As my regular readers know, one of my favorite bloggers is the Russian Orthodox traditional conservative Daniel Larison. I didn't realize until today that he spent a "short, very unfortunate and lamented" time in his early adulthood as a convert to Islam. In mentioning it here, Larison says he found his way to Islam from his background as a vaguely cultural Christian, and that's why he is today "very confident that Islam represents a great spiritual and cultural danger to any secularised society that is looking for meaning."
I am intensely interested in reading his further commentary on this point, especially in light of the situation in Europe. I think I know where he might be going with this, especially in light of my friend Daveed Gartenstein-Ross's excellent book about his own youthful conversion to salafist Islam (he is now a Christian). Daveed came from a vaguely culturally Jewish background, one spiritually unmoored to any tradition, and experimentally inclined. He was attracted initially to the strength of Islamic belief, and the sense of belonging it gave to a young man such as he, adrift in the spiritually atomized marketplace.
I am reminded in writing this of something a Muslim woman I once met said to me. She and her husband are both immigrants to the US, and he teaches at a prominent American university. She told me with real pity in her voice how shocking it is to both of them how many students come to her husband for plain fatherly advice. These kids are raised in relative wealth, but they've been spiritually and morally abandoned by their parents, who give them no understanding about how to choose right from wrong. Freedom to choose is the ultimate end ... but freedom to choose what? She told me that for foreigners like she and her husband, it's a real shock to see the spiritual and psychological suffering of these best and brightest American kids.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Charles, I didn't vet your last comment. The software automatically did, probably because you'd included links in it. I got an e-mail alert that it was waiting for my approval. Many people, unfortunately, find their posts held for approval, but I never get notification that they're stacked up and waiting for me to check them off. I don't understand why that is, but honestly, it's not on purpose.
I have mentioned before that there were a few classmates at language school who converted to Islam, despite an official policy against proselytization which our teachers largely abided by. (Teaching staff there is about half Muslim.)
A lot of these kids had simply never thought deeply about their own faith, if they were even raised in one. They were away from home for the first time, facing the the demands of the military lifestyle and the uncertain future which faces anyone in this line of work. They saw before them upright, generous, and wise teachers who happened to be Muslim. They then saw the rituals and traditions of the faith (live on Al Jazeera!) as the Islamic year progressed, from the poverty of the month of Ramadan, to its rich ending, to the great global pilgrimage to Mecca where rich and poor and black and white truly become equal, and back through the lesser memorials and remembrances. Islam combines simplicity with a certain measure of pageantry. It is great, and its God is great, it is something grand you can subsume your identity to and become somehow bigger yourself in the process.
I guess the process applies in some measure to all faiths.
The attraction to the faith is real, and I don't fault any of those young students for converting. They weren't really converting at all in my view, being only nominally Christian. They started from a lack of something, and they gained a great deal. Not the least of which is an ability to comprehend the battle raging in the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. May they become bridge builders and militant idealogy destroyers.
Of course, I would hope that the merely nominally Christian among us would embrace the demands of our faith, which is truer and best of all faiths. But the prize of converts goes to he who makes his faith look and sound more reasonable, more true, and greater. And lifestyle speaks much louder than words. That is the lesson of the quiet teachers at the Defense Language Institute.
Thanks, Rod. I know I'm a little off center and lurid, at times, and that what I am saying doesn't usually fit into most people's cognitive frame. So I get a little paranoid, sometimes. I appreciate you telling me that.
And AnotherBeliever, check that. I'm ME II Arabic, class March 2002. If more people had sat with us in that classroom on 9/11 watching the Towers come down on Al-Jezeera, we would very likely not be in the catastrophic mess we are in now. Daniel Pipes and his cohorts have every reason to fear our human interaction with "those people." My friend Abu Hazim (a Palestinian in his seventies, former Arab League Ambassador to Japan, who was in Beruit studying in 1948 when the Israelis took his home in Hebron.. he's never been back. DLI and the relationships I developped there changed my life. I had been a Zionist until I met him, and my other profs at DLI. Now while I remain a vociferous pro-Semite, I now include the Arabs under that umbrella of compassion and affection..)
Poor editing, there. It was actually 1967 when the IDF took Hebron. And I believe Abu Hazim was in Tripoli or Tunis the time.. but he has been a refugee for over sixty years, in any case.
Posted by: Charles Curtis | January 25, 2008 12:51 PM
>>>
Well, John E, you're obviously a fully actualized autonomous individual.
>>>
It is a process, not a destination, but "every day in every way, I'm getting better and better."
>>>>
I'm glad all that therapy is paying off.
>>>>
I think it has more to do with exposure to Heinlein and Horation Hornblower in my formative years. Not that therapy is a bad thing - I've been considering getting a work-up to see if I fall somewhere on the Asperger spectrum.
>>>>
I haven't time now to answer you point by point, especially since Rod seems to have vetted my last comment, and may deem it fit to censor this one.
>>>>
I hope you find the time, I'm interested in what you have to say.
>>>
I mean, apart from faith in our individual transcendence, what does set us ontologically apart from a tapeworm? Sorry if that is a moronic question, but I'd really like to know.
Posted by: Charles Curtis | January 25, 2008 2:26 PM
>>>>
Higher reasoning skills and tool use.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.