Saadia's Column

Oops, I'm Religious! (June 2003)

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.'
Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Living in America as a Muslim and a Pakistani, I’m constantly struck by the differences in people’s approach to religion in both countries. In Pakistan of course, Islam provides a steady backdrop to everyday life. Not a day passes without being reminded of God in some way, whether it’s hearing the prayer call, hearing people mutter "Bismillah", and "Inshallah", at appropriate times, watching a religious discussion on TV, or seeing mystical verses painted on buses and trucks.

My experience in America has been restricted to a liberal arts campus and a large cosmopolitan city. So of course I can’t speak for the country as a whole. But in the circles I moved in, I suspected religion was mainly food for intellectual debate; it played little role in everyday life. In fact, sometimes I wondered if religion had become uncool.

The educational system in America focuses on the tangible. It isn’t enough to believe in God; you have to prove him with clever equations and sophisticated arguments. If you can’t do that, He doesn’t exist. I sometimes felt naïve and rather silly, for believing in a God I couldn’t explain.
" To think it’s all such a fairy-tale," my journalism professor once remarked.
" What do you mean?" I asked.
" The whole idea of God, the prophets, religion. It’s so absurd, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s absolutely ridiculous. How can anyone possibly believe in that?" He paused. "Do you?"
" Um...yeah." I hated myself for being embarrassed for a split second.
" I just don’t get it." He continued. "Look around. We’re a biological mistake. Think about it. Here we are, in this world, way more advanced than any other animal, we can’t get along, and we don’t understand anything about where we come from. We have no idea how large this universe is, can’t even imagine where it ends - the earth is like a little virus, really in the universe.
And just think: how did creatures like us get created in the first place? How did something like a rhinoceros get created? Or a giraffe? How the hell do you get a four-legged quadruped, colored yellow and white, with a 20-foot long neck? The idea is absolutely absurd!"
I didn’t know what he was getting at. How did the existence of a giraffe disprove the existence God?

But I digress. The point being that many of the liberal/intellectuals I encountered here not only were atheists, they made one feel downright ridiculous for believing in the first place. And this sense of being silly or naïve became even stronger regarding social habits and values. My friends and I faced many rather supercilious questions regarding our odd behavior.
" You don’t drink? But how do you socialize?" This was the most common, which probably all of us got asked at some point or other.
A more amusing interchange occurred between a close Muslim friend and a Danish guy, who asked her if she would have sex before marriage.
" Um, no, probably not," she told him.
" What? Why not?"
" It’s not allowed in my religion. And anyway, I think one should wait for the right person."
" See coming from Europe, I find that very, very naïve," he said.
" It’s not naïve, it’s just different."
" But you probably won’t get married till five or six years later, right?"
" I guess."
" So what’ll you do until then?"

A similar conversation transpired between a South African kid and a very shy, linguistically-challenged Uzbek girl. The boy kept teasing her, in a room full of people, asking about free sex in Uzbekistan, and what boys and girls did for kicks.
" They don’t, they don’t," she kept repeating, rather nonsensically.
" You mean people don’t have sex over there?" he finally asked.
" No," she said firmly.
" Wow," he said to everyone else, "having babies over there must be a miracle!"

Anyhow, it just seemed to me there was a certain assumption that adhering to religious values entailed naiveté, or was based upon a blind belief that completely lacked any kind of rationale. I’ve cited some extreme examples here - overall there was a great semblance of respect and tolerance. But it was there, nevertheless. Most of the books we read were by people like Nietzsche and Marx. Great thinkers in their own right, but there was little emphasis on reading more spiritual texts. And the ones we did read, such as Genesis, led to discussions such as whether Jesus was a madman or not. Or feminist discussions about the role of Eve; yawn, yawn.
I gained a lot, an enormous amount from Western education. But I still feel there needs to be a move toward a real understanding of spirituality. Like it or not, it’s a driving force in the world today.