Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  A more visible example of this growing grip over Abraham involves Muhammad’s night journey. Sura 17 tells that God called Muhammad to make a night journey from the temple of Mecca to the “farther temple whose surroundings we have blessed.” Interpreters elaborated to say that while Muhammad was sleeping at the Ka’ba, the angel Gabriel woke him and mounted him on the miraculous beast Buraq, who carried him to Jerusalem. There he met and prayed with “God’s friend Abraham,” as well as Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. A ladder then appeared and Muhammad ascended to heaven.

  In heaven, Muhammad once again met various prophets, including Moses, “a man of dark color, great build, and a crooked nose.” In the seventh level of heaven, Muhammad saw a man of mature age sitting on a chair at the gate of paradise. “I never saw a man who more resembled me,” Muhammad said. “And Gabriel said: this is your ancestor Abraham.” Muhammad no longer just emulates Abraham; he now resembles him. The link between them is not just spiritual, or even ancestral, it’s physical.

  The familiar wheel is beginning to turn again. Abraham is moving from being considered a universal figure open to all religions to being considered a more exclusive figure who favors one faith. Islam is beginning to put itself in the position toward its monotheistic forebears that Christianity earlier put itself in toward Jews. We understand the true faith of Abraham that you somehow corrupted, Muslims suggest, therefore we have replaced you in God’s eyes.

  Once again, interpreters found lines that supported their case in the Koran. Sura 3, for example, says, “The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam. Those to whom the Scriptures were given disagreed among themselves, through insolence, only after knowledge had been vouchsafed them. He that denies God’s revelations should know that swift is God’s reckoning.” For Muslims, the message of passages like this became clearer with time: Islam didn’t supersede Christianity and Judaism, it preceded them. Islam, in fact, was the faith of Abraham, which his descendants twisted for their own purposes. Put another way: Before Abraham was, Islam am.

  It was during this period, beginning around the tenth century and continuing for several hundred years, that Islam was at its political and cultural peak, dominating the world from the Indian Subcontinent to the Caucasus, from Central Asia into Southern and Central Europe. Many of the apparent conflicts among the religions were forged during this time, including the idea that Ishmael was the son Abraham was called to sacrifice. When I asked Sheikh Abu Sneina which of Abraham’s sons was involved in the dream of sacrifice, he said Ishmael, and proceeded to lay out all the arguments.

  “So this is a situation where the Bible is wrong?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Muslim superiority toward Jews and Christians eventually entered the political realm. In some places non-Muslims were ghettoized, forced to ride asses instead of horses, obliged to ride sidesaddle instead of astride, and even prevented from going out of doors when it rained or snowed lest their contaminants spread. As early as the ninth century, Christians and Jews in Baghdad were obliged to wear yellow emblems on their clothes, the origin of the yellow badge later used by the Nazis against Jews.

  The great historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, has written that Muslim discrimination against nonbelievers, while profound, never reached the levels of Christian hostility to Jews. “On the whole, in contrast to Christian anti-Semitism,” he wrote in The Jews of Islam, “the Muslim attitude toward non-Muslims is one not of hate or fear or envy but simply of contempt.”

  This mind-set changed in the twentieth century with the struggles over European colonization in the Middle East, the emergence of the State of Israel, and the rise of American hegemony. These political battles gradually began to infect the religious dialogue, so that even a conversation about Abraham among Jews, Christians, and Muslims today often deteriorates into a disagreement about Jerusalem, Palestine, Osama bin Laden, Jewish settlements, suicide bombers, Iraqi schoolchildren, Iranian hostages, the Gulf War, Jewish control of the media, the Saudi royal family, the CIA, the Mossad.

  And, inevitably, the will of God.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I went to see Sheikh Abu Sneina, I met a Palestinian friend at a hotel in Jerusalem, piled into the back of his beaten-up sedan, and headed deep into East Jerusalem to meet the imam of his local mosque. I had discussed Abraham with my friend, a tour guide and amateur archaeologist, and he offered to introduce me to his neighborhood cleric. “My brother studies with him every week,” my friend said.

  Masoud El Fassed was sitting in elegant robes on a small sofa in a shiny living room with white linoleum floors. He had a short white beard and wore an embroidered skullcap. His manner was gracious, if distant. He was not eager to answer questions about his background, even though his English was eloquent from years in London. When my friend and his brother served us teacups filled with warm, sweet yoghurt, walnuts, and cinnamon, we paused to enjoy what seemed like the best thing I had ever tasted in the Middle East.

  Our conversation began in the ordinary way, as we talked about Abraham in the Bible and the Koran, his building of the Ka’ba, his night journey to Jerusalem. But when the topic turned to the sacrifice, the imam’s tone shifted, as he began to suggest that Isaac was inferior to Ishmael. In the Bible, he said, even the prophets denounce the behavior of the Jews because they ignore the word of God. “Moses said it. David said it. Malachi said it,” he mentioned. “They all said that if the Jews don’t follow the will of God they will wreak God’s revenge. All the problems started with Isaac.”

  “So from your point of view God prefers Ishmael over Isaac?” I said.

  “God does not prefer so-and-so,” he said. “He prefers the people who worship him correctly.”

  “And the descendants of Ishmael worship him correctly?”

  “Look at the Muslim nation,” he said, “look around the whole world. We worship God around the clock, five times a day, then do extra prayers. Look at the Jews and Christians, you don’t worship God as Muslims do.”

  “So what will happen to the descendants of Isaac who pray incorrectly?” I asked.

  “God gives you the opportunity to submit yourselves to him and follow the rule of God. But you ignore him because you have become strong. You can deliver your message around the world, you can switch the mind of the people. You do the opposite of what God wants. You open banks, sexual places, gambling. Evil things. God gives you many chances, but of course we know that you’re not going to follow.

  “And look at what happened,” he continued, his voice animated but hardly hostile. “He sent people very strong, who killed themselves, in order to kill you. This is something unbelievable what happened in America, but it came from God.”

  At this point I was taken aback by his words but not outraged. I stayed calm, trying to follow his line of thought. I looked across the room. My friend was sinking in his chair, but his older brother was sitting erect, his eyes wide, his head nodding approvingly. He held the shoulders of his four-year-old son, making sure he faced the imam. The boy was rapt.

  “So let me make sure I understand you correctly,” I said. “You’re saying that if I’m a Jew, and I’m a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I follow the laws of the Torah and I’m not following the true laws of Abraham and the Creator, then I’m going to be punished?”

  “According to your Bible, yes. According to the Koran, yes. And the reason is because you abhor Islam and try to destroy the religion of the Creator. By forcing your ideas and way of thinking on the world, you show your hatred for God. Now you must follow the last prophet he sent. And then you’ll be saved.”

  “So what will happen to me?” I asked. I was looking directly at him.

  He looked directly back. “You’ll die.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “The punishment is going to come from the Creator,” he continued, “but of course through the people. Like Hitler, for instance. According to the Jews, Hitler killed six million people. I was asking myself, �
�Why does Hitler love the Jews so much that he grilled them alive?’ I understood why when I studied the Bible. The Jews don’t do what the Creator wants. They do the opposite.”

  At this point it was clear that our conversation was over, and I began to wonder how exactly I would get home. Was I being set up somehow? Was this a misunderstanding? Or was this just casual after-dinner discussion in East Jerusalem, with tea, crumpets, and chitchat about genocide? I had to ask another question.

  There’s a conversation going on in the world, I mentioned, among people of different faiths, who are attempting to see if they can get along, live side by side. “Can they?”

  “We are Muslims,” he said. “And this is Muslim land. If you want to live among us, what you believe is your problem. This is the message of God. Read it in the Bible, read it in the Koran.”

  “So there’s no message of hope, not even in Abraham?”

  “Usually that message comes from people who do not believe in God. Abraham is the father of one religion, and that religion is Islam.”

  I DID GET HOME safely that night, riding silently back in the car with my friend. I craved a shower. The whole encounter left me rattled, and sad. I immediately wanted to forget it, pretend it didn’t happen. Who was this guy who wouldn’t tell me two things about himself? Was he a religious figure at all? Or was he just an agitator?

  “It doesn’t matter,” said a journalist friend who writes a lot about religion in the region. “The unfortunate truth is that he represents the mainstream in Islam at the moment. You can find Jews who have a similar message of Jewish nationalism, but not that many. You can find apocalyptic Christians, but still a limited number. Your imam represents the bulk of Muslims, at least around here.”

  Because of my experience in East Jerusalem, I waited about an hour into my conversation with Sheikh Abu Sneina the following day before broaching the subject of politics. The sheikh was also known as something of a flamethrower. He would not be giving the closing sermon of Ramadan at El-Aksa unless he was prepared to use the platform of the third holiest mosque in Islam to rouse Palestinian hostility toward Israel. “Muslim Palestine is one and cannot be divided,” he had said in a recent sermon. “Palestine is waqf land, part of the religious trust that belongs to Muslims throughout the world. No one has the right to give it up. Whoever does is a traitor to the trust and is nothing but a criminal whose end shall be in hell.”

  As our meeting was drawing to a close, I mentioned the interfaith conversation in the world and asked whether he believed Abraham was a uniting figure or a dividing figure.

  “If Muslims, Jews, and Christians follow what is mentioned in the Koran, then Abraham can be a uniting figure,” he said, and I felt we might be heading down a path similar to that of the night before. “But even if Jews and Christians just follow what’s mentioned about Abraham in the Bible, then we can reach unity.”

  Now this was a new idea. “But we have two different texts,” I said.

  “But the principle is the same,” he said. “You have a true heart, you have to believe there is one God. Maybe we have different approaches, but the destination is the same.”

  This was so radical in its openness that I didn’t quite believe it at first. I mentioned that the previous Friday I had stood on a perch overlooking El-Aksa as he spoke. I could see Jews praying, Muslims praying, all the churches with their bells ringing. “And everybody could hear everybody else.”

  He laughed. “So what is your question?”

  “Was that the sound of conflict or the sound of peace?”

  “As Muslims we have the order to pray, to believe according to Islam, and God asks us very clearly to protest against other groups who have other beliefs. We want to spread Islam, to have a jihad. But that doesn’t mean we have to fight. Jihad does not mean to fight people, it means to invite people to Islam, which is highly misunderstood, both historically and now. But this can be done peacefully.”

  “I would like to believe that,” I said. “But people are dying. I live in New York.”

  “The situation is very difficult. There are problems in Palestinian society. People are deprived from coming to El-Aksa. Every family knows people who are prisoners, or who were killed. This political domination threatens religious tolerance. So religion is mixed with politics, you see.”

  “So when I look at the situation, should I feel sad, or concerned? Or should I feel that in the future the spirit of Abraham can prevail?”

  “You should feel sadness,” the imam said, “not just for the Muslim world but also for Jews and Christians.”

  We nodded.

  “But despite this sadness,” he continued, “hope must endure. We all sacrifice. We all have people killed. It’s the same for Palestinians and Israelis, for Christians and Jews, for Americans, for people all over the world. We must find a way.”

  For the first time all morning I felt the imam emerging from his defensive posture. He was sitting on the edge of his chair now. His arms were stretching wide, his hands upstretched. His eyes burned. He was a preacher. He was a leader.

  I lifted my voice in response. I moved to the edge of my chair, too. I swung my arms out wide. “So I give you a microphone,” I said. “You can speak to the whole world. And I ask you to speak about Abraham. What is your message?”

  We were sitting face-to-face now. The gap between us had disappeared. “Abraham was a man of faith,” he began. “He worshiped God, and was thankful for God. He invented monotheism. He had high values. If all people—not just Muslims, Christians, Jews—follow the correct path of Abraham, I’m sure life would be better. But we are not doing that. The situation we are facing is that people are living their daily lives far away from the truly faithful, and from Abraham. If we look beyond the details, which we may disagree about, and follow the principles of Abraham—truth, morality, and coexistence—then most of our problems will disappear.”

  He finished with a rousing flourish of his hands and immediately stood up. I stood up, too, and we shook hands. I felt the impulse to embrace him but stopped short. The imam of El-Aksa, who had memorized the Koran and all the sayings of the prophets, had proclaimed that we could look beyond the details and focus on the principles. It seemed like enough of an embrace.

  Out on the street a few minutes later, I stood by myself. The guards had disappeared. The rain had stopped. The sun was pushing through the clouds. I didn’t quite know what to do. Part of me wanted to alert the media and tell them what I had heard: FIREBRAND IMAM DELIVERS A SERMON OF RECONCILIATION: “IGNORE THE DETAILS, EMBRACE ABRAHAM.” Part of me wanted to call the peace negotiators.

  Mostly I just wanted to believe.

  So I slung my backpack over my shoulder. I turned my back to the Haram al-Sharif. And I walked.

  8

  * * *

  LEGACY

  * * *

  THE MOUNTAIN HIGH ROAD that leads south from Jerusalem toward Beer-sheba was once called the Patriarchs’ Road, because it’s the route the biblical forefathers took from the Galilee to the Negev. Abraham took this road on his first trek through the Promised Land, from Shechem to Bethel and down to Egypt. In recent years, the same route was called the Tunnel Road, because it contains the two longest tunnels in Israel. These days, the route is called the Blood Road, because it’s the main target of Israeli and Palestinian snipers boring down from rival hills.

  On a bitter, brilliant Thursday morning I set out on this road toward Hebron, one of the deadliest cities on the planet, the epicenter of Muslim-Jewish warfare, and the one place that most contains the echoes—and possibly the glimmers—of reconciliation. All three faiths agree Abraham bought land here, buried Sarah here, and was buried himself here. A building constructed over their burial caves two thousand years ago contains memorials to Abraham and Sarah, as well as to Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have struggled for control of the site for generations.

  Some have been willing to kill for it. Hebron, about twenty-five mi
les south of Jerusalem, was long a benchmark of coexistence; Jews and Muslims lived peacefully here for centuries and prayed together at the tombs (though Jews were restricted to the seventh step outside the building and were denied entrance). In Arabic the town is called El Khalil, or “the friend,” the same name the Koran gives to Abraham. The name in Hebrew is Hevron, a derivative of haver, which also means “friend.”

  But for the last century the town has become a symbol of fanaticism. Riots in 1929, followed by decades of skirmishes, a massacre in 1994, and round-the-clock sniper fire, booby-trap bombs, and drive-by shootings have left the final resting place of Abraham a gory, embroiled, unrestful hive. The larger area is even worse. Just the night before I went, the Israeli military raided a Palestinian home in the city. A suspected Islamic militant fled into the night, and the soldiers shot and killed him. The story was so routine it didn’t even make the front page of the papers.

  “Aren’t you nervous?” I asked my Palestinian friend Nasser, a Jerusalemite and cabdriver who agreed to shuttle me the one hour south to Hebron. In his late twenties with a veteran’s sly nose for bridging the hostility between East and West, he was calm, even laconic, as he picked me up and turned down the hill toward the first tunnel, just minutes from the Old City.

  “No,” he said. “Actually, it’s something most Muslims feel. I believe if I’m going to die—or be shot—it’s my destiny. God wants me to die at this moment. Even if I’m at home, then I’ll die. So why should I be afraid to go to dangerous places? This is what helps suicide bombers kill themselves. They believe it’s their destiny.”

  “So you have no choice?”

  “Correct. There are three things in Islam you have no control over: your money, your marriage, and your death. These are things that are determined by God.”