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Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast
Keeping it 101 is the podcast that helps our nerdy listeners make sense of religion. Why religion? Well, if you read the news, have a body, exist in public, or think about race, gender, class, ability, or sexuality, you likely also think about religion — even if you don’t know it yet. Let us show you why religion is both a lot more important and a little easier to understand than you might think. Put us in your earholes and let us show you why religion isn’t done with you — even if you’re done with religion.
Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast
Extra Credit with Professor Omid Safi
in which we chat with our dear friend and scholar-goals icon Omid Safi, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.
Homework: Radical Love, "Sufi Heart," and MLK's Riverside Church speech
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Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion is proud to be part of the Amplify Podcast Network.
Keeping It 101: theme music
Ilyse:Hello and welcome to keeping it one Oh one a Killjoys introduction to religion. I'm Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, one of your killjoy co-hosts. I'm the one who studies Islam imperialism and is a general grump.
Megan:I'm Megan Goodwin, the other killjoy host. I'm the one who studies gender, sexuality America and is well, Ilyse says that I'm less grumpy than she is, but I feel like I'm just differently grumpy. Anyway, remember those nerds who are always doing the most, getting all the extra credit? Of course you do dear listeners because those nerds, they're you, which means you're in for a treat today. It's an extra credit episode!
Silly Noises:extra credit sound clip
Megan:It is in fact your first extra credit assignment, so let's explain the premise extra credits are episodes with a slightly different format. We welcome a rock star in the study of religion to join our chat and with their help we build on issues we've talked through before but in greater depth.
Ilyse:Today's extra credit is really special. Nerds. We have with us professor Omid Safi, an eminent scholar of Islam who is professor of Asian and middle Eastern studies at Duke university. He is the author of very many books, most recently radical love teachings from the Islamic mystical tradition. He's working on a new book about the appropriation reception of Rumi, the famous Sufi mystic. He's also working on another book about the legacies of Martin Luther King jr. But dear listeners, you've likely read or heard one of his countless pieces of public scholarship. He has a podcast of his own called Sufi heart, which is a part of the be here now network. He had a long running and unbelievably popular column in on being, countless op-eds in major newspapers, radio, and TV spots across all those accessible venues. He's most often talking about social justice, whether that's on issues of gender or race. For full disclosure, Omid is also one of my dearest and oldest friends, and so it is an unbelievable joy to welcome him to our podcast and spend a little bit of extra time on this extra credit episode.
Megan:Yes, and as always, I feel so privileged that you two besties are willing to let me sit in on your chats, so today I will hold on to my own butt while Omid keeps it one-oh-one with us.
Ilyse:Yay. Hi[ Omid.
Omid:Hello. Hello. You goddesses of religion and all things cool.
Ilyse:I like that my note says Omid is allowed to say hello having been introduced like the goddamn celebrity he is.
Omid:Can I be like God blessed? Right?
Ilyse:Totally. Especially cause I feel like you know, your mom might listen and she'll think less of me.
Omid:she WILL listen and then you know, she will say something adorable about you. I'm sure
Megan:it is our getting to know you segment, which I want to use a stupid musical theater thing to introduce.
Silly Noises:Oh, you getting to know, getting to know all about you(from the King and I)
Megan:getting to know you. This is our primary sources with a guest. We did the stuffy aca-intro, but Omid-jan, can you share with us why religion? Why do you work on what you work on? Give us your, your primary sources, man.
Omid:Cause I like people, I like humanity and I don't know how to talk about humanity without talking about the things that are dear to people. And I'm interested in the messiness of life, always on the side of love and justice. And beauty, but I've been moved, I've been moved by the way that people, especially vulnerable people end up pointing the moral compass for humanity as a whole. And I want to know what it is either very, very deep or very, very high that people tap into to point their lives in a, in a direction. I don't come at this from, you know, the study of theology per se or you know, kind of stuffy intellectual side of things. I want to know why it is that, uh, the proverbial taxi cab driver or the farmer is reciting a Rumi poem or a Hafiz poem or you know, what it means for a group of Jewish activists from New York to go down South and to be holding hands with oppressed but proud African Americans and singing gospel songs together. And that for me is really what I'm interested in, much more so than, you know, a group of theologians sitting in the corner. I'm kind of interested in a religion out in the streets among humanity out in public.
Megan:Yeah. Hey, that's so nice. And I'm a little bit confused about why you're friends with us.
Ilyse:we're not, we're not that nice. We're not that nice.
Omid:My lived experience tells me otherwise, but, you know, you're entitled to your truth.
Megan:I love that about you, and I love that journey for us. I'm wondering if I can just ask a follow up question. For the primary sources sections that we've done already, Ilyse and I have reflected on experiences in our own lives that help us, I think better understand why we study religion and how we study religion and not put you on the spot because we didn't actually give you any questions ahead of time, but I'm wondering if there's an experience that you could maybe share with us that helps us understand where you are in the study.
Omid:Wow. going right for the personal.
Megan:I worked for NPR for a long time. So come at me.
Omid:So I mean, the truth of the matter is that I am an immigrant kid, uh, who oddly both born US citizen, born in Florida, but raised in Iran. And during my childhood in Iran, I got to see this extraordinary utopian, revolutionary transformation of society, uh, led mostly by college kids who thought that they were going to establish the Bernie Sanders revolution. No, I mean the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution and build a human society that would transcend the lines of a race and class and topple their, the palaces, uh, of, of imperialism. And, uh, it didn't really work out that way. Um, but to be a nine year old and to have these religious revolutionary slogans, uh, everywhere around you and on the street and get to miss your entire, uh, third grade, um, was exhilarating. And I wanted to know what it was that gave meaning to people who would want to do that. Um, and you know, like all autobiographies, this is retrospective and partial and connecting dots that at the time I was just like, Hey, I don't get to go to school. Awesome. Um, but maybe 20 years later or 10 years, 15 years later, I can look back and say, wow, that really ended up being important to me. Um, a couple of years after that, um, was the one of the longest, if not the longest, um, 20th century Wars, which was the war between Iran and Iraq, um, which included, uh, urban bombings of, um, the city that we lived, Tehran, a city with more people than New York. Um, and that made me into a pacifist, which I remain till today. I loathe, uh, war and warmongering and militarism, um, because I still hold very dear to me, that little child that would have to go and hide in our basement when the planes were flying overhead. And I don't want any child, especially black and Brown children to ever have to go through that. Um, and so imagine how powerful it is when, as a grownup and after getting my PhD. And you know, how lovely that our education and our growth doesn't end just because we get to fool four people sitting on the other side of the table that, you know, we're smart enough to sit on their side of the table. Uh, you know, and so long after I've been supposedly certified to be a nerd on medieval Islamic thought, um, I start studying, uh, African American religious history and not just Dr. King, but other people that I had not even heard of. Like, you know, Jim Lawson, uh, who's talking about, uh, if you love the people, you can't hurt the people. Uh, and if you love the folk, then you have to be nonviolent. And so it was almost like finding, um, in people to whom I wasn't related, uh, ethnically or initially linguistically, uh, a very noble and beautiful lived expression of the same kind of truth that that little scared a 10, 12 year old boy in Iran already knew in his heart.
Megan:Well, thank you for sharing that. And also that'll teach me to ask personal questions. Yeah.
Omid:And I'll send you the therapy bill afterwards and uh, you know,
Ilyse:we've got a running tab so it's totally okay. Well I think one of the things I love so much about your work, Omid, is that you so seamlessly blend I think. I think on the one hand we totally blindsided you and that's a mean thing of us to do by asking you to share a personal story without having given you a heads up about it. But on the other hand, I think, I don't actually feel that bad about it because you're someone whose work sort of drips with this understanding that the personal is political and the personal can't be excised from the scholarship we do. Now, I think you're one of my, I mean obviously are one of my earliest examples of how you exist in the world as a scholar who's like a person who has to eat dinner and raise children and then also like write books and have a, have a scholarly voice. But I think what you're so good at is, is refusing to divide up your own humanity into little silos of like, here's me, the scholar, here's me, the dad, here's me, the son, here's me, the activist. And so I'm wondering if you could say a little bit a little bit about that. I guess I could ask that differently. So Megan and I are really bored by the idea that scholars shouldn't be activists. And I think it assumes, as we've talked about over the years, all sorts of like genuinely stupid things like neutrality or objectivity or that our bodies aren't like in the world,
Megan:let's call it white supremacist because that is in fact what it is.
Ilyse:Yeah. And I would say like cishet, male patriarchy, white supremacy,
Megan:Capitalist bullshit. Next.
Omid:But Megan, how do you really feel about this, because I'm not really clear on...
Megan:Vexed. I feel vexed, Omid. Thank you for asking.
Ilyse:Three of us having known each other for so long know that we are all really itchy about those kinds of divisions. But I think each of us divide up how we talk about ourselves as doing scholarship or activism. If that's a fair way, a fair word to use differently. So I'm curious how your thinking of yourself as a scholar, as an activist, like what kind of labels would you use to self-describe and which ones wouldn't you use?
Omid:So, I mean, I think I tend to think about it in a few different ways to begin with. You know, uh, I'm very mindful of the fact that the kind of bifurcation, the neat bifurcation that you're talking about, uh, it is very much something that comes out of the experience of privileged white men. And by the standards of the Academy, I am privileged in the sense of, you know, now I'm a full professor and I am male with all of the male privilege that comes along with it. I am most emphatically not white. And one of the ways that I know that I'm not white is that people keep telling me, um, and you know, like, uh, I mean here I am and at, uh, one of the better universities in America and I still, uh, would get introduced as Omid is our first Muslim director of one of our interdisciplinary centers and institutes and kind of whatever. And, and at some point I was like, you know, that's funny. I don't ever remember any of my colleagues being introduced as you know, such and such is our first Jewish director, our first Christian director or first whatever. And so eventually at some point in some meeting, I think I said something like, you know, I come from a really long line of brilliant, charismatic and inspired people and it's actually rather embarrassing that it would take a leading global institution like my university until the year 2014 to have one of my people in a position of leadership. So it's actually not a compliment for me since I know how excellent my community is and has been. It's a really sad reflection on how slow we have been to recognize the excellence of humanity and what does it say if we think of ourselves as a global university and we're very happy to have very wealthy Chinese and Arab and other students come to our university because we know that they will never qualify for financial aid and they will always have to pay full tuition every last penny. But we teach about the whole world, but that our faculty expertise is not in fact representative of either the Academy nor of the planet that we supposed to teach about. And then I sat down and I think that might have been the last time that I got invited back to that particular meeting. Um, which from my point of view is like a win because that's one less meeting that I have to go to. But you know, I think there is this, um, and this is something that I had kind of had the inkling inside of me, but I didn't have the words until I was reading Malcolm at some point. And I don't make mistake of equating the experience of a Brown and Muslim immigrant, Iranian American with the experience of Malcolm coming out of an, in the Jim Crow context. But there can be a resonances; there can be echoes. And I think it's frankly one of the reasons why every good decent scholar of religion has to be at some point a comparativist. Um, even if the comparison is, uh, in some ways having theoretical models that have come out of different disciplines and different traditions. Even if you only think of yourself as studying one tradition, you've got to be used to looking at, to use the old Buddhist Sufi metaphor, looking at the elephant from multiple vantage points and knowing that it's always bigger than any one, um, criteria that you can bring to it. Um, and you know what Malcolm was talking about, which I think this gets back to your activism question was he had a critique of people who really hold their head up high by saying such and such. And he's using the language of that time period is the first black doctor, the first black engineer, the first black university professor. And he said, what that means is that you've left your community and you're primarily serving an all white community. So I'm very mindful of the fact that even though it's changing and it has changed in my own lifetime, so you know, if the good Lord gives me another few months or so, I'm going to make it to 50. Uh, I'm going to be half century old. And, um, I have been going to the AAR for almost my entire adult life and it has changed drastically during the course of that time. But I still work in not only an institution that is white dominant, but it is an institution that is committed to a white liberal, capitalistic ethos. And so if you don't fit into that framework, and if your paradigm is one that says the dignity and the worth of human beings is not at all connected to the amount of fundraising that you can do around those people, um, then it's natural that those of us with such commitments pose not only a problem, but actually an obstacle for many of our institutions and they don't understand why we're not grateful to have a position that mind you, we have earned through blood, sweat and tears with lack of institutional support that a lot of our white peers have had. Oh, go ahead, Megan
Megan:in keeping it one Oh one moment, I'm wondering if I can ask you to tell listeners who Malcolm is in just a few sentences and Hey, what's an AAR?
Omid:and AAR. Yeah. So, uh, you know, Malcolm, Malcolm X, truth speaking, uh, bold and fierce, a black leader who just like, uh, Dr. King was killed at the age of 39 and I love both Malcolm and Martin. I'm learning to love Ella Baker and a lot of other figures that I was never taught about. And I think one of the things I love about Malcolm is that he was a high school dropout, uh, who is self-taught in prison. Uh, and you know, for a lot of us who never were sent to elite prep schools or boarding schools and, you know, show up in these very privileged institutions, feeling woefully under prepared, you know, Malcolm touches my heart in a very deep way and I love to see the way that he grows and he changes and that, you know, sometimes people say, Oh, you're saying something different now than you did five years ago. And he said, good. It just means I'm not dead. It means that I'm still growing and changing. And the AAR is basically the, the geek Fest, uh, galore. It is, uh, it's my intellectual guild, uh, the American Academy of religion, uh, which is both very, very, very American and, uh, very international. Um, it is a gathering of about 10 to 14,000 people depending on if we meet somewhere sunny or not. Um, which is becoming an increasingly unaffordable but necessary meeting place. The cost of our$2,000 plus a year to attend. And a lot of us are asking in an age of how is this for a tangent, uh, in an age where 80% of the people who teach religion and teach in the Academy don't have tenure track positions. Why do we have structures and institutions that almost necessitate that your advancement and your networking be tied to attending a place which very few of us can afford. And I say this as somebody again who has been going for two such gatherings for about 30 years. And if I can just wrap around, come back around. That ended in terms of the question that Ilyse-jan(dear Ilyse) asked about activism and scholarship and kind of what have you, I think it comes down for me to that fictitious line about where the edge of the Academy is. Yes. The Academy is essentially an institution that has a white supremacist, Christian dominant, a male dominant, classic, heteronormative, et cetera, legacy and present state. But guess what? So does the larger world and I think one and whatever term people want to use public, intellectual, organic, intellectual community. And based intellectual these days maybe as good of a term as I have found is public facing intellectual. And I think the question of a who are you really speaking with? But also who are you speaking for? I think those two questions really linger with me. And you know, I, I've written my share of books that to be honest, maybe two dozen people have read in their life and I think as Ilyse-jan in one of her more, um, truthful moments said, good God, you didn't know how to write back then.
Ilyse:Oh no! Don't out me on my own podcast!
Omid:And you know, it's true. Like, you know, that book, by the way, dear listeners in case you ever suffer from insomnia and need to immediately go into a deep and restful meditative sleep, lulled into that higher state of awareness, is called the politics of knowledge and pre-modern Islam where for some reason this guy that at some point in his forties learns how to write in when he's 30. He insists on putting a God blessed footnote after every comma and every period. Just to show you that, dear reader, I've really done my homework and I've done all these readings and I have all these articles and they're not really relevant to what I'm saying, but you just need to know that I'm really smart. So can you please see that I'm so smart? Um, and so as a result, it's just unreadable. And you know, to be honest, like I said, two dozen people maybe have read that book. And so I think about what a waste is to contribute to something where maybe some other scholars in some other disciplines can afford. My people can't, we can't afford it because we do need to have not just me and Ilyse and you, Megan, and a lot of the people who are listening out there hopefully elevating public discourse. But I think this work is important because in my heart of hearts, I am a small D Democrat. Uh, and I think education is an essential component of a robust democracy.
Silly Noises:Mr Rogers train sounds
Megan:well, I love that. I love all of that. I also, my assigned follow up question was to ask you why you do public work. But I think you have beautifully elevated why and how you're doing it, and I'm also reminded of a Najeeba Syeed and Simran Jeet Singh, both saying in different spaces that they were never given an option about whether or not they wanted to do public work. They have been asked to represent their communities because of being the one Sikh man, the one Muslim woman in the room, and were sort of just about pushed into the spotlight whether they wanted it or not. So that we can speak specifically about your work and the public facing piece. I want us to think about how your commitment to justice informs and infuses your public facing work. Particularly. I know you've got the book that you're working on on Dr. King, the volume that engages queer Muslims, but broadly I find myself wondering how your work helps folks, smart, engaged, caring, people who say like love Rumi but maybe don't know a whole lot about Islam, gain a better and more expansive understanding of what Islam is, who Muslims are and who Muslims can be. Basically, how does this kind of work help us be smarter, better, more careful thinkers about religion?
Omid:Yeah, that's wonderful. That's a great question. I would love to, you know, think about that for a few hours before opening my mouth to say anything. But I'm guessing that the podcast format, uh, doesn't lend itself to it unless your editorial skills are just really way more advanced. Um, and we now switch seamlessly into meditative music and then reemerge from it two hours later.
Silly Noises:Spa music. Rupaul clip
Omid:No. We all have lives and one of us has sick children and uh, Hey, yours truly has to go pick up his daughter. Um, which is real life. So I think, here's what I would say. And just this last weekend I was doing a retreat out in California with a Buddhist friend of mine. So it was like a love Fest of Sufis and Buddhists. And in fact, dear Megan, like there were about 30 people who came to me after my, my Rumi session. And they were like, I've always loved Rumi, but I never realized that he was Muslim and, and, and even even better and worse and more frustrating, but more endearing. And, and I, because I'm a nice human being, I choose to look at it as endearing. They say things like, I never realized that Muslims talk about love.
Megan:Oh no. I'm so sorry about white people, Omid. I'm so sorry.
Omid:It's a, you know, look, we've got Osama, you got Trump, we call it even. Let's just move on. What I oftentimes try to explain to people is that yes, everybody is a moral agent. Yes, everybody has agency. Yes, everybody should look at their own life as a perpetual unfolding of our soul's journey. But the fact that so many folk and in particular, so many spiritually seeking white people have never made the connection between Rumi and Islam is not only a personal failure, it's also part of this larger industry, which is through rooted in capitalism of keeping these boxes separate so that the Islam shelf of your bookstore looks like the Quran jihad and terrorism section, plus the obligatory oppressed women. And the one solitary woman who got out shelf like that. Those are the Muslim boxes into which we can fit. And the Rumi section is going to be right next to the Dalai Lama section and the yoga section and the personal individualistic, spiritual, non-religious, um, enlightenment seeking section. And you know, there's a vested interest in keeping these two quite apart from one another and more power to anybody whose life does in fact intersect with some of those categories. Surely there are those solitary women who got out. Surely there is a whole wave of oppression in Islam as there is in every other religious tradition and every other religious and ethnic community. And, and if the late, uh, Shabbat mud was right and I think he was that after the Koran, it is the mystical erotic central poetry of people like Rumi and Hafiz, which was read more widely by Muslims than any book other than the Quran. Then almost whenever we talk about the spiritual and moral and poetic imagination of Muslims, we have to talk about the erotic and mystical and the sensual love poetry stuff. We have to.
Ilyse:And so do you, Omid... On the podcast, we've talked in previous episodes in this semester's worth of work about like the really boring history of religion stuff that you know, I get off on of like, well what is really and what is Judaism really and these boxes. And so we've talked about how labeling Islam in particular as one thing creates a real violence. And would you categorize the, I actually can't describe it in n ot violent words? So it's like a false question I guess. I guess I'm saying...my question is more of a comment a nd that like when I hear you describe what a bookstore looks like, you know, I, I live in those bookstores too and you're totally right, but it feels like a real dissection, like a real o rgan removal to say, you know, Islam equals t exts, terrorism and violence against women and all of its beautiful stuff. It can be universal, can be for everybody can be cherry picked out and literally divorced to the point where well-meaning white ladies cannot imagine that R umi was Muslim and Muslims engage Rumi.
Omid:Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I know, uh, what the two of you have said in your previous podcast because I'm a fan and I listen and dear listeners, you should listen and you should listen as soon as the podcast come out so that the podcast for rises in terms of its ranking and other friends can and notice and benefit from this. So subscribe and share on social media with your friends. And I'm not being paid for that shameless plug. because I have no shame. I have no shame. Uh, I mean I think, look, uh, you are, you're exactly right about this and I'll give you, because we're talking about being comparitivist, two examples, one about the bookstore and one about our training. Most religion departments when they train people in this study of Islam and Ilyse and Megan, this is also true sadly for the institution that the two of you got your doctorates from. And I did my best to change it and failed and I will keep on trying as long as anybody would listen to me. We were told that we could have expertise in one primary source language could be Persian, it could be Arabic, it could be, you know, if need be Turkish or whatever. And then there had to be like an expertise in a research language which had to be French or German. Now pray tell, why can't Persian be a research language?
Ilyse:I don't...I don't know.
Omid:Last time I checked my people are, my people are nerds. We write books, we do research. And if you do work, let's say on Sufism, uh, I'm willing to stack my books on scholarship in person against anything that the blessed French or the blessed German and I love them to have written on this subject. And if you want to make the argument that the French or the German do critical scholarship and the Persians do devotional appreciation, then say it, say it so that I can debunk it and we can get on with our blessed life. But you don't go into this modality which is just hiding the fact that there is a biblical tradition underwriting the traditions that we study that have nothing to do with the Bible. But that if you want it to be a scholar of the Bible, you had to know Hebrew and Greek and German because the Germans did a lot of scholarship on the Bible. And then now when you've got people coming up in this study of Islam and the Hindu traditions and Confucianism, we're still making them have command of French and German. How much of a richer world of Islamic studies, just to take the field that I know a little bit about would be to say every scholar of Islam should know something about at least two, at least two languages that Muslims all over the world use. And it could be Persian and or do, it could be Persian and Mandarin. It could be Arabic and Bahasa. It could be Wolof and Turkish. Right. And if you're doing research on African American Islam, Hey, maybe English should be one of them, right?
Megan:I'm pretty sure Muslims don't speak English, Omid?
Omid:Yeah. Right. You know, I think, uh, some of us only know the choice words, the salty ones in there. Um, and that, bless that language. And, um, can I just tell you about a way, and no, I will not name this particular scholar because mama raised me Right? But I was introduced in an institution where I had a full time job. Ilyse, you're not allowed to name this person either.
Ilyse:That's what I was laughing about!
Omid:yes, yes, yes. I was introduced as, and he speaks such good English and I was like, mother bleeper like w you know, do you want to hurt? They want to hear me, like cuss in five different languages, you know, I could, but like I was raised in the South. What other language do you expect me to be speaking here?
Megan:They speak English in Florida, right?
Omid:Right! I mean, you know, as far as I know, English is one of the more commonly used languages in Florida. It's not the only one, but it's truly is one of them. And anyway, so there's that whole issue of what languages count and who's doing real critical language study and teaching and what does it mean if we're only requiring, at least on here's your second plug, um, for a brilliant article that will be coming from professor Ilyse, uh, in the journal of the American Academy of religion about why people should be writing better job ads for Islamic studies. Uh, and why, uh, Arabic perhaps should not be the only language that is named in 80% or so of these job ads. So that's one. How much more interesting would it be if all of our PhD graduates a, would learn to speak a couple of language travel, have funds to travel, be able to think across regionally, uh, and perhaps even across multiple centuries. And then to sort of come back to the bookstore example, because I'm one of those people that when I go into a bookstore, I go to the children's section to the, got some stuff for my kids. I go to their religion section, which is just a Christianity section. Um, and you know, then I sort of check out what there is on in the jihad and terrorism section. And then I go over to see what new books have come out in African American studies. And here's one of the interesting things that I discover in most bookstores. So this semester I'm teaching a seminar on Martin Luther King, a subject that you know, I'm a little passionate about. And so I'm always interested in what is coming out on Dr. King. You are not in most bookstores that I go to, you're not going to find the books by or about Dr. King in the Christianity section. You have to go to black studies or African American studies to find Dr. King.
Ilyse:That doesn't surprise me. I mean sadly,
Omid:you know, then then what is the Christianity section? We can talk about what the Islam section is and the violence that's done there to collapse the beauty and the messiness. And I don't want a sanitized version. I don't want an eight historical version, but give us everything. Yeah, give us everything. So we know the violence that's done on the Islam side. But what happened when the Christianity section also looks like a sanitized and whitewashed version of Christianity, so that it's the Bible and devotional literature and a few other things section. And what happens when someone as monumental as Dr. King is almost never put in the Christianity section.
Ilyse:Yeah. It's almost like our categories are already making arguments for us about what is and isn't authentic. That's true. Isn't religion even, right? Because if it's civil rights, is that also religion? How could that be Christianity? Omid, you fit in well around us Killjoys.
Omid:well, you know, and, and yet I continue to insist that there is real joy and there is real beauty and real love and real poetry. And honestly, I would say this is one of the things that in my own life I feel like I'm still insisting on is, you know, look, I entered grad school, uh, in 1992 and it was kind of one of the heydays of postmodernism. And this was when Fred Jamison and all those folks were at Duke. And so what I really learned to do in grad school was to deconstruct the hell out of anything. And you know, I found myself going to meetings and go into conferences and to workshops and listening to lectures on topics that I knew diddly squat about, but I knew how to tear their argument apart when I noticed a certain fuzziness about their categories or a jump into logic or a certain grandness in the narrative. And there's a beauty to deconstructing garbage there is, especially when the garbage is nationalism or white supremacy or sexism or militarism or what have you. But, and here's a big but(t) that I do like. We also have to learn to tell some stories if we're not satisfied with the narratives that have come down to us at some point, we have to be able to make better narratives. We have to be able to sing better songs, write better poems, and tell better stories. Being fully aware that somebody's going to come right behind us and critique and problematize and tear those things apart. But I think I'm not comfortable with thinking of this as normative or constructive phenology the way that some people talk about it. But I do think it's important to do work that's not only problematizing and deconstructing, but it's also offering something. And you know, that's why for all the cautionary notes and all the problematics that I try to stay mindful of, I just thought it's important for me at some point in my life to do something like the radical love book and go through these 15,000 books that I live with. These are my friends, these are my erotic lovers that I kind of way. Um, and I mean, look, you know, mine is a tradition that talks about, you know, making love to reading and it's a, it's a delicious erotic, sensual experience to read. And I don't want to just to go to the grave with me because, because I have children and because I have the community who don't have access to those same books, or if they have the books on their bookshelf, sometimes they're opaque to them and somehow they have to come alive somehow. They have to be translated not only from Persian to English, but they have to be translated from a medieval kind of, um, narrative and structure to something that sings in their own context.
Megan:Yeah. I think that, not to be this theory bro, but I'm going to be in this theory bro. I think when Derrida suggests that deconstruction is fundamentally a creative process, that is the kind of creation that's possible Once you've picked apart all of the problems, right? It makes space for these new ways of seeing and new ways of knowing and that's really exciting.
Omid:Yeah.
Silly Noises:Mr Rogers train sounds
Ilyse:I am going to transition us into our final segment because I'm mindful of everybody's time, including our listeners.
Megan:I was going to offer Omid and I don't if everybody's got to run, I don't want to keep them, but I was gonna offer Omid an opportunity to ask us a question just to keep it fair.
Ilyse:Oh yeah. Fair. We were, we were assholes and made you talk a lot.
Omid:It's all good. It's all good. I have two questions for you. Excellent. Yeah. And they're kind of related but not entirely other than everyone. Like who do you really want to listen to this podcast?
Ilyse:I think our realistic audience, are professors gearing up for introductory level religion classes that are looking for assignments. I think if we could expand beyond that, I mean I'm shocked by how many o f like aunts and uncles, friends from high school, smart people that want to know more and have long commutes. I t's kind of like what I imagine the audience says. Goodwin, do you have a better answer?
Megan:I honestly am not sure that I have an answer. A thing that's been funny about doing this podcast is that I imagined it as a fun way to schedule hang out with the least time as official work time and to learn new technology because I'm a dork, so I, I am a theater kid. I don't generally think about the audience. I think about the performance. So when we were putting this idea together, I was like, this is so fun and like this is an interesting way to kind of do this and maybe I'll use it in my classes. That's neat. And I have been just overwhelmed and humbled, which you all know me. That's, that's something at how many folks have gotten in touch to say that they're listening and that they like what we're doing and that they see something of themselves in how we're talking about us doing this work. So I am just flabbergasted and incredibly honored that anybody at all is listening. Thank you so much. And yeah, I think if it helps keep us in conversation with an accountable to folks doing religion, however they're doing it, then then it's doing the thing that I wanted to do.
Omid:And I think the other thing is if you were, both of you are now in a position where you know folks are looking to you for, for guidance, for inspiration, what do you tell people to do to keep themselves sane?
Megan:So we're just, we're just going to fix that right quick. Cool, cool, cool, cool. I think, you know, we make the jokes about being Killjoys, but I think that's really part of what keeps me sane is being able to look at these massive overwhelming structures of oppression and violence and say this is messed up and it's so messed up that we have to make fun of it. Making fun of it. Finding ways to laugh at it, make it seem possible that it's not forever.
Ilyse:Yeah. I don't know how to answer that. I think for me, being a killjoy is baked into my yenta DNA, right? Like there's a way that you get trained up in horror and trauma and I don't think that's always good, but I think that, I think it's actually a way to keep yourself from getting gas lit. And so in that, I'm part of this beautiful group of moms who loosely identify as Jews but all identify as activists. And one of the things that keeps coming back to is, is a woman in our group who does phenomenal activism work and it's just like, it's just awesome. One of her like thesis statements is that parenting is an act of radical optimism. And so what are, what are we doing today to pay off that optimistic bet that we took, right? Like we took these bets and, and we made them optimistically. And so we can't just say like, the world looks like a cesspool. I quit. And so I think for me actually being in this sounds really counterintuitive and Omid, I know that you have different opinions about this particular flaw of my personality, but I think like that stark negativity is actually a way for me to maintain a certain level of optimism because it, for me, it's like clear vision. It's clear vision. And so how do I, how do I raise up my, my little humans with clear vision in a system that actually wants them to be gaslit, right? Like they're tiny white, blonde kids with blue eyes. Like the system wants them to inherit the mantles of white supremacy, lock, stock, and barrel. And so I actually think it's my job to like beat that out of, of like the way it creeps in through the floorboards. So I guess that's a long winded non-answer, but I think that's what I'm doing here.
Megan:Yeah. Nope. I think that's really important. And I think it's a major part of just compassion, involvement, burnout, right? So many things are so bad and we have unprecedented access to the global scale of how bad things have gotten. And the advice I think we all keep seeing is you just have to pick a couple things and care about them as hard as you can and make those the things that you're committed to you. And I think for both Ilyse and I, helping people be more thoughtful and careful and nuanced about what religion does in the world gets to be one of those things that we care a lot about. There, we fixed it.
Ilyse:guess what? Nerds don't pack up yet. You have homework. I'm going to start us off because Omid already transitioned us there if that's okay. And then we'll ask you Omid what you might want to assign our readers. So for me, quite honestly, I was going to assign radical love. I think having read, I am going to confidently state every word you've written. I think I'm an editor since, since way back when, including being at least one of the 24 people who read your first book. Um, radical love does so much work for me. It is first of all it's beautiful and it is poetic in the way that, and you know my my Persian is, is crap compared by by all measures but also compared to yours. But it is the first set of like English translations that as a native English speaker, but someone who has some dexterity in both Persian and like broader Persian it cultures. It does the work for me. Like the poems themselves are gorgeous. They, they like both accurately reflect the original and feel contemporary. Like I, it doesn't feel like I have to do that heavy work of imagining. Like when I read Shakespeare and I'm like, I don't know what this means, this, this does that work of translating, like you said, from the medieval to the contemporary as well as from the Persian to the English. And I think what I love the most about at O'Meara is that in a lot of your other books you're doing the work that I think you've had to do. And then I think I take really seriously in my own scholarly life, which is being crystal clear about the violence is done to Islam and Muslims and explaining that for a broader audience. But this book does none of that. And I love it. It's just like this is what it is. And I'm not arguing, I'm not making a case. It's just this is gorgeous. Read it. So readers do yourselves a favor, pickup radical love. Even my dad liked it, so it's, it's good. Megan, what of Omid's would you assign?
Megan:Well, as a fellow podcaster I have to recommend Omid's Sufi heart podcast on the be here now network. I just think it's a gorgeous and really accessible window into how radical love shapes teaching and activism. There are a lot of really good episodes, but the episode on rabbi Abraham Heschel who called marching for civil rights"praying with my feet" is particularly close to my heart. So check it out, rate it, listen when it comes out.
Ilyse:And so, Omid, I guess I have two questions for you about homework. The first would be if you wanted our listeners to read something of yours, what would you suggest? And then the second would be if you could assign just one piece by someone else, I don't care what it is, what would you assign to them from, from your library, but not from your own pen.
Omid:So I mean thank you first of all for that radical love book, um, recommendation. It is. Um, it is very dear to my heart and I think you're right. It's really one of the first times that I found myself not having to write a public facing book about Islam by explaining the way, the common myths about violence and jihad and women's oppression. And I was like, you know, I actually, I want to talk about love as a redemptive force. I want to talk about this kind of radical love and in the real sense of the word radical, something that takes you back to your roots and uh, and to talk about, you know, something that is simultaneously human and divine, uh, something that uplifts you and transforms you. And it's funny cause I just um, put up a Facebook post yesterday talking about how much it moves me to, uh, you know, be reading the civil rights document when, you know, you see that some of the students who organized Snick a student nonviolent coordinating committee, um, when they listened to Jim Lawson and they were defining their task and their understanding of love, they had this beautiful, gorgeous sentence. Such love goes to the extreme. And that for me, without kind of getting into, let's blend all religions together in a blender and just call it like religion mush, I want to stay fully who I am with all the particularity, all the beauty, all the weirdness and the sounds of my own faith tradition. And I do find that the deeper I go into my own, the more it allows me to fully engage and appreciate what John Lewis and Jim Lawson and Ella Baker were saying in 19 as committed black Christians. I don't have to become a black Christian, even if that were an option or the same way with Heschel, you know, I mean, Heschel moves me and inspires me cause I've never heard anyone talk about all a sense of awe and wonder and radical amazement in the way that he did. And then to know the life that he had lived. And I mean, he says at one point everyone that knew me as a child was killed. Yeah. And that never disappears. That never disappears from Heschel. And to see that same person be someone who says there's only one thing that is forbidden despair. I mean, how can I not be moved by the prophetic witness of someone like this? So at that level, I do think that we have something to learn with one another from one another. So, you know, I think that's, that's kind of what I'd like to see. A lot of the work that I do from this point on do. If folks were gonna read something that's not by me and this at least this will surprise you. None at all. I would tell folks to pick up and read dr King's Riverside church speech. There is nothing else in the world that I've ever read that so shapes my moral and political imagination as that speech. And to think about someone who 12 years after the Montgomery bus boycott, that four years after the March on Washington after having won the Nobel peace prize, reluctantly finally comes out against the Vietnam war and against his own government and stands there and says, you know, the greatest purveyor in the world today is my own government. And the got to come to terms with the demons of racism, materialism and militarism. Um, that's a Dr. King that I think has something to say to every single person, religion scholar or not. And I would just really invite people to do that. Fabulous.
Ilyse:Well everybody, you can follow. Professor Omid Safi on Twitter at@ ostadjaan that's O. S. T. a. D. J. A. A. N. you can follow me at@ profirmf. That's PR, O. F. I. R. M. F. and you can follow Megan at MPG P. H. D.
Megan:where did they follow us on Twitter? The show?
Ilyse:Crap. And follow us at keeping it underscore one Oh one on Twitter.
Omid:And where do they go to subscribe.
Megan:You can subscribe anywhere you find podcasts or find us on the web@keepingitoneohone.com.
Ilyse:Thanks Goodwin.
Megan:You're welcome!
Ilyse:We will as always put up the show notes that have links to everything Omid has written, well not everything. There's hundreds of pieces. Many of the things Omid has written, including the ones we assigned. We will link up to dr King's Riverside church speech and we will, uh, fill in the show notes with other sorts of tidbits and goodies. Peace out nerds!
Megan:Do your homework! It's on the syllabus.
Omid:Keep it eeeeeextra.
Silly Noises:theme song!
