• Home
• Articles
• Blogs
• Videos
• Buyer's Guide
• Consultant Directory
• Training & Certification
• Bookstore
• Jobs

Blood and water in the Muslim world

by: Rebecca Barnes

The European customs official furrowed his brow at my responses. He didn’t understand what business a Christian writer, an editor of a Web site dedicated to churches, would have in an Islamic state.

"But there are no churches in Afghanistan," he said. He was the one roadblock left on my way back to the United States last month after visiting Kabul.

"No," I replied. No churches. No church growth. No church health. No fellowship except in secret. No discipleship except discreet e-mails. No overt evangelism, only hushed conversations behind closed doors, maybe. Worship is private and ministry done as humanitarian aid. And prayer, well …

Five times a day "muezzins" call Muslims to prayer throughout the growing Islamic world: the Middle East, Northern Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia. Beginning early in the morning a call begins with "Allah …"

It is not a song so much as a musical chanting that repeats: "God is Great; I testify that there is no god but God; I testify that Muhammad is God's messenger; Come to prayer; Come to salvation; God is Great;There is no god but God."

And the people must answer the call, kneel and pray. Islam requires faithfulness. It promotes an obligation to God that includes daily prayers, fasting and other dietary regulations, offerings and helping the poor.

But the dust in the air of drought-stricken Kabul is heavy with the oppression of a religion that tells its followers God is demanding and faith is obligatory. In a religious culture where women continue to cover themselves entirely with a burqa that drapes them head to toe in blue, and screens their eyes from full view, it is difficult to understand any liberty, much less the freedom that comes through faith in Christ.

Perhaps it was my American nature more than my Christian faith that championed the women who pulled off their burqas, expressing a freedom that while no longer strictly prohibited is still frowned upon by either the most devout, or the most fundamental. And it was the most fundamental of fundamentalists, the Taliban, who began much of the trouble in Afghanistan just a decade ago.

High above the rooftops from the minaret, the mosque’s tower, the call to prayer is broadcast, live or from a recording. When the electricity is on the sound flits garbled and tinny through a loudspeaker haphazardly strapped to the side of a column that may be hundreds of years its senior.

Rebecca Barnes, editor

Many mosques have withstood the wars. Even when the Taliban burned and bulldozed entire villages, the mosques were often left standing. Sometimes they are the only painted building looming blue and white high above the rubble of the rest.

They are icons like the flags and crosses that sprouted everywhere in America after Sept. 11, 2001. They remind people of something else, symbols of faith and hope.

Yet the subtle differences between a cross-topped steeple and a crescent-topped mosque are important. It is perhaps the similarities in the religions of Islam and Christianity that have so confused and angered, and created tension since Islam began in the 7th Century. But the critical difference in the two faiths was evident to me on the faces of the people in Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates, even Muslims I see now, like the group of veiled women at the dollar store and the reserved little boy who rides my daughter’s bus. His name is Achmed.

Instead of the joy of salvation, Muslims have conditions and constraints. They have pleas that in the end they will go to heaven. Instead of a God who loves them, a God of mercy, they have a God who requires much and judges them harshly. That shows in their eyes.

Being in Kabul was like stepping back into the time period of the Old Testament, with mud brick buildings, dusty streets and people dressed in robes and sandals. Add to that a strange post-modern mix of old and new, war and peace.

The streets fill with veiled women in taxis, donkey carts pulling potatoes or grass in front of armed guards beside walled compounds sandbagged and looped with barbed wire. Brightly dressed Hazara people lead camels tied down with giant bundles, livestock and children. Kabuli return to their city atop ornately decorated cargo trucks. They smash themselves into already full vans and busses.

Thousands of Afghans pour into Kabul every day, returning home or seeking a better life in the city.

Commerce continues as shopkeepers open their stalls early each morning and fire up their generators to keep the lights on until well after dark. There are open-air markets of fruit and vegetables displayed on wooden-wheeled carts, shops with stationery, sodas, videos and books, rugs, cookies and nan bread, kabobs.

Being there was also like stepping back into the theology of the Old Testament, a religion of ceremonial washing, sacrifices and separation from God. Except in Islam there is no hope of a coming Messiah. Hope comes from working on your good outweighing your bad. So you pray and fast and help the poor so that even if you do something wrong, all the right things you have already deposited in the bank of your eternity will cover your mistakes, your sins.

A cramp began to develop in my gut. It was the salvation I carried within me from Christ, who paid my debt in full and continues to issue me constant credit. And it began to weigh on me like survivor guilt among people who will one day die. It began to weigh heavier the more I saw. I realized what it meant that I could not share my faith there.

There was one Afghan, however, whose smile broke through the stomach knot. This former Muslim met with us in secret to pray in the name of Jesus. This person cannot share the Christian faith either, not even with family, in fact especially not with family, whose legitimate Muslim recourse may be to kill the convert. So no one else knows that an Afghan calls me "sister." And that makes me cry.

So when someone asked me what I would do upon my return to America I quickly responded, "kiss the ground." Not because of ketchup or Starbucks, but because of freedom. It isn’t because of political freedom, although that is surely part of it, but rather religious freedom.

I was still free in Afghanistan, even under the long dress and long sleeves. My mind was free, even beneath the large scarf covering my head. And even though I was restricted from sharing my faith, I was still free to believe it, to hope in the love of Christ, to pray.

A new billboard reads, "Welcome to Kabul." The mix of new and old, construction and destruction characterizes a place in transition.

As the third anniversary of Sept. 11th arrives and Americans remember that dark day, this year instead of thinking only of New York and the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania, I think also of Kabul. For even now when I close my eyes the Afghans are still staring back at me, millions who continue to be victims of what author Sebastian Junger called the "extremist perversion of Islam."

"Blood cannot be washed out with blood," the Afghan proverb states. So while the radical Muslims promote violence, and terrorism continues under the guise of religion, perhaps there lingers some remote hope in the ethos of a culture that once believed that violence will never make things right.

But as I read that proverb again, "Blood cannot be washed out with blood," I hear the rhetoric of my own faith in contrast. Admittedly, blood sacrifice is a difficult doctrine to comprehend. That the blood of Jesus can wash out sins sounds strange even to my Christian ears — strange, but true. Christ’s blood can wash out even bloody sins: murders, killings, wars, suicide bombers … if they only knew. But those fighting a jihad are counting on their own blood washing away the blood. They count on their martyrdom to assure their salvation — the only possible assurance of salvation in Islam.

If only we could tell them, somehow, that they cannot save themselves by doing good, even the good they do that is pure evil.

It is difficult, no — impossible — to imagine a free church in a land so notoriously intolerant of religious freedom. Yet just as steadfastly as the Afghans rebuilding their bombed-out nation one mud brick at a time, I cling to the hope that Christianity will return to this war-torn land.

Christianity is a part of the old history of Afghanistan. Centuries before the War on Terror, the Taliban, the Mujahadeen, the Russian occupation, the British occupation, Gengis Khan, and Islam, the message of Christ was there. The fact that there is no trace of it left in the Islamic state now is of no consequence. In fact the situation lends itself to God’s glory. It requires a miracle, a divine intervention like water from a desert rock.

"In the ditch where water has flowed, it will flow again," another Afghan proverb states. When the water comes again, I pray it will be living water.