute wrote, “People in Muslim countries are aware that Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and yet he enjoys wide support in those countries. That support has nothing to do with Mr. Obama’s being a full, half or non-Muslim; it is rooted in the fact that he promises to change the kind of policies that have led to such a negative view of America by people in other countries, both Muslims and members of other faith communities.”

The whole incident got me thinking about American Muslims and Obama....

You can read the rest of Eboo's thoughtful response here.

Eboo Patel is one of the inspiring religious leaders featured in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life.

Labels: obama, progressive muslims, terrorism