Death Essay

She asked for my guidance in resolving her crisis of faith.If other Muslims knew about her routine excursions to a Hindu temple, she would be branded an apostate, but did I think that her instinct was right, and that perhaps it was possible for Allah to communicate his existence through a temple belonging to another religion?And all the more remarkable was their implicit decision over time to position themselves as rational thinkers and to define their religions for themselves.

She asked for my guidance in resolving her crisis of faith.If other Muslims knew about her routine excursions to a Hindu temple, she would be branded an apostate, but did I think that her instinct was right, and that perhaps it was possible for Allah to communicate his existence through a temple belonging to another religion?And all the more remarkable was their implicit decision over time to position themselves as rational thinkers and to define their religions for themselves.

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The doctors told me I had one year to live." I know it’s been ages since I posted and most may have figured out why. Right now all I need are prayers; prayers that are simple.

When such moments passed, it was again simply assumed that anyone entering a doctoral program in the humanities knowingly signed on to a traditional career of specialized research and teaching.

Instead of backing down as the local custom expected, the students ganged up on the sole guard and began a lengthy exposition on the meaning of female impurity in Islam.

First they argued that a woman was impure only when she was menstruating and not at other times; they then invoked Allah as the sole witness to their cyclical impurity, a fact the guard could not be privy to and thus should not be able to use against them; and finally they made the case that if other Muslim countries left it up to individual women to decide whether to visit a mosque, it was not up to a Bangladeshi guard to create a different rule concerning entry.

But over the course of the semester I could discern one positive effect of our classroom exercise: students’ increasing skepticism toward received wisdom.

In becoming comfortable with challenging my explanations and debating competing religious ideas, students came to perceive any view toward religion as more an argument than an indisputable fact.

In the midst of all this I thought my call to accept these various manifestations of Islam as intriguing theological propositions went unheeded.

With my early enthusiasm and amusement depleted, I was ready to declare neutral instruction of religion in Bangladesh impossible.

Several Muslim students immediately protested that I was suggesting heresy, citing a Quranic injunction that only Allah should be revered.

What I had intended was to point out how similar tension existed in Buddhism over circumambulation of a stupa — an earthen mound containing the relics of an eminent religious figure — since that act could be seen as both remembrance of the deceased’s worthy deeds and veneration of the person.