albion_moonlight

My mother was born and raised Jewish. My father was born and raised Christian. When I was about nine years old my father had some kind of spiritual awakening and converted to Islam. He became a devout Muslim, prayed regularly throughout the day, and before he died, he made the Pilgrimage to Mecca. I wish you could've met him, I've never known a more peaceful man. Kind, loving, respectful, irreverent. Loving. All of those adjectives applied equally to my mother. Now, my folks had their share of disagreements, their share of arguments, their share of unhappiness at times with one another, but I've been wracking my brain and I can't remember a single time that any of their arguments or disagreements had ANYTHING to do with religion or God. They lived with complete respect for each other's spiritual beliefs. In fact, it was my mother who taught me the story of Mohammed, as well as the stories of Christ and the Buddha. We grew up recognizing Ramadan, Christmas and Hannukah, I was Bar-Mitzvahed, I've done the fast on the Holy Month of Ramadan, and of course I looked forward to Christmas every year, for the wrong reasons like everyone else. All I can think to say from my own experience is that people are people.

I don't know, it's late, I doubt I'm making any sense, it just seems to me that the world is in a dire state and maybe the only chance we have is love, or at the very least, tolerance. And I know the answer to that is, "Yeah, but, those murderous assholes..." and maybe that's so, but it seems to me that if one must indulge in that kind of rage then maybe, just maybe, one should be careful to direct that emotion at the people who've acted in such a way as to inspire such anger, and by people I don't mean people as in 'Palistinian people' or 'Muslim people' but instead the individuals themselves who act with complete disregard for other human beings.

When 911 occurred I thought instantly of my father, and I was grateful that he had died, because I knew how sad it would've made him, to see people behaving that way erroneously in the name of Islam, and to see the repercussions that occurred against yet more innocent people. And I was glad my mother had passed away as well, because she would've been just as saddened.