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.
