Category Archives: expansive religion

Chief Seattle: An Old Attitude to nature can provide a New Attitude to Nature

Affinity, expansive religion, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature, Philosophy/Ideas, religion

 

A few years ago, in New Zealand I purchased a poster containing the complete text of the response by Chief Seattle to the President of United States to his offer to purchase land from his tribe, which I posted about yesterday.  I had only read part of it before.  It was one of the most eloquent statements I have ever heard about a genuine approach to nature that was, to some extent, the position of  many North American indigenous people.  It was radically different from the approach of the arriving Europeans.

I recognize that there is controversy over the extent to which this version or any other version accurately records what Chief Seattle said to the President, but I believe the general tenor of the letter records a profound philosophy which I am content to ascribe to Chief Seattle as I don’t know who better deserves the credit for it. I certainly think the thoughts deserve our attention.

The renowned English philosopher A. N. Whitehead once said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I think the same things can be said about Chief Seattle. At least as far as environmental philosophy goes. And to think I learned absolutely nothing of it in 4 years of university studying philosophy, proving how deficient my education was at that time, nearly 50 years ago.

Chief Seattle was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief in what we now call western North America. The city of Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington, was named after him.

As Chief Seattle said,

 

“We are part of the earth and it is part of us.

The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers.

The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man—all belong to the same family.”

 

Another way of saying is to say we are all kin. All people and all creatures of the natural world are kin. This basic premise has profound philosophical consequences. For if we recognize that we are all kin we ought to treat each other, and other creatures too, with respect.  I will get to Darwin later, for he gave the scientific basis for this view. I cherish the idea that indigenous philosophy and western science are deeply interwoven. Realizing that also has profound consequences.

To many of the First Nations of North America, they saw themselves as a part of their world.  Their philosophies vary from tribe to tribe, but a common thread, is the recognition that the Earth is our Mother and we are all together. We are all connected. We are all part of Mother Earth. Earth is not separate and apart from us. We are woven together.  This is profound fellow feeling. This philosophy recognizes that what we do to nature we do to ourselves. That is what I call affinity.

 

This idea also has profound significance in the history of religious thought.  The Indo-European word “religio” , which is the root of the word religion, means “linkage” or “connection” and is in my view the basis of all major religions. In fact, it is the core of all religions. More on this later.

I never learned any indigenous philosophy while I pursued a 4 year Honours Arts program in philosophy and English literature. I never even heard of indigenous philosophy. I did not even think such a thing was possible.

This philosophy echoes or even sums up much of what I have learned over the years, starting with German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world.  Only Chief Seattle was much more clear and easier to understand, without being any less profound than Martin Heidegger.  The natives of North America often felt a deep connection to the land.  They felt that they were a part of it.  To the Europeans on the other hand, nature was a resource ready to be exploited.  And from these two disparate attitudes springs much that is wrong with western society.

This is an old attitude to nature, which I am proposing as a new attitude to nature. It owuld be a worthy replacement for the old western attitude,.

Chief Seattle’s statement is a stunning statement about humans and nature, and all the more amazing because a “savage” (as he was wrongly called made it in 1854. Who was the savage?

 

Churches

2022 Inferior Trip to Superior, Catholic Church, Colonialism, expansive religion, Exploitation, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, racism, White Supremacy

 

 

 

I really like to photograph churches. I loved the little St. Jerome Church nestled in colourful trees beside the Pays Platt River in northwest Ontario on the land of the Plays Platt First Nation. I also loved the little river nearby and I stopped to photograph the church and the river.

The beauty of the church and the scene though belies some uncomfortable truths. Religion among First Nations peoples has been fraught, at least ever since they had contact with Europeans who believed that Indigenous religions were heathenish and unworthy of serious consideration. The newcomers were quick to try to convert them to the “superior” religions of the western nations. It was all part of the colonial attitudes. In many cases conversions were very “successful” in that the First Nations people in many cases because staunch members of the new faith. Many of the indigenous people were always willing to try something new when it came to spirituality. For some members of First Nations peoples however they never lost their indigenous religion.  In my view there was much in the Indigenous religion that was very worthy of respect, notwithstanding the lack of respect from many Christians.

Jay Miller in that wonderful book edited by Betty Ballantine and Ian Ballantine, The Native Americans an Illustrated History, described the relationship between the Jesuits and indigenous people of the northeast of North America this way:

“At the same time that the growth of the fur trade was making its inroads into native lifeways, the Christian religion, with the Jesuits at the forefront, was making its self-righteous, moral attack on the Indians. Indeed, of all the events transpired to affect the natives of Canada, none was more climactic than the Jesuit mission. Although natives responded genuinely and openly to this religious Jesuit message, they did so from an innate respect for each person’s religious beliefs. Yet they were utterly baffled by the initial insensitivity with which it was conveyed.”

 

In time the Jesuits got smarter. After all they were often intelligent and well-educated men. They did their best to learn from their mistakes. They even tried, to some extent,  to learn from the people they were trying to convert. It is unfortunate that more Christians were not able to realize that there was a lot to be learned from the indigenous people of Canada. The history of Canada might have been very different than it was.

Prophetic Pragmatism and the Problem of Evil

expansive religion, Philosophy/Ideas, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Brother West had a unique answer to the problem of evil. The problem of evil for those who are not familiar with the argument goes something like this:

 

  1. God is all-knowing
  2. God is all- powerful
  3. God is all- loving
  4. Evil Exists
  5. Therefore God does not exist

 

I first heard of the problem of evil when I was 17 years old in 1967. It was an incredible year in my life. I finished high school. I travelled with 4 buddies to Expo 67 in Montreal with my summer wages that were intended to put me through first year of University (most of which disappeared on that memorable trip) and I went to University. My life changed forever.

1967 started with a trip to the University of Manitoba courtesy of our High School. It was part of an introduction to the university offered by the University of Manitoba to all grade 12 students who had an interest in it. I did and I went.

I went to 2 classes. One of them I have entirely forgotten. The other one I remember vividly to this day.  We were “taught” the problem by Professor Arthur Schafer who had recently returned to Manitoba from Oxford University. He said he would prove to us that God did not exist.  Then he presented the argument brilliantly and then fended off all counter arguments from the mostly horrified grade 12 students. It was scintillating. I was mesmerized. I was hooked. I wanted to study philosophy and could hardly wait to graduate.

The best version of that argument that  I have read or heard since was presented by Dostoevsky in the wonderful novel Brothers Karamazov. I intend to go there on a future part of my religious quest in the modern age. West too dealt with the problem of evil.

 

Brother West is a Christian.  But he does not deny evil. Nor does he shrink from it.  We must accept that there is evil in the world and it is real and must be faced. That is fundamental West philosophy though it has not shattered his faith. In fact, it has deepened his faith. Faith that does not acknowledge evil to West is unreal faith. It is fake faith. It is at best comforting illusion and West wants no part of illusions. He wants the hard task of confronting evil. Just like he wants to confront death and says the most important thing to learn is to learn how to die. That is what he wants to teach to his students—how to die.

Brother West is a man of many parts.  A Renaissance man in other words. He is part philosopher, part theologian, or professor, or bluesman. Sometimes he calls himself a “cultural critic” By that he means a man “who tries to explain America to itself.” He has also called that American theodicy an odd expression but by that he means a man concerned about a “central obsession, the problem of evil.  If God exists, why does he or she permit evil? One of West’s mentors, James H. Cone, said that this idea was the fundamental concept in West’s own spiritual quest. According to Cone, West explores the problem of theodicy not in the abstract of heaven nor in the abstract of philosophical debate, but rather in the concrete here and now of the world around him.  He asks: “How do you really struggle against suffering in a loving way, to leave a legacy in which people would be able to accent their own loving possibility in the midst of so much evil?”

As I said earlier, West calls his philosophy prophetic  pragmatic. West does not consider the problem of evil from the perspective of trying to prove that God does not exist. Rather he tries to figure out how do we live in a world with evil and yet maintain not just our faith, but our obligations to others?

Deep Joy: Loving  and Loving Out Loud

expansive religion, Philosophy/Ideas, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Social Justice

 

Cornel West made living part of his religious quest in the modern age. How did he do that?

In his is autobiography which  he called   Loving and Living Out Loud   Brother West tried  to advocate for living with deep joy, even though as I have said earlier, he always starts with suffering. A source of deep joy for him, as I have said earlier,  was music. Particularly the blues and jazz. He is a big fan of Jazz musician John Coltrane, as am I. He says he finds in that music a deep well spring of joy.

On the other hand, like a true Old Testament Prophet he find much to criticize in contemporary culture that he find shallow. As he said,

“You have to have something that sustains you and so much of contemporary culture is a joyless quest for pleasure. The pleasures are insatiable and you never have enough of them, but you never have any deep joy. If you got to the pre-K program and look into the eyes of those precious children and that sustains you that is deep joy. That is to me a sacred calling. I find joy in the writing and lecturing and speaking like Coltrane found it in blowing his horn.”

 

West says that “we are deliberate and joyful misfits, to use the language of the great Arthur Miller.”  We are maladjusted to injustice. We are maladjusted to indifference. We are maladjusted to people in denial.”  He also said: “Justice is the way love looks in public and tenderness is what love feels like in private.” I also personally heard him deliver various versions of that claim. Again this reminds of those Prophets.

West also warns about the dangers of anger. Sometimes anger is called for. As when the powerful oppress the weak. West always opposes that. Yet West also said he learned from Audrey Lord, that  anger is a form of love, engagement and truth telling. But—and this is key—according to West, “You don’t stay with the anger; it is a medium. But you find joy in being of service to others.”

You have to move beyond anger and resentment back to joy. The deep joy that he looks for not shallow joyless pleasures that take up so much time for so many of us. Like me.

The Classics: Wisdom Speaking

Decline of the west, Ethics, expansive religion, Fear, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Truth and Beauty

 

For Cornel West the search for wisdom is also a spiritual search. Cornel West wrote an article in the Washington Post in response to Howard University and other universities getting rid of their Classics Department.  In fairness to Howard it is a university that does not have the massive dnowments that some of the Ivy League schools have. Howard University is not Harvard. Yet West thought they could do better in their search for wisdom.   Walter Isaacson interviewed West on Amanpour and Company on the dispute.

 

Cornel West believes it is important to preserve and read the classics. He said,

 

“I am convinced we are living in a moment of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude in the American empire. We have to come up with countervailing forces and countervailing weight against the rule of money, rule of mediocrity, rule of military might, rule of narrow conformity, and rule of indifference and callousness. The best classics of any civilization, of any empire, of any culture have to do with trying to convince ourselves to get involved in a quest for truth, and beauty, and goodness, and then for some of us like myself, a Christian, the holy.”

 

To me that sums up the best of the humanities—i.e. the wisdom of civilization. But West believes there has been a deep moral decline in the west and a deep intellectual narrowness has crept in, and that the classics can help us to resist this trend. He says, the reason it does that is

 

“The classics force us to come to terms with the most terrifying question we can ever raise which is what does it mean to be human? The unexamined life is not a life of human according to Plato in his Apology in line 38a. “Human” comes from the Latin humando which means burial, we are disappearing creatures. We are vanishing organisms on the way to bodily extinction. Therefore, the question becomes, ‘who will we be in the meantime?’ What kind of virtue can we enact? What kind of vision will we pursue? What kind of values will we try to embody? And once you raise that question what it means to be human, then you begin to see on the one hand what Shakespeare and Dante have taught us, like Toni Morrison, and John Coltrane have taught us, it’s dark in our history! Most of our history is the history of domination and oppression. The history of hatred. The history of contempt. It is the history of fear driven cruelty. What is the best of our history? Counterweights against that. And that is everywhere you look. Every civilization. Every continent. Every race. Every religion. Every gender. Every sexual orientation. And once you come to terms with that, then the question becomes how do you become equipped? What kind of spiritual and moral armour do you have that allows you to think critically? That allows you to open yourself to others. That allows you to act courageously.”

 

Now if that is not a spiritual quest, I do not know what is. West used Frederick Douglas as an example of a man who did that. He teased out truths from foreign languages as anyone can do. He was already a freedom fighter, but the classics of other countries helped him to find the truth, beauty, and the good. According to West, “He teased out an eloquence. And what is eloquence? “Eloquence is wisdom speaking,” say Cicero and Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (often referred to as Quintilian) a rhetorician and educator.

 

According to West, the essence of wisdom speaking is having the courage to know how to die by questioning your presuppositions. Every time you let a presupposition go that is a form of death because it allows you to be reborn. It allows you to grow. It allows you to develop. It allows you to mature. If you can learn that, from religion, philosophy, music, or the classics you have the necessary spiritual armour.

As West said,

 

“We live in an empire my brother that has grown powerful and rich but has not grown up. F.O Mathieson used to say, “America would in some way be distinctive because it could move from perceived innocence to corruption without a mediating state of maturity.” The nation believes it is innocent. How can you be authorizers of devastation of indigenous people and African slaves and then view yourselves as innocent? “

 

In many ways that is the problem many people have—particularly those who have been privileged and fail to recognize that privilege. How can you fail to look at the crimes produced in the name of your civilization? We all need to grow up and see that we are not innocent, no matter how much we would like to be innocent.

People of the Amazon Rainforest

Ancient Humans, art, expansive religion, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

The story of where the ideas of Chaco came from arose far from Chaco. Archeologists Anna Roosevelt and Chris Davis were interviewed in the series Native America.  They explained that they have been trying to answer such questions. They have been searching for evidence of the earliest people in the Americas.

Some interesting data has been discovered in the Amazon Rainforest of western Brazil. They looked in a cave there referred to in Portuguese as the Caverna da Pedra Pintada, or in English, the cave of the Painted Rock.  The walls of the cave are covered with art of animals and the sky. “This cave in the Amazon is re-writing the history of when and how people settled the Americas and who those people are.”

For a long time history books presented only one view of how this happened. They said that about 11,000 B.C. during the last Ice Age big game hunters from Asia crossed over to North America a frozen land bridge in the area known a Beringia. That land bridge arose when sea levels dropped dramatically during the last Ice Age.  Later when the continental ice sheets of North America and the world melted. the ocean levels rose again sharply growing that land bridge once more. It was thought that after the ice melted the people of Asia who had arrived in North America  migrated south into North and South America. They were thought to have hunted mammoths, giant sloths and caribou with finely fashioned stone spear points. Many of these animals have since disappeared.

According to the standard view people reached the Amazon about 1,000 years ago.  Recently scientists have discovered evidence in caves that people arrived in the Amazon much earlier than that. ?That evidence even includes some surprising art as well as human remains which have been carbon dated. .  As Anna Roosevelt from the University of Illinois said, “The remains we found and dated in the cave show that people were living deep in the Amazon forest at least 13,000 years ago. This is some of the earliest art and its definitely so far, the earliest art, so far, in the hemisphere.”

This demonstrates, she said,  that, “Thousands of years before the Romans or Greeks, eight thousand years before the Egyptians, at least 13,000 years ago, people arrive in the Amazon, and their stone tools and paintings reveal these first Americans are not only mammoth hunters, they are foragers, fishermen, artists, and perhaps scientists.”

Chris Davis is a specialist in archaeoastronomy, the study of how ancient peoples looked at the sky. He and Roosevelt found images that appear to be a grid that indicates how something was tracked  in the sky, because it was outdoors, not in a cave. These two scientists believe that these images represent calculated observations.

Davis thinks the art represents very sophisticated thinking. As Roosevelt said, “This art links people with their environment through its animals, its plants, and the heavenly bodies of the sky.” This actually reminds me of what Northrop Frye, Canada’s pre-eminent English literature scholar described as the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to give the world a human face.  Artists try to connect the world to us.

Bertrand Russell also agreed. As he said in his book On God and Religion:

“Men, as is natural, have an intense desire to humanize the universe:  God and Satan, alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.” Of course this is exactly what Northrop Frye said too.

Roosevelt concluded, “These paintings are the earliest art ever found in the Americas. They suggest that people 13,000 years ago had already developed ideas about the world that centered on the sky, caves, and nature. But what exactly are these First American artists trying to say?” What is clear though is that we ought to be wary of making easy conclusions that Europeans and their descendants were vastly superior in knowledge to the Indigenous people. If you recall, this is the point I am trying to make. I think that for too long we in the west have been blinded by bias about our own superiority to Indigenous peoples. The point is that this is a bias.

Sometimes it pays to listen to your spouse: Dead Cold by Louise Penny

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Books, Buddhism, expansive religion

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cignq80i74ons4q/Screenshot%202019-01-28%2017.39.52.png?dl=0

Dead Cold

By Louise Penny

When I first heard about Louise Penny I was very surprised. She had been an unexceptional host on CBC radio in Winnipeg. As a regular CBC listener, I listened to her nearly every day. I heard she had moved to Quebec. Much to my surprise she wrote a book called Still Life. It was a murder mystery that took place in a small fictional village in the eastern townships called 3 Pines.  I found it a little difficult to believe that she could be any good. How could a young woman from Winnipeg be a good mystery writer? That prejudice shows you how stupid I can be. Later I learned she was on the New York Times bestseller list. That did not seem improbable; it seemed impossible.

Sometimes it pays to listen to your spouse. Chris became a Penny  fan and suggested I read her too. It took me a couple of years to follow her suggestions. Funny, how suggestions from a spouse are the last that are followed. And Chris says, “Should be the first to be followed. As a matter of fact, since Chris is a big mystery fan, when I learned this Winnipeg woman was an internationally respected mystery writer, I suggested she read her. Now Chris has conveniently forgotten my suggestion to her! Funny how that happens!

Eventually I read her first novel and concluded Penny is indeed a very good writer. Chris was right. Again I have to admit that.  I have started to read her series now. Chris has read them all. This year I read the second in the series, Dead Cold. This convinced me that Penny is an exceptional writer.

One of the great pleasures of the series is Penny’s description of this small town in Quebec and it’s many fascinating inhabitants. This is how she describes the small town in her second novel:

“Three Pines had what she craved.

It had croissants and café au lait.It had steak fries and the New York Times. It had a bakery, a bistro, a B & B, a general store. It had peace and stillness and laughter. It had great joy and great sadness and the ability to accept both and be content. It had companionship and kindness.”

         There was one outstanding incident in Dead Cold that I want to mention. It involved Clara, a recurring character in the series. Clara is an artist. So far she has toiled without success. She does not know if she is any good or not. Naturally she was insecure. She asked CC, who Clara wrongly thought was a friend, to introduce her art to a Montreal art critic.  Then one day she encountered CC on an escalator in a Montreal department store, and CC, her erstwhile “friend” pretended to be talking to the critic as she was travelling down the escalator and Clara was travelling up.  She led Clara to believe that the critic had dismissed her art as “amateur and banal.”  It was cruel gesture and entirely deflated Clara. Clara was “murdered by words.” She “knew” her art was crap.

A few minutes after this painful incident,  Clara encountered a homeless bum on the streets of Montreal. The bum was lying on the ground covered in vomit and excrement. The bum was an old woman. Clara intended to give her a bag of food. She almost stopped; the smell was so bad. Yet she continued and placed the bag beside the old woman. Amazingly, the old woman turned up to Clara and said, “I always loved your art, Clara.” How could that be?

For some reason, Clara was convinced this bum was God. The shit-covered bag lady was God!  She thought she had met God. In my opinion Clara was wrong. She had not met God; she had become God. By offering food to the bum she became God. The Buddhists say that we must learn to become the Buddha. This is what Clara had done, and in the process she was redeemed. This is what we should do; we should become God. I believed that this is what genuine religion is all about. Religion leads us to the God within.

All of this in a mystery novel. Funny how that happens.

Religious Experience

Buddhism, expansive religion, religion

 

As I said before,  I find Buddhism in many ways to be a surprisingly congenial religion.  Partly this is because it is very different from most other religions, especially the three severe monotheistic religions that were born in the Middle East.

For one thing, Buddha, unlike most religious leaders always wanted the members to think for themselves rather than relying on a charismatic leader. He expected his followers to exercise their own critical judgment. This reminds me of what Nietzsche said, “You repay a teacher badly if you always remain the pupil.”

Buddha believed that he became enlightened when he awoke to the truth that he had found embedded in the deepest structure of existence itself.  He found that truth in himself, and believed that anyone could do the same.  In fact, he believed it was necessary for each individual to experience that himself or herself or the experience would not be genuine. That is why, again unlike other religions, the Buddha did not try to elicit faith. He did not want faith.  He wanted each of us to experience the truth ourselves.  He would be willing to help or guide us to this experience, but he could not tell us the truth.

Carl Jung said that religion was invented by man as self-defence against divine experience.  That sounds shocking.  And it is. Divine experience is hard.  We have to be strong to take it.  As Robertson Davies once said, “most of us are absolutely terrified of a genuine religious experience.”  We would not know what to do with it.

We can have a religious experience anywhere. Even in a church or synagogue, though I would suggest there are much better places, like a forest or a bog. Unfortunately too few of them are experienced in institutional churches these days.  Too often religion interferes with the experience rather than facilitating it. That we have to guard against.

The Religion of Pi

expansive religion, religion

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/28sagrwvol72b34/Screenshot%202019-01-01%2020.58.10.png?dl=0

In that wonderful book, Life with Pi, Pi is a young Indian boy, the son of a zoo keeper. He ends up on a small boat sailing the ocean with a Tiger, zebra, orangutang and a hyena. An unlikely combination to say the least . Pi says that before the book is over he will make us believe in God.

Pi is many things but today I want to emphasize that he was a syncretist. That is a person who tries to combine different beliefs often by blending them, or merging them, into one. This word is often used in religion. Some people don’t see religions as opposing each other, but rather as different views of the same truth. Fundamentalists usually have great difficulty with this. They see their own religion as superior, and the rest as inferior others. Syncretism is inclusive, or what I have called expansive. It is the religion I prefer.

Pi said, “I am a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim.”  All at the same time! He had no thought that only 1 religion could show the way. He had a lot to learn from many of them. Why exclude any? Pi even said, “Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith.”

Pi had a father who saw himself as “part of the New India–rich, modern, and as secular as ice cream.” He did not have a religious bone in his body. He was strictly business. “Spiritual worry was alien to him; it was financial worry that rocked his being.” Reminds me of Mennonites.

His mother on the other hand was neutral on the subject of religion. She had a Hindu upbringing and a Baptist education, and according to Pi this cancelled both out leaving her “serenely impious.” That is the best kind.

Pi is puzzled by those who think they have to defend God. “As if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless.” What a poor conception of God.  Yet the fanatics of fundamentalism take exactly that position. These people forget the Golden Rule. Their empathy has been shredded by false religion. According to Pi,

“These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, (Indian coins) walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, ‘Business as usual.”  But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily; they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.”

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.  The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God’s, that the self-righteous should rush.

Does this not sound a lot like the Old Testament prophets?

Pi also saw the same source for his ideas: “an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.”

I actually think the word “love” is a bit strong. I prefer something easier–fellow feeling or empathy or compassion. Seeing oneself in the other.  It is harder to love the other, but it is enoughto see oneself in the other. And that makes all the difference.

In a real sense such a person is “saved.”

Islam

expansive religion, religion,

Let me confess at the outset: I don’t know much about Islam. But I read a book by Wade Davis that had a very interesting story about Islam based on his personal experience. It was not based on versions of Islam from its competitors–the worst possible source for information.

After 9/11 Davis wanted to do a story for an American audience on Islam. He felt they had to understand Islam, before they saw Islam as the “infinite other”. To do that he travelled to Timbuktu a port on the southern side of the Sea of Sand that is the Western Sahara. Timbuktu is a remarkable place. At a time when London and Paris were mud hovels Timbuktu had 25,000 University students!

As Davis explained on the CBC show Ideas in 2018,

“The only reason the ancient knowledge of the ancient Greeks survived to inspire the Renaissance was because it was kept alive in the knowledge of the Great Islamic scholars of places like Timbuktu, Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad. There was a trade of knowledge up the traditional route. Remember that until the discovery of the New World 2/3 of Europe’s gold came from West Africa overland 52 days across the Sahara and that was the route we decided to follow to an ancient Salt Mine called Pudeni where the salt was not just a condiment, but profoundly curative. Salt that at one day traded ounce for ounce for gold in that west African trade.”

 

This was an important journey for young men. If they did not complete the journey to the mine they were not allowed to marry. The people believed that the desert honed their senses and in that way they became open to the grace of Allah. The mine itself was a 1,000 km north and they had to travel with a heavily armed escort, which seemed to grow in size everyday.

At the mine Davis met a man who was chronologically younger than him, but physically much older. He was worn out from working in the mine. He was there to pay off a debt he incurred to save the life of a young daughter.  He would have to work in the mine for the rest of his life in order to pay off that debt to a merchant in a form of indentured servitude. He was virtually a slave.  Even in summer he worked when it got so hot in the mine it was said the heat would melt sand. In the 800-year history of the mine he was the only one who had to work summers. It broke his spirit. His entire debt was less than the cost of a dinner for 3 in Toronto so Davis paid it for him, but he never learned whether or not the man found his way back to his family or not.

A little further south Davis encountered a caravan going north. There were 8 young men with 15 camels that consisted of all the wealth of the families. It took 40 days to get to the mine and they had no margin of error. They were completely out of food and down to their last half litre of water and 250 miles from the nearest well. Without food a person can last for up to 2 weeks. Without water a person in the desert will die within a few hours. Yet when Davis came down to their camp, they immediately started a twig fire to brew them a cup of tea honoring the obligation to kill the last goat that keeps your children alive with its milk to feed the wandering stranger who comes into your camp at night. “This is the essence of Bedouin life, because you never know when you’ll be that stranger, cold and hungry coming out of the darkness in need of rescue.  And as I watched this young Mohamed pour me that first cup of tea after all we had heard about Islamic culture in the wake of 9/11, I thought to myself in 50 years or 40 years of doing this kind of travel and field work these are the moments that allow us all to hope.”

Is there a finer example of the Golden Rule than that? Is there a better example of connection, charity, empathy, and fellow feeling than that? Is this not the essence of religion? Or do you think the essence is belief?