Month: November 2018

islamic liberation theology

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This puts together and edits writings by Kaloi Abdu-Rahman and Sohaib Sultan. Both are about religion as a duty of the powerful to protect the powerless, and as a duty of the individual to stand with the powerless against the powerful, where the role of religion is a guiding light toward building a society that takes care of its most marginalized.

Related posts: Religion as revolutionary social justice, Radical empathy and a relationship with God, Religious law and human fallibility

 

Islamic Liberation Theology – Kaloi Abdu-Rahman

Liberation theology requires practicing Islam with the knowledge that all we receive in this world is because of the grace of God, not our own action and will. It understands that all humans are equal and that some are facing trials and misfortunes that aren’t of their own making.

With that knowledge, we know that the wealthy and the middle-class are not better than the poor, men are not better than women, no race is better than the other, no one group of people are harder-working or more intelligent: we were created all equal under God, with our lots in life determined by circumstance.

The Prophet (PBUH) understood that the privileges allowed to people of Mecca before Islam were determined by the relative value that their tribe or gender or class or status gave them, much like in our societies today, and sought to dismantle this system for one of equality.

Liberation theology sees the social power of religion as a tool that religious institutions have a responsibility to use. The power and respect of religious institutions must be used to advance the status of the marginalized. Those with power within religious institutions that do not use their power for the advancement of the marginalized and fighting for equality are breaching their religious duties by doing so.

 

Background of Liberation Theology

The term “liberation theology,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Religions, means “an understanding of the role of theology in moving from abstraction to action, in which the actual condition of the poor is the starting point.” The Encyclopedia of Religion defines liberation theology “as critical reflection on the historical praxis of liberation in a concrete situation of oppression and discrimination.” It is also known as a social movement within the Christian Church and a school of thought, both of which react against human suffering due to poverty and various forms of oppression.

Liberation theology, in fact, was a religious movement that sought to liberate people from poor social conditions and injustice. It emphasizes the mission of bringing justice to the poor and oppressed. The actual message of liberation theology is to the plight of the oppressed, hungry, poor and marginalized. God exhorts us to struggle for human well-being, to strive for human rights and to liberate humanity from social and economic injustice. In other words, it is a way, a discipline, an exercise that must be practically carried out. Liberation theology stresses that institutions of religion must advocate and help the poor and try to save them from affliction and marginalization due to social and political injustice, in a spiritual way and with regard to the scriptural message.

In a broader sense, liberation theology includes an interpretation of scripture that is rooted in the everyday experience of poverty. It is an effort to improve human welfare in very basic ways. Liberation theology is a system and structure, like an organization that works for the betterment of every individual in society; everyone has a right to benefit from its sources and means; no one should be deprived of its benefits. It sees Islam as a set of responsibilities for institutions with power.

Islamic liberation theology emerged when the Qur’an started to be revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. The Qur’an seeks to liberate people from all kinds of sufferings and in different ways (socioeconomic and theological). The Qur’anic commandments were an open challenge to the tribal lords of Mecca, who would oppress and dehumanize the poor. Islam, since its beginning, through the teachings and commandments of the Qur’an, denounced injustice and oppression, and condemned the prevailing social system of Mecca. With the message of the Qur’an, Islam proclaimed liberation, freedom, justice and equality, it was stated that all people are equal before God and there is no entity who deserves to be worshiped but He (God) (Qur’an, 2:255).

Qur’anic liberation theology accords with social and economic balance, an equal social structure and assigns a high position to human dignity. In the modern age, injustice and discrimination against oppressed and marginalized people is taking place in almost every part of the world, especially in underdeveloped countries. So, how to address the issues of injustice and oppression? What are God’s commandments in relation to abuses in the contemporary age? How to mitigate these pressures upon the weaker parts of society? How do scriptures and theology admonish the authorities to help the poor and ease their suffering?

The Prophet Muhammad liberated people from the oppression of the Meccan upper classes. He conveyed the message of God to the people, with warnings and glad tidings, for the construction of a just society that should be based on equality, fraternity and justice. Islamic liberation theology started when the Prophet Muhammad received inspiration in the first message of revelation, which instructed him to “Read”. This was a message that sought to liberate humanity from darkness, ignorance and illiteracy. It also taught awareness that God is the One who created humanity. From this verse, it is inferred that man should not hold any misconceptions about his creation. Such indications and instructions were also mentioned in previous divine scriptures and messages.

When Muhammad received revelation, it came in the form of a reformative and revolutionary message to all the people of the world, as he was given the title of mercy for all the worlds (al-Qur’an, 21:107). He delivered the message of the Qur’an, the message which was revealed to him for the reformation of society. The Qur’an affirms that God sent him to deliver glad-tidings to people (al-Qur’an, 2:119). The Prophet Muhammad worked for the liberation of the oppressed, the poor, the needy and the ignorant. In his project of liberation, he was not just a prophet, teacher and philosopher, but also an activist who sacrificed his life for justice and equality. Under his inspiration, the Arabs not only liberated themselves but in turn liberated others from oppression and subjugation.

 

The Socio-Economic and Religious Background of Arabia before Muhammad (PBUH)

The Prophet Muhammad was born at a time when people were engaged in arrogant displays of tribal superiority. Privileges were based on unjust conditions and prejudices. In such circumstances, he stood up and challenged unjustified privilege and established social and moral values based upon the revealed message. In this environment, Muhammad was inspired by God to deliver the revealed message. It was a call to worship God in gratitude for His goodness both to each individual and to the Meccans as a whole. But the people of Mecca refused to accept the message, except for a few. Due to the opposition and rejection of the Meccans, the first ten years of Muhammad’s preaching were hard. He was persecuted and threatened.

Muhammad’s message and aim were to bring reform to society and condemn the socioeconomic inequalities of Meccan life. He therefore presented a direct threat not just to traditional polytheistic religion, but also to the power and status of the establishment, threatening its economic, social and political interests. He condemned false contracts, usury, as well as the negligence and exploitation of orphans and widows. He defended the rights of the poor and the oppressed, declaring that the rich had a responsibility to the poor to use a portion of their wealth for their benefit.

A truly liberating theology grew from this tradition. Islamic theology is grounded within this historical tradition, which in turn is derived from the primary foundations of the Islamic tradition—the Qur’an and the Sunnah and, more importantly, in how the core message affects the daily lives of the people in need of this theology. The importance of Islamic liberation theology is not just its relation to historical, religious, and cultural contexts; it provides the grounds on which the liberating elements must be developed for the welfare of the people in general.

Progressive Muslim scholars have criticized and opposed classical Islamic theology and Muslim theologians. In fact, theology in its received form, according to progressive Muslims, does not support human liberation. It only supports the status quo; moreover, theologians who support this form of theology are partners to the status quo. The actual purpose of liberation theology is liberation from suffering.

 

The Qur’anic Paradigms of Liberation Theology

The first objective of Islamic liberation theology, as has been shown by the verses of revelation, is to liberate people from ignorance, illiteracy, superstitions and polytheism. The Qur’an also liberates humanity from racism. Racism is the worst type of evil, in which people think that a particular race is superior to others. It exists in almost every society, creates social problems and hatred between social classes. The Qur’an condemns notions of racial superiority or inferiority. Instead, it teaches that all people are the children of Adam and Eve and equal before God (49:13).

The main goal of liberation theology, according to the Qur’an, is to provide financial help to the poor and liberate them from poverty (4:95). The Qur’an teaches that a Muslim must always take the side of the weak regardless of their religion and race, and asks the question, “Who among those in need would require more attention than the poor and the destitute?” (4:95).

The Qur’an also protects man from subjugation. It liberates man from the tyranny of governments and rulers. The Qur’an gives rights to every individual equally so that all will be treated and judged on an equal basis, irrespective of race, colour and faith (49:130). It also admonishes believers to establish justice in all spheres of life (4: 135). Qur’anic liberation focuses on justice, freedom and equality on the one hand, and the condemnation of exploitation of man by man, oppression, and persecution on the other.

The idea of Islamic liberation theology is retrieved from the Qur’anic teachings. Its core values in “key terms of the Qur’an” comprising tawhid, (oneness of God), din (religion), adal (justice), rahmah (compassion), ihsan (benevolence), and hikmah (wisdom). These key terms are the main tools for constructing the platform of Islamic liberation theology.

 

The Prophet Muhammad as a Liberator

The Prophet Muhammad liberated people from all sorts of sufferings. Through the Qur’an, he liberated people from ignorance and superstition, from polytheism and racism, from poverty, inequality, subjugation and injustice. This means that Islamic liberation theology is an all rounded affair.

The Prophet Muhammad struggled on behalf of promoting Islamic injunctions against the tribal cruelties without engaging in violence. He and his companions bore the brutalities of the Meccans and continued to propagate and practice a way of life that was based upon revealed teachings.

The paradigm of struggle and resistance to injustice, established by the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers, was a movement of liberation. Many Muslim movements that developed in later centuries attempted to follow this prophetic paradigm, and together these have become important sources of inspiration for many contemporary Muslim liberation struggles.

The Prophet Muhammad was the beacon of light who announced through the Qur’an a charter of rights for women. The Qur’an, for the first time, gave them various rights: the right to be a witness, the right to marry a husband of her own choice, the right to divorce her husband without any pre-condition, the right to inherit her father’s property, the right of mothers and relatives to have property, the right to have custody of children, and the right to make decisions freely. Thus, due to Muhammad’s prophethood, women gained social dignity and respect.

The Prophet aimed to establish justice within the social and economic environment of Mecca; he was deeply disturbed by the conditions of women. Islam teaches the values of equality, justice and freedom. Women’s rights and gender equality are emphasized greatly in the Qur’an.

Though the idea of modern liberation theology has been derived from Christian hermeneutics, we can say that all religious scriptures have a solution for liberating people from suffering. The Qur’an not only supports the oppressed and weak sections of society, but teaches lessons of equality, dignity, freedom and respect for each other. It also calls on its believers to respect and recognize the truth of other religions.

The Qur’an provides the guidelines and ways to liberate people from all kinds of sufferings. God has sent the prophets to each and every community for their guidance. A universal theology of liberation is found among all religions. It is a method by which the implementation of God’s rule on earth, the establishment of justice, equal rights and uplifting peoples’ standard of living may be achieved. Liberation theology prioritizes actions over theory. It advocates the protection of the oppressed from the oppressors. It provides socio-political resistance against oppressors. It is a theology in real sense that aims to implement a world reality based upon respect for human dignity and the realization justice.

 

The Quranic framework for liberation

Esack claims that the Qur’an’s stress on helping preferentially the mustad’af refers to someone who is oppressed or deemed weak. The mustad’afun are people of inferior social status, people who are vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed. The Qur’an also uses other terms to describe the lower and impoverished classes of society, such as aradhil, marginalised (al-Qur’an, 11: 27), the poor (2: 271) and the indigent (2: 83).

The Qur’an also denounces the powerful and their accumulation of wealth, and exhorts the believers to treat women with equality and to free slaves. According to Esack, the most significant and relevant Qur’anic text in the South African situation encompasses verses 28: 4-8. In particular, Esack quotes this verse frequently: “And it is Our will to bestow Our grace upon the mustad’afun on the Earth”. This verse shows the Qur’an’s socially engaged message of liberation and empathy for the oppressed.

 

The road to liberation

Liberation generally signifies redemption, salvation and freedom. Liberation theology seeks salvation and deliverance from all forms of oppression, especially socio-political and economic injustice, under the instructions of the scriptures that were interpreted by the prophets and theologians, and in order to help marginalized people.

Thus, scriptures exhort us to struggle for the welfare of human beings, to help them against all sorts of injustice and inequality. Islamic liberation theology addresses all aspects of existence. These include not only the socio-political, economic and theological, but also the historical, religious, and cultural.

The best sources of Islamic liberation theology are the Qur’an and the traditions of Muhammad. Both provide guidance to those who suffer in the world. They condemn ignorance, illiteracy, and injustice.

Many human beings still face the distress of unemployment, poverty, starvation, malnourishment and homelessness. On the other, the world has also been suffering from inter and intra-religious extremism and ethno-religious nationalism. People want to be liberated from both torments.

Liberation theology suggests the following:

  • To obtain liberation from poverty, injustice and inequality. Human liberation lies in helping out the poor from a sociological and not only a metaphysical perspective.
  • The Monarchical practices of Muslim rulers and religious leaders should not include nationalism, tribal and communal favor. They are supposed to be free from the intoxication of power. Their role should be like that of the model caliphs, who gave rights and dignity to every individual, irrespective of color, race, gender and religion; to help and serve the people, and to bring peace and justice to society.
  • Guidance derived from the teachings of the Quran, must play a central and critical role not only in creating harmony and religious coexistence but also in explaining that human and religious diversity is normal.

 

The Social Qur’an – Sohaib Sultan

Faith is incomplete without a radical commitment to social justice.

In the late 19th to early 20th century there emerged an influential intellectual Christian movement that preached, what became known as, the “Social Gospel.” In summary, the movement sought to apply Christian ethics, taken from the Gospel, to social problems such as poverty and war. It was and remains a progressive movement essentially rooted in the Gospel’s radical social justice message.

Interestingly, around the same period, there also emerged movements within Islam that sought to do something very similar – apply Islamic ethics, taken from the Qur’an, to the myriad of social problems Muslim societies were facing. This movement attempted to advocate and argue for human freedom from tyrannical governments, economic fairness, and so on.

Unfortunately, when some of these movements went from standing up against unjust political authority to wanting to become the political authority itself, the movements were quickly and brutally suppressed and fractured – sometimes leading to the formation of radical political organizations that responded to the suppression with calls to militancy.

Today, this much maligned and far too easily discredited movement is known in the West as “Islamism” and their followers are called “Islamists.” It has become a bad word from the halls of government to the world of academia. If you want to malign or discredit a Muslim public intellectual or activist, all you have to do is call them an Islamist. Sadly, many radical proponents of the Christian Social Gospel message have met a similar end.

In the Muslim World, the movement is received with much more nuance. There are, of course, the violent extremists who have the loudest bullhorn on the block because of their tactics – “what bleeds leads” as they say in journalism. Every major study has shown that these violent groups are largely rejected by the vast majority of Muslims.

But, some of the most effective grassroots movements in the Muslim World today are informed and inspired, at least to some degree, by the social justice message of the Qur’an as articulated by the likes of Hassan al-Banna (d.1949) in Egypt and Abul Ala Mawdudi (d.1979) in Pakistan. The attraction is not so much in the wholesale revolutionary message, necessarily, but simply in the positive concern for addressing social injustices with something that sounds and feels authentic to the Muslim imagination – as opposed to something that sounds and feels like a Western colonialist import or plot.

While there was something certainly brewing in the waters in the late 19th – early 20th century in terms of socio-political movements rooted in the Qur’anic social justice message, these movements were largely revivalist movements that were inspired by much earlier periods in Muslim history including many Sufi Orders that were committed to serving the most marginalized in society and affecting grassroots change. Indeed, it would be hard not to read the Prophet Muhammad’s biography and the story of his mission as a radical movement for social justice. The intellectuals behind the Social Gospel would see the life and mission of Jesus in a similar way.

So, in brief, what is the Social Qur’an – if we can borrow terminology from the Social Gospel movement? It is a message that calls on believers to stand up for justice and bear witness to the truth “even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives” (4:135) and warns believers to never allow “hatred of others to lead you away from justice” (5:8).

It is a teaching that commands believers throughout the Qur’an to “be a community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids what is wrong” (3:104).

It is an urging to follow a higher ethical plane that “Is to free the slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those believe and urge one another to steadfastness [in doing good] and compassion” (90:13—17).

It is prescribing as a pillar of Islam the institutionalization of almsgiving for the poor and needy (9:60) and an ethic of charity that affirms and restores the dignity of socially neglected people (2:261—274).

It is encouraging the “fair and kind” treatment of women (4:19—21). And, it is pushing people to defend the oppressed even if it means putting their own lives at risk (4:74—76).

This is just a brief glimpse into the social justice message of the Qur’an.

The Social Qur’an is also a message that prohibits usurious loans that enslave people and entire communities to a lifetime of debt (2:275—281). It strongly condemns people “who give short measure” in their business dealings (83:1—6); exploit the orphans (4:10); “act like tyrants” (26:130); set out to “spread corruption” in the world (2:203), to give just a few examples. Social crimes such as sex slavery (24:33), female infanticide (81:8—9), and so on are spoken against in the strongest language.

So, this is a summary of what the Social Qur’an looks like. It is a message and teaching for the socially conscientious people to root their social justice work in a God-centric and spiritually focused way. And, it is a lesson to those who strive to be mindful of God that faith is incomplete without a radical commitment to social justice.

worker representation and co-determination

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In our crowdsourced manifesto of policies people wanted in place, we discussed worker co-determination:

Workers’ rights

We will require half of the board to be assigned to worker representatives for companies with 50+ employees, including all resorts. We will legally enshrine regulations for minimum standards of wages, working conditions, and hours for private companies as well as public. Companies will be required to provide workers’ compensation for injuries on the job.

So we’re reprinting some material from online about what worker co-determination is and how we might start.

 

What is co-determination?

Codetermination is the practice of workers of an enterprise having the right to vote for representatives on the board of directors in a company. It also refers to staff having binding rights in work councils on issues in their workplace. The practice of board level representation is widespread in developed democracies. The first laws requiring worker voting rights passed in 1854. Most countries with codetermination laws have single-tier board of directors in their corporate law (such as Sweden, France or the Netherlands), while a number in central Europe (particularly Germany and Austria) have two-tier boards.

Most laws apply to companies over a certain size, from Denmark at 20 employees, to Germany over 500 (for one-third representation) and 2000 (for just under one half), to France over 5000 employees. This is to minimize the burden for small businesses while ensuring that huge corporations, which represents a large proportion of the economy, have worker and stakeholder representation,

Codetermination gives workers a voice alongside shareholders. Worker co-ownership would also give them a stake in the company, making them shareholders as well. Laws could mandate a certain percentage stake in companies as shares owned by workers, who receive as dividends a proportion of the fruits of their labor instead of it all going to the wealthy.

In economies with codetermination, workers in large companies may form special bodies known as works councils. In smaller companies they may elect worker representatives who act as intermediaries in exercising the workers’ rights of being informed or consulted on decisions concerning employee status and rights. They also elect or select worker representatives in managerial and supervisory organs of companies.

In codetermination systems the employees are given seats on a board of directors in one-tier management systems, or seats in a supervisory board and sometimes management board in two-tier management systems.

In two-tier systems the seats in supervisory boards are usually limited to one to three members. In some systems the employees can select one or two members of the supervisory boards, but a representative of shareholders is always the president and has the deciding vote. An employee representatives on management boards are not present in all economies. They are always limited to a Worker-Director, who votes only on matters concerning employees.

In one-tier systems with codetermination the employees usually have only one or two representatives on a board of directors. Sometimes they are also given seats in certain committees (e.g. the audit committee). They never have representatives among the executive directors.

 

The German stakeholder system

The German stakeholder system of co-determination, which gives legal rights to workers to co-manage corporations, has held back the forces of short-termism1 that have dominated American corporations for the past three decades, driven our inequality crisis, and weakened our economy.

A national law requiring the boards of public companies to include worker representatives—a key element of co-determination—would, in one fell swoop, upend our current shareholder-oriented corporate governance model and redefine it as a stakeholder system, creating resilience against the pressures of short-termism.

Workers especially, who are investing in companies with their own labor on a daily basis, have a legitimate claim as corporate stakeholders, and it will serve companies, and society more broadly, if we—on the left at least—felt empowered enough to stake this claim.

There are other policy options besides co-determination, particularly different worker ownership models, including employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and cooperatives, that would also combat short-termism. However, the larger point remains: Any benefits provided to workers that lack meaningful stakeholder decision-power will fail to foster a sustainable, long-term oriented system for any stakeholders, including workers.

The main differences concern the structure of corporate boards and the influence of workers on decision making at the top. Companies in English-speaking countries tend to have one board, whose chairman is often also the chief executive officer. Employees, meanwhile, have little to no say in strategy. The company’s fiduciaries must act only in the interests of their main “stakeholders,” which are their shareholders. At German companies, all this is different.

worker codetermination german stakeholder

Germany made it compulsory to have one board of executive officers and another, separate, board of supervisors. This independent non-executive panel had the duty to hold management accountable and to protect the interests of shareholders.

The model obliges directors to consider all stakeholders in corporate decisions. Thus German boards must, in theory, heed the concerns not only of shareholders but also of employees, creditors, suppliers, and local governments, and should take a long-term perspective that stretches over generations.

 

Co-determination, in principle and practice

For most large public and private companies in Germany, i.e. those with more than 2,000 employees, half the seats on the supervisory board go to elected worker representatives, mainly drawn from the company’s work council as well as trade unions. The other half go to shareholder representatives. There is also a supervisory board chair, usually representing capital, who can cast a tie-breaking vote. In practice, the chair rarely exercises this power, preferring to allow the consensus-building process to play itself out.

Co-determination is intimately linked to the dual-board system. If employee representatives were tasked with debating management decisions alongside their bosses on a unified board, irresolvable conflicts of interest would be the likely result.

However, employee representatives and shareholders working on equal footing in an oversight capacity has been a beneficial set-up for labor relations and even for competitiveness, by some measures. German workers have historically been among the least strike-prone in Europe. As a rule, employee representatives feel secure enough in their authority to give a fair hearing to proposals from their fellow stakeholders.

 

words misunderstood

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This is an excerpt from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and I’ve always found it a really fascinating and insightful framework through which to see the world and how we relate to others– the realization that given associations and implications we don’t all share a common set of meanings for the words and phrases that we use or for the metaphors we invoke, that it means that to some extent none of us really speak the exact same language, that being able to understand someone means working with the knowledge that the same words can create unique instinctive or emotional responses shaped by their experiences and personality. This excerpt lists instances where the same word had different meanings and associations to the characters and how that shapes their relationship.

 

Let us return to Sabina’s bowler hat. First, it was a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of a small Bohemian town during the nineteenth century.

Second, it was a memento of her father. After the funeral her brother appropriated all their parents’ property, and she, refusing out of sovereign contempt to fight for her rights, announced sarcastically that she was taking the bowler hat as her sole inheritance.

Third, it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.

Fourth, it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated. She could not take much with her when she emigrated, and taking this bulky, impractical thing meant giving UP other, more practical ones.

Fifth, now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When she went to visit Tomas in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her head when he opened the hotel-room door. But then something she had not reckoned with happened: the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. They were both touched. They made love as they never had before. This was no occasion for obscene games. For this meeting was not a continuation of their erotic rendezvous, each of which had been an opportunity to think up some new little vice; it was a recapitulation of time, a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance.

The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus’ (“You can’t step twice into the same river”) riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony. The reason why Tomas and Sabina were touched by the sight of the bowler hat in a Zurich hotel and made love almost in tears was that its black presence was not merely a reminder of their love games but also a memento of Sabina’s father and of her grandfather, who lived in a century without airplanes and cars.

Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss separating Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them

And so when she put on the bowler hat in his presence, Franz felt uncomfortable, as if someone had spoken to him in a language he did not know. It was neither obscene nor sentimental, merely an incomprehensible gesture. What made him feel uncomfortable was its very lack of meaning.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them If I were to make a record of all Sabina and Franz’s conversations, I could compile a long lexicon of their misunderstandings. Let us be content, instead, with a short dictionary.

 

A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words

 

WOMAN

Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume the correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

During one of their first times together, Franz announced to her, in an oddly emphatic way, “Sabina, you are a woman. ” She could not understand why he accentuated the obvious with the solemnity of a Columbus who has just sighted land. Not until later did she understand that the word “woman,” on which he had placed such uncommon emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one of the two human sexes; it represented a value. Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.

But if Sabina was, in Franz’s eyes, a woman, then what was his wife, Marie-Claude? More than twenty years earlier, several months after Franz met Marie-Claude, she had threatened to take her life if he abandoned her. Franz was bewitched by the threat. He was not particularly fond of Marie-Claude, but he was very much taken with her love. He felt himself unworthy of so great a love, and felt he owed her a low bow.

He bowed so low that he married her. And even though Marie-Claude never recaptured the emotional intensity that accompanied her suicide threat, in his heart he kept its memory alive with the thought that he must never hurt her and always respect the woman in her.

It is an interesting formulation. Not “respect Marie-Claude,” but “respect the woman in Marie-Claude.” But if Marie-Claude is herself a woman, then who is that other woman hiding in her, the one he must always respect? The Platonic ideal of a woman, perhaps?

No. His mother. It never would have occurred to him to say he respected the woman in his mother. He worshiped his mother and not some woman inside her. His mother and the Platonic ideal of womanhood were one and the same.

When he was twelve, she suddenly found herself alone, abandoned by Franz’s father. The boy suspected something serious had happened, but his mother muted the drama with mild, insipid words so as not to upset him. The day his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out her mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes fixed on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

 

FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL

He loved her from the time he was a child until the time he accompanied her to the cemetery; he loved her in his memories as well. That is what made him feel that fidelity deserved pride of place among the virtues: fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

Franz often spoke about his mother to Sabina, perhaps even with a certain unconscious ulterior motive: he assumed that Sabina would be charmed by his ability to be faithful, that it would win her over.

What he did not know was that Sabina was charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity. The word “fidelity” reminded her of her father, a small-town puritan, who spent his Sundays painting away at canvases of woodland sunsets and roses in vases. Thanks to him, she started drawing as a child. When she was fourteen, she fell in love with a boy her age. Her father was so frightened that he would not let her out of the house by herself for a year. One day, he showed her some Picasso reproductions and made fun of them. If she couldn’t love her fourteen-year-old schoolboy, she could at least love cubism. After completing school, she went off to Prague with the euphoric feeling that now at last she could betray her home.

Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

Though a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, she was not allowed to paint like Picasso. It was the period when so-called socialist realism was prescribed and the school manufactured Portraits of Communist statesmen. Her longing to betray her rather remained unsatisfied: Communism was merely another rather, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and Picasso, too. And if she married a second-rate actor, it was only because he had a reputation for being eccentric and was unacceptable to both fathers.

Then her mother died. The day following her return to Prague from the funeral, she received a telegram saying that her father had taken his life out of grief.

Suddenly she felt pangs of conscience: Was it really so terrible that her father had painted vases filled with roses and hated Picasso? Was it really so reprehensible that he was afraid of his fourteen- year-old daughter’s coming home pregnant? Was it really so laughable that he could not go on living without his wife?

And again she felt a longing to betray: betray her own betrayal. She announced to her husband (whom she now considered a difficult drunk rather than an eccentric) that she was leaving him.

But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.

 

MUSIC

For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’ White Album? Franz made no distinction between “classical” music and “pop.” He found the distinction old-fashioned and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as Mozart.

He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.

They were sitting together at a restaurant, and loud music with a heavy beat poured out of a nearby speaker as they ate.

“It’s a vicious circle,” Sabina said. “People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

“Don’t you like music?” Franz asked.

“No,” said Sabina, and then added, “though in a different era…” She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.

Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood. During her years at the Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at a youth camp. They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks construction site. Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning to nine at night. She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her.

At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical barbarism reign supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.

After dinner, they went upstairs to their room and made love, and as Franz fell asleep his thoughts began to lose coherence. He recalled the noisy music at dinner and said to himself, “Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.” And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, overpowering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned never to say another sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse with the orgiastic thunder of music. And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell asleep.

 

LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

In Franz the word “light” did not evoke the picture of a landscape basking in the soft glow of day; it evoked the source of light itself: the sun, a light bulb, a spotlight. Franz’s associations were familiar metaphors: the sun of righteousness, the lambent flame of the intellect, and so on.

Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the moment he penetrated Sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)

And at the moment he felt pleasure suffusing his body, Franz himself disintegrated and dissolved into the infinity of his darkness, himself becoming infinite. But the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. A man with closed eyes is a wreck of a man. Then, Sabina found the sight of Franz distasteful, and to avoid looking at him she too closed her eyes. But for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her, it meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.

 

Sabina once allowed herself to be taken along to a gathering of fellow emigres. As usual, they were hashing over whether they should or should not have taken up arms against the Russians. In the safety of emigration, they all naturally came out in favor of fighting. Sabina said: “Then why don’t you go back and fight?”

That was not the thing to say. A man with artificially waved gray hair pointed a long index finger at her. “That’s no way to talk. You’re all responsible for what happened. You, too. How did you oppose the Communist regime? All you did was paint pictures. …”

Assessing the populace, checking up on it, is a principal and never-ending social activity in Communist countries. If a painter is to have an exhibition, an ordinary citizen to receive a visa to a country with a sea coast, a soccer player to join the national team, then a vast array of recommendations and reports must be garnered (from the concierge, colleagues, the police, the local Party organization, the pertinent trade union) and added up, weighed, and summarized by special officials. These reports have nothing to do with artistic talent, kicking ability, or maladies that respond well to salt sea air; they deal with one thing only: the “citizen’s political profile” (in other words, what the citizen says, what he thinks, how he behaves, how he acquits himself at meetings or May Day parades). Because everything (day-to-day existence, promotion at work, vacations) depends on the outcome of the assessment process, everyone (whether he wants to play soccer for the national team, have an exhibition, or spend his holidays at the seaside) must behave in such a way as to deserve a favorable assessment.

That was what ran through Sabina’s mind as she listened to the gray-haired man speak. He didn’t care whether his fellow-countrymen were good kickers or painters (none of the Czechs at the emigre gathering ever showed any interest in what Sabina painted); he cared whether they had opposed Communism actively or just passively, really and truly or just for appearances’ sake, from the very beginning or just since emigration.

Because she was a painter, she had an eye for detail and a memory for the physical characteristics of the people in Prague who had a passion for assessing others. All of them had index fingers slightly longer than their middle fingers and pointed them at whomever they happened to be talking to. In fact, President Novotny, who had ruled the country for the fourteen years preceding 1968, sported the very same barber-induced gray waves and had the longest index finger of all the inhabitants of Central Europe.

When the distinguished emigre heard from the lips of a painter whose pictures he had never seen that he resembled Communist President Novotny, he turned scarlet, then white, then scarlet again, then white once more; he tried to say something, did not succeed, and fell silent. Everyone else kept silent until Sabina stood up and left.

It made her unhappy, and down in the street she asked herself why she should bother to maintain contact with Czechs. What bound her to them? The landscape? If each of them were asked to say what the name of his native country evoked in him, the images that came to mind would be so different as to rule out all possibility of unity.

Or the culture? But what was that? Music? Dvorak and Janacek? Yes. But what if a Czech had no feeling for music? Then the essence of being Czech vanished into thin air.

Or great men? Jan Hus? None of the people in that room had ever read a line of his works. The only thing they were all able to understand was the flames, the glory of the flames when he was burned at the stake, the glory of the ashes, so for them the essence of being Czech came down to ashes and nothing more. The only things that held them together were their defeats and the reproaches they addressed to one another.

She was walking fast. She was more disturbed by her own thoughts than by her break with the emigres. She knew she was being unfair. There were other Czechs, after all, people quite different from the man with the long index finger. The embarrassed silence that followed her little speech did not by any means indicate they were all against her. No, they were probably bewildered by the sudden hatred, the lack of understanding they were all subjected to in emigration. Then why wasn’t she sorry for them? Why didn’t she see them for the woeful and abandoned creatures they were?

We know why. After she betrayed her father, life opened up before her, a long road of betrayals, each one attracting her as vice and victory. She would not keep ranks! She refused to keep ranks — always with the same people, with the same speeches! That was why she was so stirred by her own injustice. But it was not an unpleasant feeling; quite the contrary, Sabina had the impression she had just scored a victory and someone invisible was applauding her for it.

Then suddenly the intoxication gave way to anguish: The road had to end somewhere! Sooner or later she would have to put an end to her betrayals! Sooner or later she would have to stop herself!

It was evening and she was hurrying through the railway station. The train to Amsterdam was in. She found her coach. Guided by a friendly guard, she opened the door to her compartment and found Franz sitting on a couchette. He rose to greet her; she threw her arms around him and smothered him with kisses.

She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don’t let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, “You don’t know how happy I am to be with you.” That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.

 

PARADES

People in Italy or France have it easy. When their parents force them to go to church, they get back at them by joining the Party (Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist, etc.). Sabina, however, was first sent to church by her father, then forced by him to attend meetings of the Communist Youth League. He was afraid of what would happen if she stayed away.

When she marched in the obligatory May Day parades, she could never keep in step, and the girl behind her would shout at her and purposely tread on her heels. When the time came to sing, she never knew the words of the songs and would merely open and close her mouth. But the other girls would notice and report her. From her youth on, she hated parades.

Franz had studied in Paris, and because he was extraordinarily gifted his scholarly career was assured from the time he was twenty. At twenty, he knew he would live out his life within the confines of his university office, one or two libraries, and two or three lecture halls. The idea of such a life made him feel suffocated. He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

And so as long as he lived in Paris, he took part in every possible demonstration. How nice it was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be out in the open, to be with others. The parades filing down the Boulevard Saint-Germain or from the Place de la Republique to the Bastille fascinated him He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

I might put it another way: Franz felt his book life to be unreal. He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts. It never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival — in other words, a dream During her studies, Sabina lived in a dormitory. On May Day all the students had to report early in the morning for the parade. Student officials would comb the building to ensure that no one was missing.

Sabina hid in the lavatory. Not until long after the building was empty would she go back to her room. It was quieter than anywhere she could remember. The only sound was the parade music echoing in the distance. It was as though she had found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don’t want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

 

THE BEAUTY OF NEW YORK

Franz and Sabina would walk the streets of New York for hours at a time. The view changed with each step, as if they were following a winding mountain path surrounded by breathtaking scenery: a young man kneeling in the middle of the sidewalk praying; a few steps away, a beautiful black woman leaning against a tree; a man in a black suit directing an invisible orchestra while crossing the street; a fountain spurting water and a group of construction workers sitting on the rim eating lunch; strange iron ladders running up and down buildings with ugly red facades, so ugly that they were beautiful; and next door, a huge glass skyscraper backed by another, itself topped by a small Arabian pleasure-dome with turrets, galleries, and gilded columns.

She was reminded of her paintings. There, too, incongruous things came together: a steelworks construction site superimposed on a kerosene lamp; an old-fashioned lamp with a painted-glass shade shattered into tiny splinters and rising up over a desolate landscape of marshland.

Franz said, “Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.”

Sabina said, “Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be ‘beauty by mistake.’ Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. ‘Beauty by mistake’ — the final phase in the history of beauty.”

And she recalled her first mature painting, which came into being because some red paint had dripped on it by mistake. Yes, her paintings were based on “beauty by mistake,” and New York was the secret but authentic homeland of her painting.

Franz said, “Perhaps New York’s unintentional beauty is much richer and more varied than the excessively strict and composed beauty of human design. But it’s not our European beauty. It’s an alien world.”

Didn’t they then at last agree on something?

No. There is a difference. Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York’s beauty. Franz found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe.

 

SABINA’S COUNTRY

Sabina understood Franz’s distaste for America. He was the embodiment of Europe: his mother was Viennese, his father French, and he himself was Swiss.

Franz greatly admired Sabina’s country. Whenever she told him about herself and her friends from home, Franz heard the words “prison,” “persecution,” “enemy tanks,” “emigration,” “pamphlets,” “banned books,” “banned exhibitions,” and he felt a curious mixture of envy and nostalgia.

He made a confession to Sabina. “A philosopher once wrote that everything in my work is unverifiable speculation and called me a ‘pseudo-Socrates.’ 1 felt terribly humiliated and made a furious response. And just think, that laughable episode was the greatest conflict I’ve ever experienced! The pinnacle of the dramatic possibilities available to my life! We live in two different dimensions, you and I. You came into my life like Gulliver entering the land of the Lilliputians.”

Sabina protested. She said that conflict, drama, and tragedy didn’t mean a thing; there was nothing inherently valuable in them, nothing deserving of respect or admiration. What was truly enviable was Franz’s work and the fact that he had the peace and quiet to devote himself to it.

Franz shook his head. “When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls’ Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.”

It is in this spirit that we may understand Franz’s weakness for revolution. First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life. He became a professor in Geneva (where there are no demonstrations), and in a burst of abnegation (in womanless, paradeless solitude) he published several scholarly books, all of which received considerable acclaim Then one day along came Sabina. She was a revelation. She came from a land where revolutionary illusion had long since faded but where the thing he admired most in revolution remained: life on a large scale; a life of risk, daring, and the danger of death. Sabina had renewed his faith in the grandeur of human endeavor. Superimposing the painful drama of her country on her person, he found her even more beautiful.

The trouble was that Sabina had no love for that drama. The words “prison,” “persecution,” “banned books,” “occupation,” “tanks” were ugly, without the slightest trace of romance. The only word that evoked in her a sweet, nostalgic memory of her homeland was the word “cemetery.”

 

CEMETERY

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue Mils, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.