Hussein Day 2012

I was humbled to share a lectern this evening with Dr. Aman Haji, Shaikh Habib Ally, and Professor Liyakat Takim, and poets and Quran recitation, as representatives of Shia, Sunni, Ismaili and other Muslim movements in Toronto joined in the annual Islamic Ahlul Bayt Assembly of Canada event celebrating Hussein Day. Don’t miss next year!

For regular visitors to this website, you will find a longer introduction to the story of Imam Hussein in my notes from February 8, 2010. If you follow the media, you’ll be aware of tragic deaths again this year in Pakistan on this holiday, but imagine the wider good news story I shared with Canadian Muslims reaching across historic divisions!

As I commented this evening, I cannot speak for two billion Christians in our generation, let alone for the generations past. Mine is a marginal sect in Christianity, the first of a series of postcolonial unions across ethnic lines and ‘old country’ historic differences in the Church of North India, Church of South India, Australia, the UK, and Africa. There are only about 150 million of us ‘united’ churches. The much larger Roman Catholic, Orthodox – and newer Pentecostal and fundamentalist movements- might not call us ‘united’ in view of our views on gender, sexuality, or church order.

I did refer Ghulam Sajan again this year to various Christian speakers more in the league of the Islamic speakers. Apparently the various ‘Reverend Doctors’ were unavailable, and I filled in. I hope for a better gesture from my official elders in the next year. Each generation, sadly, creates new divisions, and each generation, hopefully, mends with new relations. For which would you rather be remembered?

Each speaker this year was given the same them question for response: Is the message of Imam Hussein applicable for our current generation? My answer, and that of the other speakers, was ‘of course’! Freedom is never outdated. Freedom has never fully arrived. Freedom from a new tyranny, and freedom for a greater vision, faces every generation, including ours. As Jesuit Daniel Berrigan puts it, and I quoted this morning:

The real effort, never really done with, is to discern what God is saying to us
from within the real world. All else is a mortician’s job, or a child’s game.”

I reflected a bit on generations. Imam Hussein was the son of Fatima, who was the daughter of the Prophet Mohamed, and enjoyed a good name and a good position. Who are your parents and grandparents, from whom you inherit a name? The American president, Barack Hussein Obama, claims that name. Fewer are called Yazid. It’s not much different in my movement of diversity and generations of change.

My ancestors were Irish Methodists, disenfranchised by English rule, refugees from the Great Hunger, the potato famine. Each generation including mine gives the name ‘William’ or ‘Bill’ to one or several sons. In some generations we have William James and William Robert – that’s right, ‘Billy Jim’ and ‘Billy Bob’.

We are ‘hillbillies’ who remember William of Orange, a Protestant Dutchman who invaded England to oppose a Roman Catholic monarchy – which angered most of our Irish neighbours. Orangemen, at worst anti-Catholic, we provided every mayor of Toronto till Jewish Nathan Phillips – and had a parade in July downtown, with ‘King Billy’ on a white horse. At best, it was about religious freedom: at worst, sectarianism.

In a couple of generations in Canada, our accents changed, our children married Scots and even English. In my turn, I married a woman of French Catholic heritage. As one of our hymns sings, ‘time made ancient goods uncouth.’ Each generation rues parents’ errors, then make our own. My parents’ generation supported a racist assimilationist Canada, with residential schools for aboriginal children, and limited immigration.

I claim my name, ‘United’ though most Christians would call us divisive, and ‘Bill’, with all its baggage. I aspire to conserve and honour the best of those names, partly by repenting and redeeming those names in my generation. Surely those who bear the name of Islam, of Muslim, of Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Bohra and other groups, and the related personal names, starting with Hussein, share my aspirations.

Yesterday was the 83rd anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. He was a Baptist, like my mother. He was named after a German reformer and early ‘Protestant’ resisting the tyrannies of his day. He was also named after his father, also a pastor. Well educated in the northern states, he became an advocate for civil rights for black Americans, desegregation and equal rights and freedom.

By 1963, in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King’s cooperation with the Nation of Islam and black Muslims like one of tonight’s poets had grown, and if you see the video we played at our church today, most of those surrounding him on the podium were Muslim.

Martin Luther King Jr. learned nonviolence by studying Ghandi, and made common cause with many. He clung to his roots, though, and demanded of marchers like my pastor in the early 60s that when they came to Alabama to march, they signed a pledge of a new set of ’10 commandments’:
I HEREBY PLEDGE MYSELF--MY PERSON AND MY BODY--TO THE NONVIOLENT MOVEMENT. THEREFORE I WILL KEEP THE FOLLOWING “TEN COMMANDMENTS”:
1. MEDITATE daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
2. REMEMBER always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation-not victory.
3. WALK and TALK in the manner of love, for God is love.
4. PRAY daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
5. SACRIFICE personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
6. OBSERVE with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. SEEK to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8. REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9. STRIVE to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. FOLLOW the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.
My United Church of Canada pastor, 49 years ago, marched in Alabama, and signed the pledge, and took time off work, over the objections of his elders, to do so. My Thornhill clergy colleague’s father picketed the American consulate in Toronto, and his phone was tapped by the RCMP. Have I in my time, kept the honour of my name and of my elders? Have I been as militant in what I resist, and with whom and what I cooperate?

Does this sound like anyone you know, and honour today, as Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Hussein Days coincide? ‘Every place is Karbala, and every day Ashura.’ Toronto, in 2012, who resists Yazid, stands with Hussein? It is hard work to discern ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom for’ in each generation. God will reveal to those who honour the spirit, and conserve the value of the name, in each generation. The rest, as Berrigan said, is ‘mortician work’ or a ‘child’s game’.


The Library of Congress website cites the great Christian Realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, and applies his wisdom to Martin Luther King Jr, and I dare say it applies to Imam Hussein:

The discovery of elements of common human frailty in the foe and, concomitantly, the appreciation of all human life as possessing transcendent worth, creates attitudes which transcend social conflict and thus mitigate its cruelties.

It binds human beings together by reminding them of the common roots and similar character of both their vices and their virtues. These attitudes of repentance which recognize that the evil in the foe is also in the self, and these impulses of love which claim kinship with all men in spite of social conflict, are the peculiar gifts of religion to the human spirit.

Secular imagination is not capable of producing them; for they require a sublime madness which disregards immediate appearances and emphasizes profound and ultimate unities.”

Where many counseled patience and others armed resistance, King saw nonviolent protest as the only practical tool for achieving equality and dignity for blacks, and more importantly, as the only moral answer to the problem of racism.

It took a rare temperament to grasp the possibilities of nonviolence, especially in an era that tended to favor extreme solutions. But in his person King combined, to borrow from Niebuhr's terminology, "the realistic wisdom of the statesman" with "the foolishness of the moral seer." This quixotic mix of religious idealism and political realism enabled King to succeed where others before him had failed.

Is the message of Imam Hussein applicable for our current generation? My answer, and that of the other speakers, was ‘of course’! Freedom is never outdated. Freedom has never fully arrived. Freedom from a new tyranny, and freedom for a greater vision, faces every generation, including ours.

We will need some militant discipline to discern together what to resist, and what to cooperate toward and to ask and to offer mercy to one another. I closed at the Imam Ali Centre with the words of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber again:

We cannot avoid / Using power / Cannot except the compulsion / To afflict the world
So let us / Cautious in diction / And mighty in contradiction / Love powerfully.

As did Imam Hussein, and as did Martin Luther King Jr.
Amen. So be it.