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The title says it all: Removing the Silence on Domestic Violence, a sermon by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf. Recorded on February 20, 2009 in San Ramon California.
www.zaytuna.org , www.arabicintensive.org , www.zaytunacollege.org
The narrative of history always represents the specific political and cultural biases of those who have power, and who want the past to fit into their vision of the present. Hardly offering an objective view of the past, history is cobbled together from tales needed to fit the contemporary political situation, either ignoring or remaking the past to fit in with the expediencies of the present.
The narrative surrounding the contemporary situation between Muslims and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians is no different. As the current political and even geographic situation is certainly dire, only those past tales that fit in neatly with the negative energy surrounding these two peoples are expounded upon. Suicide bombings and strafing retaliations only fit in with one particular reading of history: The most negative stories afflicting this relationship are told and re-told as justification for the ongoing hostilities.
This reading backward of current enmities into the past relationship between Jews and Muslims, however, only illuminates a small segment of a rich and often positive interrelationship between these two peoples. While there has been, of course, many negative events and even periods between Muslims and Jews, there have been as many, and perhaps even more positive accounts between these two peoples.
The open-minded practice of Sufism is known as a mystical system that can easily attract believers from other religions. Today, as in the past, Jews, Christians and followers of other religions have flocked to this practice, studying under Sufi masters and learning the Sufi Way. The Sufi chronicler Idries Shah has outlined past Sufi influence on St. Francis of Assisi, the Troubadours, St. Augustine, the Rosicrucians, Maimonides, the Jewish Kabbalah and a host of other medieval and modern religious movements.
While much of this contact is incidental or indirect – Sufism reached St. Francis, for instance, through the writings of a Jewish intermediary translated into Latin – there was a time of profound Sufi influence on the direction and thought of the mystics of the Jewish religion. Though it is buried beneath centuries of historical disregard and even outright denial, the fact remains that more than 700 years ago, Jewish leaders not only had a wide-ranging dialogue with Islamic mystics, but also borrowed liberally from them to bring an Islamic brand of piousness into medieval synagogue rites. In the 13th century, Abraham Maimonides, son of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, not only wrapped Islamic mystical practice into his view of Judaism, but also considered himself a Jewish Sufi, a practitioner of both Jewish and Islamic mysticism!
