What Does Jesus Mean to a Muslim Person Like Me?
Ibrahim
Abu-Rabi
December 14, 1998
In
this advent season, it is appropriate to talk about the importance of
Christ in my personal life. For many years now, I have asked myself
the following question: "What does Jesus Christ mean to me
personally?" My answer to this question has been simple: Christ
means a lot to me as a Muslim who was born in Nazareth in a missionary
hospital and who went to Christian schools.
As
I go back in my personal and family memory in order to trace the
answer to this question, I find a lot of anecdotes that I will convey
to you today in a personal way. Only a few months before her death
three years ago, I spent a few precious hours with my ailing mother
asking her to relate to me the moment of my birth. My mother, who had
never gone to any formal school, was a very perceptive woman. Several
months before she passed away, and in spite of the pain, she felt the
need to tell all of us about her early life when she was married to my
dad. She was only sixteen years old when she married, and she gave
birth to me when she was twenty one.
"I
gave birth to you," Mom began to narrate, "in the British
hospital." The British hospital was in fact established by the
Scottish missionary society back in 1839, people who were committed to
the life of Christ in the Holy Land, and people who felt a special
kinship to the simple folks in Palestine in the 19th century. The
simple people reminded them of the people and disciples of Christ and
of Palestine on the eve of the Christian message.
Mom
did not know the distinction between British and Scottish. All she
cared about was giving birth in a safe medical environment and not at
home, like most women in Palestine used to do up to the late 1950s.
She was helped in giving birth to me by a young British doctor by the
name of John. I asked her whether she was ever shy to be helped by a
man who was not part of her family and for that man to actually look
at her body. Her answer was, "No, not all. I felt he was like a
brother to me. He was so kind and considerate and very skilled in his
profession." Above all, she said, he spoke very fluent
Palestinian Arabic with a country-side dialect. And with his British
accent, his voice sound like Music to her ears. It was soothing and it
reminded her of the old days when she a little girl and where her
grandfather used to sing to her.
When
I born, she said, this doctor, asked her in clear Arabic to say "Bismillah
al-Rahman al-Rahim" In the name of God the Merciful the
compassionate, and in the name of Sayydina Yassu' al- Masih, and in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. She said she did not understand
what that meant, in the name of Jesus Christ, but at that moment she
was totally happy and relieved because she gave birth to a baby boy
and not to a baby girl. And after Dr. John left, she said, I uttered
in your ears the Shahadha [the proclamation of faith in Islam]: There
is god but Allah and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah]. In the folk
Islamic tradition in Palestine this shahadah, in a sense, seals your
religious fate and it helps to keep you a Muslim all of your life. And
I must admit that this sealing of fate has been good to me. Little did
Mom know that I needed to be a Muslim in order to get a faculty
position at a Christian theological seminary in the United States.
After
that year Mom had a contact with the British hospital at least once a
year when she was ready to give birth to other brothers and sisters.
She always spoke with admiration about Dr. John until his death in
1995.
When
I was seven years, my parents moved me from the government school that
I had been going to, to a private Catholic school. It was clear to me
that the quality of education in this new school was higher than that
in the government school. It is true that I was intimidated by the
several languages we had to study. In addition to Arabic, we had to
study Hebrew, English and French. After a while I got used to that. We
had only two teachers in the school: Rose and Emile. Both, who were
Arab Christians from Nazareth spoke a dialect of Arabic that sounded
very sophisticated and Westernized. In Arabic there is the letter Qaf:
Those who put stress on this letter are known to come from either the
countryside or from working class families, such as my family. Our
teacher Rose would say Aaf instead of Qaf, and that distinguished her
from many of us. Actually upper class people in Palestine still use
the Aaf in order to distinguish themselves from others.
I
still cannot forget my first religion class with teacher Emile. It
took me a while to figure out why he called himself Emile and not
Muhammad or Hassan. The Muslim students in the class would murmur to
each other saying that our teacher Emile was not actually an Arab, but
that he might have been an Italian or a French person. And this
murmuring was in a sense given weight to by the fact that Emile's
cheeks were red all the time. We assumed, we Muslim students in the
class, that any white man with red cheeks must have been a European
and not a true Arab. Little did we know then that Emile, who was a
full-fledged Arab, had red cheeks because he used to drink a small
bottle of Arak or Ouzou every morning before class.
Anyway,
in our first religion class, which I still remember well, Emile begins
to teach us about God. God is present every where, he would say. No
one disputed that, and actually coming from our religious background,
we were convinced that God was all over the place. Then after that
initial discussion, Emile, who was carrying an empty and sealed
bottle, asked my neighbor, the little boy Muhammad, "Muhammad: if
you believe that God is present all over the place, do you agree that
our Lord Jesus Christ can be present inside this bottle?" For a
moment, the little Muhammad was confused; he did not know what to say.
But Muhammad later on said: "Sir, God can be present in this
bottle, but not Jesus since he would suffocate and die and God does
not die."
The
little Muhammad did not know that he was putting his finger on a major
theological issue and point of contention between Islam and
Christianity: the nature of Christ. The teacher said, Jesus Christ is
our God and if you believe that God can be present anywhere, then he
can be in this bottle.
We
had a classmate by the name of Pierre. We were also surprised at the
name that was French-sounding. Pierre was very clean with a nice hair
cut and clean clothes and above all he carried a watch on his wrist.
Pierre was the envy of the Muslim kids in the school. Every one wanted
to be his friend. By associating ourselves with Pierre, we realized
that he was such a polite boy. He would say thank you to every thing
we said to him. We were not familiar with that level of politeness
learned that level of pokiness very fast and used it at home with my
parents and brothers and sisters. One day, a brother of mine, who was
still going to the government school, was angry with me over something
and he complained to Mom about that in a loud voice saying, "Ibrahim
is like the Christian boys, he says thank you to everything."
I
would like to end these reflections with some passages from the famous
poem, the Mathanawi of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, the founder of the
whirling Dervishes Order in Anatolia:
"The
Oneness of Christ is evergreen and as refreshing to man as clean,
white water is to fish
There
may be thousands of colors on the dry earth but fish have no
interest in them; they can live only in clean water which is only of
one color. The same is true of the spiritual seekers who always felt
uplifted by their nearness to Christ
The
river referred to here is the Christian teachings and the fish are
the followers of Christ. The swimmers in this river attain great
spiritual status Indeed, thousands of rivers and fish pay homage to
the sea of kindness which Christ is!"
At
the end of these brief reflections, I ask God to bless us with
proximity to Jesus at all times; and help us imbibe from his spiritual
fountain. I ask God to bless the hungry, the poor, and the sorrowful
in this season of mercy, especially in Indonesia, in Africa and Latin
America. AMEN
