Surrendering to God
Alan Godlas brings a new
perspective on the rich heritage of Islam to students and internet
pilgrims
By Philip Lee Williams
American music lovers in 1977 were surprised by an
article that appeared in newspapers all over the world. Pop star
Cat Stevens was
converting to Islam and would be turning his back on fame and fortune
for something he considered both necessary and more abiding: faith.
Two years later, after changing his name to Yusuf Islam, he disappeared
from the music scene, leaving behind forever such teen anthems as “Wild
World” and “Hard Headed Woman.”
If one had asked most residents of the U. S. then exactly what Islam
was, they might have said it was a religion practiced mostly in the
Middle East, that
it certainly was not close to Christianity in numbers of believers, and that
there were few Muslims in the United States. They would have been wrong on
all those counts.
In fact, today some 1.3 billion people—a fifth of all those on Earth—practice
Islam. Less than 20 percent of Muslims are Arabs, and half of them live in
South or Southeast Asia. Islam is second only to Christianity, which has
an estimated 2 billion followers, in numbers of adherents, and in
America, there
are about 5.7 million Muslims, a number roughly equal to its Jewish population.
And yet, until September 11, 2001, many Americans barely gave Islam
a second thought.
Dr. Alan Godlas sits in his over-stuffed office on
the top floor of north campus’s
Peabody Hall, munching hungrily on peanuts and sipping from a soft drink. He
overflows with energy, speaking so rapidly a guest has to pay close attention
to his carefully crafted sentences. This is a man, one will conclude, who thinks
a great deal, a man who has a passion for ideas. Most of all, he wants to share
a lifetime’s study of Islam and to communicate that this ancient and
honored religion is not one represented by the fierce mugshots of the 9/11
terrorists.
He is a scholar-writer and teacher, of course, but in the past few
years, his web site on Islam and Islamic Studies has captured international
attention
and drawn him into the middle of a cultural discussion that goes far deeper
than the tenets of religious faith. An associate professor in the department
of religion, Godlas found himself in the center of a storm, and from that
center, his main goal has been to shed light.
“His is far and away the best web site for the study of Islam in North
America,” Dr. Amir Hussain, an assistant professor of religious studies
at California State University at Northridge, told The Chronicle of Higher Education,
which did a story on Godlas less than two months after the 9/11 attacks. In fact,
his website was nominated as one of five worldwide in the category of "spirituality" for
the year 2002 Webby Awards, which are the equivalent of the Oscars for websites.
Among the other nominees in the category were the Vatican's website and Beliefnet,
a commercial interfaith website that won the award. The Webby Award nominees
and winners are selected by members of the International Academy of Digital
Arts and Sciences.
A faculty member at UGA since 1991, Godlas, through his website,
teaching, and scholarship, has been increasingly involved in explaining
Islam to others.
In January 2003, he was chosen by the U. S. State Department to give two
presentations on Islam for a bilateral conference in Nigeria between
State Department officials
and Northern Nigerian leaders. He has also delivered lectures on Islam to
organizations all over the country and presented papers in Turkey,
Iran, and Morocco, among
many other venues. In short, Alan Godlas lives his life in anyplace but the
ivory tower.
“Most web sites about Islam are heavily biased,” he says, chomping
another handful of peanuts. “But I knew that for Muslims and the rest of
the world to live together in peace in today’s global village, at the very
least there needed to be somewhere on the web to which people would turn for
information on Islam that was balanced and fair. After 9/11, people all over
the world began wondering just what Islam is. The hits on the website rose dramatically,
and it helped when President Bush said that Muslims are not our enemy—terrorists
are.”
Godlas is an eastern European name whose derivation
isn’t
clear, but the name’s bearer on the UGA campus smiles when he
admits that at least etymologically, “God” was never far
away when he was growing up.
His journey from a boyhood in southern California
is something of a pilgrimage itself. His father worked in the clothing
business and
his mother was a homemaker,
and along with Alan’s younger sister, they made a standard middle-class
family. From the beginning, though, Godlas felt an affinity for different things,
and first among them was a profound love of nature. In the beginning, it was
a typical boy’s passion for reptiles, and he even managed to upset
his mother by bringing a snake home triumphantly one day. Maybe the life
of a forest
ranger would be perfect for him.
“But something else was going on with me in those days, too,” Godlas
remembers, “and that was a fascination with the workings of the mind.
It occurred to me that the human mind was a marvelous and mysterious thing,
and
I wanted very early to understand how it worked.”
More and more, during his trips into the fields on
the outskirts of Long Beach, his time was spent in contemplation
rather than the
study of animals. Though
his family was not particularly religious, he also began to think considerably
about God but always through the lens of nature, similar to writers like
Thoreau and Emerson. As he grew, his interest in reptiles changed,
first to plants
and then to insects and later to invertebrates and finally to birds, but
he couldn’t shake the feeling that the answers he sought were less in creatures
and more in the human mind itself. He also developed a passion for photography,
stoked by a lensman and junior high school teacher named Robert von Sternberg,
who was documenting the new world of beach boys and girls for Surfer magazine
and whose work is now found in the nation’s top art museums.
Still unsure which direction to follow, he went to
the University of California at Davis after high school graduation
in 1969, interested
in science. Theory
and hard facts, however, soon gave way to environmental activism that swept
college campuses. He worked as a volunteer in the local ecology center in
order to increase the public’s awareness of ecological problems,
and he read deeply in ecological theory, including the work of Dr.
Eugene Odum, who had
by then turned the University of Georgia into a world center of holistic
ecology.
What fascinated Godlas the most was the self-regulating character
of ecosystems and how things fit together. The variable that was unbalancing
ecosystems,
he knew, was humankind, which focused on short-term gains at the expense
of long-term ecosystem health. But why did people do this?
“It seemed to me that the main problem was reducible to the human ego,
which tends to have a compulsion to satisfy its short-term interests,” he
says.
He realized that most environmental activists, for
all their passion, did not understand that the root of ecological
problems such as water
and air pollution
lay in the uncontrolled action of the ego. This led him to design his own
interdisciplinary degree at Davis that he called ecological psychology—a
field that did not exist then but, in fact, does now. It gave him
a holistic way to appreciate
major problems that he never forgot.
While at Davis, he was drawn deeply into the relatively new area
of student counseling, too, and became involved in Gestalt therapy
through an innovative
peer counseling center there. (He also maintained a lively interest, enjoyed
since childhood, in music.) While studying methods of peer counseling, he
became more and more interested in non-Western ideas on the nature
of the self and
its relation to the universe.
An incident at the end of his freshman year at Davis was a turning
point, however, and one he has never forgotten. He went on a wilderness
survey expedition to
the Snake River country in Idaho, and while there, he experienced an epiphany.
“It was early summer, the snow was melting, we were in a mountain meadow,
there were wildflowers in bloom, and the air was crystal clear,” remembers
Godlas with a distant smile. “To me it seemed like heaven on Earth—I
felt the familiar peace that I had known time and again whenever I was in a
relatively natural environment. Yet this feeling was much more intense. I felt
enveloped
in the most amazing sense of complete well-being. Then, after a few minutes,
my normal reality returned.”
Taking the idea more deeply, however, he realized that using the
natural world to achieve such overwhelming happiness was a second-hand
experience. Was there
a more direct route to this sense of well-being?
During the long Thanksgiving weekend of his junior year, Godlas
stayed alone in his dorm room, immersed in books dealing with psychology
and Eastern religions, and he realized, finally and with conviction,
that he would have to move away from ecology and focus not on nature,
but on the nature of the self. He also realized that to make progress,
he had to study with those who were specialists in ways of human growth
and spirituality itself, not just in teaching it from books.
At that point, he was fortunate to be mentored by Joseph Lyons,
a professor of humanistic psychology at Davis. Then, spurred on, he
graduated from Davis
and began studying at the Gestalt Institute in San Francisco while doing
outpatient therapy with patients from the University of California
Medical Center in Sacramento
and continuing to do peer counseling in Davis. The work and study were satisfying,
but in the end, he realized he needed to plump the depths of self more fully,
so he began to study in Berkeley at the SAT Institute of Dr. Claudio Narajano.
A Chilean psychiatrist, Narajano at that time was unique in having interests
and expertise in Western forms of psychotherapy, Eastern religions, and Western
mystical religious forms.
After being there for nine months, he met a Persian
psychiatrist who happened to be traveling in Berkeley and who shed
light for Godlas
on the psychological
and spiritual dimensions of Islam. He knew instinctively that this was the
bridge between East and West, psychology and mysticism, that he had been
seeking, and in short order he found out about the Program in Persian
Literature for
Foreign Students at the University of Tehran in Iran—a place where
he could learn Persian and Arabic, read the texts he was looking for in their
original languages, and thereby get to the roots of Islamic philosophy and
psychology.
“Two problems, however, were that I knew very little about Islam, and that
my courses were going to be taught only in Persian, which I did not know,” says
Godlas, laughing. Nevertheless, he immediately obtained a passport, flew to
Tehran, and in less than three months, before classes began, he taught himself
enough
of the language to understand his lectures.
After spending three formative years
in Iran (during the last years of the Shah), he returned to the U. S., earning
his master’s and doctoral degrees
from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied under the
eminent scholar of Islam, Dr. Hamid Algar, while spending extended periods
of time
in Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco, where he studied original manuscripts relating
to Islam with the same passion he brought to environmental activism in his
early years.
When a temporary teaching position opened at UGA, he accepted it,
and when a tenure-track position became available later, he took it and has
been on
campus since then. It was only when driving around campus when he saw a sign
for the Horseshew Bend research area, that he remembered that fabled ecologist
Eugene Odum had done research there and had lived and taught in Athens. In
a sense, Alan Godlas had come full circle.
The reason Alan Godlas is eating
peanuts and drinking a Coke is that he’s been running since the moment he arose and hasn’t
stopped to eat yet. His life is a sometimes chaotic mix of teaching,
studying in manuscript libraries of the Near and Middle East, and
writing about the Qu’ran, Islamic mysticism, and the relationship
between Islam, modernism, and postmodernism. He reads and writes
Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and can be found in such places as
Uzbekistan,
where he traveled on a Fulbright-Hayes fellowship in 1997 and in
Morocco as co-director of the UGA-Morocco Summer program.
He recently developed a secondary web page called “Muslims, Islam, and
the Iraq War,” which is the only web site devoted to the relationship
between Islam and the conflict last spring. (One particularly interesting aspect
of this web page is his survey of the reasons why leading experts on Islam
in Iraq have been optimistic that the Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims will be able
to establish themselves as a moderate political bloc that will be largely independent
of the influence of Shi’ite Iran.)
Godlas has served on the editorial boards of the
journals Sufi Illuminations and Sophia as well on the advisory boards
for the Study of Mysticism and
Study of Islam, sections of the American Academy of Religion, which
is the primary
scholarly body for the study of religion. He is also translating and editing
the original Arabic of Ruzbihan al-Baqli's encyclopedic esoteric Sufi Qur'anic
commentary, 'Ara'is al-bayan fi haqa’iq al-Qur-an (which will be titled
in English, The Brides of the Qur'an). The translation, currently under contract,
should amount to approximately 3,000-pages.
In addition, he is busy with another pet project, the development
of the UGA Virtual Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Islamic
World, which will
bring together all UGA faculty members now working in areas that involve
Islam and the Islamic world and make them and their work accessible
on the Internet.
If 9/11 brought Americans a greater interest in Islam,
Alan Godlas has made a point in making clear that, despite bombs
of extremists
on the one hand and Islam’s critics on the other, Islam is a
world religion of more than a billion followers who in many ways lead
spiritually centered lives similar to observant Jews and committed
Christians. After the terrorists attacks, worldwide “hits” on
his web site (you can check it out at http://www.uga.edu/islam/) reached
4,000 a day before settling down to more modest numbers.
The Arabic word islam, he notes on his web site, “literally
means surrender, implying surrender to God. And a muslim, literally,
is one who is surrendering;
more specifically, one who is surrendering to God. Muslims believe both that
islam is the quintessence of the spiritual impulse present in humans and
that, as Islam, it is the name of the religious form revealed by
God to Muhammad
beginning in the year 610 CE [common or current era]. Those who follow this
particular religion are called Muslims.”
From there, Godlas links readers to hundreds of sites that, with
increasing complexity, give a fair and balanced picture of Islam and
how it continues
to be a major force, not only in the world of religion, but in culture and
society as well.
Given the difficulty that people of different religions and cultures
have in understanding one another, as well as the conflicts that arise
from this, Godlas
feels that one of his responsibilities as a scholar is to act as both a bridge
between cultures and a miner of the resources of religions for the gems of
understanding that can help people to transform their lives.
“The particular question that has fascinated me from the time of my early
studies in ecology and psychology until today is the problem of self-transformation,” says
Godlas. “The religions of the world are a rich source of knowledge for
understanding how we can change. And the need to answer this question is becoming
increasingly urgent in these times when we have the power to destroy or save
our world. Our fate may depend on our ability to understand and change our
selves.”
