On November 15, I participated in a locally-held, national event co-sponsored by Jewish and Muslim student groups called Health Consciousness and Religion [https://www.ffeu.org/index.htm]. The event, held at Hillel on UPenn’s campus, was a talk about Kosher and Halal, and looking at both systems not just in their similarities, but in how their scope goes beyond the mundane boundaries of governing what a Jew or a Muslin can or cannot eat. Instead, such topics as environmental stewardship and low-impact eating were examined within the constructs of Kosher and Halal. I participated in a short talk with Rabbi Joel Nickerson, the Senior Jewish Educator/Rabbi-in-Residence at Hillel. Here are some of Rabbi Joel’s notes:

Humans will have meat for their food and they will kill to get it.

• We started off as vegetarians in Genesis: “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earthm and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food.” [1:29]
• Yet, after the flood, in Chapter 9, humans are permitted to eat all food on earth, including animals, yet already with some restriction.

By viewing the Jewish dietary laws as an ethical system, we come to see that Judaism has worked out a system by which we can maintain our lust for animal flesh, yet not be dehumanized in the process.

This is done through 3 basic rules:

• Choice of animal food is severely limited – startling how few aniumals there are to eat, according to Jewish law, with no restrictions on plants and fruits.
• Animals may not be killed by just anyone – only a qualified few, whose skill and religious recognition of the slaughter process, are allowed to slaughter.
• Ensures that those who slaughter do not become brutalized through regular killing.
• Even after belong ritually slaughtered, blood must be drained before they can be consumed.
• humans have the right to nourishment, but not to the life of others
• Humans have the right to nourishment, but not to the life of others.

Bible’s method of taming killer instinct in humans is through dietary laws - not about hygiene. Bible goes to great lengths to offer rationale for dietary laws, focusing on the holiness of these commandments.

• How do you define holiness?
• Separation (from idolators and other cultures), emulating God

My thanks to Roxana and Penn’s MSA for inviting us out for the talk. We enjoyed and benefited from all of the student input as well as Rabbi Nickson’s words. It allowed us to look at how we eat as people of faith through a larger lens. We look forward to engaging in more efforts such as this.

Many thanks to Thomas and his class at the William Penn Charter School – an educational institution built on Quaker values, for inviting me out to speak on Islam again. I have spoken before at William Penn and am always impressed with Tom’s class. This term, Tom was teaching a class centered around the theme of Peoples of the Book. The main text they were reading for the class was Karen Armstrong’s piece.

I spoke on the concept of the People of the Book, namely Jews and Christians, and how they were spoken of in the Qur’an and mentioned in the Sunnah but I also elaborated on the cultural knowledge of the pagan Arabs and what they knew of in terms of stories from the Torah or the Bible. A great deal of Orientalist scholarship has tried to paint the Arabian peninsula as being more isolated than it was. More recent scholarship counters that despite paganism and idolatry being a prevalent practice amongst the Arab tribes of Arabia pre-7th Century, the narratives of Moses, Jesus and Abraham, just to name a few, were known to these Arabs and thus were relevant to them. We also examined how not only is Islam seen by other religious traditions but more importantly, how does Islam see itself in the context of the People of the Book.

Continuing about the legacy of Biblical stories in the Arabian peninsula, without their cultural familiarity of these stories the Qur’an’s relevancy would have been greatly dimmished, hence giving rise to new and alternative scholarship that suggests the Arabian peninsula was more connected to its neighbors, primarily through trade, than has been previously suggested.

I also fielded questions from a number of students, with topics ranging from 9/11 [a perennial question] to how do Muslims negotiate marriage with non-Muslims. We also discussed the role that religion plays in informing social and cultural participation in religion. One of the students, whose family hails from a historical Muslim country, described his family dynamic which consisted of three generations in his household: his grandfather, his parents and he and his siblings. The grandfather still practiced, praying 5 times a day and so forth with the student’s parents being more lax in their religious consistency and finally the student, who said that he didn’t not think much about religion at all. All three generations seemed to function under one roof but more to the above point about culture, we had discussed whether or not, if his family had stayed in their country of origin, would he have been more apt to have had some form of communal practice. By coming and staying in America [i.e., his identity forming here] and his parents not being full-time practitioners, their religious practice tapered off to reflect their environment, where there were no secondary or tertiary enforcements to inform his religious consciousness.

We also discussed the phenomenon of Islam in the Blackamerican community. As a case point, illustrating the mass familiarity Blackamericans have with Islam, one of Blackamerican students in the course stated his grandfather was a Muslim. A brief talk was given to the unique status that Blackamerican Muslims hold as an indigenous American community, whose door is [currently] open to Islam and Blackamericans can freely choose to be Muslim without having to sacrifice anything in the public sphere.

I look forward to going back again. I congratulate Tom on running such an informative course for his students to learn about the many religious traditions we have in America.

I was honored last night to be asked to attend the Town Square Meeting at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Center City Philadelphia. The meeting was presented by Philadelphia Green and was about the merging of faith-based organizations and the stewardship of those religious groups and how they are or can be engaged in environmental activities. It quickly came to my attention that Muslims at least in this area have been woefully absent. Absent either due to ignorance of such activities or because it’s simply not on the radar. For the concerns of this post, I will address the latter.

Like so many topics and events today, Muslims seem to either be swept along by the Zeitgeist of the day or bypassed all together. This is an issue that we as a Muslim community need to address more seriously if we wish to have our voice taken seriously – otherwise, it will be taken away. By Zeitgeist I am referring to the trend that many Muslims allow popular consensus or dominant voices dictate to us what is or is not important. One example that comes to mind is a conversation I had with a Muslim brother who said we needed to take a tougher stance towards homosexuality. When I inquired as to what he meant, he was referring to the unions of gay couples and homosexual marriages. He was quite passionate about the topic and felt that Islam was somehow being eroded by this lapse in what he saw as social immorality. I calmly reminded the brother to consider the following: homosexuality is not permissible in Islam. God has made this readily apparent and therefore he should take comfort in this incontrovertible truth. In other words, the question has been answered by the Highest Authority, therefore why approach the topic as if it could be reopened for discussion [and ultimately, permissibility]. (more…)