Nine days after the trauma and the tragedy of Nine Eleven, President George W. Bush declared in his address to Congress and the American people and to the whole world: “I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world: We respect your faith. …Its teachings are good and peaceful…” I am sure if he were literate enough about his own country, his own culture, his own American civilization, his own American literature, he would have most definitely concluded the whole matter with this clincher that Islam is as American as America’s very own greatest poet, Walt Whitman, who sang

Of every hue and caste am I,
Of every rank and religion…

And most importantly
Allah

Is all, all, all—

Is immanent in every life and object…

And then the whole Muslim world would not have believed as it does now that Dubya is just as bigoted and just as mean to Muslims as his Attorney General, John Ashcroft. It would have been most extraordinary, as extraordinary as that “most extraordinary letter from Muhammad, slave and messenger of God” that Heraclius, Caesar of the Byzantium Empire, received in 628 C. E. that proclaimed this challenging call to Christendom: “People of the Book, come to a Word common to both of us, that we may worship only God.” This same God says to all his creatures, “I was a Hidden Treasure, so I loved to be known. Hence I created creatures that I might be known.” As Christians & Muslims try to share their knowledge of God with each other in the current clannish zeitgeist in the wake of the tragedy of September11, it behooves them both to eschew the zealotry & the fanaticism of the tiresome, dog-tired, doggone dogmas dictated by what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences” and the evil and provocative power politics of vainglory & hegemony, of mosque & church. Always bearing in mind that “philosophy consists in asking questions, sophistry in answering them, and fanaticism in enforcing the answers.” In the place of fanaticism, may the God we all try to know and worship in Spirit and in Truth imbue us with His Spirit whose fruit is “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” In a time similar to ours and “in the midst of the crusades and violent sectarian conflict”, this same Spirit led Sufi Jalaluddeen Rumi to testify: “I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see one altar.” This very same Spirit also led Sri Lankan saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen to teach that “Love is the religion, and the universe is the book.” The only place where one often beholds such Spirit in action is neither in the church nor in the mosque but in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, “the miracle of the century,” where Jews, Moslems, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists gather together in the name of God as they understand Him; seeking and receiving “a daily reprieve” from the satanic bondage of booze. The spiritual glue that binds them together as sisters and brothers is the grace of God which enables each lush in recovery to remember that “Belief in God is autobiographical; it has to come from [one’s own] experience.” The mantra, “God as I understand Him”, is the magic that cures every alky in recovery from the mania of trying to inflict, to enforce, to impose his own particular and peculiar brand of God, his own autobiographical knowledge of God upon all the others. O Father, Lord of heaven & earth, would that you grant such Spirit of forbearance and love unto Christian & Muslim bigots and pious bores and zealots and pontificating pundits and professors and the wise and prudent as you do continually grant daily unto babes & boozers in recovery. Would that Christians & Moslems were more like recovering rummies aspiring only “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with …God.”