by Bruce Feiler
One afternoon I drove through the scorching, empty desert, passed through a bleak antechamber of cactus and vegetation, and finally arrived in this still-tense city of sixty thousand, which had suddenly erupted in sectarian violence in the days after the revolution and found itself thrust into the crosscurrents of one of the most pressing questions of the modern world: Can members of different religions live alongside one another without killing one another? At that moment, the answer appeared to be no.
The streets of Soul are not exactly paved with dreams. In fact they’re not even paved at all. They’re packed with a dense chocolate-colored dirt; they’re bumpy, ridged, potholed, occasionally muddy, and lined with trash, donkey dung, and squatters, who tuck themselves between the motorcycles and car repair shops, waiting for prayers, trouble, or, as the world had unfortunately just discovered, love. About 80 percent of Soul’s residents are Muslim, and fairly traditional Muslims at that. The rest are Copts, members of Egypt’s leading Christian sect and, at around 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East. The community traces its roots to the apostle Mark, who introduced Christianity to Egypt in the first century during the rapid spread of the so-called Jesus movement around the Mediterranean.
For several recent months, a forty-year-old Christian man named Ashraf Iskander had been having a romantic relationship with a Muslim woman. Some Muslims disapprove of such interreligious dating, and the woman’s cousin confronted her father, demanding that he take her life to protect the family’s reputation. Such in-family murders, not unknown around contemporary Egypt, are called honor killings. The father refused. The cousin promptly shot and killed the father. The man’s son—the brother of the woman in the relationship—then retaliated by shooting and killing the cousin.
Two murders. One day. Both Muslim-on-Muslim.
The victims were buried on a Friday. Following the funeral and noonday prayers, the crowd became agitated. They went looking for the Christian man at the heart of the relationship and were told he had sought refuge in the church. Four thousand angry Muslims then marched en masse to the house of worship, a four-story sanctuary and neighboring community center located down a tiny alley in the back of town. The crowd exploded five or six gas cylinders inside the building, pulled down the cross and other icons, and watched as the entire building was burned to a shell.
The episode rattled Copts across the country, who were already agitated in the wake of a New Year’s Eve church bombing in Alexandria that killed twenty-one and wounded dozens more and a shooting on a train ten days later that killed one Christian and wounded five. Inspired by techniques made popular during the revolution, two thousand Christians staged a sit-in outside the state television studios in Cairo, claiming the event was not sufficiently covered in the news. When word of the burning and the protests spread, riots broke out in a hilltop neighborhood of the capital famed for housing Christian garbage workers. Thirteen more people were killed and 150 wounded.
The number of people killed in sectarian violence during a six-week span was in the hundreds. The dream of a unified Egypt, revived by the revolution, seemed to be slipping away as fast as it had been created. It was exactly the sort of violence that Mubarak had warned about for years. Keep us in power or all hell will break loose. Egypt will disintegrate.
But then, just as quickly as this situation flared, something unexpected happened. A group of outsiders descended on Soul. What this group had in mind could alter the interreligious dynamic in the New Egypt virtually overnight. But could it succeed?
Just after nine on the morning of September 11, 2001, I got a call from my brother: “Look outside your window.” It had rained the night before, and the view from the sixteenth floor of my apartment building in lower Manhattan was spectacular. The sky was as blue and clear as I could ever remember. You could see forever. As soon as I saw the plumes of dense black smoke rising from the World Trade Center, I reacted as I often do to cataclysms around me: I was drawn to it. I grabbed my camera and began hurrying down Sixth Avenue in the direction of the fires. At one point I stopped and considered the unthinkable. What happens if those buildings fall? They could topple into each other. Tens of thousands of people might die! I quickly dismissed the idea as science fiction.
Two hours later I was back home and watched from my window as the first tower fell. The second tower followed soon after. In the days to come, as my neighborhood was overwhelmed with the steady cry of emergency sirens and the stomach-turning smell from the smoldering metal and rubble, we began to hear the questions: Who are they? Why do they hate us? Can’t the religions get along? For years we had been told that the big showdown in the coming century was the clash of civilizations between the Islamic world and the Judeo-Christian world. Was this the moment?
And in that conflagration, one name resonated. One figure stood at the nexus of all three religions: Abraham. The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual elder of the New Testament and the grand holy architect of the Qur’an. Abraham is the father—in some cases the biological father—of every Jew, Christian, and Muslim alive. Yet he is virtually unknown.
In the weeks after 9/11, I decided to return to the Middle East to figure out whether Abraham was just a hopeless fount of war or whether he could possibly be a vessel for reconciliation. I arrived in Jerusalem during an eerie, auspicious week. The city was empty of visitors. They had been scared away by a recent round of terrorist bombings there and by the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. It was also a rare, calendric coincidence: It was the last Friday before Christmas, the last Friday of Hanukkah, and the last Friday of Ramadan. Early that morning I went to the Old City and climbed a perch overlooking the Temple Mount. That fulcrum of history is the spot where Solomon built the Temple, where Jesus walked, and where Muhammad ascended to heaven. It’s also the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son.
Jerusalem on this day was a living embodiment of the challenges facing the three monotheistic religions. Thousands of Muslims streamed through the flagstone streets to gather atop what they call the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, the home of the third-holiest mosque in Islam. Down below, hundreds of Jews gathered at the Western Wall, the holiest spot in Judaism. Up above, Christians mingled on the Mount of Olives in the spectacular churches that mark Jesus’s last steps. In Jerusalem, any prayer made in the direction of one of these holy sites will by geography encompass another of these sites. You can’t separate the religions.
By midday, several hundred thousand Muslims had gathered on the plaza, and they rose for the holiest prayer of the month. Bending, kneeling, touching, standing, bending, kneeling, touching again. The tidal effect was awesome. More people praying in one place than live in my hometown. In their white tunics, they looked like giant waves of milk. At the same time, hundreds of Jews just beneath them were nodding, bowing, tucking notes into the wall. And at exactly noon, two dozen of the holiest churches in Christendom all burst into Christmas carols. It was the most joyful sound of faith I had ever heard. Then, just as quickly, the bells went quiet, the praying stopped, and the city held its breath. What would happen now?
The story of Abraham as it appears in the Bible is remarkably inclusive. When we first meet Abraham he’s seventy-five years old, married, and living in Mesopotamia. He can’t have a child. In a story about creation, he cannot create. He is the anti-God. God, meanwhile, is something of an antihuman. He has been looking for a human partner since the beginning of time. He first tries Adam and Eve, but they disappoint him. Fourteen generations pass before God tries again with Noah. That, too, fails, when Noah takes to drinking. Fourteen more generations pass. Then God tries again with Abraham. In effect, Abraham and God need each other.
So God offers him a deal. If Abraham goes forth from this native land to the land God shows him, God will give him a son. But God also promises to give him much more: “All the families of the earth shall bless themselves through you.” The breadth of this o
ffer is astonishing: Everyone who ever lives will consider you a blessing. Abraham takes the deal, forging a partnership with God that has never been undone. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims to receive God’s blessing, they must trace their lineage through Abraham.
The story of Abraham in Genesis reflects this broad diversity. Indeed, it’s a perfect tableau of the Fertile Crescent. Abraham is born in Mesopotamia, and his first wife, Sarah, comes from there. They travel down to Egypt, where Sarah takes a handmaid, Hagar. When no heir arrives, Sarah suggests that Abraham try to conceive with Hagar, who soon gives birth to Ishmael. Abraham finally has a son! But as soon as Ishmael is born, Sarah gets pregnant and gives birth to Isaac. Suddenly we have two sons, rivals for the father’s legacy, rivals for the same land. In the same way that Mesopotamia and Egypt jockeyed for millennia over who would maintain political and cultural control over Canaan—the area the Bible calls the Promised Land—Abraham’s descendants would continue a similar rivalry for thousands of years. Faith, geography, and politics have been part of every struggle in the Middle East.
The women in Abraham’s life, faced with this standoff, take matters into their own hands. Sarah forces Abraham to kick Ishmael into the desert. Abraham doesn’t want to; Ishmael is his firstborn son. But God comforts him. “Do not be distressed over the boy,” he says of Ishmael. “I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.” Ishmael, too, will carry God’s blessing. This moment represents the split between Jews and Christians and Muslims. Jews and Christians consider themselves descended from Isaac; Muslims from Ishmael.
But what’s striking is that while Isaac appears to be the “winner” of the battle for Abraham’s lineage, the text bends over backward to treat Ishmael well. Abraham expels Ishmael from the land, but not from his love. Isaac, who stays behind, is nearly slaughtered by his father in the very next scene and is largely mute for the rest of the story, even though he gets to live in the Promised Land. The narrative has remarkable balance. Neither son is a pure victor, nor a pure loser. God blesses Abraham and blesses both of his children. At the heart of the story is a message of two separate but equally legitimate traditions.
Or is there?
Though these stories appear in the Bible, there has never been any historical or archaeological evidence they really took place. This detail would appear to be problematic for the religions, but what actually happened is the opposite—the absence of any historical evidence helped the religions, because it allowed them to throw out the original story of Abraham and make up their own Abraham. Nearly every generation for the last 2,500 years has rewritten the story of Abraham for itself.
Judaism was the first to do this. Early Jews proclaimed that Abraham was a universal figure, but over time, as Jews began to feel oppressed, they began to take possession of Abraham for themselves. Commentators suggested Abraham was the reason God created the world; Abraham invented Passover; Abraham kept kosher—none of which is true about the original patriarch. Jews, in other words, turned Abraham into a Jew.
Christianity did something similar. Early Christians, who also felt oppressed, wanted to use Abraham as a universal figure, one whose blessing was opened to Jews and Gentiles alike. But over time, as Christians grew more powerful, they started using Abraham as a figure to exclude Jews. God didn’t call Abraham to go forth, commentators argued; Jesus did. God didn’t promise the Land to descendants of Abraham but rather to followers of Jesus. Just as Jews made Abraham a Jew when he wasn’t, Christians made Abraham a Christian, when he wasn’t that, either.
Then came Islam. Sure enough, in the religion’s vulnerable early years, Muhammad stressed that Muslims, Jews, and Christians worshiped the same God and had the same prophets, such as Abraham. But over time, as Islam grew more powerful, Muslims argued that Abraham cared more for Ishmael than Isaac, that he called for Muslims to make the pilgrimage, and that he built the shrine that all Muslims worship during the hajj. Muslims turned Abraham into a Muslim.
Much of my journey to understand Abraham was about trying to untangle this knot: How did the universal figure of Genesis, whom God chooses to spread his blessing to the world, suddenly become the object of bloody battle among his children? At first I thought this was nothing but a willfully ignorant rivalry, but later I came to see it as an opportunity. If every generation could create its own Abraham, why can’t we? What would our Abraham look like? He would look a lot like us. He would surf the Internet, he would need to lose ten pounds, and he would struggle to balance science and faith. More to the point, he would understand we live in a time in which religious-based terror is deadlier than ever, but in which the idea that one religion can become the world’s only religion is deader than ever. Above all, he would know we face a choice: figure out a way to coexist, or descend into an unwinnable war.
My book Abraham was published on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, at a time when Americans seemed particularly eager to learn more about Muslims and how we might improve interfaith relations. Suddenly I found myself thrust into the middle of a robust and contentious conversation about the meaning of religion in the twenty-first century. I didn’t know much about the interfaith movement before 9/11. If I’d thought about interreligious dialogue, I imagined it was probably little old ladies sipping lemonade and making themselves feel good with niceties like “You love butterflies; I love butterflies; see, we’re just the same!”
What I quickly discovered was a vibrant, and growing, international effort to rethink the foundations of exclusivist theology and design a new model for religious inclusion. In seminaries across the United States, administrators were rewriting their curricula; in churches, synagogues, and mosques, clerical leaders were throwing out old sermons. Laypeople, in particular, were often leading the way. In Portland, Oregon, the Episcopal Cathedral initiated a two-year citywide study program called the Abraham Initiative. In Portland, Maine, the Children of Abraham Down East created a statewide program to curtail violence. In New York, the Chautauqua Institution began a three-year Abrahamic Program of concentrated study. Groups in London, Jerusalem, and Alexandria started similar efforts.
Time magazine picked up on this trend and in September 2002 put Abraham on its cover. “Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim him as their father,” the magazine said. “Can he be their peacemaker?” The effect was electrifying. Suddenly interfaith relations became Topic A around the world. And suddenly Abraham, four thousand years after he would have been born, became a rock star.
Many people were skeptical of this movement, of course. Some people I encountered simply didn’t know believers of other faiths, or didn’t trust that the ones they did know were genuinely interested in exchange. I heard from plenty of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who believed unequivocally that their faith offers the exclusive claim to truth. Still others doubted that change was really possible. I replied that not only is such change possible, but it’s happened in our lifetimes. When I grew up in Georgia in the 1960s and ’70s, Jews were still systematically discriminated against in business, politics, and society. In less than half a century, Jews and Christians have completely rewritten the way they relate to one another. The current status may not be perfect, but who can deny that it has improved?
That process is just beginning with Muslims. Most of us didn’t learn until 9/11 that we were even supposed to include Muslims in this conversation. While the term Judeo-Christian first became popular in the United States in the 1950s, the term Abrahamic didn’t even enter the lexicon until 2001.
Despite the barriers, the movement did seem to gain traction for about five years after 9/11, when it suddenly hit a wall. The United States got bogged down in two wars in the Muslim world. Iran escalated its nuclear program and began saber rattling against Israel and others. The world slipped into a punishing recession. This tension seemed to boil over in the summer of 2010, after a Muslim group led by Sufi imam Feisal Abdul Rauf announced plans to build a Muslim community center and interfaith facility, called Park51, less than a mile
from the site of the World Trade Center. At first the plans generated little interest. Six hundred thousand Muslims live in the New York City area, and they are served by nearly two hundred mosques, including half a dozen in lower Manhattan.
But a pair of bloggers who ran a group called Stop Islamization of America deftly dubbed the facility the “Ground Zero mosque,” and a backlash quickly erupted. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, scores of local officials, and all the appropriate zoning boards approved the facility. Most Americans agreed that the group had a legal right to worship wherever they wanted. But a wide and diverse coalition, including cable news personalities, politicians, and 9/11 families, strongly objected to the move, claiming it was aggressive, insensitive, and yet another sign of Muslim incursion into the inner sanctums of American identity. In no time, three-quarters of Americans were against the idea.
The entire episode came to a head on the eve of the ninth anniversary of the original attacks, when Imam Rauf returned from the Middle East (where he was appearing on behalf of the U.S. State Department) and appeared live on CNN. He said that if he had known the planned facility would have caused pain, he wouldn’t have done it. But he refused to relocate it, saying that doing so would be buckling to radicals and would harm the United States’ position in the Muslim world. “The more that the radicals are able to control the discourse on one side,” he said, “it strengthens the radicals on the other side. We have to turn this around.”
I was backstage at CNN that night, waiting to join a panel after the interview. Next to me was Rosaleen Tallon, who lost her fireman brother in the Twin Towers. She clutched a photograph of her brother and was clearly still grieving. Next to her was Andy Sullivan, a fireman who had worked on the rescue effort, and who wore a helmet in tribute to his fallen colleagues. As Imam Rauf spoke, all three of us knew his defense was not as strong as it might have been and had little chance of reversing the widespread opposition. Sullivan leapt to his feet, pumped his arms in victory, and thrust his finger at the monitor. “We won!” he shouted.
