** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 748 14 November 17 CHRISTIAN JIHAD

PREACHING A CHRISTIAN JIHAD AT THE ARBAEEN REMEMBRANCE OF IMAM HUSSEIN'S MARTYRDOM
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It had long been my ambition to summon Muslims to a jihad. The other day I did it. And it felt good!

To explain. What is a jihad? Violence? Military aggression? Bloodshed? Nope. That’s what the uninstructed believe. The word comes from an Arabic verb, 'jahada’, that means striving or struggling. Thus a Muslim friend told me of his pregnant wife engaged in the ‘jihad’ of childbirth. I have heard Arab-speaking Christians from Lebanon talking of their ‘jihad’ or efforts in daily life. However, in Islam jihad particularly signifies an inner battle against one’s own lower drives and desires. A form of self-discipline. The famous mystic al-Ghazali never alludes to an armed jihad. Only to its spiritual sense.

In front of John Nash’s ornate Marble Arch, based on Rome’s Arch of Constantine, the priest addressed a vast crowd of Muslim faithful, engaged in the observance of Arbaeen. That’s 40 days after Ashura, marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson, slain at Karbala by the soldiers of a tyrant, Caliph Yazid. Western media keep mum about it but the Arbaeen pilgrimage is the world’s largest religious gathering. Millions of pilgrims, even more than the Mecca Haj. Sort of ecumenical, because not only Shia Muslims join it but also many Sunnis, some Christians and even Hindus. And it gets
remembered all over the world. Like on Sunday, by Hyde Park.

Waqar Haider, the organiser, invited me to speak. Inspired by the example of Wahab al-Kalbi, a Christian who fought and fell along Hussein at Karbala, I agreed with alacrity. A mournful sacred play I saw in Leicester years ago revealed the amazing story of that solitary follower of Christ who embraced the Imam’s cause. Why did he? The expedition across the desert seemed doomed from the start. Caliph Yazid’s army was far superior to Hussein’s little band. A death wish? An angel from Heaven advised him? Or was al-Kalbi perhaps a romantic, drawn to lost causes? Best to refer to a just war, a hallowed Christian concept. A tyrant is an enemy of the common good, St Thomas Aquinas taught. Fighting tyranny is a duty. So, it was for justice’s sake that a Christian would fight for righteous Hussein against nasty, unrighteous Yazid. And that battle, that jihad, is as imperative today as it was centuries ago…

I prefer to imagine that al-Kalbi’s role in the combat was chiefly spiritual. Non-violent. That, in the thick of the battle, he supported Hussein with his prayers. Still, for Muslims jihad may also take an armed dimension – absurd to deny it. Scholar Asma Afsaruddin relates how some medieval jurists, such as al-Shafi’, came to stress certain bellicose Qur’anic verses over others, counselling patience and forbearance. Further, modern Islamist writers, like the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, have claimed that war ‘for the sake of God’ isn’t just defensive but it can be offensive, aggressive too. A view embraced by the gentlemen of ISIS and al-Qaeda, whose deeds of blood have besmirched the name of their religion.

Objection: what when armed jihad is directed against Christians? Didn’t Muslim empires like Arabs and Turks fight Byzantines, Spaniards and Austrians in the name of their religion? Yes, they did. But, note, empires is what they were. Religion was the ideology that fuelled their conquests. Yet, like for all empires, greed, robbery and plunder were the essential motives. Likewise, democracy and ‘a civilising mission’ have been invoked by Britain and France to justify imperialistic aggression and exploitation of ‘lesser’ peoples and races. I cited St Augustine to my listeners: ‘What are great empires but bands of robbers?’

Actually, Christians and Muslims have occasionally fought along each other, or ‘done jihad’ together against common enemies. El Cid, the noble hero of medieval Spain, led Moorish troops against other, fanatical invaders from North Africa. And the Moroccan soldiers that served under General Franco in the Spanish civil war were engaging in jihad against communism and atheism. (Franco even paid for their going on the Mecca pilgrimage.) Amin al-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem, tried to enlist Muslim troops from the Balkans to fight against the Allies, on Germany’s side. It turned out rather a damp squib, though. Hitler’s jihadis were always few and far-between. Maybe the Syrian refugees Germany hosts will one day join the true Church in jihad against frumpy Angela Merkel, who knows?

Tyranny, I told my pious hearers, takes many forms. Scumbags like Caliph Yazid are not the most insidious types of oppression and corruption. The fat elites that profit from economic and financial globalisation, with their transnational corporations and tax havens, are guilty of innumerable crimes against the weak and the poor. The media, ranging from the Murdoch channels to the smug, vile BBC, engage in relentless, obsessive spreading of filth and fake news aimed at bamboozling people into a false, degraded view of reality. In Arabic that is called Fasad – a great evil. Above all, the pestilent, malignant ideology of secularism persists in suppressing or marginalising any voice calling attention to transcendence, to that Supreme Reality only in the light of which existence has a genuine purpose and meaning.

With what weapons should Christian jihad preferably be fought? With the same weapons Jesus of Nazareth, the Saviour of the World, employed when walking the earth. Preaching, teaching, admonishing, healing and casting out demons. If necessary, wielding the whip and driving out the evil merchants out of God’s temple: the world.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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