Muslim Heretics Conference

February 19, 2008 12:10 PM ET | Jay Tolson |

I set off to Cairo this week to meet and interview a man who is considered to be one of the most influential voices of moderation in the Islamic world. His name is Ali Gomaa, and he is the grand mufti of Egypt, a leading scholar of jurisprudence and head of the Dar Al-Iftah (literally, the House of Fatwas), a state-sanctioned body that issues religious judgments on matters ranging from employment and finance to gender relations to, well, just about anything of importance in a Muslim’s life. In terms of religious authority in Egypt, and indeed within the larger Sunni Muslim world, the grand mufti ranks second only to the grand sheik of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, perhaps the foremost center of Sunni Islamic learning.

Like many moderates within Islam, the grand mufti views himself not as a reformer or modernizer but as a traditionalist. He considers fatwas a bridge between the rich traditions of Islamic law (with four major schools and literally scores of minor schools of interpretation) and the modern world, and he is very concerned about self-appointed muftis who, with only the scantest knowledge of those traditions, issue judgments to support extreme or rigidly puritanical understanding of sharia. The grand mufti believes that such extremism tends to come from the so-called modernizers and reformers of Islam, including the Wahhabis, the Salafists, and the various Islamists who seek to make Islam into an all-encompassing political ideology.

Whether Ali Gomaa and other like-minded Muslim scholars have enough influence to counter the extremist tide is one of the questions I will be exploring. They are up against a powerful current of thought and interpretation that gets much of its funding, directly or indirectly, from the petrodollars of the Saudis. But there are other challenges as well, including the inherently anti-authoritarian character of Sunni Islam. Technically speaking, Islam has no official clergy but only prayer leaders and scholars. The leading scholars are known as the ulema, and they used to have significant clout in the Muslim world. But much of that authority has declined during the past century, in part because of their association with the unpopular and usually authoritarian regimes that govern much of the Muslim world. The rise of literacy and the spread of mass communication technology also undercut the teaching authority of the traditional ulema. Muslims can now go to many sources and many self-styled experts to get guidance on matters of faith.

Ali Gomaa may not be able to stem the tide of recent history, but he is an energetic and media-savvy man. His own office has a call center and website, with about 12 muftis on hand to answer up to 1,000 queries a day. He continues to teach every Friday at a busy mosque, fielding questions from all comers, and he is a frequent guest on radio and TV talk shows. A popular figure, he is often referred as the “People’s Mufti.” And this week, I hope not only to meet with him but to talk with some of the people who support and oppose his point of view.

The People’s Mufti (US News)

By JIM GILCHRIST

THINK of Scotland’s first contact with Muslims and we tend to think in terms of the 1950s and 60s; of lonely pedlars bearing suitcases, of bus conductors, of the first tentative corner shops which would become indispensable and, of course, the handful of Indian restaurants which would give us our first piquant taste of what has become virtually a national cuisine. Yet, as Bashir Maan  explains in his new book, The Thistle and the Crescent, Scotland’s links with the Islamic world can be traced as far back as the seventh century AD, and over the centuries have been maintained through amicable trade and scholarship, as well as less enlightened crusade and empire-building

The book comes with plaudits from historian professor Tom Devine, who describes it as “a pioneering study of Scottish-Islam relations, which will be of deep interest in today’s world”, and from Alex Salmond, the First Minister, who will launch it at the Scottish Parliament tomorrow. Maan, 81, a kenspeckle figure in the Scottish Muslim community, former Glasgow councillor and current convener of the Muslim Council of Scotland, was prompted to write it by what he perceived as a yawning gap in historical accounts. “We didn’t have any record whatsoever about Scottish-Islamic relations,” he says, “and after 9/11, when Islam was… shall we say, accused of being terrorist and this and that, I was stimulated to do something about it.”

He embarked on his research with the help of a fellowship from Glasgow Caledonian University, but found the kind of early records he was looking for sadly thin on the ground. There was, of course, the legend, as recounted in the 15th century Scotichronicon, that the Scots were descended from Scota, daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh. More substantial connections have been discovered in the form of fragments of fifth-century Egyptian and North African pottery in south-west Scotland, suggesting trading links. By the seventh century AD, the institution of pilgrimage to the Holy Land was well established: a Frankish bishop by the name of Arculf, who had gone on such a journey, was blown off course while returning to Gaul and ended up in Iona, where his accounts were recorded by Adamnan, the ninth bishop of Iona, in what was in effect a guide book for pilgrims, the De Locus Sanctis. Maan points out that, although Arculf refers to the Muslims as “Saracens”, “unbelievers” or “infidels”, his account is notably free of animosity and records no instances of harassment of Christian travellers.

Tantalising evidence of Islam making its mark – in this case quite literally – on the British Isles, if not specifically on Scotland, appeared a few years ago with the discovery in England of a coin stamped on one side with the head of “Offa Rex”, the eighth-century king of Mercia, and on the other the Arabic inscription “La ilaha ill Allah – “there is no god but Allah”. That, says Maan, leaves “a real conundrum” as to why an English coin should be stamped with the Islamic creed at a time when the religion was still emerging in the east.

Other tell-tale coinage has turned up in Scotland – 9th-century silver coins bearing the name of the Baghdad caliph al-Mutawakkal ala Allah, and silver dirhams from Tashkent and Samarkand found on Skye, both hordes probably left by traders or Viking raiders. Scots participated in the crusades, now regarded as a pretty discreditable episode in Christian history with the widespread massacre of both Muslim and Jewish occupants of “reclaimed” cities, and King Alexander I was reputed to have owned both an Arab horse and Turkish armour, possibly brought to him by a returned crusading Scots nobleman. Better known is the story of Sir James Douglas, who carried the heart of Robert the Bruce into battle against the Moors in 1330, during the Spanish reconquista, when he was killed himself, the casketed heart later being found and returned to Scotland.

Not surprisingly, Muslim accounts of such adventurings are less than favourable, expressing disgust at what they saw as the boorish, immoral and unwashed ways of the Farnji – “the Franks”, as they called the crusaders, regardless of where they came from. On the other hand, writes Maan, the returning crusaders learned much from Islamic culture and technology – not least the art of distilling.  By the 16th century there were numerous Christians happy to convert to Islam, such as “Inglis Mustapha”, a general in the Ottoman army who was actually a Campbell from Scotland. Then there was the Perthshire girl Helen Gloag who, in the 18th century, ran away from home, boarded a ship bound for America, was captured by Moroccan pirates and sold to slave traders but eventually became the favourite wife of the Sultan of Morocco.

The first Muslim visitor to Scotland of whom we have any record was one Ishmael Bashaw, during the 18th century, although Maan cites circumstantial evidence that there were Muslims here from at least the 15th century. But Islamic culture made a real impact on these shores with the arrival of the “Mahometan berry”: Scotland’s first coffee house opened in Glasgow in 1673, despite opposition from the clergy and press, who regarded it as an inducement towards Islam. Their fears were possibly intensified by the fact that, around the same time, the Koran was first translated into English by a Scotsman, Alexander Ross. For centuries before that, however, Scots scholars had been investigating the riches of Islamic culture and science, a notable example being “the wizard”, Michael Scott, or Scot, a renowned scholar and philosopher who studied in Moorish Spain and translated Arabic works into Latin. Maan’s book shows a carving of Scott at Melrose Abbey, sporting what looks very like a turban. Others drawn to Arabic culture included the early 17th-century traveller William Lithgow who, at a time when Jews were suffering under the Inquisition, noted in his wonderfully titled Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations the religious tolerance and hospitality he encountered in Muslim countries.

As an inordinate number of Scots became involved in the running of British imperial India, some became totally “Indianised”. Among them was James Achilles Kirkpatrick who, fluent in Persian, Urdu and Tamil, pursued a successful diplomatic career, adopted Indian dress and habits, such as smoking the hookah, and became very friendly with the local aristocracy. Amid much scandal, he courted and eventually wed a beautiful young woman who was already engaged to a Muslim noble, which involved him converting to Islam and undergoing circumcision. His two Anglo-Indian children were sent back to England to be educated, much against the wishes of his heartbroken wife, and their Indian names replaced with the more prosaic sounding William George Kirkpatrick and Katherine Kirkpatrick. Another to “turn Turk”, as the expression went, was Sir David Ochterlony of Angus, who maintained a diplomatic post at the court of the titular Mughal Emperor at Delhi, as well as four wives, plus concubines, and gave each one an elephant by way of transport and status symbol.

The trust and intimacy which the British enjoyed with the Indian establishment was dispelled, however, by the brutal suppression of the Indian Mutiny, or war of independence, depending on your point of view. But among the many and mixed legacies of the British Empire in India, says Maan, is the 50,000 Muslims currently living in Scotland.
When Maan first arrived in Glasgow from Pakistan in 1953, as a student of textile chemistry at the Royal Technical College (later Strathclyde University), he met a relic of imperial times in Sundhi Din, who had come from India at the beginning of the century as servant to a retired Army colonel. When Maan met him, he was an old man, living in a “Lascar colony” in Port Dundas. Such colonies were where other early-20th-century Muslim immigrants settled, the first door-to-door hawkers, at a time when racism and prejudice were rife. As Indians and Pakistanis reversed the journeys taken by their colonisers in previous centuries, more and more arrived, taking up jobs, if they were able, on the buses, or working in factories; then, gradually, opening the corner shops and restaurants which would become ubiquitous.
Today, we Scots like to think of ourselves as more tolerant and less racist than elsewhere, yet, as Maan agrees, there is no room for complacency. Our understanding of Islamic culture remains imperfect, to say the least, at a time when mutual understanding has never been so necessary, to counterbalance the suspicion and fear engendered by extremist terrorist outrages.

Despite some occasional encounters with racism, Maan’s Scottish experience has been a positive one: “For example, when I stood for election (as councillor for Glasgow’s Kingston ward in the early Seventies], “nobody expected me to win. But they were all proved wrong – Scottish people voted for me against one of their own.” And in 2005 he joined a joint Christian-Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusalem, organised by the former Glasgow Lord Provost Alex Mosson: “It was a wonderful exercise,” he recalls. “The kind of thing that can really bring the communities together.” Maan terminated his long-term membership of the Labour party in response to what he saw as the lies behind the invasion of Iraq, and he had effectively finished the book by last June, when a blazing car at Glasgow airport brought the threat of Islamic extremist tactics horribly to our doorstep. However, he was gratified by the reaction of the both the police and the Scottish Government, both of whom sent representatives to an emergency meeting called by the Glasgow Islamic Centre. “Whenever things seem to be getting better, something else happens,” he says. “There was 9/11, 7/7, and we thought we were all right in Scotland, but we also had our unlucky day and these things do strain relations. There is still a lot of distrust about, unfortunately.”

Which was, of course, prime motivation for him writing the book. “I wanted to show that Islam and the West have lived together for 14 centuries – sometimes in good ways, sometimes confrontational,” he chuckles. “But they have to live together – now even more so, because we’re not in the world of the 11th or the 14th or the 19th centuries, when nobody knew what was happening in other countries. We’re in a global village.”

FROM THE THISTLE AND THE CRESCENT BY BASHIR MAAN ISLAM is now the second largest religion in Scotland. Muslims are living in almost every city and town and participating in every walk of Scottish life. Muslim women wearing the hijab (headscarf) and men wearing baggy trousers and skullcaps are common scenes in the streets of Scotland.
New, beautiful, purpose-built mosques with domes and minarets are changing the Scottish skyline and making the presence of Islam felt in this predominantly Christian country.
Muslims began to settle in Scotland in the third decade of the 20th century and, to date, their numbers have grown to nearly 50,000.

However, there have been contacts between Islam and Scotland since the seventh century. It was a strange coincidence that Islam reached the Holy Land and Christianity became the religion of Scotland at about the same time, in the mid-seventh century. By the beginning of the eighth century, Islam had spread to Egypt, the North African countries and the Iberian peninsula, with which Scotland had minor trading links. These developments led to contacts between Islam and Scotland, at first through the Scottish pilgrims to the Holy Land and trade, and later through the Crusades, scholars, embassies, travellers, the Empire and so on. However, there is no collective and comprehensive record in Scottish history linking these centuries-old varied connections. At this time, when Muslims are experiencing a growing alienation from society, there can be no better antidote than information and knowledge about the historical relationship between Scots and Muslims.  If people can be helped to see the nature of this relationship over many centuries, the likelihood of being influenced by a rhetoric that casts all Muslims as potential terrorists will be lessened considerably. It is hoped that this effort would bring about a better understanding of Islam and Islamic culture, help stem the rising tide of Islamophobia and lead to harmonious relations between Muslims and other communities in Scotland.

Islam and us (The Scotsman)

By OnTheWeb: Aaron Velasquez Tuesday, February 19, 2008

My curiosity about Islam was piqued in the 1990s when I was completing my masters’ degree at St. Johns College. A special section was offered on the Koran and I decided to take the class.  During the semester my classmates and I read the book from cover to cover, in English and Arabic.

About halfway through the course I realized that the Koran contradicts itself. It became apparent to me that Islam couldn’t help but be schizoid. Some verses said to “respect the people of the book,” that is, Jews and Christians, while other verses spoke of putting the same people to the sword.

I have been following world developments with an eye to Islam since then, and it is clear to me that Islam is still a political movement intent on domination, despite the cloak of public relations calling it a “religion of peace.” I was presented an outlet for this knowledge when I was asked to write for Right Side News.

It is easy to assume the truth of the oft-repeated statements in the press and by our own President that Islam is “a religion of peace.” But why do we have to keep reminding ourselves and our Muslim friends that Islam is a religion of peace? When was the last time you questioned the peacefulness of Buddhism? When was the last time the President of the United States of America came on national TV to affirm the peaceful nature of Judaism or Christianity? Plenty of folks on the left will tell you how much harm has been inflicted on others by Christians, but by and large they will reference the Crusades and slavery as proof while declaring infanticide a right.

It seems no one ever bothers to refute these arguments so I will. The Crusades happened hundreds of years ago. No bands of roving Christians are bothering people with sword and cannon now. Besides, the Crusades were a response to an invasion of Europe by Muslims, intent on conquest and conversion by the sword. The Crusades were a long time ago and the Muslims started it.

Why didn’t the Christians turn the other cheek as Jesus told them to? The fault is not with the religion, but with the adherents to the religion. Perhaps they were imperfect people doing their best who got tired of being slaughtered. It is hard to love your neighbor when he takes over the neighborhood.

Why did the Muslims invade Europe? Because their prophet told them to. Muslims were and are enjoined to go forth and convert people to Islam forcibly or kill them. The distinct difference is that Christians are expected to practice tolerance, but Muslims are expected to practice beheading infidels.

Until very recently, slavery, the other black mark against Christendom (pun intended) was a worldwide institution, not a Christian, or as is so often insinuated, a white institution. The people selling African slaves to Europeans were Islamic Africans. Christians cast off the moral chains of the practice of slavery after two thousand years of it being acceptable practice everywhere. Good for the Christians for finally getting it right. Yet, the Muslims in Saudi Arabia are still keeping their Filipina house slaves.

The Saudis are also funding Madrassas across the Muslim world. Madrassas are schools for Muslim boys where only the most inflammatory sections of the Koran are taught, and only the peculiarly Medieval interpretations of Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab are used to illuminate the passages. Generation after generation of young men are brought up to hate their neighbor, not love, forgive, or tolerate him.

Graduates of these schools go on to a variety of prestigious careers. Some organize operations against the West, such as the bombing of the USS Cole, the attack on the Marine baracks in Beirut, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and of course the demolition of 9/11/2001. Some will recruit desperate or retarded children for suicide bombings against schools, nightclubs, shops and other secular targets. When has another religion endorsed such an inversion of morals?

Yusuf Islam , AKA Cat Stevens, publicly talked about the fatwa for the death of Salman Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses.” Muslims plotted the death of Danish cartoonists for daring to mock their prophet in print. Islam sanctions and encourages these murder calls, or ‘fatwas’. When have you ever heard of this sort of behavior sanctioned by another religion?

Who would call for my death after publishing this article, and what religion would they belong to? I have small children, and it has crossed my mind that I should use a pen name. Evidence  proclaims that Islam is a not a religion, not of peace, but a political movement of violent conquest. It is true that not all Muslims are violent, and that not all sects of Islam preach violence, but the Koran still encourages it. The religion is flawed because the book is flawed. We can only hope that sane Muslims continue to purposefully overlook the sections of their holy book that tell them to cut off our heads.

Aaron Velasquez, Sleuth of the Realm and co-founder of The Clue Society. Right Side News - your online newspaper, publishing accurate information about  threats against Western civilization

Hate Thy Neighbor: an examination of Islam: Islam is still a political movement intent on domination (Canadian Free Press)

abdu-interview.pdf

Interview in PDF

A Celebration of Heresy

Abdullahi An-Na`im invites online debate among Muslim scholars over his vision of secularism in the Muslim world
Emory in the World recently y spoke to Abdullahi An-Na`im about his latest project.
Winter 2006
Two years ago at The University of Jos, nigeria, Professor of Law Abdullahi An-Na`im was whisked from The auditorium by security after a quarter of his audience of 800 angrily walked out. Jos was a particularly volatile venue - the last few years have witnessed violent clashes between its Muslim and Christian populations - and An-Na`im had arrived with an unwelcome claim: that the northern Nigerian states’ imposition of Shari’a -Islamic law -was jeopardizing the country’s future. An-Na`im, a devout Muslim himself, does not mind such reactions to his ideas. Rather, he views resistance and debate as parts of a reform process that he says is vital to the future of the Muslim world.
An-Na`im has spent the last twenty years working to modernize Shari’a and to find cultural legitimacy for human rights. Reform, he argues, can never be imposed. Now he has begun what he hopes will be his legacy, providing the virtual soil for an organic process by posting his unpublished manuscript The Future of Shari’a on the Internet in eight languages of the Muslim world and inviting critique. Creating an open space for debate among Muslim scholars—what he calls “a celebration of heresy”—he hopes to build consensus around a vision of secularism that will not only promote peace and social justice, but strengthen Islam as well.

It is deeply personal work, rooted in An-Na`im’s childhood in Sudan in the 1950s, when he struggled to reconcile his faith with his concern over the treatment of women and religious minorities. While in law school he encountered the teachings of Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who preached a brand of Islam consistent with human rights. Hearing Taha speak was like pouring water over fire, An-Na`im says. In 1985, An-Na`im fled Sudan after Islamic fundamentalists gained power and executed Taha. During his years in exile, he has worked to carry on his mentor’s vision. His work has attracted nearly $2 million of support from the Ford Foundation over the last decade for a series of research and advocacy projects, including The Future of Shari’a. To download chapters from The Future of Shari’a, visit www.law.emory.edu/fs

EIW: The Future of Shari’a describes the central challenge facing the Muslim world as a paradox: between the necessity of separating religion from the state on the one hand, and acknowledging religion’s natural connection with politics on the other. But this is not a paradox unique to the Muslim world, is it? Do Islamic values need to play a greater role in influencing public policy in the Muslim world than, say, Christian values do in the U.S. on issues such as abortion and gay rights?
AA: Principles such as constitutionalism and human rights cannot succeed unless people believe them to be consistent with the religious beliefs and cultural norms that influence their political behavior.
But each society has its own struggle with these issues. People in the U.S. seem to take for granted that the question of state and religion has been decisively dealt with. This is dangerous. We talk about neutrality of the state, but it’s not human to be neutral. Therefore, neutrality is not something we can assume or take for granted. How can we keep the state separate from religion despite the connectedness of religion and politics, and despite the political nature of the state? This is a difficult question, and why I call for mediation instead of a solution, because you have to constantly negotiate and renegotiate these issues.
Secularism in every society is contextual and historical. There is no preconceived theory of a secular state that you can just put on like a dress. As Muslims, we cannot simply import secularism. I don’t think the Muslim world is unique, or that there’s a certain complexity in the Muslim world that is not present in other societies.
But what is true about the Muslim world is that it’s a post-colonial world. Therefore, the state that we live with now is not an organic outgrowth of our societies. It is a European state, and a European idea of law. Muslims in these societies have not been through the process of negotiating these questions for themselves. The colonial period was an intrusion into what might have been an organic development of state institutions.
EIW: In the Muslim world, the term “secularism” is often negatively associated with a complete rejection of faith. But you argue that the separation of state from religion is actually good for Islam itself.
AA: Belief has to be a choice; otherwise, it is not belief. The state corrupts religion. When I finally returned to Sudan in 2003, I could see the disillusionment in people’s eyes. They have seen how financial interests and power interests have gutted the Islamist movement from within.
So in fact I am saying that Shari’a is too important to allow the state to take it over. My claim is not that we need to secularize the state in order to be modern. My claim is that we need a secular state to be better Muslims. We need to keep religion out of the state so that people can practice religion out of conviction, not coercion. And also so that we can debate religious doctrine. Within every religion, every view that came to prevail was at some point a heresy to the previously prevailing view. To keep the possibility of heresy alive is critical to the vital development of the tradition itself.
EIW: What would you say to those who claim that Islam is not compatible with human rights?
AA: If you look at the Old Testament you will find violence, incitement to kill infidels, and subordination of women. But Jews and Christians have struggled and come to terms with understanding their scripture in a way that is consistent with the values of human rights.
And these are very new values. If it took a constitutional amendment in the 20th century to give women the right to vote, we should be very modest in our claims about an inherent superiority or inherent inferiority of other cultures.
We should understand that each society struggles with its own demons.
EIW: You write that you are “trying to influence Muslims as a Muslim.” Would you be able to influence them otherwise, since you assert that reform must come from within a culture? Would a non-Muslim be able to do the advocacy work you’re doing, even armed with the same ideas?
AA: I’m not saying that because I’m a Muslim you should accept my ideas. I’m saying that I am personally motivated by being a Muslim. A non-Muslim doing this work would lack the conviction of personal belief. It would be more of an intellectual exercise. He or she could not say, ‘I stake my soul on this.’ The passion and conviction of personal belief gives resonance and force to the ideas.
EIW: How has the current international situation affected your work?
AA: Unfortunately, events since 9/11 have set us back. There is an assumption that because the West is suddenly interested in Islamic reform there should be facility, but in fact it can have the opposite effect.
The crisis in the Muslim world is very old, going back hundreds of years to Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and then colonialism. But I have a new sense of urgency in the sense that the task is becoming more difficult and the stakes are becoming higher. The whole fundamentalist project—Shari’a enforced by the state—has failed, in Iran, in Sudan, in Pakistan, and other places. And it is seen to have failed. People have no illusions now. So this could be the right moment in the sense that people are becoming more receptive to new ideas.
EIW: You have said that reform is not likely to emerge from the Arab world, but from Muslims living in West Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia, which is where 90 percent of the world’s Muslims live. Why does your hope lie in these regions?
AA: Islam started in the Arab world. The Koran is in Arabic. In these other regions there is not the same sense of ownership of the religion as there is in the Arab world. In my opinion, Southeast Asia is one of the most promising regions for reform. There, you see how Buddhism,
Hinduism and Islam have co-existed and mixed, indicating a fundamental understanding of pluralism. The 1945 compromise known as the Jakarta Charter, which created Indonesia as an independent state, set up a secular state which had to make concessions to religious sentiments.
It was a compromise that was struck from the very beginning and has been constantly negotiated since. It is a very promising model, but even it has been under threat from Islamist movements. That is why the first translated edition of the book will be published in Indonesia.
EIW: Why are you putting your manuscript on the web and inviting critique?
AA: My ideas are useless if they do not achieve consensus and acceptance. So my challenge is to be persuasive. Any rebuttal I receive, I have to respond to, or else change that part of my argument which I am unable to defend or support. In that sense, the text will keep changing. It is not something I will finish and walk away from.
EIW: Traditionally, Shari’a was developed through a similar process of debate and consensus-building among Islamic scholars and jurists. But it was a process that took generations. Will you live to see change?
AA: The level of education and the level of communication we have now can accelerate this process tremendously. With more education, more people can read the original sources [like the Koran] for themselves than ever before in history. More people are able to make up their minds and act than ever before. The sociology of knowledge in Muslim societies has been so radically transformed that it is conceivable to have a fundamental paradigm shift within a lifetime.
EIW: What is the next step?
AA: To the extent that my health and abilities allow me, I will be willing to go everywhere and anywhere to talk about this and debate it. But I cannot expect to go far by doing it single-handedly. That is why the consensus-building process is so important. We will also mass-produce pamphlets that summarize these ideas in several languages. Because that is how the Islamists do it. They are very effective, and very modern in the sense that they are masters of communication. We need to bring these ideas to the people and not expect people to come and find them. Over time I hope people will come to own this.
I will work on this project constantly for the rest of my life. This is what I will be accountable for.