The sound of the muezzin in Oxford

Issues of respect and difference

Sipping my coffee today in our local preferred café, my wife Akasha read to me a report in the newspaper the “Daily Telegraph” about a controversy apparently stirred up in Oxford, the city of “dreaming spires”. It concerns a proposal to allow a mosque near the centre of the city to broadcast the muezzin from the minaret, to summon the faithful to prayer. People were complaining variously about the noise and the affront to Christianity in that most Christian of English cities, a formal citadel of Anglicanism and the establishment, and the headquarters of Charles I in the English Civil War – very symbolic, I thought.

If you’ve spent time in Oxford, you’d be aware of the glorious panorama of medieval and early modern stone towers of the colleges and churches, those dreaming spires, many chiming the time through the day or ringing the bells for chapel, also summoning the faithful, or dinner for hungry students in halls surrounded by portraits of the great and learned of the colleges’ history, often clergymen. The city centre can seem like a step into the past, a great seat of learning paternalistically overseen by the vigilant Church, as of course it was at least until the later 20th century.

Thus, I was struck by the irony of certain Oxford citizenry protesting at this apparent threat to their peace. Yes, we’ll tolerate Islam, but not in my backyard. Why not, I thought, in this age of religious toleration, why can we not have Islamic practice side by side with Christian? I thought of the beautiful sounds of the muezzin in Tunisia, almost haunting to my western ears, echoing across the city.

Yet this subject of accepting Muslim practice side by side with mainstream western practices is certainly stirring people’s feelings. I was in a workshop recently where people were discussing reactions in particular places to the use of a piggy bank and how it was being stopped because it offended Muslims. What, they said, can’t we use our piggy bank! It’s a childhood special, that simple little way that we were given to save our pocket money for something special! The consensus was, if “they” don’t like it, “they” can “go home” (home being somewhere else abroad, not “their” actual home).

Again, putting on my history hat (I used to teach history, if you hadn’t gathered by now), I am reminded of how the Austro-Hungarian Empire gradually fell apart in the late 19th century, eventually to be engulfed in the First World War and then Nazism. When one particular nationality in a very multi-national empire was granted a right, the others would protest in Parliament such that Parliamentary rule would become impossible. You might also think of the inability of certain Kenyans to accept a disputed election and fall to killing each other. Life becomes impossible. The inability of people to accept and live side by side with one another, the intolerance of one group or tribe or belief system for another.

Thus does the human experience of separateness get played out. One of our great challenges as humans, in my view, is that we find ourselves to be different from one another: different genders, transgenders, sexual orientations, families, classes, groups, friendships, styles of self-expression, age, ethnicity, religion, dress, facial expression, personality, look, tone of voice, values, belief system, ideology, food, drink, body shape, physical ability, culture. Take a walk around London today. It has become a massively varied city, representing just about every part of the planet, hugely different from the rest of the UK. That’s how we show up, at the superficial level.

It is so seductively easy, even for the most liberally minded, to get caught up in thinking of us as separate and then to divide ourselves from others. You might ask yourself how often you catch yourself having a view, a judgement about one or more of your fellow humans. You might have an experiment and notice how often in the next day you find yourself in the mode of forming an unfavourable opinion about something to do with one or more of your fellow humans. For starters, how about your partner, or children, or parents!

My wife has a wonderful expression: “look for the jewel” or as my guru says, “See God in each other”. Imagine that the person whom you are seeing has at their core a piece of heaven, a golden centre of pure, unadulterated delight, full of love – like you really. They may not know it, but that is who they are. Each person is like that, even though they may not be aware of it. Peel away the layers and our essential common humanity steps out from under its wraps. How often have you had the experience that as you’ve spent time around someone you hadn’t really known before, and maybe didn’t have good opinions of, and found them to be charming or least not what you’d expected?

As I wrote about in an article, we constantly project ourselves on to others: all perception is projection. What we meet “out there” is simply a projection of our inner state. So if we experience certain others as different, alien and hostile, that is a reflection of a disowned part of ourselves, which we’ve separated off and “put out there” in the world to take issue with. From this perspective, that Muslim is a part of me.

What we need to be doing is be taking responsibility for our projections and deal with how we are creating this experience, while honouring the essential value and worth of our fellow humans. Of course we need to declare our boundaries for the sake of being able to live together but, for me, we need to be looking to ourselves in how this experience is occurring: awareness of and surrender of ego to the experience of inner peace, and thus world peace. And I am reminded that the word “Islam” means surrender - to God - which for me is letting go of ego in favour of our higher self. In disputing with others, we are only disputing with ourselves.
 

(c) John Gloster-Smith 2008