Irfan Yusuf writes today at altmuslim:

Iranian Muslim youth aren’t the only ones disillusioned with theocratic politics. Many young Muslims in the West like myself, once attracted to political Islam, have now become disillusioned by it. At the same time, we feel disenchanted with Western attempts to manipulate it, then demonise it when it suits.

Aziz Poonawalla is monitoring the Iranian twitterers and can give you access to them:

The regime is afraid. That’s why they disabled text messaging on election day; why twitter and facebook are blocked; why the internet is being censored; why journalists are being expelled. And yet despite their efforts, the story is being told.

How long will it take for Iran’s younger generations to rid themselves of theocracy? And when they do, will they have something better than consumer capitalism and the best-democracy-money-can-buy to replace it with?

Shahed Amanullah

That’s the role that young Western Muslims like Shahed Amanullah and co. at altmuslim, Aziz P at City of Brass, Hussein Rashid at Religion Dispatches, Khalid Latif and Haroon Moghul (see their recent piece in Tikkun) are working out day by day: how to take the best of the various cultures and political traditions they know and craft their own synthesis. Had a fascinating breakfast with Wajahat Ali of altmuslim and Goatmilk last week, in which he talked about how young Muslims have to visibly shed their religion in order to be acceptable in progressive liberal circles (explain to me again what “liberal” means?). There are many smart young Muslims making careers in America who are in the closet about their own spirituality.

Will young Muslims of the future be divided between the anti-religious, reacting against Islamic theocracies they were raised in, and the brave rediscoverers of their religion, reacting against the secularity of the Western societies they were raised in? There’s a whole lot of synthesizing ahead. Progressive Muslims who take their own spirituality seriously are potential revivers of American democracy quite as much as of Iranian democracy and other majority Muslim countries’ polities: we can all learn, in discussion with them, from their emerging syntheses.

Zahara Nakibuule, aged 19, graduating from high school

My eye was caught in the paper yesterday by the happiness of this young woman graduating. I was curious about her relationship with the older woman. Turns out she is a Ugandan who lost both parents to AIDS and was adopted by an affluent US family at age 12. She says she finds it hard to see her friends leave food on their plates because she recalls so well going out to the garden every day with her mother in Uganda to see what there was left to eat, and sometimes finding nothing. Her personal journey and struggle is an extraordinary story of our current world. This sentence stood out for me:

“It seems like it’s switched,” Zahara said. “In Uganda, no one complains about how stressful things are, and there’s a lot of joy in people, especially in the kids. Here, there are so many enjoyments, but the people are stressed out. They talk about their stresses all the time. … I was not sensitive to my friends’ complaints. I wanted to understand them, but at the same time, I could not.”

If that doesn’t relate to Nichola’s comment in the last post, what does? It’s not that life in Uganda is happier than here: of course that was not what Zahara meant or why I quote her. It’s that we have so little understanding of how fortunate we are and at the same time of how truly bizarre is the way we are using that good fortune.

Something’s going wrong with our comments, so that at least two people who have left long comments found them cut off. So If you are leaving a comment, please copy it before you hit save comment, and then if it doesn’t save please email me the comment, at dave@tikkun.org. We will get it fixed as soon as we understand what the problem is.

Nichola Torbett, founder of Seminary of the Street

Here’s a comment from Nichola Torbett to my last post:

Thanks, Dave for this post, which is as thoughtful as you always are. There were a couple things I wanted to respond to.

You ask, “If [our movement] starts with consciousness raising or coming out of the closet, like the women’s and GLBT movements, what is the mindset and mask that we have to break out of and how do we support each other to do it?” I think the first thing we need to come out about is the dissatisfaction many of us feel living according to the rules of the dominant culture–how bored, how depressed, how anxious about money, how strapped, how despairing, how lonely and alienated, how unable to feel for other people. I really believe that these feelings are so widespread that they are almost like the water that the fish swims in. They just seem normal, and to the degree that they don’t, we talk about them only with our therapists or a small handful of close friends, and then in terms that suggest the problem is a personal failing rather than a culture that is inhospitable to sensitivity, joy, aliveness, a sense of abundance, love, and connection. This is why it’s important that we acknowledge this suffering –this feeling of being weighed down, cut off, or both–every week at my church. It’s also why Seminary of the Street hosts a “Funeral for the Empire” every year. That’s an opportunity to say loudly and clearly “All is not well with us” and also, just as importantly, “It’s not just you. This problem is bigger than any one of us.”

This acknowledgment of a larger societal problem somehow frees up individuals to act in dissident ways. It emboldens people to say and do things that aren’t expected, that aren’t according to the rules. Whether that is quitting one’s well-paying but soul-deadening job to organize poor people or boycotting companies that do egregious harm or simply speaking up when one’ sees injustice happening interpersonally or systemically, it opens up spaces in “the way things are” for something new to emerge. And it’s contagious.

I also really appreciated the reference to JoEllen Kaiser’s article, which is right on. The issue is not having a black man or a lesbian in office, but having someone there who is willing to align her- or himself with the poorest and most vulnerable. As Rev. Lynice Pinkard said in an article in Tikkun right after the election, electing a black president is not in itself radical unless Obama can use his own suffering as a way to connect with the suffering of all people and stand in opposition to systems of domination. And that’s what each of us has to do in whatever ways we can.

Hope is the Flower, by Salma Arastu

A world of caring and sharing.

In which we are healed and the earth is healed.

We would turn this commercial civilization into a biophilic civilization. (Biophilic: love of all life). A spiritual civilization, where spiritual is not about what you believe so much as how you glory in life and the universe, and how you do love. “How many know that love is a Do word?” as Lynice Pinkard asks her congregation often, “love isn’t a feeling, it’s something you decide to do and you do it.”

How to create it? It takes the talk and the walk.

Central to the talk is vision, which Tikkun magazine writers present brilliantly, for example in these Memos to Obama. Read Michael Lerner’s recent commencement address at a seminary, or the content on the Tikkun and NSP websites.

But what about the walk? Without some sense that the vision is being put into practice, the best talk is just talk.

Maybe talk is never “just talk,” because just to say outrageous things–like women are equal to men, or gender isn’t binary but fluid, or God did not give the top race lesser races to rule over, nor the top species lesser species to rule over, because there is no top race nor top species, or that a materialistic Left will never be able to deliver even on its own goals–just to say things like that is to let them loose into consciousness to work their slow way: because while few of us may recognize truth when it is spoken, more of our children will. It takes prophets to state such ideas clearly and loudly: that is Tikkun‘s main role. Or its most successful role currently.

But at some point these ideas get legs and the real walk begins.

We all know that the progressive movements most successful in changing America in our lifetimes have been those for rights for women, blacks, other ethnic minorities, GLBT people and the differently abled (and these are the ones Michael Lerner cites when asked how his own vision will be realized–through movements like those). And to some extent the environmental movement. Still a long way to go but it must drive neanderthal conservatives (yes, Virginia, there are other kinds of conservatives) bonkers that even when they had control of all three branches of government they couldn’t entirely stem the tide of GLBT rights or higher energy efficiency rules for office buildings. So these movements worked. They changed attitudes first and laws second. Straw in wind: they converted even a neanderthal conservative (a neacon?) like Dick Cheney to approve gay civil unions. Not to approve energy efficiency yet, but probably his daughter, whom he hopes will succeed him as a great Republican leader, will be on board with that. And it’s obvious to all that it’s the personal example of Liz Cheney’s lesbianism that converted her father on lesbian marriage.

So what we dream of at Tikkun is a movement like those that is full spectrum on the human condition. Jo Ellen Kaiser has an excellent essay in the print edition of Zeek right now that explains the distinction between “difference feminism,” which would change society throughout, and “equality feminism,” which would get women an equal place in the society we have. A married lesbian President who pursues foreign wars and tortures suspects is not exactly what difference feminists had in mind. They want a full spectrum change. A married lesbian President who pursues a Global Marshall Plan would be a fine start.

What would a full spectrum movement look like? If it starts with consciousness raising or coming out of the closet, like the women’s and GLBT movements, what is the mindset and mask that we have to break out of and how do we support each other to do it? What would make our friends and parents (and children) gasp at our bold overturning of the ways things are supposed to be, in our private as well as public lives? If it starts with church, like the civil rights movement, what are the congregations (including equivalents for nonbelievers), we need where we can nurture community, leadership and followership skills, pride in our identity, and emotional support for generating the conflict it will take to turn a commercial civilization biophilic, and for the nonviolent methods we must use if we want to succeed?

Nichola Torbett, founder of Seminary of the Street, and I invited some friends to a discussion recently and Nichola phrased the questions we wanted to talk about this way:

• How do we build powerful social change movements that embody love in their practice as well as in their principles?
• How do we promote necessary conflict with the status quo without creating “enemies” or needless opposition?
• How can social change movements be sites of healing for those who participate in them, so that our own healing is not separate from the healing we are trying to promote in the world?
• How do we bridge the gap between people who are drawn to personal transformation and those doing activism?
• What organizations are doing these things well, and how can we learn from them?

Please send us your responses! Your experience. Your analysis. If you have a lot to say, apply to join our team of bloggers. Email me: dave@tikkun.org.

Ways to find like-minded people: Join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and get NSP emails. Read this blog. Get connected with groups we will be profiling here and the ones you know already. We’re stumbling now, but we will be walking.

Image: www.salmaarastu.com/

Later: Don’t miss this great comment by Nichola Torbett, about this post.

Carly Fiorina (at left), former head of Hewlett Packard, now running against Barbara Boxer for the US Senate, didn’t vote in 13 out of the last 18 California elections. Meg Witman, once CEO of eBay, now running to succeed Schwarzenegger, didn’t even register to vote until seven years ago and then only voted in 7 out of the next 13 elections. When he was head of Halliburton, Dick Cheney skipped 14 out of 16 state and local elections. A sad little expose in the SF Chron today.

A Business Week investigation of 100 top executives in 2000 found that “precious few” of the business elite cast ballots in often-critical state and local elections dating back as far as the 1980s.

They couldn’t even be bothered to ask their admin to get them a mail in ballot? Would have taken several seconds of their time.

Why even bother to blog about it? We knew our CEOs’ sense of citizenship was utterly feeble already. It just got me for some reason. Maybe because it’s so simple, doesn’t involve arguments about whether what’s good for GM/HP/eBay is good for America. It’s just: these people didn’t care about America in the most basic simple way.