Jesus and Jihad: Reclaiming the Prophetic Heart of Christianity and Islam

By Robert F. Shedinger

Few words inspire more fear in Americans these days than jihad. Its mere utterance conjures up images of car bombs exploding in crowded markets; Boeing 737s crashing into tall buildings; and flag-burning, gun-toting bearded Arab men shouting, "allahu akbar" and "Death to America!" But what if all our stereotypical images of jihad are wrong, and when rightly understood, jihad turns out to be the perfect lens through which to understand the life and mission of Jesus?
Jesus and Jihad argues that in early Muslim sources jihad stood for the struggle to transform a violent and unjust pre-Islamic society into one characterized by greater levels of justice and peace. When rescued from his Christian pietistic misinterpretations, Jesus emerges as a highly prophetic figure of resistance to the injustices authorized by Roman imperial power.
As Muslims reengage an authentic understanding of jihad, and Christians, through a renewed understanding of jihad, meet the prophetic Jesus from whom they have become estranged, a new era of Christian-Muslim cooperation in the struggle against injustice can become the norm, replacing the current antipathy dividing these communities with a passion to reclaim once again a prophetic heart in service to a hurting world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498220224

Robert F. Shedinger

Robert F. Shedinger is Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Temple University and is the author of Radically Open (Cascade Books, 2012) and Was Jesus a Muslim? (2009). He is a frequent speaker in Islamic centers in the United States and Canada.

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Jesus and Jihad

Reclaiming the Prophetic Heart of Christianity and Islam

Robert F. Shedinger

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Jesus and Jihad

Reclaiming the Prophetic Heart of Christianity and Islam

Copyright © 2015 Robert F. Shedinger. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2021-7

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2022-4

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Shedinger, Robert F.

Jesus and jihad : reclaiming the prophetic heart of Christianity and Islam / Robert F. Shedinger.

x + 166 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2021-7

1. Religion—Philosophy. 2. Social Justice—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Social Justice—Religious aspects—Islam. I. Title.

HM271 .S33. 2015

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations come from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For all prophetic Muslims currently denied the right to due process

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The Loss of the Prophetic

Chapter 3: Waging a Jihad for Jihad

Chapter 4: Jesus and Jihad

Chapter 5: Waging a Responsible Jihad

Chapter 6: Reclaiming the Prophetic Heart of Christianity and Islam

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I never thought I would write a book titled Jesus and Jihad. That I have is a testament to all those Christians and Muslims who have inspired me with their uncompromising dedication to social action in the pursuit of justice. Special thanks are due to Mustapha Elturk and the members of the Islamic Organization of North America for all their friendship and support, and for their making me aware of the extraordinary work of Dr. Israr Ahmad.

Thanks are due also to Zulfiqar Ali Shah and Ahmed Afzaal for their inspirational concern for justice and peace, and to Sayyid Qazi for showing me that Las Vegas is much more than just the playground for the rich and powerful.

If it were not for the wonderful work of John Kiser, Kathy Garms, and all those associated with the Abd el-Kader Education Project, I would know nothing about this great nineteenth-century Algerian who embodies the spirit of jihad at its very best and whose name so improbably adorns a small Iowa town.

I must also thank Mel Underbakke of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, both for reading the manuscript, and for making me aware of the plight of Muslims being preemptively prosecuted and imprisoned without access to due process. The tireless advocacy of Mel and her husband, Fred, in support of these innocent victims of America’s War on Terror is truly inspiring.

I cannot say enough about the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of Luther College and the collegewide concern for activism leading to justice and peace. I have learned so much from so many students over the years. I owe them a huge debt of gratitude, along with the many faculty colleagues who have been an inspiration. Thanks especially to Todd Green, who is always a particularly insightful conversation partner on the plight of Muslims in the contemporary West.

Thanks also must go to the many wonderful examples of prophetic Christianity who worship in my home church, First United Methodist Church in Decorah, Iowa—especially to Rev. Jim and Barb Dale, whose lives embody what it means to follow a Jesus who demands justice; and thanks also to Rev. Dr. John Caldwell, whose preaching brings a prophetic Jesus alive in the pulpit Sunday after Sunday.

I also must thank all of the dedicated professionals at Cascade Books, who make the experience of publishing so easy and stress free. I especially thank K. C. Hanson for believing in the value of this book.

Finally, I thank my family: Tina, whose loving support means everything; Tyler, whose growing interest in golf gives me a welcome respite from books and academia; and Amey, my book writing companion, who will undoubtedly publish her own work someday.

1

Introduction

We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.

—Albert Einstein

Few words possess more power to inspire fear and loathing in the average American these days than jihad. Its mere utterance conjures up images of car bombs exploding in crowded markets, of Boeing 737s crashing into tall buildings, and of flag-burning, gun-toting bearded Arab men shouting "Allahu akbar!" and Death to America! Jihad is almost universally thought to mean holy war, a military venture waged by primitive Muslim extremists bent on conquering freedom-loving Americans in order to enslave them under an Islamic theocracy based on shariah law. Given the prevalence of this overwhelmingly negative caricature of jihad, a creative new interpretation recently offered by an American-born Muslim man in a Boston courtroom is almost sure to offend American patriotic sensibilities to their very core. Who are we talking about?

His name is Tarek Mehanna, and in April of 2012 during a hearing in which he was sentenced to a seventeen-year federal prison term for allegedly expressing sympathy with Islamic extremists, he had the audacity to characterize the American Revolution as a jihad! Such a seemingly outrageous characterization will likely have the same effect on American ears as the scratching of fingernails on a chalkboard. Yet despite its near-heretical nature, I believe Mehanna’s understanding of jihad has the power to point us in the direction of a more just, peaceful, and sustainable future. I realize just how counterintuitive this sounds—jihad as a path to peace?—so please let me explain.

For those unfamiliar with this case, Tarek Mehanna is an American-born Muslim pharmacist sentenced to seventeen years in federal prison for allegedly expressing sympathy for al-Qaeda and conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq. No evidence exists linking Mehanna to any actual terrorist activities. He was simply charged with translating certain Arabic documents found on the Internet into English and expressing sympathy with what the U.S. government brands terrorist organizations. Because of Mehanna’s status as a natural-born American citizen, some protested his sentencing, alleging it to be politically motivated and a violation of Mehanna’s constitutional right to free speech. That Tarek Mehanna was preemptively prosecuted and sentenced to prison is, however, hardly noteworthy even if it is constitutionally troublesome: this happens to Muslims all too routinely these days. But my purpose here is not to focus on Mehanna’s guilt or innocence, but rather to focus on the extraordinary statement he delivered to the court at his sentencing hearing.¹

Mehanna begins by asserting that the FBI had tried to hire him as an informant against possible terrorist organizations. If the FBI had hired him as an informant, Mehanna would have been granted immunity from prosecution. But when he declined to provide the requested information to the FBI, Mehanna claims, he was arrested and charged with the crime of, in his words, supporting the mujahideen fighting the occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or as they like to call them, ‘terrorists.’ As someone born and bred in America (and in the patriotic milieu of Boston, no less), how could Mehanna come to support Islamic extremists who exacted such a heavy toll on his fellow American citizens? Are the charges against him legitimate? This is where Mehanna’s statement takes a most unexpected turn.

When he is questioned about how he could believe the things he believes or take the positions he takes, Mehanna’s shocking reply is that it is because of his American upbringing that he is who he is! To clarify this astonishing assertion, Mehanna launches into a long discourse about what he learned through his years in the American public school system, and about how that educational experience transformed him into a sympathizer with so-called Islamic terrorists. Viewing his American education as a source for his support of Islamic extremists might seem outrageous at first. But let’s hear Mehanna out before passing hasty judgment. Mehanna’s argument is really quite compelling.

Mehanna begins by taking us back to when he was six years old and collecting Batman comic books like any other six-year-old American child. He learned early on from these comic books that the world is set up in a particular way: there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This idea resonated so much that as he grew, he gravitated towards books that reflected this theme—books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and other classics of American literature (even The Catcher in the Rye). By the time he was studying history in high school, Mehanna realized just how real this theme was as he learned about what befell the American Indians at the hands of European settlers, and in turn how the European settlers were oppressed by King George III. He read about Paul Revere, Thomas Paine, and the armed insurgency of American colonialists against the tyranny of the British crown. He learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and John Brown in the struggle against slavery. He learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the development of the labor movement. He learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights struggle. But Mehanna did not see this theme of the struggle against oppression reflected only in American history.

He learned also about Anne Frank and the Nazis, Ho Chi Minh and the fight for Vietnamese independence, and Nelson Mandela and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. In every one of these examples of the struggle for justice, Mehanna found himself regularly siding with the oppressed and respecting those who intervened on the side of the marginalized of society regardless of their nationality or religion. The one figure that really stood out to him was Malcolm X. Mehanna was impressed with the fundamental transformation that Malcolm underwent in his life—from hardened criminal to leader of his people and a disciplined Muslim performing the hajj to Mecca. Malcolm’s life taught Mehanna that Islam is not something inherited; it’s not a culture or ethnicity. It’s a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose no matter where they come from or how they were raised. Through his study of Malcolm X, Mehanna began to delve deeper into Islam, and there he found the answer to the question that stumped the greatest scientific minds: the question that drives the rich and famous to depression and suicide from being unable to answer: What is the purpose of life? Why do we exist in this universe?

Soon Mehanna found himself valuing Islam like a piece of gold and turning his attention to the trials befalling Muslims in other parts of the world. He learned what the Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan, what the Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia, what the Russians were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya, and what Israel had done in Lebanon and Palestine with the full backing of the U.S. government. Further, he learned about what America had itself done to Muslims: about the sanctions against Iraq that killed more than a half million children; and he learned that then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously passed off the deaths of these children as worth it in a noteworthy 60 Minutes interview. Mehanna learned about the slaughter of twenty-four Muslim civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines; about Abeer al-Janabi, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl gang-raped by five American soldiers who then shot her and her family and set their corpses on fire; about the drone strikes that killed innocent Muslim civilians in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Mehanna’s sympathy with the oppressed became more acute and more personal as he witnessed the fate of his fellow Muslims at the hands of his own government.

But reflecting back on his own American roots once again, Mehanna follows with likely his most shocking statement of all:

I mentioned Paul Revere—when he went on his midnight ride, it was for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minuteman [sic]. By the time they got to Concord, they found the Minuteman [sic] waiting for them, weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat them. From that battle came the American Revolution. There’s an Arabic word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. That word is: JIHAD, and this is what my trial was about.

Can this seeming frontal assault on American patriotic identity really be taken seriously? Or is Mehanna just trying to provoke American ire?

Many will conclude the latter, but I would opt for the former; for I believe that Mehanna’s equating of one of the most detested ideas in contemporary public discourse with a foundational event of American patriotic nostalgia actually makes good sense. The American Revolution does accord quite well with the meaning of jihad as jihad is represented in the Qur’an and the works of many important Muslim scholars. In fact, I will go Mehanna one better and argue that, not only is jihad a good characterization of the American Revolution, but it is also a perfect lens through which to focus the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth—hence, the title of this book: Jesus and Jihad.

At this point, some readers will be ready to consign this book to the flames. But before warming your hands by the fire, consider the following: Jihad is simply not what the hysterical fearmongers want us to believe it is. By linking Jesus with jihad, I assure you I am not arguing that Jesus was a terrorist with no regard for the sanctity of human life! Quite the contrary. My purpose here is to reframe jihad, to rescue it from its hysterical Fox News–driven misrepresentations, and to recover it as a concept with the power to restore a prophetic heart to both Christianity and Islam—a prophetic heart in tremendous danger of being lost from both traditions much to the detriment of a world suffering under unspeakably inhumane systems of injustice. Viewed for its prophetic character, the Jesus/jihad connection should not appear so threatening. Still, some readers will be asking how such a universally vilified concept as jihad could ever be considered a force for justice—and a description of the mission of Jesus no less! But before I engage this question, please note that I am not alone in my belief in the profoundly helpful nature of Tarek Mehanna’s interpretation of jihad.

A few days after Mehanna’s sentencing hearing, Ross Caputi published a blog post titled If Tarek Mehanna is Guilty So Am I.² What makes Caputi’s support for Mehanna so noteworthy is that Caputi is a former U.S. combat marine who served in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. He fought in the battle for Fallujah in November 2004 and witnessed the deaths of several of his close friends at the hands of the Iraqi mujahideen. How could Caputi possibly find sympathy with Mehanna’s support for those who killed his fellow marines? On Caputi’s reading, all Mehanna is really guilty of is believing that Muslims have a right to defend themselves against outside invaders, just as any other people do. If this is a crime, Caputi confesses to sharing that guilt: I too support the right of Muslims to defend themselves against U.S. troops, even if that means they have to kill them. Caputi even accepts Mehanna’s wider understanding of the meaning of jihad and asserts, most Americans would be shocked to learn that they share many values with Jihadists, like duty, the importance of self-improvement, and the right to self-defense.

Indeed, Americans in general—even American Christians—will be shocked at how much they hold in common with an idea as vilified as jihad. If a combat marine who witnessed the deaths of close friends at the hands of jihad-waging Muslims can nevertheless find common cause with Mehanna’s support of those same jihadists, maybe the rest of us ought to approach this issue with a considerably more open mind. There is much that we do not understand about jihad. I seek to correct the record.

Allow me then to sketch out in broad outline the steps in my argument equating Jesus with jihad in order to demonstrate the idea’s potential merits. Subsequent chapters will then fill in the details to hopefully render the argument convincing. But whether my argument is convincing or not, we do have to realize that the common American perception of jihad as a holy war designed to spread Islamic influence to the far corners of the earth while destroying a Christian America has little basis in Islamic teachings and is nothing more than a harmful stereotype conjured up by well-funded Islamophobic networks in the West who seize on the ideas perpetuated by a minuscule minority of Muslim preachers in order to impugn the reputation of a diverse and complex tradition in its entirety. Nathan Lean brilliantly analyzes the highly coordinated character of this movement in his aptly titled book The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. Michele Bachmann, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and other high-profile Islamophobic figures may get the media attention they crave with their hysterical rantings about an imminent Muslim threat, but their knowledge of Islam appears to run about as deep as a rain puddle evaporating in the July sun. My purpose is to provide a much deeper and more nuanced discussion of Islam and jihad than is available from these fearmongering media darlings.

If we can positively engage the concept of jihad as it emerges from Islamic sources and the works of Muslim thinkers, we may be able to find a key to dismantling the antipathy that currently colors the relationship between so many Americans and their Muslim neighbors. It won’t be easy, but at least it is worth a try. Neither Christians nor Muslims will pass from the world stage anytime soon. Learning to live and work together is the only possible path to a peaceful future.

Connecting Jesus and Jihad

What does it mean to make the provocative—but nevertheless serious—claim that Jesus waged a jihad? And what does it mean to argue that embracing this Jesus/jihad connection may hold the key to reclaiming the prophetic heart of both Christianity and Islam—a prophetic heart in serious decline in both traditions, much to the detriment of a world in desperate need of a prophetic movement toward the establishment of justice and peace? Let me begin with the second question by considering the evidence for the claim that the prophetic heart of Christianity and Islam is fast disappearing. This may not be a controversial idea, but it will help here to clarify precisely how I am using the term prophetic. Once we have done this, we can work back to a detailed discussion of the Jesus/jihad connection and its importance for any attempt to reclaim a prophetic heart in service to a hurting world.

What exactly is a prophetic heart? The concept of prophecy is related by many people to telling the future. A prophet is one who makes predictions about the unfolding of future events, especially events of historic magnitude. Many times the term prophecy is used to describe speculations about the end of the world. Prophets are those who make end-time predictions or who try to discern the signs of the last days, like Hal Lindsey in his book The Late Great Planet Earth. This idea of the prophet as apocalyptic fortuneteller is a modern invention, however. When I speak of the prophetic, I am thinking of the way prophets functioned in the Bible—not as fortunetellers but as those who spoke truth to power. Biblical prophets primarily acted as social critics, prophetic disturbers who called their people to account for their ethical lapses and predicted the divine wrath that would result. It is in this sense of making prophetic disturbance that I think the prophetic heart of Christianity and Islam is quickly slipping away.

What is the evidence for this? Well, consider the following. The parts of the world where either Christianity or Islam is the dominant religion (and this is a significant part of the world) are struggling under