WEBVTT 00:00:00.496 --> 00:00:06.216 Writing biography is a strange thing to do. 00:00:06.216 --> 00:00:08.899 It's a journey into the foreign territory 00:00:08.899 --> 00:00:12.095 of somebody else's life, 00:00:12.095 --> 00:00:14.768 a journey, an exploration that can take you places 00:00:14.768 --> 00:00:17.039 you never dreamed of going 00:00:17.039 --> 00:00:19.264 and still can't quite believe you've been, 00:00:19.264 --> 00:00:22.992 especially if, like me, you're an agnostic Jew 00:00:22.992 --> 00:00:24.817 and the life you've been exploring 00:00:24.817 --> 00:00:29.649 is that of Muhammad. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:29.649 --> 00:00:32.080 Five years ago, for instance, 00:00:32.080 --> 00:00:35.348 I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle 00:00:35.348 --> 00:00:38.831 to what I knew was an impossible question: 00:00:38.831 --> 00:00:42.049 What actually happened 00:00:42.049 --> 00:00:43.488 one desert night, 00:00:43.488 --> 00:00:47.082 half the world and almost half of history away? 00:00:47.082 --> 00:00:48.802 What happened, that is, 00:00:48.802 --> 00:00:51.120 on the night in the year 610 00:00:51.120 --> 00:00:54.971 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran 00:00:54.971 --> 00:00:59.048 on a mountain just outside Mecca? 00:00:59.048 --> 00:01:03.653 This is the core mystical moment of Islam, 00:01:03.653 --> 00:01:05.019 and as such, of course, 00:01:05.019 --> 00:01:08.095 it defies empirical analysis. 00:01:08.095 --> 00:01:12.200 Yet the question wouldn't let go of me. 00:01:12.200 --> 00:01:15.384 I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am, 00:01:15.384 --> 00:01:17.263 just asking it could be seen 00:01:17.263 --> 00:01:20.523 as pure chutzpah. 00:01:20.523 --> 00:01:23.205 (Laughter) 00:01:23.205 --> 00:01:25.816 And I plead guilty as charged, 00:01:25.816 --> 00:01:29.847 because all exploration, physical or intellectual, 00:01:29.847 --> 00:01:33.724 is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, 00:01:33.724 --> 00:01:37.121 of crossing boundaries. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:37.121 --> 00:01:43.136 Still, some boundaries are larger than others. 00:01:43.136 --> 00:01:46.056 So a human encountering the divine, 00:01:46.056 --> 00:01:49.178 as Muslims believe Muhammad did, 00:01:49.178 --> 00:01:52.019 to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact 00:01:52.019 --> 00:01:53.776 but of wishful fiction, 00:01:53.776 --> 00:01:57.714 and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:57.714 --> 00:02:00.598 Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts 00:02:00.598 --> 00:02:02.375 we have of that night, 00:02:02.375 --> 00:02:05.194 what struck me even more than what happened 00:02:05.194 --> 00:02:10.716 was what did not happen. 00:02:10.716 --> 00:02:13.868 Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain 00:02:13.868 --> 00:02:16.818 as though walking on air. 00:02:16.818 --> 00:02:19.292 He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!" 00:02:19.292 --> 00:02:21.652 and "Bless the Lord!" 00:02:21.652 --> 00:02:25.380 He did not radiate light and joy. 00:02:25.380 --> 00:02:26.959 There were no choirs of angels, 00:02:26.959 --> 00:02:30.259 no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, 00:02:30.259 --> 00:02:33.921 no golden aura surrounding him, 00:02:33.921 --> 00:02:38.063 no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role 00:02:38.063 --> 00:02:41.139 as the messenger of God. 00:02:41.139 --> 00:02:44.094 That is, he did none of the things 00:02:44.094 --> 00:02:46.848 that might make it easy to cry foul, 00:02:46.848 --> 00:02:51.995 to put down the whole story as a pious fable. 00:02:51.995 --> 00:02:54.827 Quite the contrary. 00:02:54.827 --> 00:02:58.572 In his own reported words, 00:02:58.572 --> 00:03:00.949 he was convinced at first 00:03:00.949 --> 00:03:06.230 that what had happened couldn't have been real. 00:03:06.230 --> 00:03:08.942 At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination -- 00:03:08.942 --> 00:03:10.751 a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps, 00:03:10.751 --> 00:03:12.926 or his own mind working against him. 00:03:12.926 --> 00:03:15.103 At worst, possession -- 00:03:15.103 --> 00:03:17.392 that he'd been seized by an evil jinn, 00:03:17.392 --> 00:03:19.183 a spirit out to deceive him, 00:03:19.183 --> 00:03:22.192 even to crush the life out of him. 00:03:22.192 --> 00:03:25.216 In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun, 00:03:25.216 --> 00:03:26.844 possessed by a jinn, 00:03:26.844 --> 00:03:28.956 that when he found himself still alive, 00:03:28.956 --> 00:03:33.805 his first impulse was to finish the job himself, 00:03:33.805 --> 00:03:36.008 to leap off the highest cliff 00:03:36.008 --> 00:03:40.126 and escape the terror of what he'd experienced 00:03:40.126 --> 00:03:47.228 by putting an end to all experience. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:47.228 --> 00:03:50.148 So the man who fled down the mountain that night 00:03:50.148 --> 00:03:52.599 trembled not with joy 00:03:52.599 --> 00:03:57.319 but with a stark, primordial fear. 00:03:57.319 --> 00:04:03.239 He was overwhelmed not with conviction, but by doubt. 00:04:03.239 --> 00:04:06.040 And that panicked disorientation, 00:04:06.040 --> 00:04:08.919 that sundering of everything familiar, 00:04:08.919 --> 00:04:12.587 that daunting awareness of something 00:04:12.603 --> 00:04:15.512 beyond human comprehension, 00:04:15.512 --> 00:04:22.087 can only be called a terrible awe. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:22.087 --> 00:04:25.301 This might be somewhat difficult to grasp 00:04:25.301 --> 00:04:27.839 now that we use the word "awesome" 00:04:27.839 --> 00:04:32.018 to describe a new app or a viral video. 00:04:32.018 --> 00:04:35.223 With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, 00:04:35.223 --> 00:04:37.871 we're protected from real awe. 00:04:37.871 --> 00:04:39.759 We close the doors and hunker down, 00:04:39.759 --> 00:04:42.305 convinced that we're in control, 00:04:42.305 --> 00:04:45.327 or, at least, hoping for control. 00:04:45.327 --> 00:04:47.235 We do our best to ignore the fact that 00:04:47.235 --> 00:04:49.296 we don't always have it, 00:04:49.296 --> 00:04:52.053 and that not everything can be explained. 00:04:52.053 --> 00:04:56.215 Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, 00:04:56.215 --> 00:04:58.910 whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night 00:04:58.910 --> 00:05:03.174 came from inside himself or from outside, 00:05:03.174 --> 00:05:07.878 what's clear is that he did experience them, 00:05:07.878 --> 00:05:10.314 and that he did so with a force that would shatter 00:05:10.314 --> 00:05:12.635 his sense of himself and his world 00:05:12.635 --> 00:05:15.775 and transform this otherwise modest man 00:05:15.775 --> 00:05:22.468 into a radical advocate for social and economic justice. 00:05:22.468 --> 00:05:27.710 Fear was the only sane response, 00:05:27.710 --> 00:05:32.734 the only human response. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:32.734 --> 00:05:35.242 Too human for some, 00:05:35.242 --> 00:05:37.975 like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that 00:05:37.975 --> 00:05:39.842 the account of his wanting to kill himself 00:05:39.842 --> 00:05:42.280 shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact 00:05:42.280 --> 00:05:46.734 that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies. 00:05:46.734 --> 00:05:49.525 They insist that he never doubted 00:05:49.525 --> 00:05:56.135 for even a single moment, let alone despaired. 00:05:56.135 --> 00:05:59.972 Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate 00:05:59.972 --> 00:06:04.691 human imperfection. 00:06:04.691 --> 00:06:11.886 Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt? 00:06:11.886 --> 00:06:14.860 As I read those early accounts, I realized it was 00:06:14.860 --> 00:06:18.670 precisely Muhammad's doubt that brought him alive for me, 00:06:18.670 --> 00:06:21.067 that allowed me to begin to see him in full, 00:06:21.067 --> 00:06:24.653 to accord him the integrity of reality. 00:06:24.653 --> 00:06:26.822 And the more I thought about it, 00:06:26.822 --> 00:06:29.839 the more it made sense that he doubted, 00:06:29.839 --> 00:06:36.422 because doubt is essential to faith. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:36.422 --> 00:06:39.302 If this seems a startling idea at first, 00:06:39.302 --> 00:06:42.963 consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, 00:06:42.963 --> 00:06:46.798 is the heart of the matter. 00:06:46.798 --> 00:06:51.203 Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, 00:06:51.203 --> 00:06:56.446 but absolute, heartless conviction. 00:06:56.446 --> 00:07:00.317 You're certain that you possess the Truth -- 00:07:00.317 --> 00:07:04.608 inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- 00:07:04.608 --> 00:07:07.166 and this certainty quickly devolves 00:07:07.166 --> 00:07:10.678 into dogmatism and righteousness, 00:07:10.678 --> 00:07:14.781 by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride 00:07:14.781 --> 00:07:18.569 in being so very right, 00:07:18.569 --> 00:07:26.457 in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. 00:07:26.457 --> 00:07:30.933 It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history 00:07:30.933 --> 00:07:33.991 that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists 00:07:33.991 --> 00:07:37.182 is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists 00:07:37.182 --> 00:07:39.994 known as Crusaders: 00:07:39.994 --> 00:07:45.219 "infidel," from the Latin for "faithless." 00:07:45.219 --> 00:07:49.558 Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism 00:07:49.558 --> 00:07:54.023 is in fact the opposite of faith. 00:07:54.023 --> 00:07:59.982 In effect, they are the infidels. 00:07:59.982 --> 00:08:02.809 Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, 00:08:02.809 --> 00:08:06.654 they have no questions, only answers. 00:08:06.654 --> 00:08:09.446 They found the perfect antidote to thought 00:08:09.446 --> 00:08:13.217 and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith. 00:08:13.217 --> 00:08:15.166 They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob 00:08:15.166 --> 00:08:17.216 wrestling through the night with the angel, 00:08:17.216 --> 00:08:20.374 or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, 00:08:20.374 --> 00:08:23.576 or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain, 00:08:23.576 --> 00:08:26.070 but throughout his years as a prophet, 00:08:26.070 --> 00:08:30.254 with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair, 00:08:30.254 --> 00:08:33.542 and condemning those who most loudly proclaim 00:08:33.542 --> 00:08:37.339 that they know everything there is to know 00:08:37.339 --> 00:08:44.233 and that they and they alone are right. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:44.233 --> 00:08:51.646 And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, 00:08:51.646 --> 00:08:57.415 have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. 00:08:57.415 --> 00:08:59.908 We've allowed Judaism to be claimed 00:08:59.908 --> 00:09:03.779 by violently messianic West Bank settlers, 00:09:03.779 --> 00:09:06.726 Christianity by homophobic hypocrites 00:09:06.726 --> 00:09:09.246 and misogynistic bigots, 00:09:09.246 --> 00:09:14.205 Islam by suicide bombers. 00:09:14.205 --> 00:09:16.976 And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that 00:09:16.976 --> 00:09:19.168 no matter whether they claim to be Christians, 00:09:19.168 --> 00:09:20.783 Jews or Muslims, 00:09:20.783 --> 00:09:26.438 militant extremists are none of the above. 00:09:26.438 --> 00:09:32.052 They're a cult all their own, blood brothers 00:09:32.052 --> 00:09:37.546 steeped in other people's blood. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:37.546 --> 00:09:39.748 This isn't faith. 00:09:39.748 --> 00:09:44.910 It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. 00:09:44.910 --> 00:09:49.932 We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. 00:09:49.932 --> 00:09:54.010 It's difficult and stubborn. 00:09:54.010 --> 00:09:56.248 It involves an ongoing struggle, 00:09:56.248 --> 00:09:59.302 a continual questioning of what we think we know, 00:09:59.302 --> 00:10:01.867 a wrestling with issues and ideas. 00:10:01.867 --> 00:10:05.167 It goes hand in hand with doubt, 00:10:05.167 --> 00:10:08.244 in a never-ending conversation with it, 00:10:08.244 --> 00:10:14.639 and sometimes in conscious defiance of it. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:14.639 --> 00:10:19.687 And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, 00:10:19.687 --> 00:10:23.828 can still have faith. 00:10:23.828 --> 00:10:26.816 I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East 00:10:26.816 --> 00:10:31.126 is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence 00:10:31.126 --> 00:10:34.287 to the contrary. 00:10:34.287 --> 00:10:36.659 I'm not convinced of this. 00:10:36.659 --> 00:10:38.783 I can hardly say I believe it. 00:10:38.783 --> 00:10:40.725 I can only have faith in it, 00:10:40.725 --> 00:10:44.743 commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, 00:10:44.743 --> 00:10:47.744 and I do this precisely because of the temptation 00:10:47.744 --> 00:10:49.744 to throw up my hands in resignation 00:10:49.744 --> 00:10:53.265 and retreat into silence. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:53.265 --> 00:10:57.946 Because despair is self-fulfilling. 00:10:57.946 --> 00:11:00.266 If we call something impossible, 00:11:00.266 --> 00:11:04.034 we act in such a way that we make it so. 00:11:04.034 --> 00:11:09.967 And I, for one, refuse to live that way. 00:11:09.967 --> 00:11:12.266 In fact, most of us do, 00:11:12.266 --> 00:11:15.842 whether we're atheist or theist 00:11:15.842 --> 00:11:19.782 or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, 00:11:19.782 --> 00:11:24.098 what drives us is that, despite our doubts 00:11:24.098 --> 00:11:26.426 and even because of our doubts, 00:11:26.426 --> 00:11:30.898 we reject the nihilism of despair. 00:11:30.898 --> 00:11:34.131 We insist on faith in the future 00:11:34.131 --> 00:11:38.869 and in each other. 00:11:38.869 --> 00:11:42.370 Call this naive if you like. 00:11:42.370 --> 00:11:45.467 Call it impossibly idealistic if you must. 00:11:45.467 --> 00:11:47.895 But one thing is sure: 00:11:47.895 --> 00:11:51.361 Call it human. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:51.361 --> 00:11:54.396 Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world 00:11:54.396 --> 00:11:57.248 without such faith, without the refusal 00:11:57.248 --> 00:12:01.964 to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty? 00:12:01.964 --> 00:12:05.230 I think not. 00:12:05.230 --> 00:12:07.273 After keeping company with him as a writer 00:12:07.273 --> 00:12:10.573 for the past five years, I can't see 00:12:10.573 --> 00:12:15.676 that he'd be anything but utterly outraged 00:12:15.676 --> 00:12:18.823 at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak 00:12:18.823 --> 00:12:24.292 and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today. 00:12:24.292 --> 00:12:28.582 He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population 00:12:28.582 --> 00:12:31.580 because of their gender. 00:12:31.580 --> 00:12:39.561 He'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism. 00:12:39.561 --> 00:12:42.267 He'd call out terrorism for what it is, 00:12:42.267 --> 00:12:47.011 not only criminal but an obscene travesty 00:12:47.011 --> 00:12:51.916 of everything he believed in and struggled for. 00:12:51.916 --> 00:12:57.185 He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life 00:12:57.185 --> 00:13:00.386 takes the life of all humanity. 00:13:00.386 --> 00:13:07.582 Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity. 00:13:07.582 --> 00:13:10.652 And he'd commit himself fully 00:13:10.652 --> 00:13:17.672 to the hard and thorny process of making peace. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:17.672 --> 00:13:19.107 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:19.107 --> 00:13:23.506 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:13:23.506 --> 00:13:27.506 Thank you. (Applause)