#14: Spiritual Inclusion with El-Farouk Khaki
The concept of spiritual inclusion becomes an important lifeboat for minority individuals who struggle to reconcile their expressions of identity be it sexuality or gender with their religious beliefs. Not everyone wants to throw the baby with the bath water. Today’s guest self-identifies as a spiritual activist and places spiritual inclusion at the forefront of his cause.
On this episode, we are joined by El-Farouk Khaki, a refugee and immigration lawyer, public speaker and human rights activist. We explore the toxicity of dogma and how religion can be used as a form of spiritual violence. El-Farouk shares with us his vision for a more inclusive and tolerant Islam. In 1991, El-Farouk founded Salaam: Queer Muslim Community and in 2009, he co-founded the El-Tawhid Juma Circle, Toronto Unity Mosque. El-Farouk speaks publicly on issues including Islam, LGBTIQ and human rights, refugees, race, politics and HIV. He has served in diverse capacities in groups and boards including Africans in Partnership against AIDS, The 519, & the Canadian Ethnocultural Council. He has received numerous awards for his work in spiritual activism and social justice. He is currently working on his first book exploring issues of sexuality, social justice and spirituality.
Highlights:
- Spiritual Abuse and Violence
- The Need for more Inclusion and Tolerance in Contemporary Islam
- Sufi Practices
Resources:
- Salaam: Queer Muslim Community
- El-Tawhid Juma Circle
- Masjid el-Tawhid Toronto Unity Mosque Facebook
- TEDx: We Resist: A Queer Muslim Perspective w El-Farouk Khaki
Listen:
An Original Poem Inspired by This Episode
Full Transcript
Thal:
El Farouk, welcome to the show!
El Farouk:
Thank you. Nice to be here.
Adrian:
Actually, I wanted to ask you right off the bat is the meaning of your name and how to properly pronounce your name?
El Farouk:
I pronounce, my name as El Farouk, but I think it’s proper pronunciation would be more like El Farook, and it comes from the Arabic word ‘furqan’ for criterion. El Farouk is the one who can tell right from wrong.
Adrian:
It sounds like an appropriate name.
El Farouk:
It is sometimes burdensome.
Thal:
Yeah, I hear you there when the name is like, you know, there is a lot of expectations.
El Farouk:
Absolutely. It has forced me to always measure my actions or my omissions with this premise that I have this capacity or this ability to distinguish what I’m doing and whether it’s correct or incorrect or appropriate or inappropriate.
Thal:
We’d like to start maybe with your early experiences with spirituality and religion, maybe spiritual orientation and childhood, if any. Sort of…how did you end up doing what you’re doing?
El Farouk:
My family is Muslim and Islam has always been a very important part of our identity as a marker and also as a practice. My family is of Indian origin, but we are from East Africa, so we are … and my family’s historical roots are as a small Shiite community. So we are a minority within a minority, within a minority. So I grew up, I was born and spent the first seven, eight years of my life in east Africa, which is predominantly black. The majority of the black folk were Muslim, are Sunni. So we’re at diasporic, immigrant origin and Brown, Muslim, but not even majority – a Shia minority, Shia community. Maybe at that time I didn’t quite didn’t understand that, but I think over the years we left when I was about eight years old and lived in England, and then moved to Canada and to Vancouver specifically.
I grew up basically with very limited sort of Muslims around me. You know, if we would go to our places of worship there were Muslims there, but most of them kind of looked like me. My day to day life was really not connected to those people. I grew up with people of all skin colors, all racial backgrounds, and all religious backgrounds. When we first landed in Canada, we were in Toronto for 10 days, and the first religious celebration was at a syngogue. That’s the kind of background that I came from and my family was very open and inclusive when it came to diversity in terms of race and religion. One thing that was always present was this notion of a spirituality.
That religion wasn’t just about ritual, but it was about spirituality, which I understand as connection and connectivity and often spirituality is understood as a connection between an individual and the divine or to a higher power. I think that for me, part of my evolution has been this notion of spirituality that actually connects you to other human beings and to the rest of creation. The tradition that I grew up in didn’t necessarily embrace that or integrate that. That has also been a fed by my politics, my anti-oppression work, as an activist, as a lawyer who represents refugees, people fleeing persecution. Most of the folks I represent are either queer folk or women fleeing some kind of gender or domestic violence kind of a situation. My notion of spirituality started to evolve that it needed to address all of these injustices. It wasn’t just simply enough just to feel connected to some higher or some divine power, but it had to be transformative. It had to be transformative for me, but it also, someone had to transform my relationship to the world around me. I often call myself the accidental activist because I didn’t often find spaces that I found wholesome like that embraced the fullness of who I was. I would walk into, I would be an activist circles, but they didn’t have the spirituality or you know, you’d walk into political circles and you know they talk the talk but they didn’t really understand intersectionality and so on and so forth. A lot of times, I was in these spaces and going, but there’s more, there’s more, there’s more. And so in 1991, I started Salaam here in Toronto.
Toronto was the first time that I met other Muslims or other people who were Muslim identified and who are also queer and or involved in anti-oppression, social justice and human rights work. Salaam was my attempt to create a social support network for lesbian and gay Muslims because this was back in the nineties and you didn’t really talk about the bi- or the trans- stuff back then. At that time I wasn’t even ready to deal with the theology. I didn’t feel that I had the, the material, the capacity to deal with that. That has been part of my own sort of growth and my journey. I have even come to this conclusion that a lot of our social justice movements and our political movements are unsuccessful because they don’t actually embrace our spirituality and the notion of our own transformation as we are working to transform the world around us.
If you’re starting out as a hollow vessel, how can you fill anything else and so this, entrenched me even further into seeking a spiritual connection that embraced all of these sort of different elements of myself, which includes, you know, being a social activist and a human rights advocate.
Adrian:
Yeah. Beautiful connection to, we did an episode with Andrew Harvey recently and he coined the term, I believe, sacred activism. And so looking at activism that’s not divorced from a spiritual connection, you know, sort of fueled by spiritual practice in something that is acknowledging the mystery that is also underneath all the great work that’s coming out of the activism but not forgetting that there is that connection that you’re pointing towards. How did the first few years go for you when Salaam was created, I’m really curious, the early challenges, what were some of the big obstacles when you had the idea to actually opening the doors?
El Farouk:
The challenges were multilayered. Technology was a challenge, right? This was back in the early nineties. Not everybody, there was no cell phones and you know, people had these little answering machines at home that you had to press and play and you couldn’t retrieve them from somewhere else and so on. At one point we had a contact list of about 60 to 80 people and you had to phone each one of them in order to tell them about some activity or some event that you were hosting. There were people with varying degrees of outness and different living situations, you would have a note attached to the phone number as to what you could say and who you could say it to, and you know, you couldn’t leave on the message and so on and so forth.
That was a technological and an outreach. First of all, how do you let people know. What media do you actually use in order to get the word out? How do you keep in contact and how do you inform people, especially people who are sort of scattered and at various sort of different levels of autonomy. People living at home, people not out and all of that sort of stuff. Those were some of the challenges. I think one of the ongoing challenges is the toxicity of institutionalized religion. A lot of people have given up on their spirituality because religion has been such a toxic influence in their life. For me, that never works, I’ve never been able to do that.
Never wanted to do that and always believed that I didn’t need to do that. Sometimes when you’re organizing these kinds of spaces and you’re reaching out to people and people don’t actually want to know about the space or don’t actually want to even walk into the space because they’ve got so many barriers to it. I think that ends up creating a lot of disconnect like a spiritual schizophrenia, if you will. I think that a lot of our issues that we face are that people have disconnected not just from religion but also from spirituality because often spirituality is vested in a religious tradition or in a religious path. When that spirituality has been stripped away, all your left with is religious toxicity. So even convincing people that this might be a safe space or a healing space for them to try to connect their histories and their stories and that they don’t have to make a choice. It continues to be a challenge even, even now.
Thal:
How do you reconcile that … because people who find themselves identifying in sort of alternative identities find themselves either having, especially those who are brought up in the institutional patriarchal and monotheistic traditions find themselves either having to throw the baby with the bath water or become paralyzed in dogma. How, how can they reconcile?
El Farouk:
Oh dear, that’s a heavy question. I think that’s a journey that everybody has to take. I think that in some traditions there has been some opening up. We see that happening in, and I don’t think it’s just a problem with monotheism because you see it in non-monotheistic traditions as well. Whether you look at Buddhism and Hinduism, they’re also often plagued by dogma and by misogyny. I was in Bali and every Hindu temple had huge signs that prohibited people who menstruated from entering.
You know and I was shocked because despite all of the, the menstro-phobia in Islam or in Muslim communities, I’ve never seen a sign like that on any mosque. Yet, here are these Hindu temples, and we have this notion that Hinduism is so inclusive and so embracing with female gods and so on and so forth that you wouldn’t encounter this and yet, lo and behold, here it is. I think that everybody has to go through that journey. Certainly, like if you look in the West, the geopolitical north or however you wanna define it, certainly some Christian traditions have been grappling with some of the issues around gender and sexual diversity for some time. there are both internal and external influences and pressures in Islam today that tell us that Islam is a monolith. Even the people who have been oppressed by this notion still cling to this notion that there is only a singular ahistorical Islam.
Which is actually counter-intuitive even to the whole message of the Quran and even to the symbolism in the Quran, right? I mean Allah in the Quran is constantly telling us to look at nature and to the passage of time and to the cycles of nature and the moon and so on and so forth, which integrates change and growth and development as being integral to the religious experience. Yet the religion itself, supposedly we are now being told is unchanging and unresponsive. It doesn’t respond at all. We are supposed to conform to this. Yet who defines what this is? It is certainly not us who defines it.
Adrian:
I remember you bringing up the term spiritual abuse, spiritual violence. I think it was in a Ted talk you did. Could you elaborate what you mean by that? I love the wording because it seems so appropriate.
El Farouk:
I heard the expression spiritual activism a few years ago from a friend of mine, a gay man from Jamaica who described him as being a spiritual activist. I went “bing” you know, and ended up talking to him about it and sort of started to sort of identify with that term myself. The notion of spiritual violence for me is how religion or spirituality is actually used as a weapon against certain kinds of people. For those of us who may not conform because of our views around gender or because of our sexual orientation or our gender identities or expression or just our politics.
Right and how religion under the guise of spirituality…and I think, you know, contemporary Islam is kind of really devoid of spirituality. It’s been reduced to a set of do’s and don’ts. And if you do this, then you’re Muslim enough. And if you don’t do this, then you’re not Muslim enough. And that’s violence, right? Because who is determining this…this who is judging this? In the Sufi path and in Islamic tradition we have the 99 most beautiful names of God. God is the judge, not you, not me, not somebody else. There’s a whole body of tradition and literature that dates back to the Prophet that talks even about diversity of opinion and practice even at the time of the Prophet. All of these narratives are, you know, unpopular to the contemporary discourse and so they’re pushed aside, they’re not discussed and they’re marginalized, because they’re just not convenient. The whole idea of spiritual abuse is how religion is used to bludgeon us rather than to liberate our hearts.
Thal:
There are so many layers to this. I’m thinking also about the psychological layer. For people to be so complacent and to just download and accept and not question is one layer. Then there is the just the black and white way of thinking. It seems like if there is no spirituality, then people have no sort of direction of growth. There is no spiritual growth, then there is no psychological growth, and so then there’s no emotional growth. I really don’t know where I’m going with this but…it’s it’s paralyzing.
El Farouk:
There’s a whole notion of being unworthy. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who comes from a South Asian Muslim background and I said, do you celebrate Eid? She said to me I don’t practice and so I don’t think I deserve to celebrate Eid. So I said to celebrate Christmas? What makes you worthy to celebrate that? Right. It’s really so interesting how people compartmentalize, you know, and so she can’t celebrate Eid because she doesn’t fast, but she’s got a Christmas tree and you know,
Thal:
Maybe also the notion of the Divine as, you know, someone up there that’s going to zap you. Yeah. You’re not worthy of connecting to that God is also problematic and psychological and spiritual abuse too.
El Farouk:
Now we get into language around decolonizing and decolonizing our faith tradition because the notion of God anthropomorphized into a male human form is not something that’s actually intrinsic to Islam, right? Even the word Allah has no gender, even though Arabic is such a gendered language. The word itself has no gender. It’s an irregular word formation. The notion of God as male is not something that comes intrinsically from Islamic theology, right? Maybe it’s part of our colonial legacy. Even the way we understand certain words like the word Taqwa, which in the early translation, English translations of the Quran, which all happened during the colonial period.
Taqwa is translated as God fearing as opposed to God awareness or God consciousness. Right? Yet this notion of fearing God, which may or may not have come from a Christian European sort of paradigm is now so much embraced by people within the Islamic tradition, and I don’t think it’s actually intrinsic to our tradition, but it’s just adopted, embraced, and unquestioned.
Thal:
It’s like a tool that’s used for self abuse almost. Speaking of the divine name and gender wasn’t it Ibn Arabi, one of the early Sufi that referred to Allah as ‘hiya’ and you can him “howa”…you can call her or him.
El Farouk:
He did and within variety of different Muslim traditions over the years, particularly within spiritual explorations the feminine quote unquote aspects of the divine, have often been embraced or talked about and theorized over and so on. Even with the 99 names, the Tao of Islam, is an interesting book. I found it very, very heavy reading. It embraces and explores the notion that the 99 names, and this is an old historical tradition within Islamic history that the 99 names are the names of beauty and the names of majesty and the names of beauty have what we would traditionally describe as more feminine qualities and the names of majesty as more traditionally masculine qualities. We’re projecting our own binary limitations but what it does is open up is this notion that God is not male, and that God has no gender.
That’s at the unity mosque, we’ve made an explicit choice in our English material to refer to God in a diversity of genders. In our format we tend to prefer feminine pronouns for the Divine simply because any pronoun you use is going to be inaccurate and insufficient. Everyone’s insufficient and inadequate in one side, Islam is very big on the ‘mizaan’ and on the balance. We’re just trying to balance it out by using another pronoun, which is equally inadequate.
Thal:
Right. I feel that this concept can serve well in the mainstream circles. I think if people open up and embrace these different…uhmm…it’s not even different. It is intrinsic to Islam. Lots of forgiveness will happen.
El Farouk:
Absolutely, I think that what we have been experiencing is a growing intolerance of diversity within the Islamic tradition. I don’t want to have this sort of rosy image that our precolonial or pre-European colonial because we also have an Arab-colonial history as well, right…that it was all perfect and so on. We can see today, historically, that even today there are all these different traditions, but the dominant face of Islam is one of monolith and patriarchy. I use the examples of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that they survived a thousand years plus of Islam, but they didn’t survive 15 years of the Taliban.
Thal:
It is the toxicity of dogma.
El Farouk:
It’s toxicity of dogma. It’s the same thing with the Sphinx and the pyramids. You know, these are, these are pre-Islamic monuments. These are iconography. There was no intention or desire to destroy any of these. When the Muslims went into India, they didn’t destroy Hindu temples. They didn’t prevent people from practicing their traditions. Yet, the intolerance that we find today for diversity and I actually think that if anything, historically, in the Muslim tradition, Muslims had been more intolerant of non-conformist Muslims and non-Muslims. Even within the Islamic tradition, there has been a notion of embracing diversity. I think that’s being eroded and I think that has been willfully eroded by political forces.
Adrian:
I think I mean as a non-theist, like not really identifying with any particular religion. I see this pattern show up in places like science, like scientism, right? Where there are certain beliefs and ideologies that are becoming dogmatic and people are using that as a form of control to say, this is the authority who says this is the correct thing to believe in science and this is incorrect or, and so it seems like it’s the church of certainty that people are ascribing to in this modern world.
El Farouk:
This happens politically too, right? I worked in political staff at Queen’s Park and I’m like, wow, this is their religion and it’s very dogmatic, you know, it can also change very quickly if it’s politically expedient for it to change.
Adrian:
I think you’re absolutely right when you say it’s the tolerance for diversity, but it seems also for the mystery, for not knowing, to admit the uncertainty that, hey, we might actually not really know what the answer is and to sit in that space and have a capacity for that.
El Farouk:
Sit with the unknown…but that’s also what drives us, right, is our intellectual and spiritual journeys are driven by wanting to know the unknown. What did somebody say to me, I read somewhere the other day and I thought it was magic is something that science hasn’t found an explanation for yet. I’m a believer of magic and I do.
Thal:
That what was very interesting too…when you had mentioned about activism as well, because there’s also dogma within the activist communities and it is almost interesting to see that because activism, I feel, at its heart is sacred work. If you’re asking for justice and pointing at the wrongs that are happening in the world, how can you not work on your inner-self?
El Farouk:
Well, I think we get swept up with anger. Was it last summer or the summer before, one of the women who was part of the Unity mosque here asked me to speak at a rally and it was like, you know, an anti-racism rally and stuff. I agreed to do that and I went there and I listened to some of the speakers before me and they were all so angry, you know, we’ve got to crush this and we’ve got a crush that with him to stop this and we’re going to stop that, and I just couldn’t do it, you know? I spoke about transforming and building a better future so that all of our kids could live together and have a world to live in and live in harmony with not only each other, but with creation around them and that was the world that we had to create it as activist. I’m not sure how the message went over in a room full of anger, a space full of anger.
Thal:
I mean, I can ask you that question. How are you not angry with all those intersections, El Farouk?
El Farouk:
I do get angry. I do get angry but at the end of the day, my anger is not going to change anything. If you’re empty on the inside or you’re filled with anger on the inside, how do you change something on the outside and what do you change it with? And where do you fill that space with? Right? At the end of the day, the work has to start with yourself. I often speak, the anger is righteous. We have every right to be angry. Now what do we do with it? Right? Where do we go from here? How does that work? And if you’re just stuck in the anger, there’s no movement. There is no transformation. You just replace one structure or one leader or one ruler with another, and then you just keep replicating that same, that same paradigm.
We’ve seen this in revolution after revolution. We were talking about the Arab spring before we started our formal conversation today and we all had such great hopes. I was talking to some clients of mine who are from Iran and I said to them, you don’t know in Iran before the revolution and the revolution was something that was filled with hope and it brought a million people into the streets of Tehran from a variety of religious and political traditions. It was filled hope, but it got lost and it got lost in religion that became toxic. It didn’t embrace the human condition and it became stripped of spirituality in its need to have political and social control.
Thal:
Absolutely.
Adrian:
I want to ask you, what fuels your work in terms of practices. What sort of daily or regular practices that seemed to really help keep you going? I imagine you’re met with all sorts of resistance and challenges and you need something to keep that energy going.
El Farouk:
Yeah. I have Zikr playing constantly. I have sacred music playing constantly. Mostly Sufi music and native music that seems to calm my soul. I need to hug more trees.
Thal:
I recommend that.
El Farouk:
It’s a little bit difficult when it’s minus 30 outside. I’m a West Coast Kid, right? So that’s what I aspire to. We just came back from Costa Rica and I’m like, I just want to be here, you know. Be at the beach and walk through the forest and look at the birds and the butterflies. That’s not always possible. It is my connection to the sacred and it’s the music and the chanting that really hold myspace for me. Hmm.
Adrian:
I know you regularly attend Dargah with Hoiking doing some of the Sufi practices. I’ve never actually gone to one. I’m actually curious to hear what’s involved in those meetings and gatherings. And I’m quite interested in the practices themselves.
El Farouk:
Well, when we were talking earlier, you talked about breath, right? You actually need to be at a Sufi Dargah because breath is so important and all life starts with breath, right? The Koran says that all life starts with water, but creation starts with God’s breath being blown into us. I really like the Dargah space because I end up, like with the unity mosque and other spaces, I often end up being sort of a central to that space. What I like about the Dargah is I can just be a student in that space. Was that your question?
Adrian:
I was curious to hear you describe what it’s like to attend one for listeners that have not had experience either.
El Farouk:
The Dargah is basically the school of our teacher. In some Sufi traditions, the teachers is called a Sheikh. In the Rifai tradition, we call our teacher Baba, which means father, and we begin by sitting in a circle and he delivers his sohbet, which is a lesson or a teaching. He always tells us that this is the most important part of the evening because it’s basically where we are toned and brought into common space right through his teaching. Our Baba is fairly informal. Other communities are more formal or more vested in cultural or a ritual and so on and so forth. He’s quite open to people asking questions and we laugh and we, you know, engage in conversation, but he’s the teacher. We are in class and that lasts for about two hours. Then depending on the time of the year it is, we will then say our communal prayer, our ritual prayer, Muslim ritual, prayer and after that we begin Zikr.
Zikr comes from an Arabic word that means remembrance. Allah in the Koran says prayer is good, but remembrance is even better. A dervish is called upon to remember God at all times in all things. To see God manifest in all things all around us. And so the Zikr is the chanting of the Divine names. We chat La Ilaha Illallah, which means there is no god but God and I think essential to that is the understanding that small god is not just an idol or an icon, but the idle and the icons that we hold in our heart.
So whether it’s our money or it’s a person or it’s our job, our art or whatever it is, those are the idols or the icons that we hold in our heart. We have to break those idols and those icons because there is only One reality and that we’re all joined in that reality. That’s the foundational remembrance. There are other remembrances so we chant Allah as the name of God and Hu which Arabic means He, but it is the remembrance of the breath. The sacred name of the Divine that we remember each time we breathe. It’s orchestrated as part of the practice so that it is done in community and ritualized and then we do that for about 90 minutes and then we eat because by then you worked up an appetite. That’s part of my therapy, right? So I find the Unity mosque to be very therapeutic, but because of my position and location within it, it’s a different space for me. Then when I come intothe Dargah where I’m a student and I can just actually sit and just be present without having to be active, you know.
Adrian:
Does everybody do the whirling or is it just the dervishes that are performing?
El Farouk:
The whirling is a ritual that’s present in some Sufi traditions and not present in others. Our teacher, our Baba is part of a sacred lineage from two different Sufi traditions, the Rifai and the Jerrahi. The whirling is a ritual, a historical ritual component of the Jerrahi lineage. We used to have whirling, but not very often. So our Baba’s son and his wife, they both whirl, but we didn’t have it very often because we didn’t have a lot of people within our community who were, who knew how to whirl and that’s changing because now there’s more and more people. We get people who go for classes, and they are offered every Saturday before the Dargah. We’re starting to see it happen more within our Zikr ceremonies.
Adrian:
I’m so curious because to me it seems like the movement practice is like sort of the yoga in other practices where the body and the mind actually there’s a component.
El Farouk:
So Muslim ritual prayer is yogic, but we don’t recognize it as such. I’ve had friends who practice yoga who’ve come into Muslim space and joined us in prayer and said, this is very familiar. This is not foreign, this is, but Muslims don’t conceptualize our ritualized prayer as being a yogic practice. I think that’s our loss. The practice of the Zikr depending on which community can also have movement and that is combining the body, the spirit, and the mind in movement. The whirling for me is very interesting. Thal you and I were talking about Umrah and Mecca, and when we went in 2011 and we were staying at the hotel and we were overlooking the Haram Sherrif, the mosque in Mecca. There was never a moment in the day when there were people who were not doing their Tawaf. They’re circumambulation of the Kaaba. I remember thinking and because people are wearing a lot of the men are wearing white and some of the women are wearing black and then other colors.
I am a sci-fi fan. I looked at this and it was like Oh My God this is like looking at the Milky Way. It’s like looking at a galaxy that’s constantly whirling, right? It’s whirling around the central point…this black box that’s in the middle. It could be a black hole in the middle of the universe or the middle of the galaxy, and it’s all whirling around that. The Dervishes when they’re whirling, they are whirling around their heart as the center point, because the heart is where God sits. Right? So all of these movements, whether it’s the dervish that’s whirling or the pilgrims that are going around the Kaaba or the earth going around the sun or the galaxy spinning, we’re all turning towards the heart. We’re all turning towards the core. I really see a connection between what’s in the universe out there and the microcosm that is in the Dargah and the further microcosm that’s within each of us and within our bodies.
Adrian:
That’s beautiful. Spirituality is underneath that is the connection and seeing the connection from all scales, whether it’s the large Cosmos to you as an individual, just even looking at your body as a cosmic representation. In our bodies, and actually Baba often talks about this as well. Our bodies are so complex. They are a universe in and of themselves. We don’t recognize that we take our bodies for granted, abuse it and neglect it and forget it and do all sorts of things with it.
Thal:
That’s true. How can you get angry if you think you want all those things?
El Farouk:
I think anger is part of the human condition. It’s where we allow it to take us and how we bounce back from it.
Thal:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking about, you know, who young are Muslim people that identify as Queer and who are really struggling mentally and probably thinking about walking away from the religion because they feel they’re not accepted. I mean, what kind of advice would you give those people?
El Farouk:
Don’t let other people tell you who you are or what you are? Learn to define it for yourself and embrace your spirituality which is innate to us. Why should we have to choose because it doesn’t fit with somebody else and so I would say to people you know, look within and find your own path because it is possible to do.
Adrian:
What is your vision for the future of unity mosque and beyond and I guess all the other manifestations that branch out of that.
El Farouk:
I want to subvert the planet.
Adrian:
What’s your master plan?
El Farouk:
The idea for me of the unity mosque is to transform the face of Islam, not everybody’s going to end up at the Dargah. It’s always been that way. Not everybody has a calling to a center stage, a spiritual connection, right? But everybody has spirituality. Everybody has a need for connection. I don’t think it’s a small coincidence that a small number of people who come to my Dargah actually started coming to Unity mosque first and some of them don’t come to Unity mosque anymore but they found their way from there to the Dargah. My hope for the Unity mosque is that it’s a vision of inclusion and of a shared humanity and a cohesive spirituality is something that continues to be disseminated and that similar spaces start coming up in different places. I’d like to see this as a globalized movement and we’re starting to see more and more spaces like this coming up in different parts of the world.
Of course, in some parts of the world is not actually safe for these spaces to exist or to exist publicly and it’s not going to be possible, which is also why our sermons, our Friday services are broadcasted through Facebook live and we actually have an international congregation and every Friday there’s people from Kenya, Ireland, and places in the states and across the GTA who for some reason can’t get down to the physical location and so on and so forth, who do access the service and because the service is then…the recording is kept on the Facebook group. I will often go back and check and see that something’s been watched 200 times or 150 times and so on and so forth. It’s my hope that people’s mindset and their understanding is also being transformed. One of the things that I always say to people is that if you want to try to start a community in your own physical location, we’re here to help you start that. The Protestant reformation started with people taking back their Christianity, and so the unity mosque is hopefully a vehicle for people to take back their Islam.
Thal:
One of the interesting things that you had mentioned because we attended the Unity mosque prayer last Friday and one of the things that you mentioned that there are a lot of Jewish people that practice too, right?
El Farouk:
Not everybody who comes to the unity mosque is Muslim identified. For me it speaks to the potential transformative capacity of a space like the Unity mosque because we are not trying to convert people. I would like people to come and feel better about themselves and find their own connection and if that connection is through Islam, that’s fabulous and if it’s not through Islam then you know, well, Allah in the the Koran says not everybody’s meant to be Muslim and that even religious diversity is part of God’s plan.
Thal:
It is mentioned that, “or else I would have created you all just one type of people.”
El Farouk:
Absolutely. So I don’t actually know when people come to the mosque, whether they’re Muslim or not. Yeah. Unless I happen to know them. Right. Most of them are but some but of them are not, and some of the folks come from a mixed religious backgrounds or mixed families or have Muslims in their extended family. Some of the folks who I spoke about, who come from Jewish backgrounds, some of them are converts to Islam, some of them come from mixed Christian and Jewish homes, and you know, if you come from a mixed Christian and Jewish home, then Islam is really a very good solution.
Thal:
It is like the end of the narrative.
El Farouk:
Because you don’t have to, you don’t want to have to give up Moses and the Torah and you don’t have to give up Jesus. You find them both? You can. Exactly. You know, I said it jokingly, but it’s actually kind of true. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and it has appeal for people, and remember during the time of the Prophet in Madina, Muslims and Jews used to pray together. Yeah.
Thal:
Yeah, there are many stories.
El Farouk:
We’re not doing anything new. We’re just reclaiming our past that other people have tried to pretend it never existed, and at the same time, move forward. I think this is the element or the essence of Islam that I think the fundamentalists forget that it is organic and it is responsive. Even the history of Islam, the Quran was revealed over a 23 year period to the prophet Mohammed because it was in response. It wasn’t here it is, now conform, which is what we are told Islam is today, but it is not the history of Islam. It is not even how Islam came into the world. It came into the world as a response and a response to the need of people and of society.
Thal:
I think people confuse the concept of surrender with conformity.
El Farouk:
Yeah. Who is the surrender to is the question because usually the people who are telling you that you need to surrender. They’ll tell you to surrender to God as they understand God and to God’s word as they tell you to understand it.
Thal:
Whereas, you know, true surrender is a very deep way of being and it’s about a connection with your self, really.
El Farouk:
Well, if Allah is closer to you than you’re own jugular vein, then you know, you need to look inside as well as outside.
Thal:
Any thing that you wanted to talk about that you haven’t had the chance to talk about or any questions that you would have liked to be asked because you’ve always been out in the media for like 20+ years.
El Farouk:
We talked about psychotherapy and so on. I think that a large part if the crises that we see and the dependencies that we see in the world around us, I think it’s comes from this schizophrenia, this compartmentalization of our physical, sexual, spiritual, and emotional beings. The name for the unity mosque, it is tawheed, it is unity, it is oneness, but Oneness is not sameness.
I think that whether you find it in Islam or you find it through any other tradition. Finding that sense of balance and that connection to yourself and to the world around you, I think is what’s missing for many people and it’s what causes all this dysfunction in the world around us.
Thal:
Absolutely.
Adrian:
Thank you. Beautifully said.
El Farouk:
Thank you.
Thal:
Thank you very much for your time.
Bonus Material:
El Farouk:
In my work as a refugee lawyer and I primarily represent the majority of the cases that I represent are either based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression or gender. So everything from, you know, for the gender stuff, it’s forced marriage, domestic violence, a lot of female genital mutilation, but it, over the years of doing this work and listening to people’s stories, and I represented people from about 120 different countries, so from all religious and non-religious and racial backgrounds and so on, is how religion and spirituality are used as, as these weapons to bludgeon people. We talked about that within the Muslim context, but I’ve seen it sort of universally women. I think that, you know, not all gay men are visibly gay, but all, most women are visibly female from birth.
The way patriarchy, misogyny, and religion intersect as how women’s bodies are controlled and how women, girl children are controlled and limited, and told that they’re not worthy. You’re not worthy to lead prayer. You’re not worthy to be in this space. You don’t have the capacity or the ability, and so this kind of gendered hierarchy is created within our theology and within our religious spaces, and to me, that’s abuse. That’s a form of violence right there to say that you are not worthy, that somehow you need to be confined in a particular space.
Thal:
Even women’s voices…
El Farouk:
Yes, your voice cannot be heard, and so on. To me, even if you don’t recognize this as abuse or ss violence, it is. I just presented a case today, my client is a Muslim woman from West Africa. I remember having this conversation with her because it’s a question I have to ask my female clients who are alleging domestic violence is if they were raped during the marriage and the notion that they can be raped by their husband is actually something that they sort of look at me and go, what? If your husband forced you to have sex against your will, that’s also rape. It’s your body and you have to consent, and yet even within some Muslim theological constructs, there’s no concept of marital rape. To me, that’s a form of violence. These are the kinds of things that sort of have informed me in the development of my own theology and how our relationship to God and to ourselves and to religion and our spirituality has to be transformative and has to liberate because this is violence and surely our spiritual tradition doesn’t teach us violence as a vehicle for closeness to God’s creation.
Thal:
Yeah and shouldn’t be a source of pain and separation and trauma. Sort of take away people’s lives, really, not allow people to thrive as human beings.
El Farouk:
That’s exactly what it does, it suffocates our growth as human beings, and if we are all created in God’s image, then how does this violence allow us to reach our fullest potential? It doesn’t, in fact, it constricts us and confines us and denies us that growth.
Thal:
Keeps us small…
El Farouk:
And separated and the separation is also a separation from ourselves and I think that’s where all the anxieties and depressions and the mental health issues that arise.
Thal:
Yeah, not only in the queer communities, it’s everywhere now.
El Farouk:
Pervasive.
