Subject: FW: Maintaining your identity.
The enabling of being both an 'insider', and an 'outsider' when seeing yourself, one foot inside the customs and traditions you were born into, whilst the other foot is clearly outside those traditions and encourages experiencing that 'other world' which involves, amongst other things, some of the things denied in the place once removed, you called home.
Listening to a British born Muslim women, conflicted by her faith and her femininity, living in a non Muslim country, with only pockets of the faith to draw sustenance from one saw the daily conflict. Undertaking the Hajj to Macca, she experienced the slow rotation of people, hundreds of thousands of 'fellow believers', walking around the Kaaba. It inevitably made her reconsider her faith and the sense of her individuality the space she occupied with those 'other people' back home.
This ongoing confrontation with the 'other', the non Muslim, is part of her life here in the UK, separated as she is for most of the time, from people with similar goals.
I'm not comparing apples with oranges but the Hajj is like being in a football crowd, a crowd seeped in the hysteria towards one team. The occasions when we displace our normal sensible self and take on a different persona, as we become infected by the crowd, and change, from the contemplative person to the seeker of a particular truth.
Of course the scale of 'individual soul searching' can be equally comforting. No one is looking or criticising, everything is embryonic and personal. The conflict which can arise when following the crowd as part of you questions your own commitment, a commitment carried along by hysteria, a hysteria you never subscribed to since your personality always made room for the other side opinion which is an anathema when hysteria is involved.
The woman, a highly intelligent Indian lady highlighted the conflict of the multicultural nature of our society. She valued highly her background and the part history and religion played in it. She didn't resent the forces around her which conflicted her values but never the less she wished to keep her distance. She was not about to amalgamate her beliefs or customs, even whilst living amongst people who were at odds with her. Her strength and her future she saw as continuing to be who she was.
In our own contradictory search for an alignment with all peoples, all religions and all customs, we become a person without any recognisable 'surety of our own. We are then in danger of becoming irrelevant in our own country as new forces push out to sway the government to install new categories of 'exceptionalism' and the landscape we knew is now so unrecognisable, that we ourselves begin to search for a new home.
I'm not comparing apples with oranges but the Hajj is like being in a football crowd, a crowd seeped in the hysteria towards one team. The occasions when we displace our normal sensible self and take on a different persona, as we become infected by the crowd, and change, from the contemplative person to the seeker of a particular truth.
Of course the scale of 'individual soul searching' can be equally comforting. No one is looking or criticising, everything is embryonic and personal. The conflict which can arise when following the crowd as part of you questions your own commitment, a commitment carried along by hysteria, a hysteria you never subscribed to since your personality always made room for the other side opinion which is an anathema when hysteria is involved.
The woman, a highly intelligent Indian lady highlighted the conflict of the multicultural nature of our society. She valued highly her background and the part history and religion played in it. She didn't resent the forces around her which conflicted her values but never the less she wished to keep her distance. She was not about to amalgamate her beliefs or customs, even whilst living amongst people who were at odds with her. Her strength and her future she saw as continuing to be who she was.
In our own contradictory search for an alignment with all peoples, all religions and all customs, we become a person without any recognisable 'surety of our own. We are then in danger of becoming irrelevant in our own country as new forces push out to sway the government to install new categories of 'exceptionalism' and the landscape we knew is now so unrecognisable, that we ourselves begin to search for a new home.
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