Identity and Belonging

IDENTITY AND BELONGING

It’s Friday the 13^th, November 2015, around 6 PM, I’m on my way to dinner at friends in East Hampton when the phone rings. I stopped my car in their driveway and answered the call.  It’s my sister from overseas. She’s crying. Something terrible happened, Paris is under a state of emergency, and France’s frontiers are closed. People are killed, it’s a massacre. My heart drops and my first question was: Islamists? Unfortunately yes, she said. 

Immediately, my thoughts go to the victims and just as quickly to the perpetrators, a group of murderous psychopaths who call themselves Muslims, and in so doing they just smeared the very identity of a huge population of some 1.7 Billion people, who follow Islam, the world’s largest and fastest growing religion. And I am one of them!

Why am I telling you this?  Because, I am often faced with calls to speak up in defense of Islam. Moderate Muslims, we are told, should make their voices heard in their condemnation of Islamic terrorism; as if their silence was an abdication of their identity. In that regard, I admit I felt some guilt myself for a long time.

Identity, however, is a complex construct that is often difficult to tease apart. Identity is also the source of much pride and prejudice for many, who live to guard theirs at all cost, and in so doing, create separation and exclusion. I have come to believe that to heal the world; we must connect with our humanity and experience our Oneness.  That is not to say, that we cannot treasure our individuality or that we need to shed the mantle of identity altogether. But I am saying we cannot value one without the other.  

After all, why should it matter what our backgrounds and origins are?  Matters of birth, race, and religion are merely accidents of geography and artificial boundaries, nothing more.  With human migration steadily rising, national identity is increasingly muddled, which flies in the face of those who still want to return to race and creed purity.

For many years, I was unsure which box, or boxes, I belonged to because I am a blend of diverse elements. This explains that my identity was often a source of confusion that I experienced as a matter of either pride or shame depending on the place and the circumstances. It could be something I openly admitted to, ignored or artfully danced around. 

I was born in Morocco, of Muslim parents, a mix of both Berber and Arab descent.  Morocco itself is struggling with its identity as it is part of Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, the Arab and the Islamic Worlds.  For many decades, Morocco was occupied by Western powers: Portugal, Spain and most recently France.  Its official language is Arabic but French is everywhere, and for all intents and purposes, its second official language. There are also different Berber dialects spoken in the rural areas.

I was educated in French schools exclusively and raised like a French girl who happened to live in a majority Muslim country. Hence, growing up, my identity was not only a source of puzzlement, it was also and mostly a burden for a young westernized woman yearning to be free and not be caged because of her gender.

Coming to America offered me the promise and opportunity to free myself from the shackles of mingled labels and limiting beliefs. I wanted to be part of the American fabric, melt in its magnificent melting pot and integrate the larger identity.  And all was good and well until 9/11… followed months later by the war in Iraq. Two events that felt like I was slapped in the face again with the same questions of identity and belonging I thought I’d left behind. 

Like a fish pulled out of the water and gasping with each breath, I felt ashamed of an identity I was sure I had shed two decades before. I became concerned about how Muslims were being perceived and troubled by the growth of Islamophobia.  I believed I couldn’t stay silent and had to speak up against the atrocities committed by Islamic extremists and the horrors they perpetrated in the name of Islam.

And so there I was, hardly a Muslim or an Arab, except for the fact that I was stamped with such labels at birth. I didn’t practice the religion and I didn’t speak the language with proficiency and I lived two thirds of my life in the US and was thence thoroughly Americanized. Still, with all its many imperfections, I did love the culture I was born in, I did value my heritage, and I did connect with its beauty, richness and vibrancy.  And so I did want to make my voice heard. I wanted to put a different face on what my fellow Americans perceived Muslims to be.

However, as I was reflecting on how best to do that, I was struck with the realization that I did not have to defend Islam. Islam does not need defending; it needs to step out of the medieval times it’s been stuck in, certainly. Otherwise, like every religious doctrine, it preaches Love, Peace, and Tolerance at its core.  Admittedly, it is also tainted with contradictions, and in some instances even advocates violence, bigotry and prejudice depending on which verse or article one happens to quote or misquote. 

I also recognized that all religious texts, without exception, share the same contradictions. Their imagery, symbolism and messages could easily be used to validate any principle and justify any action.  After all are they not all based on orally transmitted myths and beliefs? Were they not all corrupted because written centuries after their revelation by men for men for the purpose of building and consolidating power? Have they not all led to killings and massacres of some kind or another throughout human history?

So why should I want to speak up on account of my identity when the only identity that matters to me now is that I am unquestionably a member of the Human Race? And why should I defend my religion when I only believe in Love, as the only True Creed; Acceptance, as the only True Faith; and Non-Judgment, as the only True Divine Law? As much as I understand the need and beauty of preserving and celebrating our belonging to a treasured culture, a religion, or a race, I truly believe there is a belonging that's bigger and more expansive that we must never forget or overlook our humanity.

In the end, I do appreciate and recognize that diversity of cultures and identities provide the essential colors, favors and textures to any society that a homogeneous entity cannot, but they are to be celebrated as an indispensable piece of the bigger all-inclusive patchwork.  And so no group should ever be made to feel guilty for the crimes of some of its members.  Because when identity is taken as a narrow concept, it divides and isolates.  Its defense invites judgment, while comparisons lead to perceptions of good and bad, right and wrong, and I have no desire to indulge in any of that, knowing that fear, anger and retribution create more of the same.

Only the experience of our wholeness can unite and save us as a species.  Hence, I choose to preach and to speak the language of Consciousness and Non-Identity instead, or rather identity as part of a whole. 

As the world most famous Muslim poet Rumi once wrote:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.