Penomee (Dr. Kari Ann Owen), Ex-Jew, USA
There is no god but God, and Muhammad, may God praise him, is
his messenger."
These are the words of the Shahadah oath, I believe.
The Creator is known by many names. His wisdom is always
recognizable, and his presence made manifest in the love, tolerance
and compassion present in our community.
His profound ability to guide us from a war-like individualism so
rampant in American society to a belief in the glory and dignity of
the Creator's human family, and our obligations to and membership
within that family. This describes the maturation of a spiritual
personality, and perhaps the most desirable maturation of the
psychological self, also.
My road to Shahadah began when an admired director, Tony
Richardson, died of AIDS. Mr. Richardson was already a brilliant
and internationally recognized professional when I almost met him
backstage at the play Luther at age 14.
Playwriting for me has always been a way of finding degrees of
spiritual and emotional reconciliation, both within myself and
between myself and a world I found rather brutal due to childhood
circumstances. Instead of fighting with the world, I let my
conflicts fight it out in my plays. Amazingly, some of us have even
grown up together!
So, as I began accumulating stage credits (productions and staged
readings), beginning at age 17, I always retained the hope that I
would someday fulfill my childhood dream of studying and working
with Mr. Richardson. When he followed his homosexuality to America
(from England) and a promiscuous community, AIDS killed him, and
with him went another portion of my sense of belonging to and
within American society.
I began to look outside American and Western society to Islamic
culture for moral guidance.
Why Islam and not somewhere
else?
My birthmother's ancestors were Spanish Jews who lived among
Muslims until the Inquisition expelled the Jewish community in
1492. In my historical memory, which I feel at a deep level, the
call of the muezzin is as deep as the lull of the ocean and the
swaying of ships, the pounding of horses' hooves across the desert,
the assertion of love in the face of oppression.
I felt the birth of a story within me, and the drama took form as I
began to learn of an Ottoman caliph's humanity toward Jewish
refugees at the time of my ancestors' expulsions. God guided my
learning, and I was taught about Islam by figures as diverse as
Imam Siddiqi of the South Bay Islamic Association; Sister Hussein
of Rahima; and my beloved adopted Sister, Maria Abdin, who is
Native American, Muslim and a writer for the SBIA magazine, IQRA.
My first research interview was in a halal [meat regarded as lawful
in Islamic law] butcher shop in San Francisco's Mission District,
where my understanding of living Islam was profoundly affected by
the first Muslim lady I had ever met: a customer who was in hijab,
behaved with a sweet kindness and grace and also read, wrote and
spoke four languages.
Her brilliance, coupled with her amazing (to me) freedom from
arrogance, had a profound effect on the beginnings of my knowledge
of how Islam can affect human behavior.
Little did I know then that not only would a play be born, but a
new Muslim.
The course of my research introduced me to much more about Islam
than a set of facts, for Islam is a living religion. I learned how
Muslims conduct themselves with a dignity and kindness which lifts
them above the American slave market of sexual competition and
violence. I learned that Muslim men and women can actually be in
each others' presence without tearing each other to pieces,
verbally and physically. And I learned that modest dress, perceived
as a spiritual state, can uplift human behavior and grant to both
men and women a sense of their own spiritual worth.
Why did this seem so astonishing, and
so astonishingly new?
Like most American females, I grew up in a slave market, comprised
not only of the sexual sicknesses of my family, but the constant
negative judging of my appearance by peers beginning at ages
younger than seven. I was taught from a very early age by American
society that my human worth consisted solely of my attractiveness
(or, in my case, lack of it) to others. Needless to say, in this
atmosphere, boys and girls, men and women, often grew to resent
each other very deeply, given the desperate desire for peer
acceptance, which seemed almost if not totally dependent not on
one's kindness or compassion or even intelligence, but on looks and
the perception of those looks by others.
While I do not expect or look for human perfection among Muslims,
the social differences are profound, and almost unbelievable to
someone like myself.
I do not pretend to have any answers to the conflicts of the Middle
East, except what the prophets, beloved in Islam, have already
expressed. My disabilities prevent me from fasting, and from
praying in the same prayer postures as most [Muslims].
But I love and respect the Islam I have come to know through the
behavior and words of the men and women I have come to know in
AMILA (American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism) and
elsewhere, where I find a freedom from cruel emotional conflicts
and a sense of imminent spirituality.
What else do I feel and believe about
Islam?
I support and deeply admire Islam's respect for same sex education;
for the rights of women as well as men in society; for modest
dress; and above all for sobriety and marriage, the two most
profound foundations of my life, for I am 21 1/2 years sober and
happily married. How wonderful to feel that one and half billion
Muslims share my faith in the character development which marriage
allows us, and also in my decision to remain drug- and
alcohol-free.
What, then, is Islam's greatest gift
in a larger sense?
In a society which presents us with constant pressure to immolate
ourselves on the altars of unbridled instinct without respect for
consequences, Islam asks us to regard ourselves as human persons
created by God with the capacity for responsibility in our
relations with others. Through prayer, charity and a commitment to
sobriety and education, if we follow the path of Islam, we stand a
good chance of raising children who will be free from the violence
and exploitation which is robbing parents and children of safe
schools and neighborhoods, and often of their lives.
By Dr. Kari Ann Owen
The Religion of Islam
- Category: