haile selassie the mahdi?

Recently I've "met" someone online who is a Muslim / Rasta / Ethiopian Orthodox Christian. (I'm not sure if that does justice to exactly how he identifies).  But he did put forward the interesting notion that Haile Selassie was the Mahdi. He was basing his views on statements from Ibn al-Arabi, and hadith about an Abyssinian being prophecies to destroy the Kaaba along with other sources. 

I don't agree with that position, but I wonder if it we could view him as a sort of antitype to Ashama, the Negus of the first Hijra. 

RESPECT!: An Islamic Tribute to HIM Haile Selassie & My Abyssinian (“Rasta”) Brethren

muslim easter hymn

The closest thing I know of to a Muslim Easter song, is Bob Marley's Time Will Tell, with the powerful line "Jah would never never give the power to a baldhead/ run come crucify the dread" I've blogged about it before, but here is a cover of the song by Gilberto Gil:


Gilberto Gil: Tempo só (Time will tell)

land far away / satta massagana / happy land

Land Far Away by Muslim female rap duo, Poetic Pilgrimage, is a remix of the reggae classic Satta Massagana by the Rastafarian musical group, The Abyssinians.


Land Far Away - Poetic Pilgrimage

My first impression was that mixing Islam with Rastafarian themes was odd until I really started thinking about how the Quran also deals with the subject of the Exodus of the children of Israel to the Promised Land. Furthermore, the general themes of land and migration show up in other Islamic contexts as well, from the travels of Abraham (as), to the Hajj to Mecca, to the hijra which marks the turning point of the Islamic calendar, to the Night Journey to al Aqsa (the "farther mosque" so literally a Land Far Away), to the "minor hijra" in Abyssinia, to the Garden. We are always traveling.


Satta Massagana - Abyssinians (the standard "studio" version)


Satta Massagana - Abyssinians (a "rootsier" version from a documentary about Rastafari)


Happy Land - Carlton & the Shoes (an earlier song which inspired Satta Massagana)

i and i and thou

So from time to time I tend to ride on strange trains of thought. A while ago I wrote a post called the tao passes the turing test which tried to give an alternative way to think about God's existence (or more specifically, God's intelligence). Then I started to wonder if one could make use of Martin Buber's distinction between I-It relationships (objective, detached) and I-Thou relationships (loving, unconditional) to make a similar point. It isn't really surprising that Buber says it is possible to have I-It relationships with other people because it is all-too-easy to find examples of alienated, dehumanizing relationships. The funny thing is that Buber says it is possible to have I-Thou relationships with trees...

which for me evokes some lines from the Spearhead song, "Of Course you can"

In school they tried to tell me
that a rock is not alive
but I have seen a volcano growin' up and die
In school they tried to tell me
that a tree it couldn't feel
but I have felt a tree and it was bleeding for real
In school they tried to tell
me animals couldn't talk
but they can understand it when a dog starts to bark
in school they tried to tell me
man doesn't have a soul
"whet happened to his" I say "cause mine is
still whole!"

But if I-Thou relationships are possible with trees, then perhaps with "the Tao" as well? In other words, the question of God's personhood may have more to do with our subjective perspective than God's objective ontology. So if a hardcore skeptic has trouble accepting a theistic personal God, perhaps another kind of spiritual path would start with belief in a not-necessarily-personal Ultimate Realty (the Tao, Higher Power, Nature) but would then still find meaningful ways to relate to this Reality as an intelligent (in the sense of Turing) Thou (in the sense of Buber). Just a thought.

But that's all background. Actually the thought which most directly inspired this post was the question of whether anyone out in the blogosphere had ever compared Buber's terminology with the Rastafarian use of the phrase "I and I". And a couple of Google searches later I came across Caribbean blogger and published author, Geoffrey Philp and his fascinating post on Reggae, Rastafari and Aesthetics.

And more recently I was reading in Sadiq Alam's post Language of the Sufis how within Islam, mystics have also used pronouns in unconventional ways in order to transmit a higher level of truth. In fact, one could probably draw other analogies between the relationship between Rastafarianism and Christianity and the relationship between certain Sufi orders and Islam. But that will have to wait for another day.