Son of Babylon - The Forgotten Horror of Iraq's Missing

I have just returned from the Greenbelt Festival at Cheltenham. As usual it was nice to bump into folk and meet old friends. However, I was not greatly inspired by this years theological talks line up, but plenty of others obviously were, as 100's packed in to see this years headliners - many again from the USA - including Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren and Rob Bell.

Hundreds of people also attended the different events associated with the Just Peace Campaign on Israel/Palestine highlighted by Greenbelt over the last 3 years - with many workshops and installations around the site sharing the Palestinian experience of the conflict.

Being free of the urge to attend the theological talks allowed me to enjoy the music this year and I spent more time listening to some passionate and beautiful music by singer songwriters both the well known and not so well known than ever before.

But the highlight of the festival for me was going to see the film Son of Babylon by the Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji, tucked away in a small venue and attended by only 30 or so folk.  The film tells the story of a boy and his grandmother looking for her missing son of 12 years - the boy's father- in post invasion Iraq. The compelling story highlights the forgotten reality of the thousands upon thousands (some say the numbers go over 1 million) of Iraq's missing who disappeared during the regime of Saddam Hussein and others since. The film took me right back to my own journey into Iraq in 2004. I was reminded of the amazing people I met then, the hospitality I received from people who often had very little and the stories I was told of lost relatives and their longing for information about where they were and what had happened to them.

At the end of the film the producer Isabelle Stead talked to the 15 of us who remained in the theatre about the film and the campaign that it has initiated into Iraq's Missing. I remember that at the time of the fall of Saddam there was a similar campaign to put resources into excavating the mass graves and finding the disappeared initiated by the Iraqi community in the UK.  That campaign was met with a total lack of enthusiasm from the then Blair government and from the occupation forces whose priorities appeared to be elsewhere!

The Iraq's Missing Campaign is having similar problems in  convincing both the present Iraqi authorities and the international community of the central importance of this endeavor to the healing of the peoples of Iraq. Check out the campaigns website, sign the petition and support it in any way you can. Also watch out for the screening of Son of Babylon on BBC 4 in the near future. Below are two interviews one with Mohamed Al-Daradji the film's Director and the other with Isabelle Stead the film's Producer  -who also talks about the Iraq's Missing Campaign

'A steady stream of gentle people...' Reflections on a Funeral in the Park

I was away on holiday in Wales during the riots. I was glad  to have been back just in time to be able to attend the funeral of Haroon Jahan, Shazad Ali and his brother Abdul Musavir in Summerfield Park. This was a very moving and dignified occasion. The following post is a reflection on the event by Ramona Kauth who is the Chair of Birmingham Council of Faiths, a Buddhist, an Associate Tutor on my Inter Faith module at Queens and a local resident in the area where the 3 men lived:

It is hard to find words adequate to describe what happened today in the Park. I got there at about 2 pm. Lots of people were there earlier, and there had been prayers said earlier on the loud-speaker system. I could hear it from my house, as I was preparing to go.

When I got there I realised there was an area to one side that had been set aside for women. This was very comfortable for me, relieving me of feeling that I might be intruding.

As people were speaking from the stage, more and more people were arriving in streams, like a river flowing into the Park. At first I thought that this event might be smaller than the one on Sunday, but in the end there were many, many more people. On the news they have said there were 20,000 people.

There was such a strong feeling of quiet, of gentle presence and total focus on the purpose of the gathering. They were very still and moved carefully, with respect and regard for everyone around them. It was as if this area of the park had indeed become a mosque, an open-air mosque. We were there to honour these three young men as martyrs: martyrs for the peace and safety of the community, they are assured a place in history and in heaven.

Of all the speeches the words I remember most are the ones said by the Imam when he said that this day, this event, would be remembered in history. He said it marked a change, a turning point, a change in the perception of Muslims because it was such a clear commitment to the Islamic way of life, the peacefulness and dedication to community and following the teaching, praying five times a day and putting that into practice in ones daily life. And we will always remember this amazing gathering of Muslims to pray together at this event, to support the family and give respect to Haroon, Shazad and Musavir.

It would be very wonderful if some kind of memorial stone may be put up here in the park, to remember these young men, with the words of Tariq Jahan that he spoke so soon after his son's death: that no one should think to respond with violence but on the contrary because only more anger and violence comes from hatred and violence, that the only way to respond is with care and coming together. This was such a timely and powerful response. I think he must be a kind of saint, certainly someone worthy of our respect.

After the final prayers and the sight of the three hearses covered in flowers, everyone left in the way they had arrived, a steady stream of gentle people walking simply and peacefully on their way.

It was all very moving, very thought provoking. I am so glad I was able to be there.



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PACKING AND POLYDOXY

I'm off on holiday from the end of today. We are going in the camper van to Wales for a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to the space -  I get to walk and chill out in lovely countryside -  but I can't stop reading and I can't stop reading theology, sad person that I am. This holiday I'm packing some exciting stuff . I'm concentrating on the work of three North American theologians - Catherine Keller, Laurel C Schneider and Beverly Lanzetta. I dipped into some of Keller's and Schneider's work earlier today and it looks wonderfully promising:

In recent years a discernable movement within theology has emerged around a triune intuition: the daunting differences of multiplicity, the evolutionary uncertainty it unfolds, and the relationality that it implies are not problems to be overcome in religious thought. They are starting points for it. Divinity understood in terms of multiplicity, open - endedness, and relationality now forms a matrix of revelation rather than a distortion, or evidence of its lack. The challenges and passions of theological creativity blossoming at the edges of tradition and at the margins of power have shown themselves, far from being distractions from doctrinal or doxological integrity, to be indispensible to its life. And this vitality belies at once the dreary prophecies of pure secularism and the hard grip of credulous certainty.

Really, given the venerable pronouncements of the death of God, theology at the start of this millenium should be worse off than it is. The undeniable atrophy of those denominations that still support educated clergy limit the resources for even discerning just which God it is that is presumed dead. The hard questions remain hard; the institutional fragilities remain unsparing. And so the buoyancy we see in theology right now is all the more remarkable. Its life and movement, which in this volume we are nicknaming "polydoxy", has multiple sources. Indeed multiplicity itself has become theology's resource. What had always seemed a liability for Christian theology - multiplicitous differences contending from within and competing from without - has miraculously turned into theology's friend. Indeed emergent commitment to the manifold of creation as it enfolds a multiplicity of wisdoms may be functioning as a baseline requirement for theological soundness. A responsible pluralism of interdependance and uncertainty now seems to facilitate deeper attention to ancient religious traditions as well as more robust engagement with serious critiques of religion. This is an approach that no longer needs to hide the internal fissures and complexities that riddle every Christian text or that wound and bless every theological legacy.

These intuitions and starting points find grounding in the Christian tradition not only because of the rich history of texts and practices therein that support doctrinal and ethical formulations of multiplicity, evolutionary openness, and relationality. But also, like other global religions, "Christianity" was never merely One to begin with. Internally multiple and complex, it has always required an agile and spirited approach to theological reflection. We sense that the current resilience of theology in its becoming multiplicity of relations is a sign and a gift of that Spirit.

Catherine Keller and Laurel C Schneider (Eds) Polydoxy : Theology of Multiplicity and Relation (Routledge 2011) p1

Hopefully, I'll be back posting towards the end of August with an interesting book review from Andi Smith Minister at Saltley Methodist Church in Birmingham who has been enjoying reading Allah : A Christian Response by Miroslav Volf

APPROACHING RAMADAN - CHRISTIANS READING THE QUR'AN

With Ramadan fast approaching I thought I would repost this article I wrote last year on Christians reading the Qur'an

It was during the Ramadan fast of 2005 that I first seriously engaged with the Qur'an and haven't put it down for long since. And I have received much spiritual insight from reading the Qur'an.

What is the nature of the Qur'an for Christians willing to openly engage with it?

It has been argued that in the latter years of the last century three lines of explanation developed amongst Christian readers of the Qur'an - beyond the negative dismissals of simplistic Christian apologetics - on its value to Christians (1)

The first position recognises that the Qur'an is of spiritual benefit to Muslims but tends not to explore its possible spiritual benefit for Christians. It emphasises the differences between Qur'anic statements and Christian conviction. Jacques Jomier in The Bible and the Qur'an has said 'According to Islam, God's message has not been incarnated in a man, Jesus Christ, but rather delivered in a book, in the Qur'an. This book gives guidence to Muslims to follow the path of obedience to God's law, which they believe, leads to salvation. For Christians, public revelation is full. complete and concluded in Jesus Christ. And because the Incarnation and Redemption are denied in Islam, the whole idea of salvation is different in this religion'. For Jomier the benefit of reading the Qur'an for Christians is simply to help them better understand their Muslim neighbour.

The second position argues that the text is divinely inspired and can be read with spiritual benefit by Christians but tends to recruit the Qur'an as a Christian text. its proponents argue that Islamic tradition has misunderstood the Qur'anic revelation and emphasises a Christian influenced interpretation or appeals to a 'higher' level of truth/reading in which the differences between the Qur'anic and Christian revelation are overcome. Franciscan, Giulio Basetti - Sani's The Koran in the Light of Christ - Islam in the plan of History of Salvation (1977) is an example of such an approach.

The third and to my mind most interesting position takes a mediating path between these two, trying to respect the Qur'an as Islamic scripture and to respect Islamic traditions of interpretation, whilst showing how it might also function as spiritually beneficial to Christians.

Hans Kung has argued that the Qur'an can act as a 'prophetic corrective' for Christians to the overly 'high christology' of concilliar Christianity and aid the recovery of an earlier Jewish Christianity with a lower Christological perspective. Although I think there is some merit in this argument the way Kung goes about it appears a little too much like recruiting the Qur'an to his modernist Christian theological project.

On the other hand Kenneth Cragg seeks to work in the other direction to Kung. Whilst being steeped in a deeply appreciative understanding of the Islamic interpretation of the Qur'an Cragg argues that Christians can interpret the Qur'an from within the perspective of Christic revelation. Cragg arguesthat certain Quranic themes can be illuminated more fully through an engagement with the Christian gospel. Whilst Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman was very appreciative of Cragg's encounter with the Qur'an, if not uncritical, other Muslims have argued more forcefully that he reveals an overly Christianizing and indeed orientalizing tendency in his approach.

Perhaps the most interesting mediating perspective is found with the long term Muslim-Christian Research group - a European- North African initiative of the 1980s that brought together Christian and Islamic scholars to read the Qur'an and the Bible together over a number of years. The small but richly engaging book The Challenge of the Scriptures - The Bible and the Qur'an was one of the results of this dialogue. The Christians in the group, at the end of the process, when asked to reflect on the meaning of the Qur'an said:

'We see the Qur'an as an authentic Word of God, but one in part essentially different from the Word in Jesus Christ'

Peter Ford argues that ' these Christians have thus been willing to be drawn in into a certain spiritual tension, to live with a measure of paradox. it cannot be denied that their approach, at once honest and respectful, holds an excellent prospect for constructive dialogue with Muslims, and not least because such statements are formulated within such dialogue.'

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a new phenomenon the Scriptural Reasoning movement developing amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims. This movement may be said to share the same spirit as the earlier Muslim-Christian Research Group but this time including Jews. A very interesting film showing one such scriptural reasoning group in process can be found here.

Reading the Qur'an as a Christian and listening to and reading about how Muslims understand and interpret the Qur'an has been a challenging and enriching spiritual experience. I find myself drawn to the tension ridden paradoxical position of the Christians in the European - North African initiated dialogue of the 1980s.

Below I recommend some resources for any Christians who would also like to step out on a journey of their own into the Qur'an

(1) See F. Peter Ford Jnr 'The Qur'an as Sacred Scripture: An Assessment of Contemporary Christian Perspectives' in The Muslim World April 1993

Some resources for engaging with the Qur’an written by Muslims or taking an approach that is sensitive and knowledgeable about how Muslims engage with the Qur’anic revelation, that I have found helpful.

Books on the Qur’an by Muslims

Farid Esack, The Qur’an – A Users Guide (One World 2005)

A very good all round introduction from a Muslim committed to a faith activist and liberationist perspective but who also undertook traditionalist Islamic studies. Esack was a leading Muslim activist in the anti Apartheid struggle in South Africa and has been involved in activism on war, imperialism and Aids. Esack’s more academic earlier work based on his PhD thesis at Birmingham University and drawing particularly on his involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle is Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism (One World 1997) and very much worth the effort.

Mona Siddiqui, How to Read the Qur’an (Granta 2007)

Muslim academic’s accessible introduction to the Qur’an. An interfaith practitioner who has featured in recent years as one of the main speakers at the Greenbelt Arts Festival

Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur'an, (1989)
A modern classic probably better read after some time of engagement with the Qur'an.

Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press 2002)
A brilliant reading of the Qur’an from a woman’s perspective emphasising the radically egalitarian and anti-patriarchal nature of its teachings. Asma Barlas is amongst a leading group of women scholars challenging readings of Islam based on western media stereotypes and cultural patriarchy.

Reading/Hearing the Qur’an

Approaching the Qur’an – The Early Revelations Michael Sells (White Cloud Press 2007)

This is an excellent starting place. The book goes through each of the Surahs - the shorter Meccan surahs of early Qur’anic revelation - that a young Muslim would learn as they first became familiar with the Qur’an. Sells translates these surahs and has a scholarly but accessible commentary on each. The book also contains a CD with recitations of some of surahs by world renowned reciters.

The Light of Dawn - Daily Readings from The Qur'an - Camille Helminski (Shambhala 2000)

A lovely accessible but scholarly translation of key parts of the Qur'an organised into daily readings

The Book of Revelations: A Sourcebook of Themes from the Holy Qur'an edited by Kabir Helminski (The Book Foundation 2005)

A good next step with commentaries by respected modern commentators on a large number of selected passages .

The Qur’an translated by M A S Abdel Haleem (Oxford World Classics 2008)

A good modern accessible translation of the whole Qur'an

The Message of the Qur'an (Book Foundation 2008)

The Arabic text with transliteration, translation and commentary by modern scholar Muhammad Asad - for deeper engagement.

Cambridge Inter Faith Summer School Visits Birmingham

While the Feast were off in Istanbul meeting with folk from Beirut. I welcomed on Sunday morning a group of Muslims, Christians and Jews from USA, Middle East and Europe who are on the Cambridge Inter Faith Programme Summer School. The Group were visiting Birmingham for the day touring places of worship of the three faith traditions utilising the Faith Encounter Programme's Faith Guides.The above picture was taken outside their first port of call The Ghamkol Sharif Masjid in Small Heath. They went on to visit Birmingham Anglican Cathedral and Singers Hill Synagogue

QUESTIONS WITHOUT BORDERS - A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY IN ISRAEL & PALESTINE

Forum for Discussion of Israel & Palestine (FODIP) still have a few places available on their Autumn study tour. Click on link for details
A journey of dialogue and encounter in Israel and Palestine

BIRMINGHAM MEETS BEIRUT....IN ISTANBUL!

 The folks at THE FEAST have gone international!

Birmingham based interfaith youth project The Feast - who bring together Christian and Muslim teenagers  to encourage dialogue  and joint action in their communities, is taking a group of young people to Istanbul this weekend to meet up with Muslim and Christian youth from Beirut. Andrew Smith Chair of Feast Trustees who will be leading the trip said

The aim is to build some good relationships and to help the group from Beirut look at how we have faith conversations between Muslims and Christians. The trip promises to be both exciting and challenging for the leaders and the young people.

Check out the news story about the group here

You can follow the groups adventures on twitter at #brummeetsbeirut