LOVE AND FAITH

[Yaaluwa]

…When I was a child, I experienced the two different rereadings of Islam firsthand. As the child of a single mother, there was a time when I grew up with two different grandmothers. At the first glance these two women were so alike: they were both Turkish, they came from similar class backgrounds, and both were Muslims. Yet, my father's mother was a follower of the religion of fear. The Jalal side of Allah appealed to her more than anything else. She taught me about the patronizing, paternal, and celestial gaze always watching me from above to then make a note of all the sins I committed down here. I came back from her house slightly traumatized, unable to go to the bathroom for fear of being seen naked by Allah, ashamed of the body given to me.

But shortly after, I moved to the house of my other grandmother and thus entered an iridescent universe replete with folk Islam and superstitions. This was an old woman who poured melted lead to ward off the evil eye, read the coffee cups and taught me not to step on the thresholds where the djinn danced at night. She was a follower of the religion of love. For her Allah wasn't a God to be feared but a God to be loved. Indeed, the celestial gaze watched us constantly, she agreed, but it also blinked from time to time, just like any other eye would. Those times of blinking were the moments of freedom when we were invisible to God. "Sure, the religious authorities are rigid, and yes, some teachings are constraining, but do not worry," she would say, "for they are bricks, you are water. They will stay put, you will flow." She is the one who taught me all about water. Love and faith could be just like water, so fluidlike. I doubt if I have entirely managed to follow the path of the water in love and faith, but eventually, that was the model my fiction writing followed….

Elif Shafak, Women writers, Islam and the Ghost of Zuleikha.

http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/ ... -zulaikha/

found through links in a discussion of the new movie INCEPTION which has generated a lot of lively discussion among dream studies folks as well as others this week.

I don't agree with everyting she says. But there is much food for thought in it.

[Jamal]

Yet, my father's mother was a follower of the religion of fear. The Jalal side of Allah appealed to her more than anything else. She taught me about the patronizing, paternal, and celestial gaze always watching me from above to then make a note of all the sins I committed down here. I came back from her house slightly traumatized, unable to go to the bathroom for fear of being seen naked by Allah, ashamed of the body given to me.

You're going to find this in all religions. There are lots of paranoid people. I have observed that for some reason these people, women especially, feel it their duty to pass their paranoias onto children. It's like a virus or something that wants to propagate itself.

I personally even suspect there's a grandparent/child gender dynamic in this. For some reason grandmothers interacting with the children of their daughters tend to be more aggressive than with the children of their daughters. It may be a territorial thing were they're subtly challenging the authority of their daughter in law.