The Yezidis

The Yezidis are a non-Muslim ethnic minority group, concentrated in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq, Western Iran, Eastern Syria, southeast Turkey and Armenia. Numbering no more than around 700,00 worldwide, the adherents of this little known religion are a people shrouded in mystery and obscurity.

Yezidis consider themselves to be among the oldest races on earth. Theirs is a monotheistic religion dating back to the time of the Median Empire during the middle of the first millennium BC. It is believed the religion either preceded or derived from Zoroastrianism – an ancient Aryan faith, which is centered in modern-day Iran, and with which Yezidism shares many qualities.

What makes the Yezidi religion so hard to pin down is that there are no surviving texts or scriptures. It is a religion that has been transmitted orally. That, along with its cult of secrecy, and changes to its doctrine over the years, has caused it to be poorly understood even among Yezidis themselves.

But if anything, it is the term “devil-worshipper” which is most frequently attached to adherents of this elusive sect. In the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths the popular story of the angel Lucifer who disobeyed God and was demoted to rule Hell as Satan, has a somewhat different twist in the Yezidi faith.

In the Yezidi version of the creation story, the rebellious angel, who in this rendering is called “Azaziel” or “Malek al-Tawwus” (The Peacock Angel), was later pardoned by God and made chief of a gang of six angels.

The Yezidis worship and pray to the Peacock Angel which has caused others living in their midst to refer to them by the pejorative “devil-worshipper”. The idea in the Yezidi faith that both good and evil are of equal importance in the world, and that neither can exist without the other, has not helped them gain admirers. Reincarnation, another pillar of their faith, is another notion highly reviled by the orthodox religionists living among them.

It is thus of little surprise that throughout the ages, Yezidis have been persecuted and driven into isolation by both Muslims and Christians who had little comprehension, or tolerance, of their beliefs or ways.

European colonial-era travelers, too, who wrote about their encounters with the Yezidis in the 19th and 20th centuries, including such notables as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, tended to perpetuate the devil-worshipper misnomer without much scrutiny.

Despite the difficulties they’ve endured, the Yezidis continue to practice their culture and religion.

Once a year, Yezidis from around Europe and the Middle East, gather for their annual Eid al-Jameyah (the Feast of the Assembly), at the holy sanctuary of Lalish, near the city of Duhok in Northern Iraq.

This sacrosanct area has no residents apart from the custodians of several spire-topped mausoleums tucked in a valley below scrub-spotted hills. The Yezidis maintain that Lalish is the place where the universe began. During the festival it teems with thousands of families who bring their belongings and camp among the mausoleums for the weeklong festivities.

“This event is a kind of haj to a holy place,” says Sheikh Pasha, the Supervisor of the Yezidis in the Governorate of Ninevah, in Northern Iraq. “Lalish is like the Qa’aba at Mecca, or the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - but of the Yezidi people.”

Music, food, song, dance and socializing underpin the event, which is more akin to an enormous family reunion, than a religious festival.

Saudi Vignettes

A trip to the antiques market yielded another unexpected find last week. There, I came across a book entitled Saudi Arabia: An Artist's View of the Past.

This hardcover book published in 1979 by Jeddah-born artist Safeya Binzagr features interesting sketches and paintings of traditional Saudi scenes.

Binzagr was compelled to capture and preserve images of old world Saudi Arabian life as the pace of sweeping cultural and technological change quickened in the latter half of the 20th century.

Her illustrations (a combination of oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, and etchings) capture the finer details of traditional Bedouin life. The writer of the book's preface commends Binzagr for having “done something commendable, for she has preserved these scenes from the ravages of time and oblivion.”

She reportedly took much of her material from old photographs which she found at such places as the Royal Geographical Society in London.

“It is important for Saudis to remember, and for the West to learn,” Safeya writes in her introduction. “This book will be a record for the new generation.”

A quick Internet search yielded a website for Binzagr’s gallery, which opened in Jedda in 2000, and where many of her works are displayed today.

The Ancient Olive Trees of Bechealeh

Lebanon is famous for its biblical cedars. But there are also ancient olive trees in the country that rival the cedars in age and beauty. They may or may not be as old as the Ministry of Tourism claims (4,000 B.C.), but nature's craftsmanship and the twists and turns of the wood over centuries is a metaphor for time itself.

This miniature grove of half a dozen trees is tucked away on a small road on the way to Douma in the northern Lebanese mountains. From there, one can climb to the valley of Tannourine, and further up towards the great cedars themselves. Unlike those emblematic trees, however, it's very easy to just drive by and miss the ancient olive grove of Bechealeh.

'The Baptized Sultan'

Most people are aware of the impact of Islamic Spain on the European history. The role of Andalusian philosophers, mystics, and translators on the development of the West cannot be underestimated. What is less known is the positive effects of Islam on Italy, and its role in the blossoming of the Renaissance there. Over the coming months, we'll examine some of the key examples of this influence, among other cross-cultural learning.

In these days of globalization and the confusion that comes with it, it may be useful to examine some past examples where cultural mixing and tolerance by leaders led to positive and unexpected developments. In the late 11th century in Sicily, Norman kings developed a royal dynasty. One of its first kings, Roger II, had a court that combined East and West, Christianity and Islam, merging the traditions of civilizations from all shores of the Mediterranean. His son, Frederick II, who was a polymath, went on to become an even greater cultural and political innovator, as well as Holy Roman Emperor.

Frederick's string of achievements were unusual: he established a written constitution that protected the rights of his subjects and founded the first secular university in Europe at Naples (Thomas Aquinas later studied there before going on to theological greatness in Paris). He also set up a refuge for Troubadours fleeing from southern France, and a Sicilian school of poetry which directly influenced the poetry of Dante.

Like the great Italian poet, Frederick's court used the local dialect for literature, rather than the traditional Latin. And despite Germanic and Norman roots, Frederick spoke Arabic fluently. His court scholars in Palermo translated the great works of Ibn Rushd and Aristotle, and it is even claimed that Arabic numerals came to Europe through his efforts. Frederick was so Arabized that he was referred to by some as "The Baptized Sultan".

This fantastic cross-mingling that he permitted helped re-awaken European culture. Significantly, Frederick II disbelieved anything that could not be proved by reason. Like Akhenaton, the great pharaoh, he insisted on shutting down charlatanism among physicians, and banned useless cures. He was also a profound religious iconoclast, and is said to have denounced Moses, Jesus and Mohammed as deceivers and fakes. For this and his closeness to Muslims in general, he earned himself a place in the sixth level of Dante's inferno - a heretic to forever burn in his tomb.

Frederick was also excommunicated four times, once by Pope Gregory IX for refusing to join the Crusades. When he finally travelled to the East, he managed to rapidly parlay access for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land in his discussions with the Sultan of Egypt. Indeed, he viewed the peoples of Islam as a rich and honorable society to be respected and learned from - possibly one of the secrets of his success, earning him the title 'The Wonder of the World' in his time.

The Emperor was described by the Damascene chronicler, Sibt Ibn Al Jawzi as having "eyes green like .. a serpent. He was covered with red hair… bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he would not have fetched 200 dirhams at the market."

Frederick II is an example of the constructive coexistence of cultures at a time of great intolerance. His achievements speak to the possibility of success even as cultures blend and mix under duress. Through his eccentricities, his liberalism and healthy linkages with the Muslim world, he became a key door for the knowledge of the East to enter Europe and begin the process that we know as the Renaissance.

Islamic Art Across the Ages

The following are examples of Islamic art stretching across ten centuries, and ranging from Central Asia to the Maghreb. They are found in "The David Collection", in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Haji Omran Road

The Haji Omran Road, also known as the “Hamilton Road”, is a little-known rural highway in Northern Iraq that cuts through some of the most rugged terrain in the Middle East.

Sir Archibald Hamilton, a New Zealand engineer in the British army, was charged with building the road. He and a motley crew of local workers (comprising Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, and Turcomen) labored for four years on the project beginning in 1928. The crew, working under the most difficult circumstances, blasted their way through a mountain wilderness where tribes who've always resisted central authority, made their home.

Hamilton completed his namesake route in 1932 and detailed his many adventures in his travel classic, Road Through Kurdistan.

The British desire to create a direct overland route and short cut linking the Eastern Mediterranean coast to the Caspian Sea, Iran and India led to the road’s creation. The route runs north from the city of Erbil, and then turns east connecting it with the remote towns of Rowanduz and Choman, and the Iranian border-village of Haji Omran. Passing through some of the region’s most difficult terrain (including five separate mountain ranges and the formidable Gali Ali Beg Canyon), the road is today still considered a marvel of engineering.

Buses and lorries traveling between Iraq and Iran ply the road. Iraqi Arabs from Baghdad also use the route to reach the higher altitude regions of Kurdistan in the summer to escape the stifling desert heat.

As you push past Rowanduz and head closer to Iran, the traffic thins out. Small side roads of dirt and gravel break off the main route and can be seen threading up towards mountain villages lying in the direction of the Turkish and Iranian frontiers.

In spite of the access granted to the outside world by the highway, and the subsequent inroads made by modernity, the region through which the Haji Omran Road runs remains wild, untamed and autonomous. Smuggling, rebel activity military intrigues and kinder-than-kind Kurdish locals are just some the things lying in wait for those intrepid enough to venture off the road.

Ibn Maimoun (Maimonides) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

In the tenth century, the city of Cordoba was the New York and Paris of its time, the centre of cultural activity, with over seventy libraries and even more centres of translation and learning. It was also known for its pervasive street lamps, and well-lit and paved streets – a stark contrast to the mud and darkness of its northern counterparts, like medieval London. This Andalusian city was the centre of learning and intellectual effervescence in Europe.

By the mid-twelth century, however, a new Islamic and Berber dynasty, the Almohad (or, more tellingly in Arabic, ‘Al-Muwahiddun’ or ‘unitarians’ or ‘unifiers’) had taken over the Andalus, imposing a stricter and less tolerant interpretation of Islam than previous rulers.

It was in this more difficult and darker environment, that these two men, Musa Ibn Maimoun (Maimonides) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a Jew and a Muslim, were born in Cordoba, nine years apart. They grew to leave a lasting legacy on both Islam and Judaism and to become known, in later times, as the ‘Second Moses’ and the ‘Second Aristotle’, respectively. Through their later impact on an Italian studying in Paris, they also changed the future of Christianity, and the cultural development of Europe.


The two men were both the sons of jurists, and became in their own way, intellectual revolutionaries. They brought the logic of reason into a world whirling often with blind faith, testing and questioning many long-held premises in their societies, and gaining much opprobrium from the religious powers of their time.

Both men were profoundly influenced by Aristotle and saw no contradiction between believing in a greater universal faith and utilizing reason to the utmost of an individual’s capacities – as the great Greek philosopher had so clearly demonstrated in his texts.

Oddly, their lives also paralleled each other. Both men lived out difficult worldly versions of their intellectual daring. The two men were cast out of Cordoba and both lived in exile in Fez for a time - neither able to return home again. Both also became authorities in their respective religious traditions, as well as court physicians: Ibn Rushd, originally, to the ruler of Cordoba, and Ibn Maimoun to Salaheddine in Egypt.

Ibn Mainoun wrote that “the truth should be pursued from whatever source that it proceeds,” and both men died as they lived. Ibn Rushd lost his life in Marrakesh, under suspicious circumstances, likely while under house arrest by the Almohads for his philosophy. Ibn Maimoun died in Egypt or Tiberias from ill-health brought on from a maniacal work routine of writing, medical healing and community service.

Their brilliance arose out of a marked humility regarding the place of the human in the larger scheme. As Ibn Maimoun wrote:

“Now consider the enormous dimensions and the large number of these material beings. If the whole earth is infinitely small in comparison with the sphere of the stars, what is man compared with all these created beings! How, then, could any one of us imagine that these things exist for his sake and benefit, and that they are his tools! This is the result of an examination of the corporeal beings: how much more so will this be the result of an examination into the nature of the Intelligences!"

Despite their tribulations, their legacies ultimately lived on in a man called Thomas Aquinus - an Italian studying at the University of Paris, who absorbed their works and, through his own thinking, changed forever the philosophy behind the Roman Catholic church. Aquinus brought the power of reason into the intellectual infrastructure of the church, and from there into the development of knowledge and education of Europe and the West as we now know it.

Sheikh Ali

For conservative Egyptians, this bar, located on a side-road off Saad Zaghloul Street in Alexandria, adds a certain insult to injury with its unorthodox appelation. Seldom has an establishment selling alcohol in the Middle East found itself with a name better suited to a mosque, a holy shrine, or a person of religious piety. But then again, Alexandrians have always had the reputation of being a little more open-minded about things.

This famous watering hole, which opened circa 1900, was called Cap D’Or (not to be confused with its notorious imposter on Abdel Khalik Tharwat Street in downtown Cairo). Two Greeks and a Frenchman were the proprietors of the bar - one of a cluster of venues in the neighbourhood catering to the city’s cosmopolitan socialites. Egyptian aristocrats, politicos, foreign expatriates, businesspeople, and artists all flocked there to eat, drink and make merry.

When the 1952 socialist revolution took place, the foreign owners of the bar, like many others, decided to pack up and leave the country. Before departing, they sold Cap D’or to a local man named “Ali”.

But unlike subsequent owners of the bar, Ali decided to close on Fridays (the Muslim sabbath). So when clients came to the bar that day, only to find its doors shut, they began to refer to him as “al Sheikh Ali” - the "sheikh" being an honorific designating piety, respectability and knowledge, especially of a religious type. And like all nicknames of genius, it stuck like glue.

Ali’s son now runs the joint. It retains its art nouveau décor and is one of the most popular old-school drinking shacks in the country. The bar has its own regulars and has a bit of a cliquey, clubhouse feel to it. Henry Kissinger is said to have made a stop here in the 1970s, between his diplomatic hobnobbing, to have a cold Stella.

Old World New Mind

In 1989, two renowned American academics, psychologist Robert Ornstein and biologist Paul Ehrlich, wrote a book called “New World New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution”. Their thesis, in essence, was fairly straightforward: humans had created a new world for themselves, but were still using an “old mind” to ineffectively deal with its consequences.

This mismatch meant that primitive fear and anger could potentially launch nuclear weapons, and that a mind wired for drama and stark contrasts simply could not detect and react to “slow change” - such as what we are seeing in climate change and the slow but sure consumption of the planet’s resources. By the time Chinese and Indians consume like Westerners, it may simply too late.

Ornstein and Ehrlich put forward an answer: humans can develop a “new mind” to deal with the challenges of a new world through a process they call “conscious evolution”. For this to happen we need to slow down our fast reflexes, widen our mental filters, see more “grays” in the world and approach the complexities facing us through holistic methods. Through a campaign of awareness and new forms of education that are focused on developing those parts of the mind currently slumbering, they believe we can make this transformation, thereby effectively saving ourselves from the spiraling dangers of our new world.

Above all, the shift will hinge on humans first becoming aware that they even have a problem, and realizing that their minds are operating according to methods devised to save us from saber-tooth tigers - and not from the environmental impact of carbon-based resources. Only when we become “conscious” of these limits, can we proceed to a new evolution.

In our other blog, entitled The Missing Piece, we have attempted to demonstrate how the specific problems of the Middle East, especially the ongoing ethnic conflicts and their fall-out, can be approached in new ways based on novel understandings of our psychology and culture. We have looked at matters ranging from cult thinking, to conditioning, to the basic sources of extremism. We have also placed a heavy emphasis on the Human Givens approach of psychological understanding that describes the innate needs and capacities that all humans have, and that, if satisfied, eliminate mental illness.

In our view, meeting these needs will also diminish and even resolve conflict in the Middle East, and serve as the basis for the proper planning and development of societies there and in other regions.

The approaches presented in “The Missing Piece” are another way of understanding and developing “The New Mind” that Ornstein and Ehrlich propose.

Recently, we have seen the Arab countries go through unexpected revolutions that have succeeded in casting aside leaders and systems in place for decades. In the first few months of 2011, this "old world”, which is in a sense the oldest world, has leapt from a culture frozen since ancient times to a situation where positive evolution is at least possible.

The road ahead for the Arab world is difficult and unpredictable. The old mind may triumph. But the Arab revolutions carry with them a spirit of individual empowerment and functionalism that are largely anti-cult, anti-ideology and anti-authority, and which may yet carry the day even if the process is decades long.

The Arab people have risen up en masse because their needs - especially for legitimacy and dignity - were not sufficiently met by their rulers and governments. Today, they have the space to attempt to wrest control over their lives and build a future where their needs, their “Human Givens”, are indeed met and the problems ahead faced more constructively.

Ornstein and Ehrlich wrote their tome the year that the Berlin Wall fell. Little did anyone know that twenty-one years later another set of earth-shaking revolutions would occur, and that radical changes would begin in a most unexpected place. There are no assurances of success for this endeavor in the Middle East, nor anywhere in the globe for that matter. However, we believe that the dissemination of these ideas is crucial today to the solution of our problems and for the future of human development. As Ornstein and Ehrlich say to end their book:

“If this book stimulates some more people to think about the roots of the human predicament, and how we might begin to adapt to our society, then we will have accomplished our purpose. With luck, we will have started to change your mind.”

With luck, the Arab revolutions may also lead, against all odds, to an “Old World New Mind”.

Jibril Rajoub

They say that birds are descended from dinosaurs. It may be that some humans have also undergone such transformations. Jibril Rajoub, once supreme tough guy and the head of security in the West Bank under Yasser Arafat, is today the head of the Palestinian Football Federation and the Palestine Olympic Committee.

“Abu Rami”, as he is better known, has successfully managed the shift from confronter of Hamas, to leader of youth and sports activities in Palestine. Indeed, as Palestinians increasingly aim for the symbols and realities of statehood this year, Jibril’s efforts to bring international football teams to play in Palestine, and to give coherence to his national football league, can only be seen as part of this living current: the slow and belated search for statehood for the Palestinian people.

Abu Rami was not always so benign. He was arrested at the tender age of 17 for having thrown a grenade at an Israeli bus in an act of resistance against the occupation. The explosive did not go off, but the attempt was enough to land him 17 years in jail. There, he learned Hebrew and formed his character, firming up his toughness and acumen enough to become a leader - a skill that has served him well as a member of the Fatah Party.

Jibril has known the full spectrum of knocks in life. He was exiled from the West Bank in the late 1980s and unceremoniously dumped in southern Lebanon by the Israeli government for his troublesome activities. From there, he made his way to Tunis and the offices of Yasser Arafat and the PLO, before returning to the West Bank with the Palestinian leader during the Oslo accords. From there he rose to the highest positions of national security of the Palestinian Authority.

All those efforts wasted away in a few deadly months in 2000 as Israel crushed the Palestinian Intifada that followed the Camp David negotiations, and, along with it, all of Abu Rami’s security institutions in the West Bank.

Since that time, Abu Rami moved slowly but surely away from pure politics. But he retains an important position on the Fatah Central Committee, and has since made the best of his positions as leader of athletics in his burgeoning nation.

A trip to a football match with Abu Rami is a thrill ride. A fight between players caused President Rajoub to leap from his imperial balcony (where he presides over the game) and rush the field to split up the players and create the calm needed for the game to go on. Undoubtedly, this is an intervention he had practiced in jail, and later in the West Bank, before applying it on the grass of the stadium at Al-Ram.

But these are just the professional depictions of the man. Those who know him well describe him as generous and buoyant personality, with a deep, gravelly voice, fitting of a member of "The Sopranos". He possesses an intimidating presence that makes everyone from young women to ministers cower near him. Indeed, there are some who have very difficult memories of his time as head of security in the West Bank and the abuses that came with that.

Still, an invitation to Abu Rami's diwan (with daggers and scimitars hanging from the walls) for a meal of every fowl and fish available in Ramallah, is an opportunity to know the power of traditional Arab and Bedouin generosity. It's also a chance to know the large heart of a man who, after all his travels, will always be from the village of Doura, near Hebron.

Restaurant Varouj

The most interesting Middle East Institutions are often those that fly far below the radar of the masses. A purely word-of-mouth establishment, Restaurant Varouj is one such place.

This Lebanese cookery, located in the tiny labyrinthine streets of Beirut’s Armenian enclave of Burj Hammoud, requires of its customers not just a monster appetite, but also a serious wherewithal for exploration.

There are no maps, street names or workable directions to find the place – just a general location from which to enter that Borgesian maze of laundry-draped alleyways that make up the Middle East’s most densely populated neighbourhood. Only by asking directions from a series of bleary-eyed elders and teenagers playing soccer in flip-flops will one find their way, point-by-point, to Varouj’s doorstep.

Here a father-and-son team presides over all four tables situated beneath shelves decked with Middle Eastern bric-a-brac. The mercurial, cigar-smoking elder, playing the combined role of owner, waiter, and maitre d’ is a character of the old school variety, who’s known to verbally manhandle his customers in the slightly tarnished Arabic of the Burj Hammoudi Armenians. His mild-mannered son whips up culinary storms at his command from a cooking station just a few feet behind him.

The usual Lebanese fare is on offer here – and all of it is extremely good. The prize dishes are the sujouk (spicy Armenian sausages), chicken livers, makanek (Lebanese sausages), b’tata harra (spicy homefries), and the raw kibbeh. To wash the whole thing down, order a bottle of locally made Arak (diluted with water in a pitcher and served in small glasses with ice cubes).

The novelty of the Varouj experience is amplified by the absence of printed menus or listed prices of any kind. Food is ordered ad hoc depending on what the master of ceremonies has available that day - and what he thinks you should eat!

At the end of the smorgasbord the host haphazardly tallies the meal price in an indecipherable chicken-scratch and throws it on the table. But it’s invariably less costly than what you'd expect to pay for such a meal fit for a king.

We’d add a few lines about how to find the place, but getting there through one’s own efforts is half the reward.

Mujib Nature Reserve

Overshadowed by the heavily trafficked tourist sites of Petra and Wadi Rum, is one of Jordan’s least known treasures. Ninety kilometers south of the capital Amman, off a main highway is Wadi Mujib – a massive riverine gash in the mountains running in an east-west direction to the Dead Sea.

Comprising numerous tributaries and located within the Mujib Nature Reserve, Wadi Mujib begins inland at around 900 metres and drops to more than 400 metres below sea level to reach the Dead Sea. The main wadi is fed by several seasonal and permanent streams and is a major source of H2O replenishing the ever-receding shores of the world’s lowest body of water.

Like its iconic cousins to the south, Wadi Rum and Petra, The Mujib Nature Reserve is breathtakingly beautiful, and exudes the same Biblical profundity and rock-hewn drama as the other sites. But there is an added feature here that the other venues lack: water and few people.

The area’s stark disposition (marked by canyons as narrow and as steep as the famous rock cleft that leads to the Treasury at Petra) is brilliantly juxtaposed by the life-giving rivers that run through it, creating an impression of a kind of secret paradise flowing with milk and honey. It is a safe-haven resonating with an almost sacred quality.

But it's not so much the wadi itself that is Mujib's real worth. Instead, it is what’s contained within it. The area’s relative remoteness and inaccessibility to humans has allowed a large biodiversity to thrive here – including both rare and endangered animals.

Mujib is an important home and way station for around 200 species of birds, many of them migratory. They include birds with such colorful names as the Black Stork, the Honey Buzzard, the Levant Sparrow Hawk, the Short-Toed Eagle and the Barbary Falcon.

Three hundred different species of plants grace the wadi’s walls and floors. Walking through the shallow, clear waters of its streams, one is surprised to find small schools of fish and even frogs.

And although they are not easily seen, Mujib is also home to jackals, wolves, mongoose, hyenas, Nubian ibex, and caracals (a medium sized cat with black and white ear tufts that can catch birds in mid-air). The animals’ continued survival here is owed, in part, to the special care given to the site.

The 212 square kilometer Mujib Nature Reserve was created in 1987 by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN). There are three main trails for hiking and canyoning and no more than 25 people are allowed on each trail per day. The dry trails are open year round. The wet ones, where you can sometimes wade up to your chest in fast-moving torrents of water, are open between 1 April and 31 October.

(These photos were taken on the Malaqi Trail, which follows part of the Mujib and Hidan Rivers).

The Beauty of Reform

A reality that is easily forgotten about each of the three monotheistic faiths of the Middle East is that they were each once a profound attempt at reform of an existing religion.

Judaism was a reform of the many pagan Canaanite faiths, focusing on the One God, instead of the many.

Christianity was a reform of Judaism, focusing on the individual human relation with God, rather than the law in-itself.

Islam was a reform of both Christianity and Judaism, focusing again on the universal unity of God (known in Arabic as “Tawhid”), rather than ethnic or iconic representations of the intangible.

Of course, each derived from a specific context and time and still reflects the tones and spirits of those beginnings - in Judea, Galilee and the Arabian Peninsula, respectively.

Today, we view these faiths as civilizations and separate cultures, often in deep competition with one another, and even sometimes at war. Despite the talk in interfaith activities, the common spirit behind them is secondary to the cultural references; the form of the faiths is more important than their spiritual motivation.

As reforms of existing religions that had grown stiff and fixated on objects rather than the divine, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are originally simply branches of a singular “tree” of spiritual and human development. It is a tree that existed before those branches took shape and that continues to this day in other forms. Their acts of reform were in direct line with this larger effort, and no other.

The question today is whether these three faiths, spread as they are across the globe, can be realigned to serve their original purpose and the deeper current from which they stemmed. There may be no way to do this without each becoming humbler to that origin. That would mean that the rituals, cultures and identity these faiths have developed are treated as secondary to human growth and development; a step that would require the religions be adjusted to the needs of today.

The monotheistic faiths are not ends in themselves, but means, and so a process of endless reform of human foibles without sacred cows. Only so can they help humanity in its “eighth day of the week”.

Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul

In his book, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World, William C. Chittick has put forward a refreshing outlook on Islam today. Away from the ideological and cartoonish depictions of this faith, Chittick unfolds a forward looking, indeed revolutionary perspective on how Islam was meant to be understood in the first place.

The core of his work is a critical differentiation in Islam between two forms of human knowledge, "transmitted" and "intellectual". Simply put, the former is passed on in the form of "Taqlid" (imitation of an authority), the latter can only be found independently through "Tahqiq" (realization, verification), using mind, heart and personal experience.

According to Chittick, to think “Islamically’” is above all to pursue the unity of God, the only source of truth and reality, through Tahqiq. This highly personal pursuit of unity stands in stark contrast with the modern obsession with intellectual and academic specialization, a form of fragmentation that moves away from the discovery of unifying principles in the world.

In his view, this fragmentation creates the many gods of modernity, a source of confusion and suffering, especially when "God" enters the domain of politics becoming yet another manifestation of difference. Indeed, Chittick claims that much of modern Islamic intellectual and political thought “suffers from a grave illness” by imitating modern Western thought, having little to do with original Islam as he understands it.

He also puts a powerful focus on how to “go beyond ideology and dogma”, and steps beyond politics to include much of modern Western scientific thinking as dogmatic because it involves imitation, rather than personal realization. In this novel yet ancient approach to knowledge, there can be no ivory towers of pure objectivity. Knowledge becomes moral again because it springs directly from the human, embedded in our very natures. “We cannot study the natural world without studying ourselves, and we cannot learn about ourselves... without understanding the wisdom inherent in the natural world.” The two are inseparable; there is no room for stark dualisms.

The odd but perceptive title of the book introduces this secret missing piece of Islamic science, the human dimension of "soul". This is in many ways a very radical book, asking us to approach matters with an unimposed or legislated lens: “Until you know yourself … your self-knowledge is based on imitation, not realization.”

What Chittick proposes requires enormous training and personal discipline in the development of one’s self and “soul”, the very instrument through which verification and understanding are gained. But, he makes a powerful argument that this is the real Islamic tradition, and one that offers the modern world, East and West, the chance to rediscover the self as the proper basis for knowledge and creativity.

There are signs today that the Arab world is awakening. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions have sought independence from authority, rejected dogma and ideology and, by their pluralism, accepted that individuals, and not just "tribes", matter. Although this current runs at the political level, it mirrors Chittick´s intellectual approach, a mechanism that can be a road forward for Arabs, and a model for many others around the globe.

As he clearly states in this book, the need has never been greater for creative, independent, and unifying action to meet our challenges. "Tahqiq" and its fruits seem very much the proper beginning.