The Sacred Refusal
On Holiness, Violence, and the Rug Beneath Our Feet
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
—Victor Hugo
It’s summer in Paris. The humidity renders my hair its own entity over me and my desire to control it. Here during summer solstice, during the national annual music festival where millions of people spilled into the streets. We gathered with a group of close friends to celebrate a birthday—her life, her journey, her becoming. The air feels soft, sacred, and scented with life’s bustle.
Years ago, before her child was born, I loaned her a rug—a prayer mat I had purchased from a Muslim man in Turkey. Woven by Anatolian women in the early 19th century, it was embedded with symbols of fertility, protection, and abundance. I loaned it to her as a talisman after I used it as a payer mat followed by the success of my own pregnancy journey. She placed it next to her bed as I was advised to do. She stood on it through the quiet rituals of waiting, hoping, calling in life.
And life came. A healthy child, born into a circle of care. As we toasted her birthday last night I didn’t think of the rug, it remained folded and neatly stored in my Los Angeles abode. When morning came and the news in the aftermath of a US strike on Iran emerged, the carpet came to mind.
The prayer mat—not just as a sacred object, but as a cipher. A thread in a much larger tapestry that connects past to present, empire to spirit, violence to beauty.
Because that same kind of rug—the Anatolian prayer mat—appears beneath the feet of the Virgin Mary in countless medieval European paintings. As I walked through the Louvre and entire wing featuring renaissance art, images of the Madonna and Child, the Muslim world is present, literally woven in, beneath Christianity’s most sacred figure. Persian, Mamluk, and Anatolian carpets—designed for Muslim prayer—appear as decorative platforms, stripped of their original purpose, laid down like trophies.
The symbolism is not accidental. These rugs were imported during the Crusades, during centuries of so-called holy wars, when Christian Europe sought not only to dominate the Islamic world but to extract its beauty, its labor, its sacredness. The rug beneath Mary becomes a metaphor: the West’s sanctity has always stood on the ground of the Other.
There is a profound difference between standing on something and standing with it.
And now, the U.S. has deployed an attack and war on Iran, as Western leaders invoke security, deterrence, and moral authority, the pattern repeats. The language is modern. The posture is ancient. Christianity remains the invisible scaffolding behind these violent acts, casting the West as righteous, enlightened, and under divine mandate.
But here, in Paris, in this summer light, surrounded by irreverence, debauchery and softness, I feel something else.
The rug still holds the power of myth.
And it raises a deeper question—one that has followed me through this city and its contradictions:
Could it be that Islam is the last remaining beacon of Eastern ideology?
Not just in religious terms, but as a living, breathing counter-worldview. One that continues to resist the Western impulse to individualize, secularize, aestheticize, and ultimately commodify all things sacred.
Where Christianity has largely been absorbed into capitalism—and Buddhism, Hinduism, and Indigenous traditions have been selectively dismembered into self-help regimens or lifestyle brands—Islam remains unmarketable. Unbroken. Unapologetically whole.
Its rhythms—of prayer, modesty, charity, surrender—are incompatible with Western liberalism’s obsession with autonomy, self-optimization, and personal branding.
To the modern West, what cannot be consumed must be controlled.
And what cannot be controlled must be feared.
That’s why Islam has remained not just a political adversary but a spiritual antagonist in Western imagination. It isn’t simply foreign. It’s incomprehensible to the machinery of empire. Because it doesn’t parse the world into private and public, sacred and secular, body and soul. It speaks in continuity.
This is not to romanticize Islam. Like any major tradition, it holds contradictions, power struggles, and histories of harm. But it is to recognize that it still offers something the West has long since lost: a cosmology unafraid of the divine.
That’s why it shows up so often as both scapegoat and symbol.
That’s why the rug was under Mary’s feet.
That’s why it is surveilled in New York, banned in France, and bombed in Gaza.
Because it reminds the West that its story is neither universal nor complete.
“La ilaha illallah.”
There is no god but God.
And in that phrase lies a radical humility—a refusal to center the self, the market, the nation.
And that refusal may be the most dangerous—and sacred—resistance
Ground Zero: Los Angeles as a Militarized Future
Before I came to Paris, I stood in a very different kind of street.
In Los Angeles, I witnessed what happens when an empire begins to turn inward—when its war machines are redeployed on its own people. ICE. National Guard. Marines. Residential neighborhoods under surveillance. Helicopters circling at night. Families detained and children separated under the same broken logic that has created generations of dispossessed, displaced, criminalized lives.
California—home to nearly 40 million people and the fifth largest economy in the world—is being treated not as an asset, but as a liability. Not as a beacon of potential, but as a threat to power. And instead of addressing the crisis with care, the administration sent its most cynical mouthpiece, J.D. Vance, to pour gasoline on an already fraying city. Not to heal, but to provoke. To bait. To deflect from the epicenter of collapse in Washington.
They are not setting California—or its people—up for success.
They are weaponizing it.
“The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.”
—Simone de Beauvoir
The Cracks in the Machine
The collapse isn’t coming. It’s already here.
You can see it in the gaps between image and reality.
Tulsi Gabbard, once presented as the administration’s multi-tool—veteran, woman of color, anti-establishment—has been quietly benched. Sidelined at the moment when intelligence might actually require independent thought.
Kristi Noem, meanwhile, has become a stylized echo chamber. Her public appearances—military cosplay in full makeup, media content that blurs the line between campaign ad and conspiracy thriller—feel more curated than candid. Designed not for leadership, but for affect. Obedient. Glamorous. Frontier-coded and algorithm-ready.
Two women rendered as property that upholds the patriarchy.
“The simulation is no longer that of a territory… It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard
In this moment, even collapse is managed like a brand. The people who pose aren’t governing. The people who could govern aren’t allowed to speak. And those in power seem more interested in controlling the lighting than the legislation.
This is not politics. It’s theater staged over rot.
California: Empire’s Mirror and Export
What’s happening in California doesn’t stay in California. It reverberates globally—because California is not just a state. It is a symbol. A story. A soft-power empire of its own.
Especially to the Eastern bloc and much of the Global South, California represents the exported culture of Western collapse: the glamour, the gluttony, the hyper-individualism posing as liberation. It’s why the Kardashians, Silicon Valley, and wellness capitalism are simultaneously worshipped and loathed.
Even here in Paris—a city known for its restraint, its elegance, its performative hauteur—I see the American infection: cut off jeans, cowboy boots, influencer poses, TikToks on the Seine. The glam and glitz of exported narcissism has seeped into the cobblestones like oil slick—shiny, shallow, and everywhere.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
—Jean Baudrillard
Cultural cringe, symbolic decay, or entropy—it’s no longer isolated to a single region.
A sacred aesthetic, hollowed out by consumption.
Unweaving the Pattern
The Western world has built its spiritual identity through conquest—redecorating itself with the sacred objects of those it names enemies. But real holiness has no interest in domination. It asks only for presence, reciprocity, reverence.
Until we learn to recognize what lies beneath us—and how we have desecrated it—we will continue to repeat the old rites of destruction, dressed in new flags and false gods.
But in quiet rooms, with open windows and laughter rising, a different ritual is possible.
The rug rests folded now, still holding the prayers we whispered into its fibers.
Not as property.
Not as power.
But as possibility.
“To consent not to be a single being.”
—Édouard Glissant
The Architecture of Beauty, the Machinery of Distance
Even as these truths unfold around me, I’m also moved—viscerally—by beauty.
In Paris, we visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton, walked the halls of a building imagined by Frank Gehry, its soaring glass sails catching the sky like something halfway between cathedral and spaceship. Inside: a major retrospective of David Hockney, full of color and irreverence and radical seeing. I stood before his works—some playful, some solemn, all defiant—and I felt joy. Awe. A kind of necessary disorientation.
On another day, we toured the Christian Dior gallery—thread upon thread of exquisite construction, dresses floating in soft-lit vitrines like sacred objects. Craft elevated to art. Abundance reimagined as form.
And I loved it.
I let myself be inspired. I watched my daughter and friends revel in the art. Immersed in the reverence, I let my senses be saturated. I remembered how beautiful the human instinct to make can be.
But part of me kept pulling away.
Because I also knew, in real time, that wars were being waged to the east. Not just with bombs, but with data. With remotely operated strikes and sanctions. With militarized border regimes and energy trade-offs. We can’t see it but it’s always happening.
Beauty on display.
Destruction outsourced.
What does it mean to walk through rooms curated for wonder while knowing that other bodies—brown bodies, poor bodies, inconvenient bodies—are being targeted by algorithms, bombs, and missiles? What does it mean that so many of us have the privilege of forgetting?
And yet, I don’t want to give up on beauty.
I don’t want to abandon art to empire.
Because what if reverence—the deep act of looking—is what the machine most wants us to forget?
What We Uphold
And so I return—again and again—to the moment.
To a riverboat in Paris.
To a city that doesn’t sleep, but drifts gently through night.
To an open window, where laughter rises like incense and no one rushes to leave the table.
We are here celebrating a woman I love. A friend whose life is a constellation of tenderness, defiance, and wonder. A woman who has taught me—again and again—that our humanity is not in what we conquer, but what we cultivate. That to love the arts, the sciences, the theater, the wild mess of being human—is not indulgence, but devotion.
She has modeled for me what it means to uphold only what we love—without the need to dominate it, without the borders that divide us from each other.
This, I believe, is what the rug was always trying to say.
This is what holiness means, once it’s stripped of conquest.
Not territory. Not doctrine. But shared breath.
And if there’s anything left to build—after the fires, the wars, the spectacles—it must begin here.
Not with what we fear.
Not with what we own.
But with what we love—and are willing to stand with, not on.
“There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?”
—Rumi