Xmas
Palm Tree
By
William Dalrymple
In late December, the plains of North
India turn suddenly cold and grey. Towards
evening, as the sun is beginning to set over the minarets of the village
mosques, smoke from the buffalo-dung cooking-fires begins to mass in a
flat layer at the level of the tree tops. By dusk, the layer has turned
into a vaporous mist, which thickens and curdles overnight to form by
morning a dense fog. Some fifteen years ago, on just such a bleak, cold
dawn, I climbed the long flight of ceremonial steps leading up to the
great mosque at Faithful Sikri. This lay in the heart of the ruined Moghul
capital built by the sixteenth century Emperor Akbar, a few miles to the
West of Agra. I was a 19 year old backpacker, and it was my first visit to
India. I had just spent my first Christmas away from home, and I was
enjoying the sensation of complete disorientation. It was immediately
after Christmas, I kept thinking, but not only was there not a Christmas
tree or a Christmas decoration in sight, there was nothing even remotely
Christian to be seen- or so I thought.. For when I reached the top of the
steps that rose to the Buland Darwaza- the massive domed, arched gate
leading into the Imperial mosque- I saw something that confused me even
further. Here was one of the greatest pieces of Muslim architecture in
India, but according to my guidebook, the strip of Persian calligraphy,
which framed the arch, read as follows:
"Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a
Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He, who hopes for a
day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in
prayer, for the rest is unseen.
The inscription was doubly surprising: not only was I taken aback to find
an apparently Christian quotation given centre stage in a Muslim monument,
but the inscription itself was unfamiliar. It certainly sounded the sort
of thing Jesus might have said, but did Jesus really say that the world
was like a bridge? And even if he had, why would a Muslim Emperor want to
place such a phrase over the entrance to the main mosque in his capital
city? Weren’t he Christians regarded as the enemies and rivals of the
Muslims- and vice versa? This was certainly the impression I had been
given at my Catholic school where I had only ever come across Islam in the
confrontational context of the Crusades.
It was only much later, after I had lived and travelled in India and the
Middle East for several years that I began to be able to answer some of
these questions. The phrase emblazoned over the gateway was, I learned,
one of several hundred sayings and stories of Jesus that fill Arabic and
Islamic literature. Some of these derive from the four canonical gospels,
others from now rejected early Christian texts like the Gnostic Gospel of
Thomas, others again from the wider oral Christian culture-compost of the
Near East- possibly authentic sayings and stories, in other words, which
Islam has retained but which Western Christianity has lost.
These sayings of Jesus circulated around the Muslim world from Spain to
China, and many are still familiar to educated Muslims today. They fill
out and augment the profoundly reverential picture of Christ painted in
the Koran where Jesus is called the Messiah, the Messenger, the Prophet,
Word and Spirit of God, though- in common with some currents of heterodox
Christian thought of the period- his outright divinity is questioned. The
Koran calls Christians the nearest in love, to Muslims, whom it instructs
in to "dispute not with the People of the Book [that is, the Jews and
Christians] save in the most courteous manner and say we believe in what
has been sent down to us and what has been sent down to you; our God and
your God is one.
I have been thinking a lot about that quotation over the last three
months. Ever since September the 11th we have seen some of the right-wing
Qualities,- as well as the tabloids- united in an often virulent bout of Islamophobia,
as a hundred instant experts in Islam have popped up to offer their
disparaging views on a religion few seem ever to have encountered in
person. After the scale of horror of the atrocity in New York perhaps this
sort of thing is inevitable; but it doesn’t alter the fact that the
image these writers are projecting of Islam- particularly vis-à-vis its
relations with Christianity- is a ludicrously unbalanced, inaccurate and
one-sided one.
For the links that bind Christianity and Islam are so deep, and so
complex, and so intricately woven, that the more you learn about them, the
more the occasional confrontations between the two religions begin to seem
like a civil war between two different streams of the same tradition than
any essential clash of two incompatible civilisations.
When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet's armies in
the seventh century, they assumed that Islam was merely a variant form of
Christianity: Islam of course accepts much of the Old and New Testaments,
obeys the Mosaic laws about circumcision and ablutions, and venerates both
Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets. The early Life of Muhammad relates
how, when Muhammad entered Mecca in triumph and ordered the destruction of
all idols and images, he came upon a picture of the Virgin and Child
inside the Ka’ba. Reverently covering the icon with his cloak, he
ordered all other images to be destroyed, but the image of the Madonna to
be looked on as sacrosanct.
When Muhammad's successor Abu Bakr stood on the borders of Syria he gave
very specific instructions to his soldiers: "In the desert, he said, "you
will find people who have secluded themselves in cells; let them alone,
for they have secluded themselves for the sake of God. Likewise, when his
successor Omar went to Syria, he actually stayed with the Bishop of Ayla
and went out of his way to meet the Christian Holy Men in the town. For
many years Muslims and Christians used to pray side by side in the great
churches of the Middle Eastern cities: in Damascus, for example, the great
basilica of St John was used for worship by both Christians and Muslims;
only fifty years later were Christians obliged to pray elsewhere and the
building formally converted into what is now known as the great Umayyad
mosque.
A s late as 649 AD a Nestorian bishop wrote: "These Arabs fight not
against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they
revere our priests and saints, and they make gifts to our churches and
monasteries. There were never any conversions by the Sword, a myth much
propagated in anti-Islamic literature.
Indeed, the greatest theologian of the early church, St. John of Damascus
(d. 749), was convinced that Islam was at root not a new religion, but
instead a variation on a Judeo-Christian form. This perception is
particularly remarkable as St. John had unique access to the fountainhead
of Islamic thinking in the earliest days of the faith. He had grown up in
the Ummayad Arab court of Damascus- the hub of the young Islamic world-
where his father was chancellor, and he was an intimate boyhood friend of
the future Caliph al-Yazid; the two boys drinking bouts in the streets of
Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the streets of the
new Islamic capital. But, in his old age, St. John took the habit at the
remote desert monastery of Mar Saba, where he began work on his great
masterpiece, the Fount of Knowledge.
I first really heard about St John of Damascus and his writings was when I
went to spend a few night in Mar Saba in the course of a journey around
the monasteries of the Middle East in 1994. Mar Saba lay tucked into a
cliff face in the wastes of Judea, a spectacular near vertical plunge of
chapels, cells and oratories. One night, while the monks were still
singing their vespers in the chapel, and their chant of their kyries were
echoing around the rock-cut corridors of the monastery, I was taken by the
monastery guestmaster to see the cave with St John wrote The Font of
Knowledge. With a flickering storm lantern in his hand, he led the way to
a small cell backing onto a rock wall, its ceiling cut so low as to make
standing virtually impossible.
"St John spent thirty years in that cell," he said.
"Although he could not stand he hardly ever went out of it. He
believed he had become too proud of his high position in the court of
Damascus, so he chose this cave in which to live as a monk.
It was here that St John of Damascus wrote his critique of Islam, the
first ever penned by a Christian. Intriguingly, John- the ultimate
insider- regarded Islam as a form of Christianity closely related to the
heterodox Christian doctrine of Arianism: after all this doctrine, like
Islam, took as its starting point the idea that on Christmas Day God could
not have become fully human without somehow compromising his divinity.
Used to the often-surrealistic scriptures of the Gnostics, then in
widespread circulation among the Christians of the Near East, John was
apparently unworried by the points where the Koran diverges from the basic
narrative of the Gospels- such as the very full but oddly unfamiliar
description it gives of the first Christmas. In this Koranic version,
Jesus' birth takes place not in a stable but under a palm tree in an
oasis, shortly after which the Christ child, still in his swaddling
clothes, sits up and addresses Mary’s family with the words: "I am
the servant of God. He has given me the Gospel and ordained me a prophet.
His blessing is upon me wherever I go, and he has commanded me to be
steadfast in prayer and to give alms to the poor as long as I shall live.
I was blessed on the day I was born; and blessed I shall be on the day of
my death; and may peace be upon me on the day when I shall be raised to
life."
Islam of course grew up the largely Christian environment of the Late
Antique Levant, and the longer you spend in the ancient Christian
communities of India the Middle East, the more you become aware of the
extent to which Eastern Christian practice formed the template for what
were to become the basic conventions of Islam. The Muslim form of prayer
with its bowings and prostrations appears to derive from the older Syrian
Orthodox tradition that is still practised in pewless churches across the
Levant. The architecture of the earliest minarets, which are square rather
than round, unmistakably derive from the church towers of
Byzantine Syria, while Ramadan, at first sight one of the most distinctive
of Islamic practices, bears startling similarities to Lent, which in the
Eastern Christian churches still involves- as it once used to in the West-
a gruelling all-day fast.
Perhaps no more branch of Islam shows so Christian influence as Islamic
mysticism or Sufism. For Sufism with its Holy Men and visions, healings
and miracles, its affinity with the desert and its emphasis on the
mortification of the flesh and the individual's personal search for union
with God, has always borne remarkable similarities to the more mystical
strands of Eastern Christianity, and many Muslim saints- such as the great
Mevlana Rumi- worked to reconcile the two religions. Indeed the very word
Sufi seems to indicate a link with Christianity. For Suf means wool which
was the characteristic clothing material of Eastern Christian monks, which
was taken over by the early Mystics of Islam. Other styles of dress
adopted by the Sufis are also anticipated in pre-Islamic Christianity: the
patchwork frock made from rags, and the use of the colour of mourning,
black for the Christians, dark blue for the Muslims. Another interesting
link- at the extreme edge of both Christian and Muslim asceticism- is the
wearing of heavy chains. This was a practice first adopted by the
Christian Grazers and which was later adopted by some Sufi sects. Through
punishing the flesh, such exercises were believed by both groups pf
ascetics to induce visions and spiritual ecstasy.
Certainly if a monk from sixth century Byzantium were to come back today
it is probable that he would find much more that was familiar in the
practices and beliefs of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with, say, a
contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by
our tendency to think of Christianity as a thoroughly Western religion
rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. The recent deionisation of
Islam in the Christendom, and deep and growing resentment felt in the
Islamic world against the Christian West, has created an atmosphere where
few on either side are still aware of, or even wish to be aware of, the
profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.
I first came across the idea of Christ as an object of Muslim devotion
when I read that inscription quoting Jesus, son of Mary, on Whom be Peace,
on the gateway at Fatehpur Sikri. Last month I came across a Mughal
miniature, now on display in the British Library, which was probably
painted within that city soon after the gateway had been built. It is a
nativity scene, with Mary and the Christ child and wise men coming to
offer gifts. But the wise men are Mughal courtiers, Mary is attended by a
Mughal serving girls, and the Christ child and his mother are sitting
under a palm tree. As this miniature shows, there are certainly major
differences between the two faiths- not least the central fact, in
mainstream Christianity, of Jesus' divinity. But Christmas the ultimate
celebration of Christ’s humanity- is a feast which Muslims and
Christians can share together without reservation. At this moment when the
Christian West and Islamic East seem to be heading for another major
confrontation, there has never been a greater need for both sides to
realise what they have in common and, as in this miniature, to gather
around the Christ child, to pray for peace.
Source: Rense.com (http://www.rense.com)
William Dalrymple, a Scottish Catholic travel writer, walked all over the
Middle East following the footsteps of a 6th century Palestinian poet and
divine, John Moschus. His travelogue, From The Holy Mountain
(HarperCollins 1997), is a compulsory and compelling reading for all
lovers of the Holy Land.& nbsp; Visit his website at <a href="http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com">www.williamdalrymple.uk.com This
text was originally broadcast by the BBC Radio 4.
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