Back in 1982, I was a chaplain at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., a large federal psychiatric hospital. It is where John Hinckley, the young man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, is and where the poet Ezra Pound was hospitalized after WWII. I was in a training program for chaplaincy and we spent part of our time with patients and part of our time in training. Psychiatrists and psychologists would regularly come and give talks.

One I will never forget was by E. Fuller Torrey. He was a psychiatrist, something of a maverick. When he first began at St. Elizabeth's, he took a position in one of the most backwater wards, a place which housed and treated chronic male schizophrenics. These were very ill men who had not been given a lot of attention. On arriving, Torrey had the wards painted. They had been government surplus green and they were re-painted a really nice blue. He hung paintings on the walls, reproductions of good art, from classical to modern; and music was played. He clearly really cared about the patients.

He gave us a lecture on psychoanalysis. He believed that all mental illness was organic in nature and that medicines were the primary way to treat mental illness. He then went on to claim, in his words, that psychoses and neuroses were last-ditch attempts at mental health; that is, mental illness itself is an attempt at mental health.

Here's what he meant: He said that there is a basic human need to organize experience into a coherent pattern. We need predictability; we need to know that if we put our foot out and down in a series (i.e., if we walk) there will be solid ground. You know how disconcerting it is when you think there is a step and there is not. This need for order lies deep in our basic nature. Most of us do quite well at this; we do so in ways that fit in with the organization of others. Well, at least some of us do better. You know-check your desk or your teenager's room.
The emotional and relational world, Torrey said, is far more complex, and so more difficult to organize. But organize we must.

Because of brain chemistry and the complexity of our emotional worlds due to histories, families, and environments, some people cannot easily organize their emotional or relational world-hence a neurosis or psychosis. But, Torrey claimed, the drive is a healthy one. Our patients were trying to organize the world so that they could function well. Some people, he said, were able to tolerate chaos and ambiguity and some could not. There is a continuum. Those who completely failed became catatonic; they just shut down.

Does this make sense? You know how sometimes it is hard to make sense of your world? You know how sometimes you just need to shut out the world, that things become too much, that you need to withdraw some, even if in little ways? I have certainly experienced that. Well, for my patients, that was their whole world. Their mental illness was their attempt at mental health. Then-and I will never forget this-Torrey looked at all the chaplains, about sixty of us, Protestants, Catholics, one Jew and one Unitarian, and I thought he looked especially at me and said, "I've always thought the same was true for religious faith."

And what came immediately into my mind was sympathy for Jerry Falwell. I reasoned that he must experience the world as very chaotic and so had to develop, or adopt, a very rigid system to keep the chaos away. If Torrey is right, then fundamentalism is an attempt to order the world. It comes from the need for security; and for people who experience the world as very chaotic, a rigid faith system is their way of surviving. If Torrey is right, even fundamentalism represents something healthy in the human spirit.

Certainly all religions have their fundamentalists; some more than others and certainly some historical eras have more than others do. Chaos. Ambiguity. Any intellectual system, whether it be science or religion or art, is an attempt to make sense of a very complex and even chaotic world. All religious belief is an attempt to make sense.

The second point that Torrey made was that mental illness required physical expression. It wasn't just how patients saw the world that was dysfunctional; it was how they acted. Torrey argued that we are one thing-not mind and body, or matter and spirit, but a unified system-so that what we believe shows up in how we act. And this is as true for religion as it is for mental illness. Ethics is married to belief, action to theology.

I decided to talk today about Islam in part because the election is coming up, and I won't preach again until the Sunday after the election. I will be away next weekend and Stefan Jonasson will be in the pulpit on the 31st.

As is claimed by so many, we are at something of a crossroads in this country, and perhaps at a crossroads in the world as well. Nietzsche said that the 21st century would be a religious century, much like the 16th century, and that religious questions and demands would take center stage. I believe that the future of the world, at least in the short term, depends on Islam and how others relate to Islam.

While statistics on religious adherence are tricky, it seems the case that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, up 235% in the last 50 years, with an annual growth rate of 6.5%. It is the second largest religion in the world. There are still more Christians, but in the same period the number of Christians increased 47% with an annual growth rate of 1.6%. One quarter of the world's population is Muslim, with significant populations nearly everywhere in the world. There are probably more Muslims in the U.S. than there are Jews. Islam and its branches clearly dominate the world stage at present.

Do you know the story of how one day sometime in the year 610 a young business man decided to go up into the mountains to fast and to pray? He did this regularly. But this time a voice came to him and said, "Recite…" He fought this (remember Kathleen's sermon last week?). Imagine hearing a commanding voice. It would be frightening. But the voice returned and he could ignore it no longer. He told his wife and a close friend and they became convinced that it was the voice of God.

This is the beginning of Islam, which means "surrender" or "submit" in Arabic. The revelations came to him over several years; they were written down and became the Koran (the word means "recite"). For the area, it was a progressive and liberal message. Mecca, which sat on a caravan route, was polytheistic, and Muhammad had a vision of one God and of a just society.

Mecca and the Arabian Peninsula were very tribal and Muhammad soon ran afoul of the primary tribe in Mecca. He fled to Medina, and then later conquered Mecca. Soon Islam had spread throughout the Middle East. Its spread was rapid and dramatic and lent to its adherents a belief that they were indeed on God's side. Because of that initial and rapid spread, it is often said that Islam was spread by the sword.

But the spread of Islam was economic, not religious. People in conquered territories were not forced to convert. Within 45 years of the original revelation, Islam controlled lands from India through northern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and what is now modern-day Turkey. It was later that Islamic theologians divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim, but the original intent was not conversion. Conquered lands had most of their rights recognized.

Islam is not a religion of the sword, though like nearly all religions that come to power, it has spawned and justified violence. When Muhammad first received the revelations, caravan raiding was how tribes made their money-it was a part of the culture. As Arab tribes became unified under Islam, they turned to neighboring countries to raid-for money, not conversion. The Arabian Peninsula had little agriculture (this was before industrialization), so raids were a way of life. When most of the tribes were unified under Islam, raiding each other became impossible, and so they turned to nearby countries. They were just doing what was in their culture. (We are no different. UUism grew up in the Boston area in the early 1800s, which might explain why so many UUs like the Boston Red Sox-it is our culture. Oh, the heartache and the hope of it all!)

Islam continued to spread until a decline began in the late 1800s when the Ottoman Empire began to decline. There are two branches of Islam: Sunni and Shia Islam. Sunni is the largest group and Shia Islam exists mostly in Iran and Iraq. Shi'ites tend to be more conservative, though not always. With well over a billion and a half Muslims, one will find an enormous range of belief. Sufism is the mystical tradition with Islam. Its most famous poet is Rumi, and the Whirling Dervishes are perhaps the best known of the various Sufi groups.

Muslims range from conservative to liberal. Like every religion, it has changed significantly beyond the shared faith of a founder and close companions. Islam has always been a communal religion-that is, its expression has from the very beginning been historical and political. Beyond two simple statements of belief-God is one and Muhammad is the final prophet-Islam is about a series of behaviors, and above all the behavior of a community.

There are five pillars in Islam:

Belief in Allah, and in Mohammed as the Prophet.
Daily prayer, five times.
Charity.
Fasting: the time of Ramadan, which has just begun.
A pilgrimage to Mecca. (I would recommend Malcolm X's description of the hajj, the Pilgrimage.)

Muhammad meant for these acts to be transforming of the individual and the community, and to help create a just society. But then all religions intend this.

So why is the fundamentalism so present in modern Islam and what might we do? First let me say that I can claim no special expertise on Islam and that this is such a large and complex question that I want to offer only some ideas. The state of Islam in the modern world is a product of a mixture of history and economics, of accident and intention. Enormous political forces are at play; enormous historical forces are involved.

But we are not slaves to the processes of history or economics or politics or theology; we do have choices of how we live and will live. And, in a very large sense, how we-not you and I or we here-but how a very large we, we of the industrialized West, live with Islam matters a great deal.

I think it goes back to the experience of chaos. For more reasons than I understand, the great Muslim Empires that existed from 700 to 1900 collapsed. But so did the great Christian Empires, and what replaced them were the industrialized and secular empires of Western Europe and the U.S. Our power has been the power of the material, not the spiritual. Our power has been in the West's astonishing ability to respond to people's desires and to create pleasure by being able to satisfy both basic needs and longings.

While poverty is obviously still a significant issue for us, and while the growing gap in income and wealth is perhaps our greatest challenge, the West has developed an enormous capacity for satisfying desires. We do not want for a great deal; that is not true for much of the world.

Also, the West is marked by an emphasis on the individual, which is, I believe, a result primarily of the Protestant reformation. Much of the world, however, is still communal or even tribal.

Islam has retained some of this tribal nature, and, in uncertain times, this gives a sense of belonging and a sense of identity. This is where I want to go back to Torrey, the psychiatrist at Saint Elizabeth's.

We live, it seems, in an ever more chaotic world; the old orders have fallen away and the future seems less certain. The 20th Century was one of great upheavals-the astonishing evils of political systems under Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Martin Buber once said that the great ideals of the 18th century of liberty, equality, and community somehow were lost. He said that liberty had gone west and had become mere license; equality had gone east and had become the faceless collective; and that community had been lost.

This is why, I think, so many are turning to rigid systems, to the move to fundamentalism around the world, to right wing and evangelical Protestantism in the U.S., to conservative Catholicism in the Southern hemisphere, and fundamentalist Islam in much of the rest of the world.

Order provides safety. Disorder breeds fundamentalism, and this is the danger in the world. If we have an enemy, it is this-it is fundamentalism. And fundamentalism grows out of a belief that ideas matter more than people, that humans ought to bend to something other than systems bending to humans.

What E. Fuller Torrey was suggesting is that all systems are flawed and that in every attempt to organize the world there is something positive and healthy. The fundamentalist is after the same thing we are-a world in which values matter and in which peace prevails. They are seeking a way to understand and a way out of disorder.

There is nothing inherent in Islam that makes it the enemy. Again, read the Autobiography of Malcolm X for a different view of Islam. The current conflict and the terrible existence of terrorism are not products of a religion but of a long and complex historical process. There is nothing inherent in Islam that encourages violence; that violence arises out of a real clash in the world, out of a loss of identity and of the need for belonging and for order.

As I said, Nietzsche predicted that the 21st century would be a religious century, and he may well be right. If E. Fuller Torrey is right that all faith is an attempt to create order out of the chaos of experience, if faith is an attempt, even a last-ditch one, at mental health, then the solution to the conflict of the world might indeed be a religious one.

And so we need, as individuals and as a nation, to guard against our own fundamentalism, from believing that only one way is right. We need to treat Islam as a partner; the interfaith dialogue may be more important than ever. We need to do those things that discourage the growth of fundamentalism; we need to help overcome fear and want and poverty.

The prophet Muhammad wrote this prayer, and I will close with it:

What actions are most excellent?
To gladden the heart of a human being.
To feed the hungry.
To help the afflicted.
To lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful.
To remove the wrongs of the injured.
That person is most beloved of God
Who does most good to God's creatures.

Amen and salaam.

Readings:
"Hatred" by Wislawa Szymborska
"Guests" by Rumi
"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski