 Fundamental Faith: Lessons from Guantanamo
A kind and caring prisoner at Guantánamo makes Hannah
Tennant-Moore rethink her attitude toward fundamentalism. She thinks too of the
people in her own life with extreme beliefs but loving hearts.
Every few months, my mother rides in a tiny, decades-old
government airplane to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where she meets with her pro bono
client, Abdul Aziz Naji. Aziz is a thirty-four-year-old Algerian man who has
been held at Guantánamo for eight years without being charged with a crime.
Four years ago, my mother and her law partner Ellen volunteered to take on his
case, in hopes of forcing the U.S. government to grant Aziz habeas corpus, the
right to challenge his detention in a court of law. This basic human right has
been intrinsic to all civilized societies since the proclamation of the Magna
Carta in 1215.
My mother describes Aziz, who has spent the last several
years in solitary confinement, as a small man with a polite, gentle way about
him. He lost a leg to a land mine some years ago, and uses a prosthesis that is
a bit too short. During meetings with my mother and Ellen, his legs—both real
and prosthetic—are shackled to the floor. Even as he describes how much he
misses his family and asks again and again when he will be freed, Aziz smiles
and laughs frequently; he constantly thanks his lawyers for their efforts on
his behalf (though, so far, their work has yielded no concrete results) and
asks after their families. He frequently tells my mother that he is able to
accept his situation because he has absolute faith in God’s plan for his life.
I have long been opposed to strict,
narrow interpretations of any religion. I associate fundamentalism with young
men taught that their only hope for happiness is “martyrdom,” opponents of gay
marriage attempting to deny their fellow human beings basic rights, and women
covered from head to toe in heavy, black cloth in the heat of summer. So
it’s been interesting for me to notice how fundamentalist Islam has allowed
Aziz to maintain equanimity through eight years of being held, virtually
incommunicado, in conditions that are now widely recognized as being physically
and psychologically torturous.
My disdain for subscribing to a narrow
conception of God and morality is born in part from my relationship with my
grandparents, who are evangelical Christians. I have a wonderful time on my
quarterly visits to their home in rural Georgia—gorging on biscuits and
blueberry cobbler, shelling peas on the porch swing, laughing at Granddaddy’s
silly jokes. But I am always acutely aware of the struggles my mother has gone
through to overcome her guilt and sadness over the unacknowledged but
ever-present emotional distance her family maintains from her because of her decision
as a young adult to leave the church. Although my mother has tried to explain
to her parents numerous times that she has a rich and fulfilling spiritual
life, they have frequently begged her to take my sister and me to church,
arguing that she is putting us at risk for eternal damnation. I am equally
disturbed by my grandparents’ unquestioning support for any politician who is
opposed to abortion and gay marriage, despite the fact that this often means
they are voting against their own economic interests and supporting violence
and corruption that is counter to their belief in Jesus’ teachings.
In a backlash against the rigidity of my
mother’s upbringing, my own childhood was marked by religious openness. My
father taught me yoga and meditation, my mother read me Bible stories and took
me to Shambhala workshops, and I was raised in a predominantly Jewish
community, which meant I attended bar mitzvahs and Passover seders. In college,
I started studying Buddhism intensively, drawn to the possibility of training
the mind to accept the present, whatever that may be. After studying at a
Buddhist monastery in India, I decided, with a sense of heavy-handed finality,
to “become” a Buddhist.
For a while, I was self-consciously
territorial about my newfound religious assimilation. I enjoyed pointing out to
liberal-minded friends who thought Buddhism seemed “cool” that it is actually a
religion—not some New Age concept—which demands a commitment to prescribed
rules (the precepts), rituals (rigorous meditation practice, prostrations,
visualizations), and beliefs (karma, emptiness, interconnectedness). The
aspects of the practice that had enlivened my own life—compassion for difficult
people, relief from the anxious cycle of self-involved thoughts, the simple
ability to sleep better and feel more joyful on a daily basis—seemed to me
inseparable from the label “Buddhism.” I felt that the world would be a better
place if everyone were Buddhist, and I was blind to the fact that I was
adopting the religious exclusivity common to the forms of fundamentalism I’d
always taken issue with.
Perhaps there was something appealing to me about the
promised structure of a “real religion”—the same concept, no doubt, that
appealed to both Aziz and my grandparents. Within a clear framework of
spiritual, practical, and ethical guidelines, one has the freedom to explore
one’s inner life, rather than floundering in purely cerebral considerations of
the pros and cons of various religious practices. Perhaps this is why the Dalai
Lama and Pema Chödrön caution against “shopping around” for a religion. While
Pema Chödrön advises spiritual seekers to “stick with one boat,” the Dalai Lama
says it’s best to find spiritual fulfillment through the religion in which one
was raised, “since all the different traditions have the same potential to
bring inner peace, inner value.”
That two leading Buddhist teachers would
promote acceptance for all religions is hardly surprising. The idea that
Buddhism is a “better” religion than others is clearly counter to teachings of
emptiness, which render judgments and comparisons meaningless. Nonetheless, for
those of us who became Buddhists as adults, it’s a hard line of thought to
avoid. We “chose” Buddhism because we felt there was empirical evidence of the
good that can come from exposure to meditation and Buddhist study.
So it was not until my mother started
representing Aziz and telling me about her visits with him that I started to
see the fallacy of my rejection of other religions. My mother assured me that
Aziz was fundamentally okay, despite his horrific circumstances, because of his
faith in God. This made me realize that the very fundamentalism I had blamed
for violence, enmity, and ignorance was, in Aziz’s life, a precious gift
affording him not only some measure of peace in his solitary cell, but also
allowing him to profess nothing but kindness toward my mother and her law
partner, citizens of the country that imprisoned him without charge.
I’m certainly not the first person to
note the power of faith in oppressive circumstances. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for writings which exposed the
brutality of the Gulag, turned to Christ to help him preserve his sense of self
through eight years in the prison camps. Not only did his belief in God lend
him the strength to withstand the deprivation and violence of prison, it also
formed the basis of his critique of modern society: “We have
forgotten God.” Though Solzhenitsyn was firm in his commitment to Russian
Orthodoxy, his admonition to “remember God” was not veiled proselytizing. In an
interview with Joseph Pearce, he said, “God is endlessly multidimensional, so
every religion that exists on Earth represents some face, some side of God.”
Numerous observers have noted the strength of believers
during the Holocaust. Etty Hillesum, who was killed by the Nazis at the age of
twenty-nine, left a collection of diaries and letters that have served as a
spiritual guide for people of all faiths. She often wrote of the vital
importance of having a rich inner life in trying times. For Hillesum, nurturing
one’s inner life meant engaging in meditation, prayer, and Bible study, which
brought her closer to “the deepest and best in me, which I call God.” No doubt
it was this religious practice that allowed her to write, during her first
months in the squalor and cruelty of the Westerbork concentration camp, “And
yet life in its unfathomable depths is so wonderfully good.”
I identify much more readily with Hillesum’s conception of
God as “the deepest and best in me” than I do with Solzhenitsyn’s or Aziz’s
God. But in a situation as nightmarish as a concentration camp or indefinite
imprisonment, does it really matter what one’s personal conception of God
entails, so long as that God allows one to maintain an appreciation of the
world as a whole, despite its specific horrors?
This gift of gratitude for being alive, come what may, is
certainly applicable to situations that are far less extreme than those of
Solzhenitsyn, Aziz, or Hillesum. Both of my grandparents’ lives, for instance,
have presented their fair share of difficulties. Throughout their childhoods
they experienced the hard labor and deprivations of poverty, the deaths of
siblings, and parents too preoccupied with putting food on the table to offer
much affection. Too poor to pursue their respective dreams of being a teacher
and a veterinarian, they ran a dry-cleaning business. I once heard my
grandmother say, “When I look back on my life, I don’t know how I would have
done it if it hadn’t been for Jesus.”
When I consider my grandparents’ evangelism in light of
this statement, I realize that it doesn’t really matter that they believe
they’re among a select group of people destined to go to heaven. If I can
accept my grandparents’ religion as invaluable to them, I can stop feeling oppressed by their implicit judgment of
my way of life. They feed me delicious meals cooked with homegrown fruits and
vegetables, hug me and tell me they love me, and generally add much richness
and delight to my life. Even more important, my grandparents take seriously
Jesus’ commandments to help the needy (they have volunteered at a local nursing
home for years), to be stewards of the Earth (their lifestyles are more
environmentally sound than those of many supporters of “green” policies), and
to practice gratitude and humility in their daily lives. In this way,
Christianity brings my grandparents the inner peace and inner value that the
Dalai Lama says every religion is capable of manifesting.
Aziz’s method of worship similarly entails simple kindness
to others. He frequently tells my mother and her law partner—who is Jewish, as
are many of the Guantánamo lawyers—that he is keeping them and their families
in his prayers, and I often end my meditation and yoga practice with the wish
that “any merit gained from this practice be dedicated to Abdul Aziz Naji.”
Though different in form, these practices have the same underlying intention of
expressing goodwill toward a stranger, an act that opens the heart and helps
one escape the prison of self-involved thinking. And Aziz’s frequent invocation
of the term inshallah (God willing)
is nearly identical in psychological effect to an awareness of impermanence;
both practices ward off the suffering that results from desperate attempts to
control the uncontrollable.
There’s no doubt that I would take issue with many of
Aziz’s religious beliefs surrounding, for instance, the treatment of women (my
mother and Ellen never visit him without donning modest clothes and head
coverings), just as I take issue with my grandparents’ belief that premarital
sex is a sin. But I need not vainly wrestle with these beliefs in order to
appreciate the individuals who espouse them, and even to value the positive
role religion has played in their lives. This is not to say that there’s no
danger in ideology. But the dangers of religious ideology have been documented
so well in recent years that I fear many of us have forgotten that religion is
not the enemy. Stalin, after all, was an atheist.
As I was writing this, I learned that Aziz had gone on a
hunger strike. Although he has been “cleared for release” for many years, he
remains stuck in limbo between a windowless, solitary cell and a return to
Algeria, where the fate of former Guantánamo prisoners is uncertain at best. Because of his association with
terrorism, however groundless, Aziz would run the risk of imprisonment and
torture in Algeria; he also could be forcibly recruited by extremists. “All the
golden ideas I had in mind are no longer here,” he told my mother. “I just want
a simple life. I have had my dreams destroyed.”
As my mother’s attempts to get another country to grant
Aziz asylum prove more and more hopeless, Aziz has resorted to the only means
of protest available to him: refusing food. Like other Guantánamo prisoners on
hunger strikes, he is force-fed through a tube in his nose twice a day. Already
a thin man, he has lost thirty pounds.
Aziz loves chocolate, which my mother and
Ellen usually bring him on their visits, sometimes along with homemade meals.
On their most recent trip, they tentatively laid out a few snacks on the table
in front of Aziz, unsure if he would break his fast. He smiled broadly when he
saw the chocolate, and then ravenously ate two bars with evident delight. After
thanking my mother and Ellen for the food, he began to imagine the traditional
Algerian meal he would share with them if he were at home. “Inshallah,” he
said, “someday we will eat together someplace other than here.”
From the May 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.
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