The Accidental Fundamentalist stumbles into Islamophobia

I'm an interesting type of Muslim. The kind you couldn’t pick out on the street. There are no obvious outward signs of my faith and my ethnicity isn't clear. You can barely tell I’m an Indian – or of Indian origin – because I’d pass for Greek, Italian, Israeli, Spanish, even southern French.

The Islam I practice is Sufism – and, in my case, most of my practice is internal. I call myself a Muslim Fundamentalist because I follow what I believe are the “fundaments” of Islam – which are generosity, compassion, kindness, loyalty and honesty. I'm always fuming at the tv when they call someone blowing up a bus a "fundamentalist Muslim." And, as someone who lives in downtown Manhattan (and has lived and worked here for 20 years), I hear it a lot. I would call them "nut cases," "cultural reactionaries"... but they would never represent the fundamental essence of Islam.

Not to say that I don’t love ritual, culture and the joy and magic of tradition, but I believe you have to come to the Divine on your own – and on your own path. And, as the often-quoted hadith (saying) of the Muslim prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) says, "There are as many paths to the Divine as there are souls."

Sufism is strangely, one of the best known, unknown parts of Islam. Most people know the writings or teachings of Mawlana Jallaluddin Rumi and Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz, their quotes are now on magnets and calendars. I even saw a bohemian outfit described by a blogger called Rumi in the window of Forever21 on 34th st.

"I Have Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call Myself
A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew."

-Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz

The idea is that the fundaments of Islam are almost too great and too universal to be contained in any one religion. Sufism, like Kabaalah, deals with the essence of Islam, the idea that the Divine is everywhere, in everything - like the Sanskirt word, Om - the all-encompassing.

Sadly, most people don't realize that Sufi ideas are based on an Islamic viewpoint.
Like Buddhism, Sufism is about giving up the ego, the desire for power, the wish to be right, the craving for material satisfaction. Again, these are fundaments of Islam.

For me, this quote describes the practice of Sufism on a personal level.

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment
Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”

-Mawlana Jallaluddin Rumi

In my understanding of Islamic fundamentalism, the truest practice of faith is demonstrated by your actions on the planet, towards all other life. A brilliant modern thinker in that vein is Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, who wrote “Green Deen,” a powerful Islamic argument, based on Quranic quotations, for the necessity of being environmentally and socially-responsible.

Since I'm your everyday single Muslim mother, I go to school for Muslim holidays with my three daughters to talk to their classes. One morning on our way to the Ramadan presentation, when my middle daughter was about 10, she said, “So when do we find out that we’re right?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “You know, that Muslims are right and everyone else is wrong. Do we find out when we die?”

And I said, “We’re ALL right. The goal is to be kind to each other and help each other and find some peace in ourselves. Different religions are just like a different languages. It’s like calling a chair, 'une chaise' in French. It’s the same thing. So in Arabic, we use the word, Allah for God. In French, you say, Dieu. In Spanish, Dios. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, you can call God, Allah, Jesus, Buddha, Shiva – you can follow your culture – and if you follow something with your heart, you will get to the same place.”

So people often ask me, how do I call myself a Muslim if I don’t veil – or wear hijab. And I say, in Islam, being a Muslim requires one simple phrase, “La illaha ill lallah, Muhammad el-rasulallah.” Which means I believe in God and Muhammad is the seal (or the last Prophet). It implies that you also believe in the Torah and the New Testament. Everything else is between you and God. I have no place judging your choices or what calls you.

What I’ve told my kids is that what you call yourself – Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Bahai – is less important than what you do with it. The imperatives in Islam are called the five pillars – faith, prayer, fasting, charity, pilgrimage.

But I have plenty of friends who are culturally Muslim but in practice agnostic, never fast or even consider going to Mecca. They drink alcohol, eat pork and have spent their lives working with underpriviledged children in the Delhi slums, or helping families in New York City who have been torn apart by the immigration laws. Or improving the lives of homeless people. And, from what I understand of faith, THOSE are the people who are going straight to heaven (without passing purgatory). Not the ones who just touch their foreheads to the floor five times a day or starve themselves on ramadan while making their families and friends miserable. (Not that one shouldn't pray or fast, but if you don't do it correctly, it's not worth it.)

Again, I tell my daughters that fasting on ramadan - not eating or drinking - is the easy part. The hard part is fasting from anger, from impatience and frustration. I tell them that for 30 days, they shouldn't raises their voices, they shouldn't be unkind or hurtful, they should be even more careful not to be untruthful or disloyal or mean. Trying to do that when you've had nothing to eat and been up since the crack of dawn is really, really hard. Many people say that if you get angry when you're fasting, your fast is broken. You might as well eat at that point and start apologizing. Because the fundamental goal of fasting is to get closer to the Divine - and how close are you when the small irritations of the material world bring you right back down to the ground?

So as an Islamic fundamentalist, here’s how I deal with “Islamophobia” or the current anger towards Muslims. I act like it doesn’t exist. The Muslim Bar Association is using the civil rights precedents set by the LBGT community – and I use the behavior of my gay friends as an example. I go into every situation assuming that people who don’t like me just don’t know me yet. I see it as an opportunity for dialogue and a chance to prove religious profiling wrong.

Talking about Islamophobia reminds me of going to a party once and meeting another Indian single mother like myself. She murmured to me, “Don’t you hate the way they look at us? The way they are all whispering about us behind our backs?”

I said, "Really? They are?" I'd never thought of that.

Suddenly, the room changed for me. Maybe they WERE all whispering behind my back. Until that moment, I’d always assumed everyone liked me until my actions gave them a reason not to. I’d always thought that my difference was an opportunity to show people that things are never as simple as you expect.

I remember when I first moved to Washington, DC, just on the edge of my teens. A girl asked me, "Do you like Black people?"

I must sound absurdly pollyanna, but I was baffled by the question. No one had ever asked me if I liked or disliked an entire race of people. And of course, since I was a new kid - brown and Muslim when almost everyone else was Jewish and European - I was keenly aware of getting the answer wrong. But I had no idea of what to say.

My mumbled answer was, "I guess there are some I like and some I don't."

Not to say that prejudice doesn’t exist but, as a fundamentalist, it is not to your benefit to internalize it. If I assume that everyone I meet is hostile towards me, then I miss the chance to connect with people who are not. And I miss the chance to change people’s perceptions. I judge someone's intentions before I experience them.

Someone who dismisses me without meeting me, misses the chance to find out that a Muslim mother with teenaged daughters is probably spending more time thinking about how to get her teenaged daughters to go to Friday prayers instead of watching Gossip Girl. Or how to get them to think more about their schoolwork and spirits and less about their looks.

Not to be Panglossian (for you Candide fans), but for me, the current public conversation against Islam and American Muslims is a good thing. This spring, when I started reading and watching the press about Park51, I said to non-Muslim friend, “Oh my gosh, they all HATE us. Did I just never notice or is this all new? When did the American public start mistrusting Muslims?”

He said, “No, it was there all along. It’s that no one said it in public.”

What’s happened is that because it's now socially acceptable to vilify 1.3 billion people (and a faith that has its roots in Christianity and Judiasm) in a public forum - even as an election platform, we can start addressing the fears and the lack of understanding in a public forum. If 60% of Americans say they've never met a Muslim, it's time for us to start shaking hands. We should be standing on street corners with "Ask me, I'm Muslim" badges on.

The scary part is that part of the reason for all this fear and anger is the Islamophobia Industry. As an investigative article in "The Tennessean" points out, keeping the American public angry and on edge generates millions of dollars. Steve Emerson alone makes $3,339,000 a year with his site.

Admittedly, the world economy, global warming and environmental concerns - not to mention, in my case, a mortgage and three girls about to go to college - are scaring everyone. Fear makes you do strange things. Which is what I feel is happening in the world today. Whether they are Quran burners or soldiers or terrorists, it’s based on a fear of losing control of life. Of trying to hold on to something that you know is familiar.

Working on the Park51 project – which I have since the inception – has been an incredible journey into facing and understanding fear, especially of the unknown.

Obviously, there is so much fear expressed against the project and against Muslims. But what I think outsiders don’t realize is that there is equally so much fear within the Muslim community. There are Muslims who say they don’t want to go to Park51 because they are worried about men and women praying together, because Shias, Sunnis and Sufis pray together, because there are gay and lesbian Muslims who pray there.

People, Muslim or not, are scared of the government, they’re scared of their neighbors, they’re scared of change and the future and how it might take away everything that’s familiar and move them out of their comfort zones. If you're an immigrant or a minority, you're scared that the majority will seduce and steal your children - as we saw even in "Westside Story" or "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

Even if the future is better – it’s not what we know, it’s not what makes us feel safe – so we don’t like it.

That said, this Muslim Fundamentalist has been blown away by is the level of support we’ve received. It’s almost like – for lots of people – the controversy really made them come alive. It’s made them question their prejudices and their beliefs as a Americans. It's made them remember their experiences as new immigrants. In so many ways, the controversy over Park51 has been a groundbreaking moment – because it’s brought the dialogue into the open.

As a Muslim mother, I started an organization called Muslims for Peace. The idea was to create a unified Muslim voice for Peace – no political agenda – just a Million Muslims standing up for peace and compassion across the different kinds of practice.

I have friends who wear niqaab or beards and I have friends who are gay and lesbian Muslim activists – I even have a friend who’s been going on tv and saying she agrees with religious profiling - but speaking out for peace is something that we could all agree on and come together on. Muslims for Peace started out with a project I launched in November 2001 - after living through September 11 as a Muslim in lower Manhattan - 100% Human (click on stories and pictures to get the whole idea).

(Then, of course, I was a casualty of the economy myself. Since I work in advertising, the canary in the coal mine of the financial industry, I lost work, got cancer... and spent a lot of time not able to get much done. That said, I dealt with my cancer in the same way I deal with Islamophobia. I don't believe in it. So far, so good.)

Recently, I met a guy in a social setting who's a PR wiz. When I told him I was involved with Park51, he sent me a video of a tv appearance in which he said the project would never happen. In later emails, he told me that public opinion is against us and growing more hostile every minute (though we might be saved if we hire him). The 9/11 families would never be behind us.

But on the ground, what I notice is, when I wear my ONE MORE MUSLIM FOR PEACE t-shirt on the street – and around the site of the world trade center, which is after all, my neighborhood, people smile at me. They honk out of cars, they ask where they can get one. My neighbors say, "Can I get a ONE MORE JEW FOR PEACE?" Or "ONE MORE FRIEND OF A MUSLIM FOR PEACE?" The greatest impact 9/11 had was felt in the surrounding streets and schools and parks and homes, and my neighbors - Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist - welcome us with open arms. Especially the swimming pool.

Since I becoming an accidental fundamentalist, I made ONE MORE PERSON FOR PEACE t-shirts and I am trying to figure out how to get cafepress to allow me to have ONE MORE JEW FOR PEACE, ONE MORE BUDDHIST FOR PEACE, ONE MORE CHRISTIAN, ATHEIST, etc without having to pay monthly fees to keep the designs up there. Because a fundamentalist knows that actually everyone wants peace, harmony and a safe place to live a healthy life.

That the fundaments of Islam are the fundaments of every faith.

The only way to escape from Islamophobia is to click my heels together and say my favorite Dalai Lama quote (that I stole from my brother) - the truth we discover as we evolve and the world shrinks and our plastic shopping bags in new york city kill dolphins on the other side of the planet -

"There is no us and them. There is only us."

how to be a leader without really trying...

[the context: i've written this to read to college students attending project nur's leadership conference this weekend from their website: project nur is a distinct and alternative Muslim voice: a civic identity grounded in pluralism and moderate thinking and action. it emphasizes civic action with the goal of forging a cohesive and mutually respectful multicultural community of university students committed to the advancement of human rights, civil rights, social justice, tolerance, understanding, and co-existence.]

i prefaced this talk with a quote from zarina, my middle daughter. when she was 10 or so, we were on our way to school where i was going to talk to her class about ramadan. she asked me, "so when do we find out that we're right?"

i said, "what do you mean?"

she said, "when do we find out that muslims are right and everyone else - like christians and jews and hindus - are wrong? do we find out when we die?"

and i said, "well, everyone is right. it's all the same thing. it's like a language, you can call god, allah, jesus, buddha, krishna and they are all just names for the same thing. all religions are trying to get us to the same place."

so here i am speaking in a muslim context, but i am really speaking to everyone. because we are all in this together.

here goes:


everywhere you look now, business culture is telling you how to be leader. there are books, seminars, cds and dvds all telling you to take charge.

saturday night, my daughter and i walked past a pop-up shop on 23rd st (in new york city) and there were mobiles and signs with affirmations and personal cheers like this:

be an individual
stand up for yourself
go your own way

you know the stuff. you see it all over the place. on posters, printed at the bottom of textbooks.

it occurred to me that the best leaders are the people who become leaders without really trying.

which doesn't mean it's easy. actually, it's really really hard. it's harder than doing every single leadership course and reading every book on it. that's like putting a lot of time into learning how to drive a car without ever knowing what you will drive or where you want to go.

from my experience on the planet, the best leaders are not the ones you imagine. they're not the ones who run the mean girls groups or the bullies in high school. they're not the ones who seem to have tons of friends around them all the time. they're not the ones trying to control anyone at all. a born leader isn't always - in fact, isn't often - a good leader.

real leaders, from my experience, are the people who are dedicated to a cause. who really believe in an idea. who are passionate and committed. so much so that they sometimes seem almost crazy.

in the harvard business school's "primal leadership" handbook, the initial premise - the culmination of their studies, articles and research - is that the "fundamental task of leaders... is to prime good feelings in those they lead. That occurs when a leader creates resonance - reservoir of positivity that frees the best in people."

this is interesting both from a prosaic perspective as well as from a spiritual one. for the purpose of this post, a great leader is someone who - by the example of their integrity and dedication - inspires others to something greater, bigger, more important.

for example, if you are obsessed with knitting and you go out of your way to find and create exceptional wool, and in the process, improve the lives of sheep and the people who raise them; you could find yourself an environmental leader.

from a spiritual perspective, if as a muslim, you take the life of the prophet muhammed (p.b.u.h.) - not necessarily the historical life, but the life and stories that we use as an example and a tool to help us negotiate the world - you find a man who is so devoted to the idea of the oneness of God and teaching compassion, honesty and tolerance that others eventually followed him.

it should be obvious here that a leader isn't in it for the money.

not that there's anything wrong with making money - but the power comes from the dedication to something bigger than personal profit - that's what draws people to you.

in my personal experience, i found i've become a leader when i've clearly stated what i believe in and how it makes me feel. people are drawn to that, they respond to it. not because i am trying to stand out, but because we are all humans and we recognize the universal emotions amongst us. when one expresses those feelings honestly and clearly, even to the point of vulnerability, people feel moved.

the most important lesson i learned from advertising came from a neurologist called donald calne. he said, “the essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.” (his book is called, “within reason: rationality and human behavior”)

the next step, once you are a leader, or perhaps when it's thrust upon you - as i found, when i suddenly became executive creative director of a large team at mccann-erickson - is what you do with it.

it seems that the biggest stumbling block for leaders is assertiveness. clearly and simply telling people what to do - whether they support you or sneer at you. most leaders, or people placed in positions of power, have trouble negotiating between over-assertiveness or under-assertiveness. under-assertive people become bullied by the people who they are meant to lead. they try too hard to be liked - they end by lacking direction.

in my case, i went out and bought a book called, "the girl's guide to being the boss (without being a bitch.)" or the chick in charge... i was trying to get a group of hostile people to work together, somewhat unsuccessfully.

and we all know the problem with over-assertive people - you've been avoiding those kids on the playground since you were four or five.

in forbes online recently, there was an interview with a neurobiologist about the brain chemistry of leaders. the interesting find was that as leaders become more successful, their testosterone levels rose, activating their dopamine systems. this means they become less empathetic to others and more likely to have a sense of infallibility.

the challenge for leaders, as they become successful, is arrogance.

we don't need brain scientists to tell us that, just history. or just the newspapers.

again, there's a spiritual side to this. just read lao tzu's "the art of war" - "a leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." as muslims, we can take our example from the prophet as well, a great leader is selfless. it's not personal glory, it's the greater good.

bizarrely, as someone who works in advertising, i've always felt that selflessness has to be the starting point in every conversation.

i still try and sell stuff and often stuff of questionable tangible value. but i always try and find the larger story in every product. i try and find how it is part of the greater good. i might be working on a fragrance for calvin klein, skincare for avon or clothing for jennifer lopez, but i always try and approach it by thinking about the message it creates for society. sometimes, it's as simple as feeling better about yourself - and thus being kinder and more peaceful - in a crazy world. other times, it's about social or environmental responsibility.

i started my own advertising agency with the idea that it is possible to use the forces of capitalism for good. that it wasn't always about getting the consumer to love your brand, it was about loving your consumer. so if you were selling a lipstick, you were thinking about women and girls' self-esteem and confidence. if you were selling a pair of jeans to an african-american guy, you were thinking about his role in society and helping him get educated and stay empowered. i got involved with park51 - the lower manhattan muslim community center project - because i felt it was crucial to have an interfaith, non-sectarian space with a muslim starting point.

of course, i wanted it - and we needed it - in my neighborhood.

all that said, in my mind, there's a pitfall to all the conversation about leadership today. especially in the workplace. it's flipside to the '50s and early '60s where people did what they were told and often didn't question it. they worked, got married, had babies, watched them grow up, retired and died. they tended not to switch careers or get divorced or go back to college to re-think. they tended to lack perspective and larger goals.

but today, it's the opposite. it's all opposition. with all the go-your-own-way and take-a-stand theories, it's hard to get the boat moving at all. too many people are overwhelmed with the do-your-own-thing mentality and it takes years for them to figure out what that thing is. they flip-flop. they don't know how to fit into an organization and they don't know how to follow. my mother quoted a native american phrase, "there are too many chiefs and not enough indians."

too many people are trying to be leaders - and for the wrong reasons, more out of a desire for personal glory than a desire to change things for the better for everyone. too many people are leaping up and taking over because they want control, or they think they do, but they're not sure where they're going.

most people would be better leaders if they learned how to be better followers. how to listen more closely to what leaders were saying and choose smarter ones to follow. how to impact leaders - because as a follower, you give the leader his/her power - to stand up for the greater good. if you don't like the message, let the leader know, especially if it's a message that pretends to speak for you. don't let your leaders talk about violence or intolerance.

as a follower, if you believe in your leader, stand up for him or her. blog, twitter, facebook - the internet is a free and fast way to connect to a wide range of people. it's a communication platform. but what's even more useful - show up - attend events. create critical mass. be a body. not just a wired "slack activist."

in the days before the internet, people used to say, "you vote with your feet." or "your wallet." in today's world, that's even more powerful. go there. don't just join the facebook group, boycott (or buy) the brand. march. sit-in. talk to people.

malcolm gladwell wrote in the new yorker about why social media wouldn't have - couldn't have - created the civil rights movement in the u.s. because social media can often win minds, but it can't always win hearts. it can't often drag us away from our laptops and inspire us to take risks in the real world. "social media alone doesn't inspire the kind of high-risk behaviour required for social activism." we need to be more than "slack activists" and make things happen.

what was frustrating for me, as a muslim, was that after sept 11 - and even today - people going on about how muslims don't speak out about the violence and intolerance. i started a not-for-profit, 100 percent human and muslims for peace, especially to create that unified public voice. i don't want to argue - muslims DO speak out - but we need to do it more. and we need to speak out even more about the people who represent us. yes, on blogs and twitters and articles, but also in real life.

so in a sense, yes, every single one of us has a responsibility to be a leader - a thought leader - to talk to everyone we know about what we believe, at home, at work, in social settings. we all have a responsibility to do something that will make the world a better, kinder place because that's why we're here in the first place.

(oh, and i just answered the question - "why are we here?" - as well)

so - back to the beginning - the best leaders are the ones who aren't really trying. they're just trying to be better people.