We the People: On Muslims, the Mind & the Machine.

Are you a machine? Well of course you are, even if you are not the best functioning type of machine. But are you also something more?

In the past year the most widespread sign in our New York subway train system has been the warning: “If You See Something Say Something.” As in other government policies, much information is missing. See what? Say what? And to whom? Once again official slogans address our organs of perception and expression but not cognition or context or our capacity for independent thought. Basically this sign means, “Trust Us.”

At the same time that this message spreads subliminally through our city, one of the most widespread images on the subway has been the image of humans flayed of flesh and presented as educational exhibits. These dead, red and white anatomies look back with naked bulging eyes from posters in every station, and advertisements on bus and train. Bizarre images-- especially since, reminded of terror in every trip, we fear being blown up by bombs as in Madrid, and reduced to such naked and lifeless flesh.

We see dead people. So who are they? They were for the most part former Chinese prisoners, now arranged for our entertainment and edification in groups paying football and engaged in other pursuits.

While one appreciates that medical students can learn from the study of cadavers, this grisly display is meant to show the human body as machine, raw materials and a commodity. The exhibition is traveling in several US cities and is highly promoted by certain corporations and industries. We do not know exactly how the bodies were taken for this purpose.

The warning message and the image in the subway both seek to strip away taboos and protections of customary human privacy in the name of modernity, national security and progress. They seem to share a sense that humanity is a machine for the collective good. The materialism of our culture presents humanity in this way, when it is not merely depicting our demands and desires for new consumer goods. The corporate machine sees us all as corporate machines.

It is at this cultural moment that the Bush administration has stripped prisoners of Habeus Corpus rights. This Latin term of course means, “We have the body” and is an ancient human right to know why a person is being detained or imprisoned, and for how long. The Bush administration (with collusion in Congress, especially among the Republican party) has challenged this protection. In the case of the Guantanano detainees and in the case of “enemy combatants” –a new category— the bodies being held have been stripped of rights along with their clothing. In the misuse of law and power, one can therefore make some comparisons to a concentration camp.

It is very good to hear the news last week that Guantanamo detainee David Hicks is to be returned to Australia within 60 days. He has faced a potential life term, so this is quite a different outcome to pleading guilty. However, the price of this arrangement was to require him not to speak to media for one year (ie until after the next Australian elections) and to forbid him to sue over his treatment during his five years in captivity.

Critics said these provisions indicated that officials would use prosecutorial powers to muffle the public debate about detention policies. “It is a modern cutting out of his tongue,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. But at least the government did not actually cut out his tongue and put it on display for the education and entertainment of the American people. As a culture, we are not so far from such behavior.

However, neither are the Arabs and so-called Muslims engaged in sectarian warfare in Iraq. These insurgents, chauvinists and criminals have been removing quite a number of eyes, ears and tongues, not to mention heads. We do not think these are medical students short of materials for their anatomy class. And we do not think that Hezbollah, Iran or Israel should be holding men and women as political pawns. Muslims should know that bodies and minds should be free.

Materialism considers that a person is his body, nothing else but that, and what we understand as mind is nothing but bodily phenomena. In this day and age, Islamic schools should not forget the care and development of the individual soul, the Tazkiyat al Nafs. Religious literalism and Materialism too often share an emphasis on external practice and on social control and can lead us to forget our essential natures.

If as Muslims and human beings we are to encourage human freedom, we need to study human nature as well as human difference. And over the last 1400 years, many Muslim thinkers have considered the mind-body-spirit relationship.

For example, over four hundred years ago, at the same time Rene Descartes explored the mind-body relation in the West, Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) studied how the soul is created with the body but becomes a finer substance and perhaps immortal through the spirit. Every living thing, including animals and plants, use their matter as instrument to move from material to spiritual being. In this way Sadra disagrees with Aristotle, who considers mental substance as merely “a function” of a body.

We the people are not just mind. We are not just flesh. Humanity is heart, and soul and mystery. You and I must work to know our selves, in all our imperfections and distractions. We can be more aware. As a spiritual book named “Beads of Dew” reminds us; “It is necessary to recognize, with every breath, that Allah is Present and Watchful. When this awareness takes control, the sense of humble modesty is felt in Allah’s presence, and heedlessness departs.”