Settling and Unsettling

I just came back from a delightful Saturday brunch here on campus at KA. At boarding schools the weekend brunches are more than just feeding times, of course, but very much about social interaction and discourse—long, lingering, lazy meals without the dread of the usual bells and responsibilities. This morning I spent some time with some teachers, and then went and joined Hasan and Hamzah for chatting practice.

As we discussed our respective plans for the upcoming winter break (lots of sleeping, mansaf and soccer for them!) Hasan said, “Mr. John, I have been thinking about class, and about what we are doing, and about Howard Zinn and Kevin Carter.” (Zinn and Carter are two men we studied in the longago first two weeks of the school year, two men who approach the world from diametrically opposed views, and offer us two worldview-poles from which to survey the vast historical landscape. Carter killed himself due to the ugliness and despair he saw as unconquerable in the world, while Zinn (famously in my classes) has “insist[ed] on hope.” As we sat there with our omelettes and juice, we discussed suicide bombers, radical fundamentalism, and how Hasan views these issues through the lenses of Carter and Zinn. In many ways, it was just another reminder of how exciting and interesting it is as I settle in to life in this school in Jordan.

But it was more than just another brunch. This last week had been an important litmus test for me in terms of my teaching, the students’ receptivity, sensitivity, and willingness to absorb and apply historical information. You see, in the last two weeks we tackled religion. Oh sure, we have explored religions in the ancient world since mid-September, relishing in the polytheistic arts of the Ancient Near East. But in the last two weeks we tackled the biggies—the Big Four. We discussed Hinduism and Buddhism one week. And then this week we discussed Christianity and Islam. It is natural to wield statistics as one embarks on these oft-treacherous seas: approximately 6% of the world is Buddhist, 13% of the world is Hindu, 21% is Muslim, and 33% is Christian. But then again—I didn’t want to wave the statistics around and make it into the competition that it can become. This was going to be tricky—as we entered the Common Era in our study of history (formerly known as A.D. Anno Domini, a worthy attempt to put everybody on a level playing field of sorts) we really couldn’t ignore these religions or squander an opportunity to really dig down deep and understand them, both theologically and how they have affected history.

So first we spent time on the nature of what religion really is. Think about it—how do you define it? Wow—talk about a challenge. I had some definitions from the last 200 years that we assessed, and all felt clumsy or sentimental, or hollow. We decided that religion was first of all a personal experience and a sacred experience, and a search for meaning and purpose in life. This enabled us to see how that covered everyone from the builders of Stonehenge to the Egyptians and the Greeks and Romans. But of course, as the one who gets to push the envelope, I reminded them that religion has two faces—a personal face and a public face. We discussed in class how when the transition comes that whole societies seek collective meaning and purpose, the path can lead to a union of religion and politics. Now—that is part and parcel of any good United States history class! You give ‘em The Crucible to read and in no time they are shouting along with Thomas Jefferson in 1790: “there needs to be a wall of separation between religion and politics!” That’s not hard at all. But that was a turning point in 1790 and not the norm at all.

But in this area of the world, and in many, many other corners of our world, that is not such a simple equation. Oh, just a nice tangent that kind of fits in, well sorta. Sarah, a very intuitive student, commented about the notion of the SPQR “logo” ancient Rome adopted (it means “The Senate and the People of Rome”) that this—well, here in her words, “SPQR is like a math equation for the Romans. The Romans were Greek wannabes, and this connection of the Senate and the Roman people was like a math equation, and like the Greeks, the Romans thought math was like a harmony.” After we checked that everyone understood this, we discussed how she came up with this kind of insight. Of course, that is exactly the kind of synthesis a teacher hungers for, and anyway, I thought of that example just now, because while to me a separation of church and state makes good sense, but to many in this world, that union is actually embraced as a kind of “harmony,” like the SPQR that Sarah understood.

So anyway, we discussed how we would approach the four religions. We discussed the differences between studying a religion and studying about a religion. I said we needed to imagine what the followers of the religions understood and professed. I emphasized I was not trying to convert anyone (actually in this part of the world that is often a truly punishable offense) or get anyone to quit a religion. But clearly, these religions must be studied if we are to understand the contemporary world at all! So we needed to understand theological tenets, and how these religions expanded and affected cultures.

Most religions involve how gods intervene in daily lives. Most religions involve miracles. These can be anything from Hindu bodily reincarnation, to a reborn Buddhist soul, to a burning bush to Moses, to Jesus’ resurrection, to Gabriel’s revelations to Muhammad. Of course, when you study your own religion, these miracles are a major part of that faith, that special, sincere strength it requires to transform your life and sanctify your time and space. We discussed how historians cannot really study miracles—historians look for proof of events and come up with theories and speculations. But what we can study are the manifestations and effects of religions beliefs on people’s behaviors.

Hinduism and Buddhism were not very “thorny” to study—simply because we don’t many here. There are several teachers who come from a Hindu or Buddhist background, but that isn’t too touchy. But in light of the British teacher in the Sudan who recently escaped who-knows-what with the teddy bear incident, I was very careful about my words, the texts I chose, but also trying to be a responsible world history teacher.

It was interesting discussing the theology of Christianity, since it became a good give-and-take about the commonalities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I used a model op-ed writer Thomas Friedman devised in which he took those three religions and refracted them through a lens like the company “Microsoft Word”—he said that Judaism was like “Abraham 1.0,” Christianity was like “Abraham 2.0,” and Islam was like “Abraham 3.0,” It made for a good model and an engaging discussion.

Hasan, the brunch partner from earlier today, didn’t agree with me when I said that Muhammad was “enlightened.” He said firmly that “Allah revealed” these things to Muhammad, and enlightenment wasn’t enough. Now we got to talk about word choice, and the power of those choices. I said that I deliberately chose the word “enlightened,” because I had used the same verb in discussing all of the Big Four (plus Judaism as well). I wanted us to see similarities and not just cultivate zeal about one faith.

That afternoon I went over to the clinic on campus where my friend Zeina’s office is (by the way, Zeina’s mother had made some pastrami for her family and sent along a care package for me!! Yippeee!!). On my way out, I saw some magazines there, you know the way every doctor’s office in the world has, and on top was a November issue of The Economist that caught my eye. The cover read, “The New Wars of Religion.” Like any other desperate, self-respecting teacher would, I grabbed the magazine under my blazer and left the clinic.

It was a long article—18 pages in all—and if I assign more than 8 pages a week to my students, the hue and cry is alarming. So I chose the best pages of the article, and the next day in class, I had a sentence from the article on the board: “Faith will unsettle politics everywhere this century.” We discussed the warning of this concise 7-word sentence. I told them about an article in 1999 in the very same magazine that ran a mock-obituary of God. The Economist had decided at the end of the 20th century that the power of religion had ceased to be important in modern politics. Now, in the fall of 2007, in this 18-page article the writer decided that they were wrong.

Even in my more difficult class, this article yielded fabulous discussion, and we looked in the article for evidence, and we weighed the evidence, and kept coming back to the fact that our historical study is not just fun stories about a dusty past—they were talking in the article about the new evangelism of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and that there are warning signs about inter- and intra-faith conflict around the world, and we kept coming back to those 7 words—it will unsettle politics everywhere (gulp) this century. One student, Samiha, asked, “So what can we do about it?” Well there just so happened to be a man on campus last week, a man from Boston, who works for an NGO called “Empower Peace,” and we invited him to come to our class, and we talked about ways that these KA students might do to somehow turn that statement around. I just sat and watched as Assad (the guy from Empower Peace) fielded questions and discussed meaningful ways teenagers can maybe lay the groundwork for a more settled world. Assad and Empower Peace had come to KA this week to host a video-conference (this last Thursday) in which 9 of our students offered presentations and answered questions from 500 United States students watching from 30 schools in the US (at the same time! I know! Isn’t that exciting??!)

So—the two weeks of theological and sociological exploration were good. No angry phone calls. Interesting discussions and busting of some stereotypes. They will have a test tomorrow. We’ll see where in the layers of ITCH this finds us!

A capstone of the week was an invitation to Randa’s house (a Jordanian Christian administrator here at KA) for a Christmas party last night. She served a dish like a sweetened cream-of-wheat she said was traditional at Christmas--in honor of St. Barbara who did something with wheat fields. But the emphasis on wheat reminded me how in the Middle Ages it was common to decorate for Christmas with wrapped sheaves of wheat--this was a harbinger of the wheat that becomes bread that becomes an element in communion, a reminder of Jesus' life and death. Somehow that made remember how The Cloisters in New York decorates with wheat and made me think of Christmas parties in New York.

Of course Christmas parties in December are usually the norm for me, but in a world in which I am in the minority, it was very special to be in someone’s home, celebrating a holiday I have known forever, with new friends, settling in to this life, more conscious than usual of the nature of settling and unsettling.