Tag Archives: Elif Şafak

Elif Shafak’s Perspective on Western Faith

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist whose Sufi faith is a powerful influence in her life and in her writing.  In this excerpt from The Forty Rules of Love she sheds a valuable light on faith from her tradition in which she can see unity where in the West often we see only difference, where our “distinction drawer” is too much in control.  (The italicized material will be my observations.)

Instead of losing themselves in the Love of God and waging a war against their ego, religious zealots fight other people, generating wave after wave of fear.  Looking at the whole universe fear-tinted eyes, it is no wonder that they see a plethora of things to be afraid of.  Wherever there is an earthquake, drought, or any other calamity, they take it as a sign of Divine Wrath—as if God does not openly say, “My compassion outweighs my wrath.”  Always resentful of somebody for this or that, they seem to expect God Almighty to step in on their behalf and take their pitiful revenges.  Their life is an uninterrupted state of bitterness and hostility, a discontentment so vast it follows them wherever they go, like a black cloud, darkening both their past and their future.

This is a picture of the ego in firm control, using their purported “love of God” to wreak havoc on the world, including those most dear and close to them.  When the ego is tyrannizing our world, it desperately functions as a distinction-drawer keeping parts of our human experience separate from our awareness and projecting it “out there.”

There is such a thing in faith as not being able to see the forest for the trees.  The totality of religion is far greater and deeper than the sum of its component parts.  Individual rules need to be read in the light of the whole.  And the whole is concealed in the essence.

But the ego is a constellation of rules that seeks to “rule” our world, that is impose order upon it to make it consistent with our need for order and perfection.  Its goal is to know all of the rules, never forget one of them, so it can always be right.  It builds for us what W. H. Auden called, “A life safer than we can bear.”

Instead of searching for the essence in the Qur’an and embracing it as a whole, however, the bigot singles out a specific verse or two, giving priority to the divine commands that they deem to be in tune with their fearful minds.  They keep reminding everyone that on the day of judgment everyone will be forced to walk on the Bridge of Sirat, thinner than a hair, sharper than a razor.  Unable to cross the bridge, the sinners will tumble into the pits of hell underneath, where they will suffer forever.  Those who have lived a virtuous life will make it to the other end of the bridge, where they will be reward with exotic fruits, sweet waters, and virgins.  This, in a nutshell, is their notion of the afterlife.  So great is their obsession is with horrors and rewards, flames and fruits, angels and demons, that in their itch to reach a future which will justify who they are today they forget about God…..Hell is in the here and now.  So is heaven.  Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven as they are both present inside at this present moment.  Every time we fall in love, we ascend into heaven.    Every time we hate, fight, or envy someone we tumble straight into the fires of hell.

The ego does not want us to live in the present moment.  It is a creation of this time/space continuum that we have been confined within by the biblical “fall” leaving us comfortable only when immersed in memories of the past…good or bad ones…or hopes of the future.

Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his consciousness that he has done something wrong, awfully wrong?  Ask that man.  He will tell you what hell is.  Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and fully united with God?  Ask that man.  He will tell you what heaven is.

Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future when this very moment is the only time we can fully experience both the presence and absence of God in our lives?  Motivated by neither the fear of punishment in hell nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love Him, pure and easy, untainted and unnegotiable.

And when you love God so much, when you love each and every one of his creations because of Him and thanks to Him, extraneous categories melt into thin air.  From that point on, there can be no “I” any more.  All you amount to is a zero so big it covers your whole being.

This “love of God” is a challenging notion as it is so easy to be trapped into loving only some idea of God, some culturally contrived notion of God, which has nothing to do with the experience of Him/Her/It/Whatever.  And here I pause as I’m at the threshold of silence, where all words become futile.

But when the “idea of God” is seen, and experienced for what it is, that being an idol, the theological teaching of God’s immanence and transcendence can become meaningful to one.  Yes, God is “out there” as well as “in here” and this intuitive insight can best be said as simply, “God is.”  And this God who we now see and feel “is” comes with a parallel development, the discovery of our own simple, bare, “is-ness” in what would be otherwise a cold and barren universe.  We discover our “zero-ness” which is so big it does cover everyone and everything, uniting us all.  In the Christian tradition we call this “the Spirit of God” which the Apostle Paul described as Christ and noted “by Him all things cohere.”

Jihad in America!

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About two years ago I had the immense pleasure of traveling in Greece and vicinity. My wife and I departed from Athens and took a cruise on the Aegean up to the Bosporus, down the coast of Asia Minor, to Santorini, and back to Athens. We spent a day and a half in the lovely city of Istanbul in April when the tulips were blooming in abundance. There were seas of tulips, and seas of beautiful people, beautiful buildings, delicious food, and marvelous Efes beer. Even in that brief time the culture captivated me and I basked in the experience of  “difference”. I’ve always loved “difference” and travel has permitted to cater to that whim occasionally.  And with the blog-o-sphere, and with reading I can also meet people of different cultures and appreciate the diversity which I feel is so vital in life.   As a result of the delightful, though brief, stay in Istanbul, I have since read novels by two Turkish novelists, Orhan Pamuk (my favorite of his being The Museum of Innocence) and two novels by Elif Shafak.

I am currently reading Shafak’s novel, The Forty Rules of Love, which is a fictionalized account of the life of the Persian poet Rumi. And early in the book she makes an observation about Rumi’s perspective of jihad which is very relevant to world culture today and even to my country’s own “jihadists.” She noted of Rumi, “In an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds. Instead of an outer-oriented jihad—defined as “the war against the infidels” and carried out by many in those days just as in the present—Rumi stood up for an inner-oriented jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one’s own ego, nafs.”

This resonates with an old refrain of mine, borrowed from W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are” and relevant to Charlie Brown’s observation, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Though we must never withdraw and live in isolation, we must be engaged with the world and take purposeful action in this world, we must always remember that our primary enemy is always within. When the Apostle Paul lamented, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me,” I do not think he was talking about “them” out there in the world. He recognized that though he was a child of God, he still fought a daily battle with his inner haunts. Failure to recognize those haunts risks self-destruction and great harm to those around us. In my country, we have “jihadists” who are presently in paranoid fury with our government and even intimate taking up arms against this government. I really think they, and those who egg them on, should take a peak within.

I’d like to share another bit of Rumi relevant to this matter that Shafak quotes:

The whole universe is contained within a single human being–you.  Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you and in varying degrees.  Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside of yourself either.  The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without.  It is an ordinary voice within.  If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness.  When a person know himself or herself, he or she knows God.

 

 

 

Elif Shafak and Difference

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist who is brilliant, insightful, and….yes, dare I say it, beautiful!  She has a TED lecture available on the internet which I strongly recommend on the subject of the Politics of Difference.  (See link below)

In this lecture she begins by telling of being raised by an educated and Westernized, single-mother in Istanbul.  She also tells of the influence of her mentally unstable grandmother who was somewhat of a natural-healer in the community.  One of the grandmother’s antics was to remove warts with prayer, incantations, and then drawing a circle around the wart with dark ink.  And Shafak declared that this procedure worked!  She once asked her grandmother about what the secret was and her grandmother told her, “Never underestimate the power of circles.”

Shafak then takes this image of the circle and developed the notion that anytime we draw circles, and do so rigidly, we kill anything within them  She explained how that when groups, for example, draw rigid boundaries around themselves they eventually do themselves great harm.  She argued that when we cocoon, when we ghetto-ize we are isolating ourselves and denying ourselves the necessary feedback from the world outside of ourselves.  Furthermore, she noted the obvious—when we are barricaded within our safe confines, we are prone to demonize all those on the outside, all those that are different, and at times we even seek to eradicate them.

And I close with my daily dose of W. H. Auden who noted, re this isolationism, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html

Elif Shafak and faith

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English: Elif Şafak

Image via Wikipedia

Elif Shafak delves into faith in her book, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within. From her book, I think she would call herself a “Sufi” personally. But she makes a thoughtful distinction between atheism and agnosticism. She noted that she lacked the arrogance to outright reject the notion of God, as in atheism, but implied that she found herself agnostic at times. She described an agnostic as “befitting of people who were perpetually bewildered about things, including religion.” She described an atheist as “sure of his convictions, and speaks in sentences that end with a full stop. An agnostic puts only a comma at the end of his remarks…he will keep pondering, wondering, doubting.”

Shafak might describe me as an “agnostic.” Hmmm. But, I appear to have the gift of faith which perseveres through the tribulation of doubt. Though to reiterate on old refrain of mine, “I’ll take an agnostic ( or an atheist ) over the notion of blindly regurgitating what one has been indoctrinated with.”