Transcriber: Almokhtar Bukhamsin Reviewer: Jenny Lam-Chowdhury
When you're deeply focused on your work,
you forget how it looks to others.
Unless, like me, you're an agnostic Jew, (Laughter)
what you're deeply focused on is Islam,
and you've just finished writing
a biography of Muhammad.
And your audience might be just a little bit nervous. (Laughter)
This photo was taken this past summer
at the Shaikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi,
and yes, that's me in the middle.
I never imagined myself in an abaya,
but in was required for entrance,
so I reminded myself
that clothes do not make the woman,
and took a deep breath.
There was no bolt from the blue,
in fact, it felt almost elegant
and since the mosque is very beautiful,
I posted the photo online,
only to find that some of the reactions were kind of –
puzzling.
There were Muslims, saying, basically,
Yay! You've become a Muslim!
And then, there were Jews saying, basically,
Uyy, you've become a Muslim. (Laughter)
This seemed a rather large conclusion
to draw from a snapshot.
So, the photo evidently invites interpretation
and the question is, why?
What were the underlying assumptions here?
If I were to put this on right now, for instance –
Is this an act of honor?
Or is it one of disrespect?
Is it a gesture of sympathy?
Or is it merely presumptuous?
Or does it make no difference what I say at this moment
because all you can focus on
is the fact that I'm wearing an Islamic head scarf.
In which case, why is it so distracting?
How this is seen, has little to do with me.
It's a function of your preconceptions
and expectations,
and of the agenda that you then
attribute to me.
And that's a loaded word: Agenda.
It implies ulterior motives.
In which case... let's look at my motives.
To the question of how come I decided
to write about Muhammad,
my immediate answer is: "How not?"
We're talking about
one of the most influential figures of all time!
A man who radically changed his world,
and is still changing ours,
so how can so many of us
know so little about him?
How come just the idea of writing about him
seems to be fraught with tension?
Welcome to my territory...
The vast and volatile arena,
in which politics and religion intersect.
Consider the renewed atmosphere
of distrust and bitterness this past summer, for instance,
when an obnoxious little Youtube video caricaturing Muhammad
sparked protests leading to dozens of deaths.
There were any number of agendas involved here,
none of them good.
That of the small minded bigots
who made the video in the first place.
Small minded bigots being a redundant phrase,
if ever there was one... (Laughter)
Of the Saudi-financed TV station in Cairo
that picked it up and made a big show of it,
thus ensuring that while maybe 30 people
had seen it before,
now millions would!
Of the once reputable news magazine,
trying to revive its fading leadership,
by implying that all Muslims worldwide
were rioting in the streets,
as apposed to a few hundred extremists
and often just a few dozen.
It's amazing what you can do by cropping a photograph.
There is the leader of Hezbollah, under attack for his support
of the Syrian regime's brutal war against his own citizens,
trying to redeem himself as a defender of Islam.
And the Pakistan Minister of Railroads,
trying to hide his corruption and ineptitude,
by offering a hundred thousand dollar bounty.
And the usual American Islamo-phobes,
putting up crude "us and them" posters
in the New York and DC subways.
So many people jumping on the bandwagon.
But where was Muhammad himself in all this?
Where was the man who listened to the Quran telling him
– and by extension all Muslims,
to pay no attention to taunts and mockery.
Ignore them, it keeps saying,
let them be, turn your face away,
or in the words of Jesus: "Turn the other cheek."
While Muhammad has certainly been distorted by his detractors,
he sometimes seems to be equally distorted
by the loudest of his self-proclaimed defenders.
Which makes it all the more urgent
that we know who he really was.
Yet the millions, if not billions of words
that have been written about him
often seem to obscure as much as they reveal.
The more of them I plowed through,
the more it felt as though he were being weighed down,
by the sheer accumulated mass of them.
What I wanted
was a real feel for the man himself.
I wanted the vitality and complexity
of a full life lived.
I wanted, in short, to see Muhammad whole.
And this meant steering clear of a virtual minefield of agendas.
Including piety and sentiment,
and stereotype and judgmentalism.
So even as the hundreds of research volumes
piled up on my floor,
my most valuable research tool
may have been this one word reminder,
pinned beside my desk:
Think!
Take the pivotal moment of Islam, for instance,
which is what happened to Muhammad
one night in the year 610,
on a mountain just outside Mecca.
He'd gone up there, it seems,
in the hope of, perhaps, a quiet moment of insight.
The last thing he expected
was the blinding weight of revelation.
So, what struck me
in the earliest account we have of that night,
was not even so much what happened,
as what did not happen.
Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain,
as though walking on air.
He did not run down, shouting:
"Hallelujah!" and "Bless the Lord!"
He did not radiate light and joy.
There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres,
no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him!
Not even the whole of the Quran fully revealed,
but only five brief verses.
In short, he did none of the things
that might make it easy to cry foul,
to put down the whole account as an invention,
a cover for some things mundane as personal ambition.
Quite the opposite.
In his own reported words,
he was convinced at first that what had happened,
couldn't have been real.
At best he'd thought that it had to be a hallucination,
his own mind working against him.
At worst, possession,
and he'd been seized by an evil jinn,
a spirit out to deceive him,
even crush the life out of him.
In fact, his first instinct was to leap off the highest cliff,
and escape the terror of what he'd experienced,
by putting an end to all experience.
Whether you believe the words he heard that night
came from inside himself or from outside,
it seems absolutely clear
that Muhammad did experience.
And that he did so with a force
that would transform his sense of himself and his world.
So that initial panicked dis-orientation,
that sundering of everything familiar,
that feeling of being overwhelmed
by a force larger than anything the mind can comprehend,
strikes me as utterly real!
It's the only response that makes sense,
it's the only sane response,
the only human one.
And this is what allowed me to begin to see Muhammad,
not as a symbol,
and not even as a subject,
but as a man,
a complex human being.
And to follow the extraordinary arc of his life,
from neglected orphan to acclaimed leader.
From a marginalized outsider to the ultimate insider.
From powerlessness to power.
One thing I knew from the beginning, however,
if I was to do justice to this remarkable story,
if I was to bring it alive on the page,
it had to be written in good faith.
Now, I do realize there may be a certain irony,
in an agnostic standing here
talking about good faith,
but there's been so much bad faith
in every sense of the term,
and we have to get beyond it.
All of us.
Whether we're secular or religious,
theist or atheist or, anywhere in between,
we are all impacted
by the words and actions of extremists.
What happens in one tiny corner of the world,
now reverberates globally.
But whether we live in Tehran or in Tel Aviv,
in New York or in New Delhi,
we do have a choice.
We can refuse.
Refuse, that is,
to allow ourselves to be lead
by anger and suspicion.
Refuse to allow ourselves to be manipulated
by extremists of all stripes.
Refuse their narrow vision,
their comic-book distortions,
their miserably small minds.
We have to reclaim the narrative.
The full narrative.
Beyond stereotypes,
beyond snap judgements,
beyond head scarves.
Just as we need to see Muhammad whole,
so we need to start seeing each other whole.
In good faith.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.