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The Timeless Spirit
The Timeless Spirit
A basic fact about life and about people, in all places and at all times, which the Palestinians embodied and have manifested during the 20th century, and continue to do so as we enter the 21st, is that the human spirit is undefeatable. This timeless spirit is very rarely talked about. It stands in contradiction with the logic which is increasingly invading societies around the world, the logic of winning, control, and profit. This logic is an accompaniment of the industrial-consumption mode of living. The dominant forms of education, development, progress and the mass media (all of which try to put people on the same track, thus killing diversity) have been the main means for spreading this logic and this mode of living.
Humanity can be suppressed in some places at certain times but, as long as there is injustice, it will always be boiling underneath the surface, and it will erupt by various peoples, taking various forms, depending mainly on the living culture of the people. Injustice cannot last. Just like a volcano where boiling energy has to come out, and like an earthquake where a fault has to be corrected and the earth has to rest, humanity will erupt and shake somewhere, somehow, until justice is regained. There is no way to suppress it completely.
Throughout the 20th century, Palestinians have been one of the main “human volcanoes,” and Palestine has been one of the places where humanity kept erupting, throwing out rich “lava” around. We have embodied hope, faith and creativity as well as inspired them in many others.
We were under occupation for most of the 20th century. We still are. Though full of pain, suffering and injustice, our story has been one of the most incredible stories of all times. Many forces have collaborated against us in order to quell our spirit, but never succeeded. “God” was brought in, and history was falsified, in order to justify and legitimize the injustices and crimes against us. Britain built several structures in the region to make sure that Palestine would not backfire. Ben Gurion and John Foster Dulles predicted that “the elders will die and the young will forget.” Golda Meir, among others, declared that we did not exist. There is no other people that the US vetoed as many UN resolutions, asserting that people’s rights, as much as the Palestinians. No other people as much as us has witnessed as many politicians, scholars, journalists, and new evangelists been lined up and enlisted to declare that we are sub-human or that we are wrong. The vast majority of Palestinians have been uprooted from their lands and homes and scattered around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since 1948, many have had their bones crushed, their bodies deformed and tortured, their homes and villages destroyed, their trees uprooted, their children killed, their youth imprisoned, and their elderly died in pain with their memories. Nothing succeeded. Palestinians’ spirit – and heads – have remained high. This is actually a manifestation of the greatness of humanity. People are incredible and unpredictable. We are, of course, not the only ones who embody and manifest this spirit, but in the 20th century, we have been a main group. Many peoples have embodied this spirit throughout history. American Indians, probably more than any other, have embodied this spirit and this greatness during five full centuries. Eduardo Grillo Fernandes, an American Indian from the Peruvian Andes, uses the word “plague” to describe the European invasion of his continent 500 years ago. That plague wiped out the vast majority of people and tried to wipe out their cultures but, unlike the spirit of the indigenous peoples and their cultures, that plague cannot regenerate itself. Grillo says that what we need is to absorb this “sickness” the same way a healthy body does: in a way that makes the body more immune to the sickness in the future. The American Indian “human volcano” has been regenerating itself in many regions, including the Andes region and Mexico, and it has erupted recently in the Zapatista movement in the Chiapas region in Mexico. The approach they follow is not one of complaining nor feeling victimized nor fighting the plague but, rather, to spend their energies on healing their bodies, minds and souls from the plague, and regaining balance and harmony in their lives. By so doing, they hope that their oppressors will also heal themselves gradually from the arrogance and blindness with which they currently live. The South Africans, the Irish and the Chechneyans are among other groups who have manifested this spirit. The Jews themselves embodied and manifested this spirit in earlier times.
This spirit can only flourish when it is the genuine, authentic and free expression of the majority of people, each manifesting it in her/his own way, place and time. It can only flourish when there is no charismatic leader and no strong organization, both of which usually rob people of their responsibility and real participation. It can flourish when the initiative is taken at the personal level but, at the same time, manifests a collective will. (The last elections in Iran manifested this combination of personal initiative and collective will.) This timeless spirit is manifested when each person becomes like a spring which joins thousands of other springs, naturally, to form a human river that brings in with it new life and new hope. Such a natural process, as I mentioned earlier, usually suffers under planned organization; it loses its spirit. Organization and authority are needed to respond to necessities in life, but they are detrimental to the sustainability of the human spirit. The human spirit can be sustained only when people feel the liberty within themselves to think and act autonomously and move collectively, just like drops of water in a river. Inspiring, rather than authoritative, leadership is what usually accompanies this spirit. Such leadership necessarily embodies wisdom.
The human spirit manifests itself in small, simple and caring acts, such as saying no to injustice, even if one knows that that may lead him/ her to be crucified or killed. We witnessed this greatness and spirit, for example, in the faces and actions of women whose homes were demolished in the Gaza Strip, and they stayed in the places of their homes and started cooking and feeding their children and caring for the elderly and helping each other. Some of these women had their homes destroyed for the fourth time in their lives: in 1948, 1956, 1967/68, and now in 2001. We witness this greatness in the ability of people to survive under the harshest conditions: Palestinian towns and villages are currently isolated from each other and surrounded by foreign army and settlers from all sides. (Just imagine the towns of Medford, Newton, Arlington, Weston, Somerville, etc around Boston being all isolated from each other, surrounded by an army of soldiers and settlers shooting at random, terrorizing people, for an extended period of time! Would they be able to survive the way Palestinians have been able to?) It is hard to realize the extent and depth at which current attempts are designed to tear Palestinians and our communities other than by being there. We also witnessed the timeless human spirit in the defiance of people against attempts to intimidate them by F-16 and other gigantic modern means of destruction. We witnessed the significance of this spirit in the reactions of the biggest power in history, in its response to a small and helpless group of people who refuse to be dehumanized. We watched, for example, how easily and shamelessly the majority of the US Congress was enlisted to decide with total ignorance (no one was ever in a Palestinian home, although they are welcome to come) that Palestinian mothers are to be blamed! And we watched, as another example, how the head of the CIA himself was dragged to Ramallah to twist Arafat’s arm to convince people in the Gaza Strip to accept the fact that it is alright for 5000 Jews from New York and Boston to steal and live on 40% of the Strip’s land and use most of the water; i.e. to convince people to accept injustice and give up their humanity. These responses show how serious those in power take assertions of the human spirit. [I have written elsewhere about manifestations of this spirit during the first intifada. See, for example, my article “Community education is to reclaim and transform what has been made invisible.” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 60 No. 1 February 1990.] Obviously, it is not the military threat that the centers of power fear (none of the above groups will ever have any significant power.) Rather, it is their inspiring spirit and their ways of living that are the target of crushing plans. It is this spirit (whether in Palestine, Mexico, Iran, Chechnya, Ireland or South Africa) that people everywhere ought to celebrate. This does not mean that the Palestinians or Zapatistas cannot be physically crushed, but that if that happens, the spirit they embody will erupt again, as 500 years of the American Indians’ history, and 100 years of Palestinian history, show.
What keeps this human flame glowing? What sustains the human spirit in peoples and communities? Definitely, it is not modern institutions, it is not experts on revolutionary change, it is not the universal declaration of human rights, it is not world organizations and big budgets, it is not civil society (as preached by academics and experts), it is not professionals and development plans, and it is not people with long and impressive CVs. Rather, it is real people; people who may have none of the modern symbols, but who still have humanity beating in their hearts; people who embody love, faith and hope, and who are ready to put the effort needed to understand and heal. It is what is rooted in people as men, women and children, and what is rooted in their cultural soils. In the case of the Palestinians, part of what is rooted in our cultural soil is the family, the neighborhood, the community, our ways of living and learning, and Islam and Eastern Christianity -- that is, everything that education, development and world organizations ignore, belittle, or try to suppress.
I will choose al-jame’ (the mosque), as one part of what constitutes our cultural soil, to elaborate on. During the first intifada, I witnessed something that never ceased to be inspiring and fascinating to me up till this day. There are two words in Arabic for mosque: al-masjed and al-Jame’. The first word, al-masjed, literally means a place of prayer which, in Islam, could be anywhere. The second word, al-Jame’, literally means a place for assembly. This is the role which I experienced in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the first intifada. I visited many places during that period, including al-Mazra’ah, Ya’bad, al-Yamoon and al-Jalazoon. Mosques became places where people met to discuss what was going on and what needed to be done; where physicians tended to the wounded; where food was distributed to the needy, where news (via minarets) were “broadcasted” to the surrounding inhabitants. Israel forbade all social forms of gathering, but could not succeed completely in mainly four areas: the family, the neighborhood, small groups of friends, and al-jame’. Unlike foreign “plastic” structures and bodies, such as schools, universities, clubs, associations, and NGOs (which were easily closed down), these four indigenous rooted “structures,” along with people, became alive and active. Being part of the cultural soil of people and knitted into the social fabric of society, they couldn’t be closed down or totally paralyzed. It was during that period that I realized for the first time in my life a basic difference between the mosque and the church. In fact, the mosque probably resembles the early Christian gatherings, but that spirit seems to have been lost in the process of the institutionalization of Christianity. [There are of course exceptions such as the role some churches played in Central and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.] I was living in Ramallah during the first intifada, where many churches exist; none of them became the open and dynamic space which mosques immediately acquired. The secret, I believe, is in the concept and in the design. As an Arab Christian and as an educator, I have been fascinated and inspired by this realization of al-Jame’. I have been asking myself ever since how a similar space can be created in churches, schools and universities. One basic difference that I see is that churches are basically denominational. There is membership where people belong to a church, and there are seats where people sit and listen. In other words, control is a built-in ingredient in the structure and design of the church. In contrast, al-jame’ as I experienced it during that period was an open space, which welcomed everyone. There are no seats and no membership. All we had to do is take off our shoes and be respectful of others, in the sense of not disturbing them. In addition to Palestine, I visited mosques in Damascus, Cairo, Amman, and al-Qarawiyyeen mosque in Fez, Morocco. I watched people sitting on the floor against a column; or sitting with others discussing various topics; or praying; or reading; or sitting and just contemplating and reflecting; or (as I saw in Fez) several groups of children sitting on the floor, each group around an adult, interacting freely with one another and with the adult. I couldn’t help but ask myself: when did the shredding arrangement, called classrooms full of rowed seats, became the norm? How could our grandparents be seduced to exchange that flexible interactive space (which I witnessed in Fez) for something that tears the social fabric of a learning group? It would be very inspiring and useful for us to look at what took place in Cordoba a thousand years ago, for example, and recapture that city’s spirit of invigorating learning space and environment.
This realization of the mosque brought up in my mind a more realistic and dynamic meaning of culture. Al-jame’ as I described it above is a manifestation of culture, not as something of the past or something in contrast to modernity, but as something very alive in people and their lives. The soil of the earth which we use for planting, and the water we drink, don’t become obsolete just because they were used for thousands of years. I felt the same way about al-jame’ during the first intifada. The way I witnessed how alive it was made me feel that we have to rethink, and probably unlearn, much of what we have been conditioned to believe in through our education. Just like the soil of earth, the soil of culture does not become obsolete unless we harden it or ignore it. As long as culture generates and regenerates life, it is meaningless to talk about culture/ tradition vs. modernity (as is customary in academia).
The necessity and inevitability of Oslo grew exactly from the need to suppress the timeless spirit as it was manifested during the first intifada. Through Oslo, however, they were able to suppress the spirit for few years, but since injustice not only continued but also gained new depth and new forms, it was inevitable that that human timeless spirit would erupt again. And it will continue to do so as long as injustice continues.
Using such words as success and failure to describe a person, a community, an act or a phenomenon is totally meaningless in the context of talking about the timeless spirit. Some may look at the Palestinian situation and see failure. Others may look at it and see it as one of the manifestations of the human spirit in today’s world, as an assertion of humanity under highly organized plans to crush us. When we talk about the human spirit, we look for what is nurturing for the human soul, heart and mind. We look at whether a person, a family, or a community is nurturing or not, and of being open to be nurtured or not. A living or healthy body is not one which has nothing wrong with it, but one which rushes naturally to do what needs to be done when something goes wrong with a certain part of it. In this sense, the Palestinian body is one of the main bodies that manifested health in the 20th century. A healthy body starts the healing process, without waiting for permission, without conducting a feasibility study, without being given guarantees that things would work. A healthy community is the same. It just does what is humanly dictated and what needs to be done. In short, to talk about the human spirit is to talk about the ability to generate oneself. In this sense, Palestine is like a real flower; it may wither away sometimes and seem to die, but only to regenerate itself through the seeds it scatters around, which flourish everywhere.
This was the spirit of the intifada. It is an adventure into humanity when humanity is under all kinds of attempts to subjugate it to the rules and needs of consumption and profit. There is no meaning to describe the intifada as successful or not. If we do that, then we have to conclude that according to modern standards, measures and ways of thinking, the biggest failure in history was Jesus. He lasted for only 3 years, and then was crucified and his friends and the believers were scattered and followed everywhere. But, it is ridiculous to describe Jesus and what he did as successful or not. He did what was in harmony with his commitment to life and to people. That’s why he has been one of the most inspiring people of all times. People cannot cease to feel hopeful and inspired by reading his story. Like him, people who embody the human spirit are ready to die rather than sell their humanity, not for any price or any gains. He asked what would benefit man if he gains the whole world but loses himself. He stood in front of Pilate with his head up, pitying those who thought they could rob him of his commitment to the disinherited, to the scapegoated, and to children. That is the spirit of “Allahu Akbar,” the eternal call against arrogance, against any one who thinks he is greater than others: God is greater. The call basically says that there is no one who is small in the eyes of God. This is the secret as to why the spirit of religions has been able to regenerate itself throughout history.
Part of the human spirit is to dare remain simple, and aware of what nature has endowed on us; not to fall into the trap of thinking that nothing can be done without powerful organizations, experts, professionals, and big plans and big budgets. That is, not to fall into the trap that we cannot learn without schools, drink without taps, heal without hospitals, get information without mass media, solve conflicts without courts, move without cars, and enter heaven without clergy. In other words, the human spirit means to liberate oneself from the hegemony of professionals, institutions and current dominant forms of development and progress.
The Palestinian situation, no doubt, is full of pain and suffering but, at the same time, it calls for hope and celebration. If we fail to see the crucial importance of the existence of people who are ready to do all they can to assert their humanity, humanity will deteriorate into creatures who are drugged by education, the mass media, banks, insurance companies, TV sets, and shopping malls. There is every reason to celebrate people who still carry the flame and manifest the human spirit in the world today. Not to give up one’s humanity, for any price, is certainly an occasion for celebration.
I would like, thus, to propose that we, Palestinians and Arabs, choose a day, say December 9, which is an important date in Palestinian history, to commemorate and celebrate this timeless human spirit. [Others may choose other dates to celebrate the human spirit which they manifest. The Zapatistas, for example, may choose January 1, which is an important date in their history. Later, we may all decide to choose one common day to celebrate this spirit.] What I mean is celebrating in a way that deepens the harmony and balance within ourselves, in our lives, and with our surroundings. It means to avoid being lazy and taking the easy path of imitating and following. It means to put the effort needed to affirm our ways of living, to protect the diversity in human existence, and to reconstruct the various parts that have been torn apart by the various forms of the plague. I mentioned the open space of al-jame’ and the spirit of Jesus, as two characteristic features in our culture, that are crucial in this process of healing and reconstructing. Others can point out to other features and aspects of our lives and our cultures (such as the way peasants converse with nature, the way friendship nurtures young people, and the way Palestinians relate to Jerusalem). By celebrating, then, I mean coming together and sharing various characteristic features of our culture; features that are crucial to nurturing, healing, learning and living. We need to reconstruct – together – our lives again according to what we really are and what we really have. We can do this by each one of us living creatively. The plague comes at different times in different clothing, under different names and titles, usually in sweet and attractive covers. Healing ourselves from it, in all its forms, is the way into the future. To illustrate, Cairo, which in Arabic (al-Qahira) literally means the conqueror of invaders, has been facing (like most cities around the world) a plague, an invader, of a new kind: cars! This plague carries with it all the symbols of progress and development. The real question then is: “Will Cairo be able to survive this new invader?” Anyone who has not lost his/her senses can easily see the effect of this invader/ plague on almost every aspect of life in Cairo: on buildings (including the pyramids), on people, on how the city is dissected into many pieces, on the communal spirit, on the air, the water, the soil, and on the Nile – the lifeline, not only of Cairo, but of Egypt. There is no easy recipe for dealing with this plague, but sooner or later, it has to be dealt with. And, by dealing with it, other things will start falling in place.
On that day, December 9, we celebrate the fact that we don’t only see the darkness that is overcoming the world but also see the light that is living and alive inside us, as persons, as communities and as cultures. The harm and suffering can be turned around and produce creative acts as well as erupt creative energies in us, in our attempts to heal and build. Hopefully, Jews will remember their history and join Palestinians and others in this much-needed healing/ building process in the world today.
Munir Fasheh
Director, Arab Education Forum
July 25, 2001
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