For where the book is banned, censored, or difficult to access:
Reformist Quran
A progressive, 21st-century translation -- in English. The U.S. publisher bailed on it after the Prophet Muhammad cartoon riots. But fear didn't stop the translators.
A few days ago, I woke up to an email from Leo Eaton, a filmmaker who’d collaborated closely on my PBS documentary,Faith Without Fear.
Leo wrote to tell me that his father had passed away. Now, you should know that Leo’s dad wasn’t just “the father of my friend.” Leo’s dad, Charles Le Gai Eaton, was among contemporary Islam’s most sophisticated thinkers.
I knew of Gai Eaton even before I’d met Leo. As the host of a Toronto TV program in 2000, I dispatched one of my producers to London, UK, where she interviewed him about homosexuality and Islam. After a vigorous back-and-forth with my producer, Mr. Eaton — a Muslim convert, accomplished author and distinguished consultant to London’s Islamic Cultural Centre, summarized why he couldn’t condemn homosexuality: “With a majestic God, anything is possible.”
It wasn’t his refusal to denounce gays and lesbians that stuck with me all these years. It was his refusal to play God. In a few unadorned words, Mr. Eaton captured the essence of my faith in Islam — leaving final judgment to the Almighty rather than the Almighty’s self-appointed ambassadors. In so doing, he paid serious tribute to the Creator, suggesting that any Deity worth worshiping is grand and expansive enough to break the mold that His insecure creatures won’t. Mashallah.
Charles Le Gai Eaton prized intellectual honesty. Hearing nothing but protest against the Iraq war from British Muslims, he went on the record with his differences. “Saddam was such a monster,” Mr. Eaton told a magazine that caters to Muslims in the West. “[M]aybe we were right to interfere in this case. I am very torn either way and I cannot quite make up my mind.” How refreshing to encounter ethical uncertainty at a time of political absolutes.
The writer to whom he made that statement went on to opine that “Eaton despairs at the state of the Muslim world, which he vehemently feels should address the issue of tyrants, injustice, poverty and human rights abuses littering its own backyard…” His moral courage, gently proffered, meant so much to Muslims like me who needed role models like him, and frankly still do.
When Leo emailed me about the death of Gai Eaton, he attached something he’d written. It’s the deeply personal “remembrance” of a son watching his father slip into the next world. Leo had shared it only privately, particularly with members of his dad’s tariqa or Sufi order.
Prepared to be turned down, I asked Leo if he’d allow me to post an excerpt of the remembrance for my international audience. To his credit and my delight, he agreed.
*****
Here’s the passage I’ve chosen:
There have been a constant stream of Sufi Brothers and Sisters arriving at this bedside from around the world, and some days they’ve set up an almost continuous chanting of the Koran. It’s beautiful and strangely peaceful, this lovely musical recitation that goes on any time of the day and night. They venerate him as though he is a saint; a strange way to think of ‘Dad.’
We have been warned that thousands will come to his funeral if given the chance, so leaders of the tariqa are helping us keep it to family and close friends. All this love and respect, based partly on four previous books, especially Islam and the Destiny of Man, which has changed so many lives, but also on my father’s character. In his old age, he had endless patience with young seekers of faith who came to him for advice and wisdom. And if they happened to be beautiful women, so much the better, as his just-published autobiography, A Bad Beginning, makes clear.
When my wife Jeri and I read the initial drafts of A Bad Beginning, drawn from over 75 years of diary entries that my father had written since childhood, we worried about how devout Muslims around the world who so respect his work might take stories of such a scandalous past.
I am reminded of a story he tells of his first book, The Richest Vein, published by TS Eliot, that he wrote when he was still in his twenties. A respected clergymen came out from England to Jamaica, where Dad was living, awed by the book and wanting to meet the author, expecting some grey-haired sage. When introduced to my father, sitting with a girl on one knee and a drink in his hand, he exclaimed in horror: “That can’t be the man.”
Perhaps some Muslims awed by Islam and the Destiny of Man or Remembering God may also say “that can’t be the man,” but I suspect the majority will take inspiration from Dad’s circuitous path to Islam, a version of St. Augustine’s prayer, “Oh God, make me chaste, but not yet.”
And in any case, my father has always taken pains to separate the human persona from spiritual work. “God can choose even the most flawed vessel from which to pour out his blessings,” he has often told me. He would be horribly embarrassed to see this outpouring of love and veneration that now surrounds him. Sitting at his bedside these past days, I sense the beginning of a legend. I don’t know if I’m glad or sorry.
Ashhadu an la ilaha illa’Llah (There is no God but God)
*****
Having been privileged to ‘glimpse’ Charles Le Gai Eaton’s final hours, I now pray for him. May he rest in peace for as long as he needs. Then may he raise appropriate hell in heaven.
In the world of Islamic reform, the big news this week is that an eminent Pakistani sheikh has issued a 600-page fatwa against Muslim terrorism — with no qualifiers attached. You’d think I’d be celebrating.
Not really.
The very notion that 21st-century Muslims need a fatwa confirming the immorality of blowing each other up is, well, infantile. Frankly, it’s just another relic of the tribal mentality, in which the higher-ups do all the thinking for the lowly peeps.
The sooner Muslims wean ourselves off the fatwa fetish, the faster we’ll tap our potential to engage our own minds, hearts and consciences. As I’ll explain in my next book, it’s individuality — not deference to yet more external authority — that will spark the long-overdue liberal reformation within Islam.
You know whose fatwa I can endorse? Watch the video below:
Yep, I dig the idea of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Paine breaking the news to a violent jihadi that he’ll be spending eternity with them. After all, America’s founding fathers were a motley crew of Christians, skeptics, secularists and agnostics. That a true believer might have to share the afterlife with such infidels makes me smile.
Does this man go through with hurling his stone at Soraya? Watch the movie…
This week, among the most important movies of my generation, “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” comes out in DVD and Blu-Ray. You can order either version here.
“The Stoning,” starring recent Emmy-award winner Shohreh Aghdashloo, dramatizes the true story of an Iranian village wife whose deceitful husband sets her up for execution so that he can marry an unsuspecting girl in the city.
Ultimately, though, this isn’t a tale of female victimhood. Instead, it’s about moral courage. The target of the stoning — Soraya — has an aunt who shows us that even when you can’t stop the crime unfolding before you, there’s always an opportunity to use your mind, conscience and voice for longer-term good. That’s what Aunt Zahra does in this film. I won’t tell you how she does it. You’ll just have to buy the DVD!
Beyond buying it, I hope you’ll screen it in your homes, churches, temples, mosques, classrooms and community centers. The questions unleashed by “The Stoning” will generate amazing conversations.
For example, are non-Muslims “allowed” to comment on issues that affect Muslim women — such as the so-called honor killing of Soraya? If you watch a movie like “The Stoning,” are you sticking your nose in “other” people’s business? In an interdependent world, is there such a thing as “other” people?
Aunt Zahra protecting Soraya
To get you into the spirit of hi-octane discussion, here’s what I would say if I were part of the film club that I want you to create once you buy the “The Stoning” DVD:
As a Muslim reformer, I routinely receive heart-wrenching emails from fellow Muslims whose basic human rights are being violated — not by “outsiders” but by members of their own communities. Equally saddening is that self-professed human rights activists in the West often play the purity game, suggesting that you can’t comment if you don’t represent.
Their misguided conviction: Anyone living in the West can’t legitimately expose oppressive practices in cultures elsewhere. Hmmm… Would they say the same to Muslims in the traditional Islamic world who expose America’s human rights abuses at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib? Of course not.
Nor should they. Human rights, being human, are above the politics of identity. As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in hisLetter from a Birmingham City Jail, “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, parochial, ‘outside agitator’ idea.”
But it seems that Elise Auerbach, Iran specialist for Amnesty International USA, can more than live with the narrow and parochial. She practices it in her baffling denunciation of “The Stoning of Soraya M.”
Tellingly, Amnesty itself released a January 2008 report that described stonings as “grotesque and unacceptable”. In its press release about the report, Amnesty called on “the Iranian authorities to abolish death by stoning and impose an immediate moratorium on this horrific practice, specifically designed to increase the suffering of victims.”
In her remarkably contradictory review of “The Stoning” — a review in which she acknowledges the report — Auerbach emphasizes that “Iranians don’t need people from outside Iran telling them what is good for them…”
Really? Then why did her own organization dare to tell Iranian authorities what to do in its report against stoning?
And why did Amnesty feature “The Stoning” at its 2009 annual film festival?
Above all, why did Amnesty invite Cyrus Nowrasteh, the Iranian-American director of “The Stoning,” to introduce the film at its festival? Is it because he’s Iranian? If so, then what makes him someone “from outside” according to Auerbach?
Of course, Nowrasteh is American too. Perhaps that’s the real taboo. In which case, isn’t Auerbach’s employer — UK-based Amnesty — also an outsider? Why does she continue to work for Amnesty and make herself part of the interference that she believes is a problem?
Within its own ranks, Amnesty International needs an intellectually honesty debate about how to realize its motto, “Defending Human Rights Worldwide.” Personally, I can attest that more than a few Amnesty activists worry about the scourge of moral and cultural relativism in their midst. That’s the single biggest concern confided to me when I presented at Amnesty’s 2006 conference in Mexico City.
Delegates disclosed to me that Amnesty International has no clear message about honor-based crimes, including stoning, because nobody wants to be deemed a bigot. As if defending human rights worldwide has ever been a matter of politeness.
It’s 2010 and apparently Amnesty has not resolved its dilemma. Auerbach condemns a movie that spotlights an Iranian heroine — Soraya’s aunt, Zahra — who tries to stop the stoning. Zahra is a Muslim who realizes her faith by speaking truth to power about the non-negotiable need for human dignity.
And yet, according to Auerbach, hapless audience dupes will respond with “disgust and revulsion at Iranians themselves, who are portrayed as primitive and bloodthirsty savages.” Thus, “we” — idiotic Westerners who can’t be trusted to reach independent conclusions — “still have to wait” for a “thoughtful” film about executions in Iran.
I hope we don’t have to wait for thoughtful human rights activists to speak truth to power in their organizations. Dissidents do exist, as I learned at the Amnesty conference that I attended. Will they exercise their own freedom of conscience? Of this, I can’t be sure. Moral courage is always more difficult than self-censorship.
To watch exclusive clips from “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” click here. And to buy the just-released DVD, click here.
The Moral Courage Project screens “The Stoning of Soraya M.” You can too.
Documentary
Irshad's PBS Documentary: Faith Without Fear follows my journey around the world to reconcile Islam and freedom.
Irshad is pioneering efforts throughout the world to promote Muslim reform and moral courage. To join her mission, first get informed about all that she's doing.
