Faith, Literature, And The Delicate Question Of Truth
Growing up with depression in a Muslim household can be a strange experience. At best, it makes you feel like an alien, an anomaly who falls outside the scope of your larger community’s understanding of the world. At worst (and in rare cases), it turns you into a sort of monster, your cycle of crisis evidence of a possession that—quite literally—must be exorcised. There were few points in my adolescent years in which I was able to breach the delicate membrane of silence that blanketed my family when it came to emotional matters and speak to my mother about my struggles with my mental health; all ended the same way. She would listen patiently, then look at me for a moment before making her one suggestion: “Just pray.” I was always an angry kid, but there weren’t many things back then that could make me as furious as those two words. As if the solution could be that simple.
Unsurprisingly, I became an atheist. Or rather, I became a crypto-atheist, carefully maintaining the illusion of belief to my family and religious community while, in private, growing increasingly certain that the horrors of this world invalidated the existence of a god—or at least of the all-loving one I was supposed to believe in. Unable to find any comfort in faith, I sought refuge in books.
Unlike religion, which could only answer the difficult questions that plagued me during my many depressive episodes with platitudes, literature and the other arts had the courage to dive into the mire of existence in search of the truth. Faith and literature appeared to be not only incompatible, but actual enemies. So much of literary history seemed a battle against the cowardly ignorance of religion and other mass delusions. And judging by the unprecedented wave of secularism spreading across the globe, art and its cousins in science had finally managed to turn the tide. Motivated by my own search for answers beyond the regressive and limiting pale of my family’s faith, my writing practice took off.
Though it was with satisfaction that I watched as evidence piled up suggesting the growing wave of atheism was set to vanquish religion for good (at least within the Global North), the promise of that victory ultimately rang hollow. It was answers I was searching for, and while literature encouraged me to explore those most difficult questions, it could offer none. It did nothing to stem my ever worsening depressive episodes, or the personal failings that often triggered them. I began to wonder if writers like Akutagawa, Hemingway, and Plath understood the only real solution.
The episode that brought me right to the precipice happened in early 2015. Like many of my others it was triggered by the breakdown of a personal relationship. Only this time, the effects of that failure cascaded through nearly every aspect of my life—family, friendships, career, even my writing—upon which I’d built my identity. As a final service to myself before following through with suicide, I committed to tracing all the threads of the narrative that had led me up to this point, to confirming that the path that lay before me was the only one that made any sense.
As I followed the threads into the darkest places at the root of who I was, the answer that presented itself to me wasn’t self-annihilation. Instead it was a newfound understanding of faith.
Surprisingly, as I followed the threads into the darkest places at the root of who I was, the answer that presented itself to me wasn’t self-annihilation. Instead it was a newfound understanding of faith. Not the sort of “born again” faith that required me to deny any past horror or paste over it with platitudes, but a kind that actually embraced my pain and the conclusions I’d come to as an atheist and only asked me to consider them through a different lens. This experience has had a powerful effect on my writing practice, encouraging me to synthesize new truths that draw from both my secular and religious sensibilities. That direction has come with challenges, though, as I find myself even more alienated from the tacitly anti-theistic CanLit community in which, as a writer of colour, I’ve always felt like something of an outsider.
Perhaps more importantly, the experience has made me question both my past condemnation of faith and the attitudes of the larger rationalist and intellectualist movements that underpinned that derision. Are violence and repression an intrinsic part of religion, or are they symptomatic of something akin to a disease, malignant but ultimately treatable? Is religious sensibility an organ we have, as a species, evolved to no longer need, or does it still have a role to play, even if it is difficult to define? Is the collective search for truth that lies at the heart of our artistic practice incompatible with faith, or do religious writers merit a seat at the table alongside their secular counterparts?
The influential cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines religion in the follow way:
[Religion is] a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
In other words, religion is not only a set of shared ideas, images, and stories that help adherents shape meaningful narratives about their world and themselves out of the chaos of existence, but also a suit of armour that protects these narratives by giving them the bearing of irrefutable fact. Since the Enlightenment, this second function has been thoroughly eviscerated by scientific accounts—the creation myths which once offered the only plausible explanations of our origins and lent religion much of its authority have been debunked by rationalism, empiricism, skepticism, and free thought.
But what of the first function? As Jonathan Gottschall suggests in his book The Storytelling Animal, humans need narratives. Whether personal or inherited, stories are the substance in which we encode our beliefs about morality, justice, and other abstractions that are otherwise difficult—even impossible—to share. More importantly, stories help us define our purpose and place in the world. It might be said then that, at least according to Geertz’s definition, we all need a sort of religion insofar as we need narratives of purpose, shared or individual, that are substantial enough to resist being undermined, whether by self-doubt or external criticism.
Presumably, the seemingly disproportionate levels of violence and repressive behaviour we find in faith communities is caused by the illusion of undeniable factuality which cocoons their sacred narratives. Perceiving ourselves to be the sole custodians of an objective, irrefutable truth empowers us and insulates us against hopelessness, but it can simultaneously be a great weakness. Evidence that challenges that perception may have such a traumatic effect on our sense of purpose that, rather than reframe our existing beliefs, we respond irrationally and double down on our denial. Whether we are overtly challenged by another system or simply confronted with the fact that other people can live good, peaceful, and, happy lives in accordance with another truth, information that undermines our belief system is uncomfortable, and our discomfort can make us go great lengths to discredit ideas that threaten our worldview.
The scientific term for this is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the process by which we unconsciously emphasize, dismiss, and interpret evidence based on whether or not it affirms beliefs we already hold. Psychologists suggest that confirmation bias makes us more, rather than less, entrenched in our pre-existing beliefs when we are presented with clear, contradictory evidence. The degree of resistance is dependent on the importance of the belief being challenged, with core ideas like our morality, purpose, and our conceptions of ourselves being especially intractable.
This bias is so pervasive that it has been invoked to explain widely divergent phenomena, from the breakdown of marriages, to the attitudes that enable and sustain genocides, to the proliferation of “fake news” and “alternative facts” in our recent news cycles, to the misogynistic hivemind of inceldom that was catapulted into the spotlight following April’s tragic van massacre in Toronto. There is even evidence to suggest it may undermine our most sterile source of knowledge: peer-reviewed academic study. And an uncontrolled and unchecked confirmation bias has long been a characteristic of faith communities that envision themselves as the sole bearers of truth beset on all sides by evil, and use that narrative to justify often violent attempts to reshape the world.
Identifying confirmation bias as the root of a movement or individual’s violence may be a logical conclusion; combatting it is another matter.
Identifying confirmation bias as the root of a movement or individual’s violence may be a logical conclusion; combatting it is another matter. Is it desirable or even possible to root out the core beliefs that, when threatened, catalyze the most irrational and extreme reactions in us? This would mean living without morality, purpose, and self-identity (among other things). Those of us who live with depression can attest to the fact that suicidal ideations tend to peak when the dissonance between our personal narratives and the external world becomes so great that our sense of identity and purpose disintegrates. It might very well be the case that there is only one long-term outcome to opting for such an undefined existence: apathy, nihilism, and eventual self-annihilation.
Alternatively, it might seem more attractive to become less attached to our core beliefs without rejecting them altogether. This probably describes the growing majority, especially of young people, who have all but symbolically divested themselves from larger traditions and cultural inheritances. But alarming rates of anxiety and psychological distress amongst teens and young adults suggest that living such an unmoored life comes with risks of its own.
Perhaps the only way forward is empathy: the ability to acknowledge and adopt perspectives and beliefs that are not our own. By building and practicing empathy, we can develop the capacity to apply it even when others, intentionally or otherwise, challenge our most closely held and emotionally volatile beliefs. A 2013 study from the New School for Social Research in New York discovered that reading excerpts of literary fiction builds empathy almost immediately. It also found that other kinds of writing, including speculative fiction and nonfiction, had no observable effect; the implication being that genre fiction, with its reliance on predictable character tropes and its primary function as an entertainment medium, and nonfiction, with its clinical approach to facts, don’t produce the necessary conditions. Only literary fiction, with its focus on complex characters whose underlying motivations and beliefs are described vaguely (if at all), mirrors the real world and the limited windows we have into the rich inner lives of the people that populate it.
There may be another reason why literary fiction helps us become more empathetic. The ambiguous nature of truth is a central preoccupation of many novels and short stories, and by immersing ourselves in imaginary worlds where we are confronted by the possibility that there is no one single true interpretation of events, we are disabused of the notion that there is only one reality in any given situation. Literary fiction, in other words, helps us develop a pluralistic understanding of truth.
At the heart of Islam, there is an unresolved paradox. According to the Quran, God not only creates us but scripts our entire lives. And yet, despite the lack of agency this implies, it is considered just that we are judged for actions that will doom many of us to eternities in hell. This is, of course, illogical: either we’re programmed to behave a certain way and can’t be held responsible for our actions, or we have free agency and therefore bear responsibility. Both can’t be true at the same time.
But I think that’s precisely the point. While logic and rationalism may be the zenith of our intellectual output, they are still products of human minds crippled by the cognitive limitations of which confirmation bias is just one. They are as unsuited to understanding the divine as they are in understanding the ethereal threads in the relationships—familial, romantic, and otherwise—through which we experience divinity. Indeed, while I argued that my own atheism was a purely rational and intellectual position, the reality I found so difficult to acknowledge was that it was actually triggered and maintained by the trauma and failure of my relationships past and present. My suffering at the hands of supposed loved ones became proof that God, too, didn’t love me or, more likely, didn’t exist to intervene. Attempts to apply reason and logic here only exacerbated the feelings of confusion, hopelessness, and being unmoored.
It was a pluralistic, seemingly irrational understanding that provided the sole viable solution in my darkest moments. We could at once have and lack agency, at once bear and be absolved of responsibility. Realizing this allowed me to acknowledge the lingering effects of my own past traumas and create space for self-forgiveness, but it also forced me to be accountable for any harm I’d done and commit to doing better in the future. It allowed me to forgive and be empathetic to the actions of those who’d hurt me without excusing them outright or letting myself slide back into toxic patterns.
We could at once have and lack agency, at once bear and be absolved of responsibility.
Some might dismiss my experience as a perversion of the base scripture or argue that I arrived at these conclusions not because of religion, but in spite of it. After all, if such an introspective, pluralistic understanding lies at the core of faith, why isn’t it reflected in the traditions? The easy answer is that it is. Even within Islam, a religion often derided as being especially under the spell of an unchecked confirmation bias and all the violence that entails, such an understanding was advanced by major figures like the scholar and jurist al-Ghazali and the poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi.
Ghazali’s perspective was immortalized in a number of theological and philosophical works including his autobiography, Deliverance from Error, in which he concluded that the experience of God is ultimately a mystical one, unreachable by any purely rational or intellectual tools. He taught that the only viable route to God was through the sort of introspective, meditative practice pursued by Sufi mystics. Rumi, in a related though distinct approach, believed that love was the central path to God, and suggested that only by reflecting deeply on our emotions and our relationships can we have any hope of understanding the divine.
Neither Ghazali nor Rumi was by any means marginal in terms of geography, history, or influence. Both lived, wrote, and taught in or around major centres of Islamic thought, Ghazali in 11th century Baghdad and Rumi in 12th century Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan) and Konya (in Anatolia). Both are counted among the major Islamic thinkers of their era. Though he had his detractors and enemies, Ghazali was almost universally admired and respected during his own time—a reputation that has endured to the present day among Muslims, Christians, and even secularists. Rumi’s legacy is similarly unshakable. His poetry enjoys such overwhelming popularity all over the world, including in Canada and the United States, that his name has become almost synonymous with love and mindfulness.
This begs the question of why introspective and pluralistic values don’t seem very prevalent among contemporary Muslim communities. Certainly much of the problem lies with these communities themselves. A model of faith that, in practice, forces us to confront our confirmation bias and be accountable to other truths requires a great deal of emotional and spiritual labour, and most individuals opt for the less arduous and more self-righteous alternative. Furthermore, such an inwardly focused model is remarkably ineffective at building unity against external foes. As a result, it is particularly vulnerable to suppression by the larger political units of Islam, especially the more militant sects.
That isn’t to say the blame lies solely among Muslim communities. Are these values not reflected in Muslim life, or is it just made to seem that way? Rosina Ali’s piece in The New Yorker, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” provides useful insight here. As the title suggests, the most popular English translations of Rumi’s work, those by Coleman Barks, scrubbed the many explicit references to Islam and the Quran from his work. As a result, many readers are surprised to learn that Rumi was a respected religious scholar and jurist, and that his poetry aimed to explore and complicate traditional interpretations of the faith rather than simply break away from them.
Ali argues that Barks’ decision, intentional or not, reflects a wider inability among writers and readers in the Global North to reconcile their derision of Islam as an ultimately primitive and tribalistic belief system with the enduring messages of self-reflection and universal love articulated by many of the faith’s most celebrated writers, philosophers, and theologians. This is another manifestation of confirmation bias, evidence selectively presented to reinforce a narrative that the Global North, both individually and as a larger community, is the champion of truth and justice, while Muslims are a group of stupid and easily manipulated pawns in need of saving—or worse yet, simply malicious villains. This narrative is hardly innocuous. It has and is still used to justify military interventions throughout the Muslim world, and allow the Global North to avoid accountability for the violent and destabilizing fallout of these actions.
As inheritors of a rich literary legacy, it is tempting to believe we will be accommodating to any and all truths, no matter how complex or personally uncomfortable—that if Coleman Barks’ editing of Rumi speaks to the presence of a confirmation bias, it is still unrepresentative of the larger literary and artistic community. But of course, that’s exactly how this bias works, making us ignore evidence that contradicts our idealized self-narratives and then, once the evidence can no longer be denied, diminishing it to an unrepresentative outlier.
While our literary communities in the Global North are predominantly progressive, they’ve always been host to a number of such racist, homophobic, and misogynistic outliers. In the CanLit context for example, take David Solway and his anti-Black Reflections on Music, which necessitated an apology and retraction from The Fiddlehead. It’s easy to dismiss such outliers as “racist uncles,” but even that analogy tacitly points to a common point of origin and a deeper root issue. The recent sexual misconduct scandals that have rocked the creative writing programs at both UBC and Concordia have demonstrated that we are not above the scandals of abuse that have become so ubiquitous in nearly every other field and industry. Indeed, despite any validity in its arguments, the divisive letter in support of former UBC professor Steven Galloway, drafted and signed as it was by several influential members of our community, might also indicate a predisposition towards a similarly ubiquitous tribalism.
Especially relevant to the issue of confirmation bias is last year’s appropriation prize controversy, in which former Write editor Hal Niedzviecki’s call for more cultural appropriation of Indigenous stories sparked hostilities between Indigenous writers, who outlined why this was offensive to them, and the many prominent members of Canada’s media elite who defended Niedzviecki. Niedzviecki’s comments and their aftermath highlighted the dissonance between the literary community’s lofty perceptions of itself and the long-dismissed negative experiences of racialized and Indigenous writers so starkly that it could no longer be denied. The community has, much to its credit, largely acknowledged and rushed to correct these issues. Still, if the literary community is genuinely committed to combating its endemic racism, at some point it will also need to address its discomfort with religion.
As the children of immigrants or immigrants ourselves, many racialized writers come from backgrounds in which faith played, or continues to play, a major role. In the act of sifting through our identities for the truth which is so essential to our craft, we will inevitably also delve into religion, a topic that editors, mostly white and mostly secular, can find difficult to engage with and are less likely to publish. As a result, without malice or intention, the literary community’s aversion to religion becomes functionally racist in its effects.
Many racialized writers come from backgrounds in which faith played, or continues to play, a major role. In the act of sifting through our identities for the truth which is so essential to our craft, we will inevitably also delve into religion.
I offer two anecdotes to substantiate this claim. The first involves a racialized friend of mine who, upon sending a manuscript that dealt heavily with issues related to faith to an editor not long ago, was told quite clearly that, though their work was strong, the publication was not interested. The Canadian audience, they were told, is a secular one, and would have trouble relating to a work that explored religion in such depth.
But perhaps their work was simply not strong enough and the faith issue incidental? I don’t know, but my own experience suggests that this is a naïve response. While on vacation with some friends early last year, I got into a conversation with a senior staff member at a well-known independent publishing house about celebrated queer African-American writer and critic James Baldwin. My friend (who it is pertinent to note, is white) saw me engrossed in Baldwin’s essay collection Notes of a Native Son, and mentioned that she had tried to read his first novel, the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, but had to stop a few chapters in. The issue, she explained, was that she found herself completely unable to engage with the work, focusing as it does on Baldwin’s experiences in the Pentecostal Church.
I didn’t take much stock in the conversation at the time, but it’s one that is revelatory in its implications of the literary aversion to religion. Go Tell It On The Mountain is almost universally acclaimed as a masterpiece. It is included on Time’s list of the 100 greatest novels published over the course of that magazine’s existence, and the Modern Library ranked it number 39 on its list of the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century. Secondly, though the novel revolves around a Black Christian experience, it is still ultimately a Christian experience, one that would be, as the historical foundation of North American and European societies, familiar even to a modern, secular audience. Finally, though it explores the positive aspects of faith as a source of inspiration and cohesiveness for a community, Go Tell It On The Mountain also strongly condemns religion as a tool of repression and moral hypocrisy. The novel falls in line with the existing literary tradition of seeing religion as regressive and mostly harmful. If a typical member of the literary community could have such difficulty engaging with the work of a novelist as celebrated as James Baldwin, a book that ultimately affirms their own worldview, what can we expect in the case of a writer who doesn’t already enjoy such critical acclaim? A writer who explores the stories, rituals, and iconography of a religion followed by mostly racialized people that have much shorter and more marginal histories in our society? A writer who, while being honest in their reflections and insights, comes to the conclusion that faith is, on balance, more positive than negative?
This is particularly problematic given that literature is a craft whose practitioners, with the exception of the rare geniuses like Baldwin, hone their craft over time. If the work of religious writers, especially the young and the racialized, is deemed too foreign to engage with and publish, they’re unlikely to ever get the opportunities to develop to their full potential. Our community can always keep any concern about its own discriminatory practices at bay by maintaining that the writing in question is simply not strong enough. It’s easy to look at these two anecdotes and dismiss them as simply that: anecdotes. But we should be careful. The age-old hubris of believing ourselves as unwavering agents of good, of being unable to see other truths past our own confirmation bias, infects everyone and everything. Our literary community is no exception.
But maybe, as both a person of faith and of colour, I’m not the right person to point this finger. It’s too easy to dismiss my position as self-serving, as the views of an outsider who should be thankful for the opportunities he’s been given, as an insidious attempt to inject religious hysteria into the one space that’s always been inoculated against it. Maybe these concerns can only be heard when they come from the mouth of a secular white man of nominally Judeo-Christian heritage. Not a darker-skinned Muslim kid whose mom still tells him to pray when he’s depressed.
