Danielle Shroyer

On a more positive note, here’s another thing I was struck by in this article on Islamism.  Sometimes, the action that began to move them away from extremism was surprising, and often subtle.  And it reminds all of us that sometimes our kindness can in fact change a person’s life…even someone as hardened as Usman Raja.

Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.  Usman’s mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. “I used to box when I was in the Navy,” he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony’s closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother’s birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. “And I thought – that is humanity right there. That’s an aspect of the divine that’s in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?”

 I love that, prior to this exchange, Tony was known as a grump.  He was not only being kind to Usman; Usman and his brother were also being kind to Tony, giving his life meaning by allowing him to teach them something he knew well.  (This reminded me of the movie “Gran Turino,” actually- which you really ought to see, if you haven’t already.)  The simple practice of caring for one another will always be the most radical action.

I’m continuing my observations from the article on Islamism I posted yesterday by saying a brief word about identity. I say brief because honestly, this issue is so critical that you could read a shelf full of books on the matter. As usual in the blogosphere, I’ll reach for the most readily identifiable and simplified argument.

The threat of totalizing fundamentalism (fundamentalism that seeks not only to hold its own beliefs but force it onto others) is in many ways a crisis of identity. I was so struck by the stories of these Western-educated Brits who became jihadists because they could not find a sense of belonging anywhere else.  This has always been the difficult reality for immigrant children- how do you straddle two worlds? How do you hold onto the world of your parents, who, though living in a new country, still operate with the same values and cultural traditions they did in their home country, while at the same time growing up as children of a society with an entirely different set of values and cultural traditions? You belong in neither place.

From the story of Usama Hassan:
When he was 13, he joined an Islamic fundamentalist organisation called Jimas. At big sociable conferences every weekend, they were told: you don’t feel at home in Britain, but you can’t go “home” to a country you have never visited. So we have a third identity for you – a pan-national Islamism that knows no boundaries and can envelop you entirely.

It sounds familiar. This is the identity I hear shouted by young Islamists throughout the East End: I might sound like you, but I am nothing like you. I am Other. I belong elsewhere – in a place that does not yet exist, but that I will create, with my fists and my fury.

Jimas told their members they were part of a persecuted billion, being blown up and locked down across the world. “It was a bit like a gang,” he says.

And from the third section of the article:
As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.

Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: “On a basic level, we didn’t know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?” They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents’, and their country’s. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to “go home” to by racists.

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of “Go back where you came from!” But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn’t want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as “the funny foreign child”, and told to “explain their customs” to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

“Nobody ever said – you’re equal to us, you’re one of us, and we’ll hold you to the same standards,” says Husain. “Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?”

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: “Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you’re told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It’s about the world – and that’s an amazing relief. The answer isn’t inside your confused self. It’s out there in the world.”

These issues bring to mind (at least) two very big questions for me as a pastor, and for the church at large:

1.  How can we help people form life-giving and centered identities in an increasingly diverse world?  How can we create sanctuary spaces of identity for people?  (That is, spaces that feel like home and that love and accept people rather than isolate people.)  These are  internal questions,  related to the inner-workings of our own faith communities and faith identities.

2.  How can we live peacefully in a pluralist world without losing our own particularity?  How can we hold our specific Christian identity in a way that does not create dualistic enemies?  Does our conviction have to come at the price of a ghettoizing isolation?  These are external questions, dealing with our relationships to/with/for the world.

Because as different as a suburban middle class youth is from a child of immigrant parents, I get the feeling that this dual-world-straddling is happening almost everywhere these days in varying forms.  These are questions with which we’re all going to have to grapple.

This is the best article on Islamism I have read in recent years. As a warning, it is incredibly long. As an encouragement, it is worth every bit of the time it takes to read it. It is the story of three ex-Islamist jihadists and one radically loyal Islamist, all of whom were raised in Great Britain, educated in Western schools, and most of them raised as only marginally religious. The article’s author wanted to know how-and why- these kind of men could become violent jihadists, so he wanted to hear their stories.

The crisis of Islamism seems to me such a microcosm of many of our world’s most pressing matters, and certainly of our country’s. I just may spend a few posts unpacking some of these one by one. To start, there is such an incredible similarity between all forms of fundamentalism. I’m sure fundamentalist Christians would balk at a comparison between their firmly-held beliefs and that of an extremist jihadist, but listen to either of them for five minutes and they are giving the same speech, using the same arguments, drawing the same conclusions under gods of different names. If you’ve ever been in a room with a fundamentalist of any religion, listen for parallels in this article excerpt. This was in the section regarding Anjem Choudhary, the one Islamist profiled in the article:

Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, [Choudhary] warns, cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. “I can’t pick and choose what I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you can pick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the final revelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there’s something that you don’t like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make sure they’re in line with the sharia.”

If I had a nickel…

Fundamentalism in every religion has the potential to bring about unthinkable harm and to threaten the very essence of the religion it claims. When you put the word “holy” in the title of any book, you are asking its readers to supply some form of allegiance to its contents. How they see that allegiance- or more specifically, how they interpret its contents and make conclusions about the allegiances they infer- can either make the world a more beautiful place (“Love one another as I have loved you”) or a place of sheer terror. The minute those of us in any religion believes our holy book to be above this kind of terrifying misinterpretation is the minute the bell tolls with sinister foreshadowing.

I think the problem is that fundamentalism invariably stems from fear that leads quickly to hatred. If a religious person feels threatened, then out comes the witch hunt to demonize anyone who believes differently. It is a terrifyingly strange way to prove your position. I’m not sure how many events in world history one must learn before realizing that this kind of proactive-belligerent-defense only ends up killing people. And any sane person will tell you that none of the world’s religions consider killing people as a sign of spiritual maturity. At the very least, this kind of isolating, us vs. them rhetoric damages our ability to see God’s image in one another…and if you can’t recognize that, what’s to keep you from attacking that person? How can you honor the sanctity of that person’s life?

The tragic irony of fundamentalism is that those who claim to be fundamentalists also claim to care MOST about their religion (they can judge these things and you can’t), but their fundamentalist beliefs are often the least effective at embodying their religion’s core convictions. And this is to say nothing about the public relations debacle they are causing. There are no worse poster children for religion than fundamentalists.

The way we read our holy books matters. It absolutely matters, as it’s literally a matter of life and death.

From the story in section I of the article, subtitled “The Imam”:
(Usama Hassan) says the 7/7 bombings (in 2005 in London’s subway system) detonated a theological bomb in his mind: “How could this be justified? I began to wonder if parts of the Koran are actually metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually just revealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia.”

Once the foundation stone of literalism was broken, he had to remake the concepts that had led him to Islamism one-by-one. “Jihad has many levels in Islam – you have the internal struggle to be the best person you can be. But all we had been taught is military jihad. Today I regard any kind of campaigning for truth, for justice, as a type of Jihad.” He signed up to the pacifist Movement for the Abolition of War. He redefined martyrdom as anybody who died in an honourable cause. “There were martyrs on 9/11,” he says. “They were the firefighters – not the hijackers.”

Seeing the reality of the destruction in London in 2005 is what made Usama Hassan begin to question the radicalized, militarized, totalizing version of his own religion. Renouncing the literalism of the Koran saved his faith (he’s now a moderate Muslim) and saved lives.

If we are people who read a holy book, we would be wise to listen to our harshest critics, and to look with open eyes at the reality of the kind of world our religion is creating. In so doing we may just save our faith, and we may just save the world from undue violence.

Doug Pagitt will be hosting me on his radio show this Sunday at 10:15am to talk with me about my book. You can listen here as well as listen to archived shows. Hope you’ll tune in!

Thanks to everyone who came out for my book release party, and a huge thanks to everyone who helped plan it/host it/photograph it/make it a fantastically fun evening!

The Dallas Justice Revival is starting tonight and I hope to see many of you there! This has been in the works for a number of months now and it’s exciting that the time has finally arrived. What I’m most excited about is the opportunity for people in churches across the metroplex to come together for a common purpose. The list of churches and people who plan to attend come from such a breadth of Christian tradition and from such diverse places on the theological spectrum- it’s both impressive and wonderfully hopeful, and I’m proud to be a small part of it. If you haven’t heard of the Justice Revival yet, here’s a brief synopsis from the website:

Our Mission:
Over three days of prayer, preaching and worship, the body of Christ will awake to new life, uniting to answer Jesus’ call to biblical justice.
By the end of 2010, our prayer is that at least 200 Dallas area churches will answer this call by:

•Creating 25 partnerships with public schools
•Advocating for 700 new units of permanent supportive housing

And here’s a schedule of each night’s lineup:

Tuesday – Call to Conversion & Unity
Lead Musicians — Salvador & Jaci Velasquez
Special guest — Mayor Tom Leppert
Main Speaker — Rev. Zan Holmes

Wednesday – Call to Community
Lead Musician — Fred Hammond
Main Speaker — Rev. Sam Rodriguez

Thursday – Call to Justice
Lead Musician — Israel Houghton & New Breed
Main Speaker — Rev. Jim Wallis

Hope to see you there! And if you haven’t registered, please do so here- the event is completely free but they’d love to get an idea of how many to expect!