To whom shall we give Access to Our Water Holes? - Islam and international relations

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Farid Esack

Let me tell you a story of my journey from the comfortable but suffocating known into the pain of the unknown and back into the ignorance of the known.

Like all Muslim children, I too, was sent off to madrassah (religious school) at an early age. In a completely unproductive butterfly dance, I moved from one madrassah to another until, at the age of twelve, I came across Boeta Samoudien. My previous madrassah saw me already being able to "read" the short chapters at the back of the Qur'an. I presumed that I would continue with my new teacher where I had left off. I read with confidence until Boeta Samoudien asked me to point with my finger where I was reading. The boys behind me started giggling and he put a primer in front of me and asked me to start from the beginning, the alphabet.

Now there are few things as fragile as the ego of a twelve-year-old. Despite my offended ego, I managed to "read," believing that I'd quickly disprove the mocking laughter that was challenging my competence.

I could not read. The primer in front of me was a new one -- one that I had never seen before -- and all the letters of the Arabic alphabet were jumbled up. With the always-available assistance of another student, I had become conditioned to memorizing my lessons. Now, without recognition of the letters in the usual pattern, I was caught out.

Twelve years old, having already started with the short chapters at the back of the Qur'an, it was discovered that I couldn't recognize an "Alif" from a "Ba!"

With humiliating discomfort, I agreed to purchase the new primer, but couldn't get myself to go back the next day. Upon being asked why I was not keen on the new madrassah, I told my late mother (May Allah have mercy on her soul) about the new primer. She then consulted her cousin, Aunty Salamah, who was also a madrassah teacher. Aunty Salamah concurred that this modern primer was wicked and probably one of the ways in which the Ahmadi/Qadiani sect wanted to subvert Islam.

I was saved by my mother and Aunty Salamah to continue my dying in ignorance.

I had a known; it was my way of learning the Qur'an. I knew how to wait for someone to make me rehearse my few lines; I knew how to parrot those lines without being able to recognize the letters of the alphabet. It was a process to which I had been conditioned over the years. I was dying, but it was preferable to the agony of heading for the unknown, starting off all over, from the beginning, in a new primer. Oh, how often do we choose death over life!

In Man's Search For Meaning, Victor Frankl writes poignantly about his fellow prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He tells how some of those prisoners, who yearned desperately for their freedom, had been held captive for so long that, when they were eventually released, they walked into the sunlight, blinked nervously and then silently walked back into the familiar darkness of the prisons to which they had been accustomed for such a long time.

John Powell, a Jesuit, comments on this unnerving encounter with the light in Why I Am Afraid to Tell You Who I Am: