The Missionary Position
A Personal Exploration of the Politics of
Persuasion in Central Asia1
When I first arrived in Kazakhstan
three years ago, I woke up early every morning to the sounds of my
village: roosters crowing, dogs barking, cows lowing while sauntering to
their mountain pastures, the sharp smack of the pastukh’s stick
against their thick hides. I was already on my way to gaining an
astonishing twenty pounds (which thankfully I later lost) from being so
assiduously attended to by my ethnic Uighur host mother, Farida;
breakfast usually consisted of soup, meat, or noodles left over from
dinner the night before, several eggs, something sweet, and in the
Kazakhstani style, a pot of tea and plenty tandoor-baked lepyoshka
bread. At 7:30 I would begin my half-hour walk uphill to the private
home where three of my fellow Peace Corps trainees and I studied Russian
every Monday through Friday. The lush green foothills fronting the
perennially snow-peaked Tian Shan range formed a daily feast for my
vision, but if it had rained recently, which it often did that summer,
the narrow, winding dirt roads would turn into streams of mud. In dry
weather the path was so rough that I wore out the soles of a good pair
of shoes.
On the way, I passed the village
school, a mere five minutes from my home. We had been hiking to our
lessons for some time before we learned why we had to go so far instead
of studying in the nearby school as the trainees in other villages did.
Our school’s director thought we were missionaries. A Muslim, he’d
had a bad experience with a group of Korean Christian missionaries a few
years before, and though we never found out exactly what had happened,
it had affected him so deeply that he refused to work with us no matter
how often and strenuously our Peace Corps Russian instructor explained
that we were teachers, not missionaries.
Later, during my two years as a university
instructor in the southern city of Shymkent, I came to partially
understand the director’s position. Most missionaries, particularly
Christians, come to Central Asia in the guise of teachers. A few are
open about their real intentions. The rest are, to varying degrees,
secretive. The reason for this is simple: in a region that is primarily
Muslim, they are often seen as dangerous influences on or, at the very
worst, outright corrupters of the predominant culture.
In Kyrgyzstan, authorities issued a decree
in May 2003 stating that groups outside of Central Asia’s two
mainstream religions, Islam and Russian Orthodoxy, are “totalitarian
sects… using deceptions, silent methods and obtrusive propaganda in
order to attract new members.” An analysis of Kazakhstani nationalist
newspapers from 1996-2000 reveals an even more acid attitude toward
missionaries, often portraying them as preying upon the young. The
analyst writes, “according to one article, a Christian church was
placed next to a Kazakh school specifically because there it would be
convenient to ‘cast a hook to children.’” In another instance,
“The Kazakh members of one Evangelist congregation in Almaty are said
to be primarily ‘girls who just yesterday wearing the white ribbons of
their childhood in their hair came to the city seeking to fulfill their
dreams.’”2
The recent rise in Islamic fundamentalism
and an attendant Central Asian fear of this has even made many Muslim
missionaries suspect. In 2000, after a trial that lasted nearly two
years, two Arabic teachers in south Kazakhstan were expelled from the
country for “fomenting national and religious hostility among the
peoples of Kazakhstan.” One newspaper reflecting on this issue wrote,
“Missionaries come and go, but they do not always bear good promises
and charity.”3
The word “missionary” derives from the
Latin mittere, “to send off,” and originally meant “someone
sent with a message.” But in today’s world it has come to carry many
other shades of meaning, none of them neutral, only a few of them good.
Where exactly is the line between sending someone with a message and
outright cultural imperialism? And why, in a region that for more than
two thousand years has been a melting pot of religions and cultures, a
meeting place between East and West, should any religious idea, however
new, be seen as a threat?
On top of all that, am I not a missionary
in many ways, preaching, no matter how secularly or subtly, my own
cultural values? In that sense, isn’t everyone a missionary?
Ultimately, this essay may be about my
belief in the freedom of each individual to choose his or her own
values, about the silk-fine line that separates the democratic religious
pluralism that makes true choice possible from the mere presence of
various religions, each intent on proselytizing.
A non-denominational Congregational
upbringing
My interest in missionaries stems from my
earliest serious questioning of the Christian church when I was thirteen
or fourteen. I was born into a moderately religious Midwestern family
and attended regular services, Sunday School, and events such as
Vacation Bible School from the time of my earliest memories. When told
that the church where I spent most of my childhood was
“non-denominational congregational,” I first heard a little “c,”
but when I later learned that its official name, the First
Congregational Church, denoted a specific denomination, I became
confused. It was just one of many inconsistencies I would encounter.
Along with my puberty bloomed a sense of
intellectual curiosity. To reconcile what I saw as difficulties in the
Bible, I typed a two-page list of questions that I presented to my
pastor. Included was a question about why people of other faiths should
be destined to Hell when, it seemed to me, it was by random fate that
they were born into non-Christian cultures. He answered that “all will
hear the word of God,” as proof quoting Jesus in John 6:45: “It is
written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone
who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.” But
realistically many could never expect to hear the Christian word of God,
I returned. What of peoples living behind inaccessible mountain ranges
or deep within remote deserts? My pastor’s reply was to repeat the
verse and say that it was the truth because the Bible said so and the
Bible was the word of God.4
Though I didn’t have a name for it then,
I understood that his answer was a logical fallacy—“begging the
question,” as I would later explain in my critical thinking classes in
Shymkent, or circular logic. His answer struck me as being stubbornly
simple-minded.
But perhaps there was more to it than that.
His faith in the Christian word of God reaching all of the earth’s
inhabitants may have stemmed not only from his ironclad belief in the
infallibility of the Bible but equally from the knowledge that Christian
missionaries were penetrating remote mountain and desert regions even as
we spoke—though then, with the Iron Curtain firmly in place and
glasnost still around the corner, Soviet Central Asia was not among
those regions.
More disturbing to me was that my pastor
didn’t seem to respect non-Christian cultures enough to leave them
alone. Though I grew up within the Christian church, I somehow never
came to view it as the only path, or even the best among many. From an
early age I was fascinated by other time periods and cultures,
particularly Native Americans and the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan. My
best friends might well have been my family’s 1950s eighteen-volume The
World Book Encyclopedia and our collection of National Geographic
magazines, which I poured over repeatedly. In the former, I knew exactly
where the multi-page color section on North American native tribes lay
(under “I” for “Indian,” the term in use then) and the section
on world alphabets with a beautiful example of Arabic script which I
found so entrancing that I created my own alphabet imitating the flowing
lines, the loops, the diamond-shaped dots.
Twenty-five years later, on a fifteen-hour
train ride to Almaty, Kazakhstan, I would find myself sharing a kupe
compartment with a Muslim Uzbek family—a grandfather, his daughter,
and her son. They were from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, only two
hours from my home, then in Shymkent. The Uzbekistani government, while
an ally of the U.S. in the so-called war on terror, is recognized around
the world for its shocking human rights abuses; theirs is a country
where just wearing a beard and regularly attending mosque can get one
thrown in jail for years as a suspected Muslim militant. This
grandfather was a teacher, dressed conservatively in a suit, clearly
loving of his daughter and grandson, whom he watched over with the
greatest care. Even with my middling Russian, I could understand him. He
wasn’t an insurgent; he didn’t even talk about deep political
issues. He simply spoke in the broad, passionate way of one whose voice
had been bottled up for too long, about the things that matter to him in
his life: a decent salary, the price of tomatoes, the freedom to speak
his mind.
Listening to him for much of the evening as
our train climbed through the Talassky Alatau range, leaving Uzbekistan
behind, I realized he could say none of these things in his home
country, had probably been saving them all up for this train ride. I
have come to understand that his need for a voice, for an outlet to
express who he was, is representative of many in the region. After
seventy years of Soviet rule on top of many previous decades of Tsarist
repression, Central Asians are now seeking their own identity, something
indigenous, something that represents the spirit of who they are and
where they come from. It is into this context of not just
nation-building but culture-building that today’s missionaries come,
and this is a big reason why they often cause such controversy.
Silk Road Central Asia and the Golden Age
of Islam
What exactly is at stake in Central Asia?
And how does it relate more broadly to the rest of the world? To
understand this, we first must look at some history. The region has a
spectacularly rich past that surprisingly few in the West know about,
and it is worth examining in some detail here.
While Central Asia is crossed by some of
the world’s highest mountain ranges and most forbidding deserts, its
broad grasslands attracted a number of nomadic empires over the
centuries, including the famed Scythians and infamous Huns. More
importantly, in the age before global sea power, its strategic location
between the rich Chinese and Indian states and those of Asia Minor made
it critically important to trade. In approximately the second century
B.C., the first of what became a network of overland caravan routes was
formed which ultimately linked ancient East with West. Today this is
known as the Great Silk Road. At its greatest, this network stretched
from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and from the Indian plains to
beyond the Ural Mountains. Its longest, and most dangerous, sections
passed through Central Asia.5
Vast quantities of goods were traded along
this “road,” including spices, jewels and semi-precious stones,
Byzantine glass, Chinese porcelain and paper, Persian carpets, horses
(the “heavenly horses” of Central Asia were especially prized), tea,
rice, furs, and, of course, silk. But physical goods formed only part of
the trade. The cosmopolitan caravan cities that sprang up along the Silk
Road’s various branches also saw the exchange of music and musicians,
arts and artists, languages and literature, sports, customs, clothing,
even hairstyles.
Central Asia was already financially and
culturally prosperous by the time of the Muslim Arab invasion in the
early eighth century A.D., but it gained a new strength after that. This
period, which lasted until sea trade began to make the Silk Road
obsolete in the sixteenth century, might properly be called the Golden
Age of Islam. While Christian Europe struggled through the Middle Ages,
Islamic Central Asia flourished. Its cities were like names in a
fairytale—Kashgar, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Merv—conjuring up all
of the color, intrigue, and romance of The Arabian Nights. The
region was a world leader in everything from politics to architecture,
the arts to the sciences. Its medressas, or Islamic universities,
trained some of the best and most influential minds of the time: Abu
Nasr al-Farabi, known as the “Second Master” after Aristotle, a
philosopher, logician, musician, and political scientist who left behind
major written works in each of these disciplines… Muhammad ibn Musa
al-Khorezmi, who devised the concepts of algorithms and algebra in the
ninth century… Abu Ali ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), who
in the eleventh century wrote his Canon of Medicine, a standard
textbook for Western doctors until the seventeenth century…
There is a Greek word, also used by the
Christian saint Augustine—eudaimonia—which means “human
flourishing.” In many ways, it was a unique time and place in human
history for eudaimonia.6
In particular Central Asia was, as it still
is, a stronghold of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam known for its
stress on gnosis—literally Greek for “knowledge” but more
specifically the inner and inexpressible knowledge gained from direct
experience with the divine. Featuring much less control by central
authorities than most religions, Sufism was perfectly suited to the
highly independent traders and nomads of the region.
Sufis were not the first missionaries in
Central Asia, nor would they be the last, but they left a lasting
impression. Arguably the most famous is Mawlana Jalal’ud-Din Rumi (b.
1207). Though most well-known as the founder of the Mevlavi whirling
dervish order in Turkey, he spent the first thirteen years of his life
in Balkh in Afghan Turkestan, present-day north Afghanistan. His
ecstatic religious poetry, of which two brief excerpts from his Mathnavi
are below, is universally recognized for the depth of its insight and
emotion:
Every prophet has received from Him the
guarantee:
Seek help with patience and prayer.
Come, ask of Him, not anyone except
Him.
Seek water in the sea; do not seek it
in the dry river bed.
and
What is unification?
To burn one’s self before the One.7
♦♦♦
This is the social, political, scientific,
artistic, and spiritual heritage that rightly belongs to every Muslim in
Central Asia.8
Or is it that simple?
Islam has long been the strongest religion
in the region, but it was a relative latecomer to the scene; for the
first thousand years of the Silk Road, Buddhism was the predominant
religion. And Christianity, while always playing a minority role, has
been around nearly from its beginning and exerted more influence than
many today realize.
From its inception as a few isolated routes
into unknown lands, the Silk Road was a combination of both trade and
missionary efforts. Buddhism arrived in Central Asia on the Silk
Road’s very first branches, and it remained until Genghis Khan’s
rout of the region put all aspects of life on hold; in the second
flowering of culture that rose from the ashes, Buddhism was left behind.
But in the millennium and a half in-between
those events, at least three major Buddhist sects—Shravakayana,
Vajrayana, and Tibetan Buddhism—all found favor at different times and
in different localities in Central Asia. The Chinese pilgrim Fa-hien or
Faxian, who journeyed through the region from 399-413 A.D., wrote of the
Silk Road city-state of Khotan, “The country is prosperous and the
people are numerous; without exception they have faith in the Dharma
[the Buddhist principle or law that orders the universe] and they
entertain one another with religious music. The community of monks
numbers several tens of thousands.…”9
At the same time, coming from the other
direction, Christianity was flexing its own missionary muscles. By the
middle ages, even Samarkand, a city clothed in such powerful Muslim
mythology, had been feeling the effects of this “foreign” religion
for centuries. In the early fifteenth century the Spanish envoy Ruy
Gonzales de Clavijo reported the presence of many Christians there,
including Greeks and Armenians, Catholics, Jacobites, and Nestorians.10
A cornucopia of religions
All creatures are God’s children, and
those dearest to God are the ones who treat His children kindly.
—From the Ahadith,
or the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed11
To make matters even more interesting,
Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity were just three in a cornucopia of
religions which mingled and flourished together during the nearly two
millennia of the Silk Road in Central Asia, along with Judaism,
Manichaeism, and Zoroastrianism from the West, Confucianism and Taoism
from the East, and countless variations of local animistic, shamanistic
religions.
Travelers from various cultures noted the
religious tolerance of the region during this time, particularly during
the reign of the Mongol empire (c. 1220-1370), for the bloody but
culture-loving Mongols promoted a policy of tolerance. One Central Asian
scholar notes, “Marco Polo, for one, emphasized the apparent
willingness of [Mongol emperor] Qubilai Khan to entertain all the
‘religions of the book,’” and that “Mongol rule witnessed a
revival in Nestorian Christianity throughout Eurasia, the spread of
Tibetan Buddhism through China to Mongolia, and the expansion of Islam
in areas of Eastern Europe.” In describing how the Mongols’ famously
efficient postal relay system helped “favored travelers,” this
scholar enthuses, “We cannot but be impressed by the ability of
defenseless Franciscans to travel across most of Eurasia in the middle
of the thirteenth century.”12
During the Golden Age of Islam, such
religious tolerance was the norm not just in Central Asia but in the
entire Islamic world. Historian and professor James Loewen writes that
today’s college students are often “astonished to learn that Turks
and Moors allowed Jews and Christians freedom of worship at a time when
European Christians tortured or expelled Jews and Muslims.” This is in
complete contrast to the unfortunate view held by too many Westerners
that Muslims are backward, vaguely threatening fundamentalists, or
worse.13
Civilizations have risen and fallen and
sometimes risen again in Central Asia. It has always been a crossing
grounds, a melting pot. It is impossible to speak of definitively, only
in broad trends. But history allows us to see these trends, and they
have something very important to teach us if only we look closely
enough. For the period of greatest flourishing of Islam in Central Asia
coincides exactly with the period of greatest religious efflorescence.
And the end of this Golden Age corresponds both with the end of the Silk
Road as the world’s most important economic highway and the end of
this religious efflorescence.
Conventional wisdom tells us that culture
can only develop when people have time and freedom from material
constraints. By this reasoning, Silk Road Central Asia was so cultured
and tolerant because it was so prosperous—people had the money and
leisure to develop culture and no need to compete with each over ideas
of religion.
My thesis is that it worked at least as
much the other way—that the religious tolerance and open-mindedness of
the era helped to create the conditions that made peace and prosperity
possible. Stated another way, cultural and religious tolerance isn’t a
product of prosperous times; rather it is an essential cause. Such
tolerance can be developed in an individual regardless of his or her
social and economic position. Conversely, peace and prosperity don’t
spontaneously arise on their own; certain conditions must be in place
before they can take root, grow, flower. Tyranny and intolerance are not
those conditions.14
And most economists will tell you that
ensuring free and open markets is the best recipe for economic success.
The vast open market that was the Silk Road was more than a marketplace
of goods—it was just as important for the exchange of ideas it
facilitated. This has been its lasting legacy.
The implications of this are numerous,
perhaps the most obvious being that Central Asia should open up to other
faiths, even welcome them. Why, then, in direct contrast to its past, is
the region so closed off today? Kazakhstan recently expelled a group of
talented doctors because they were also missionaries. This may have been
good in preserving the “traditional” culture, but in a country with
a woeful lack of qualified medical professionals, it was arguably not
the best development choice.
If a Central Asian is taught English by a
foreigner, it will most likely be by either a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer
or a missionary. Representatives of both groups have a message, and both
promote “foreign” ideas. What exactly is the difference between the
two?
Preaching to all creation: Definitions of
“missionary” and “propaganda”
As a Peace Corps volunteer, I was an
officially sworn-in representative of the U.S. government, forbidden to
proselytize on two subjects—religion and politics—or to work
directly with anyone involved in such activities. I believe this was
wise; as a guest in Kazakhstan, I was invited to work within their
cultural and political framework and offer suggestions for its
improvement, not to criticize or overhaul it based on my own personal
philosophies.
Because of this, and more so because of my
childhood questioning of the Christian church, I had negative feelings
towards missionaries even before I encountered them in Kazakhstan. But
once I did, I was pleasantly surprised to find them intelligent and
friendly, some downright engaging.
Being highly visible in my community
through the many seminars I presented and English clubs I conducted, I
naturally came into contact with a wide variety of people with a wide
variety of beliefs, both locals and foreigners. Befriending Christians
certainly wasn’t forbidden any more than being one, as long as I
didn’t become involved in any proselytizing activities. I have known
during my stay a number of missionaries from all over the world:
America, Switzerland, the British Isles. When one missionary couple who
had lived in Kazakhstan for five years left to return to England, I
asked them what their plans were.
“We don’t know,” the husband said,
smiling. “We simply trust that God will lead us to the next step.”
His calm demeanor demonstrated to me that his was no foolish blind faith
but rather something genuine that he had tapped into, something deeper
than I can explain. I must confess, I felt a little jealous, given my
own uncertain situation at the time in finishing up my commitment to
Peace Corps and not knowing what my next step would be. I certainly
didn’t feel calm.
Interestingly, neither this couple nor any
of the other missionaries I have known seem comfortable with the word
“missionary.”
Susan, a lively, articulate woman who has
spent most of the past decade living in foreign countries as a Christian
missionary, accepts her title especially reluctantly: “Hmmm…
‘missionary’… I hate that word because of all the baggage attached
to it, but there seems to be no escaping from it. If I lived in my home
country, I would be called a pastor or a minister or a church worker,
but because I’ve been involved with expressions of Christianity all
over the world, that makes me a missionary.”15
Another thoughtful individual, Greg, wrote
to me, “Seeing as I avoid the often misunderstood term of missionary,
Kazakhstan citizens usually treat me as an English teacher, another form
of ‘missions’ I suppose, or is that ‘cultural imperialism’?”16
♦♦♦
So what does it mean to be a missionary?
The second of two senses defined in The American Heritage Dictionary
is, “One who attempts to convert others to a particular doctrine or
set of principals.” I like this definition, for it properly, I
believe, leaves out mention of religion and focuses instead on the
broader framework in which religion rests, that is, its doctrines and
principals.
Equally as significant is the first sense
defined, “A propagandist for a belief or cause.” Propaganda today
carries a deeply negative connotation, one conjuring images of
Stalin’s purges and other unchecked Orwellian nightmares. But the word
itself comes from the Latin propagare, which means “to
propagate”—that is, propaganda is simply a way to “grow” or
“broadcast” an idea, broadcast here also meaning the way a farmer
traditionally sowed a field. Taken in this sense, anyone who has ever
tried to persuade another of anything—which is everyone—has been a
propagandist.
In my critical thinking classes, I
explained that there are two kinds of propagandists, or “peddlers,”
a term I use to emphasize the notion of selling ideas: political
or ideological peddlers, those who attempt to persuade in order
to gain something personally—money, power, influence, etc.—and philosophical
peddlers, those who attempt to persuade because they are motivated
purely by philosophy (the “love of wisdom”). In theory, this is a
good distinction. In practice, I’m not sure it’s true, for even the
most magnanimous humanist and spiritual masters, in disseminating their
wisdom freely, gain tangible benefits, if only in knowing their words
are helping others. The master who teaches without expectation of any
profit, as naturally as a seed falls from a tree, is one in a million,
perhaps one in a billion. The rest of us are, to varying degrees,
political peddlers.
All missionaries, by virtue of being human,
do not work for purely altruistic reasons but rather expect something in
return. They may expect to see quantifiable results—numbers of people
“saved.” They may, either consciously or unconsciously, seek stores
of treasure in heaven for their efforts on earth. At the very least,
like loving gardeners tending their flower beds, they expect the ideas
that they have planted to grow and to blossom.
♦♦♦
To witness is an important aspect of
Christian life. “Go into the world and preach the good news to all
creation,” Jesus is quoted in Mark 16:15. But where is the line
between preaching the good news and forcing it on someone? Pressure can
be subtle, as I learned from my own experience.
My disenchantment with my
non-denominational Congregational church coincided with the time it
began growing overly emotional in a way that to me seemed insincere.
This involved a shift away from open discourse and toward displays such
as waving hands, shouting praises, groaning with the Spirit (capital
“S”), and similar theatrics, especially during prayer times.
Everyone’s eyes were supposed to be closed then, but I kept mine open
and observed the congregation. What to blind ears sounded spontaneous
and joyful to watchful eyes appeared calculated and timid. Many members
of the congregation actually looked around the sanctuary first before
“spontaneously” being overcome by the Spirit, and I noticed that
these displays fed on each other, always starting slowly and growing
more numerous as people became more comfortable with what was going on.
This was the beginning of my doubts about the church.
The pressure the members of that
congregation felt was largely self-made. The pastor did not openly
dictate that his parishioners make those displays; their own need for
approval and inclusion within the group dictated it. But I wonder how
much the pastor understood this. To say that he was completely unaware
of it is to assign to this educated and specially trained man a shocking
lack of knowledge about basic human psychology. To say that he was fully
aware is to assign to him a conscious desire to manipulate, for tacitly
encouraging such displays is manipulation. The truth is most likely that
his understanding of his role and the degree to which he used it to
manipulate people probably fell somewhere between these two extremes.
But why this pressure at all? Shouldn’t
something supposedly so good sell itself?
Sometimes there’s a blurry line between
giving and selling. What is offered at no financial cost can often have
subtle or hidden emotional ones.
So to come back to what it means to be a
missionary: my working definition is anyone who has an idea he or she
wants to grow and expects something in exchange, either for the idea or
the effort in growing it. Inherently included is some element of
manipulation, however subtle or unintentional, for we’re all human,
and we cannot, unless we have undergone the most rigorous mental
discipline, avoid this. Lastly, it also involves intent: if you are a
teacher, but the main reason you came to Central Asia—to anywhere—is
to spread the Christian gospel, then your teaching work cannot hide that
you are a missionary.
Still, missionaries continue to hide this,
which raises some interesting and difficult moral issues.
Moral implications
Missionary work, while foreign to
Kazakhstan’s and Turkic cultures generally, is freely permitted by
law. The only requirement [of] the missionaries is to respect the
laws of the country and to conduct their activity in a transparent
and reasonable manner respectful to our citizenry.
—“Freedom of Religion
and Interethnic Accord”17
In addition to the missionaries already
mentioned, I met and peripherally knew a few of approximately twenty
recent American university graduates sent to Kazakhstan as teachers.
Generally, the work of this group, from reports of my own students who
interacted with them, was good. Diana (a pseudonym), who I ran into
often at various locations around Shymkent, was especially pleasant,
always greeting me with a warm smile.
However, Diana and her colleagues also
were, from my very first meeting with them, less than candid about their
true intentions. I was eating at an Uzbek restaurant with a group of
friends, enjoying a typical meal of rice, grilled mutton kebabs,
lepyoshka bread, and tea, when the newcomers stopped by. We asked them
the usual questions: How long have you been here? How do you like it? Do
you speak any Russian or Kazakh? To our surprise, they’d had no
language training, very little formal training at all, so we asked what
group sponsored them. Here they became extremely vague, and I had the
distinct feeling that they were being deliberately evasive. I continued
to press the point, respectfully but somewhat determinedly, but was
unable to find out any more than that they were teachers and their
sponsor was a non-denominational group, representing various beliefs.
With this last piece of information, I
suspected that they were missionaries, but I wasn’t certain until one
of my students, Zhanat, complained about a meeting she attended. This
was ostensibly an “English club” led by Diana’s group, and it
included the games, discussions, and refreshments typical of such clubs.
After these were over, the leaders asked those in attendance to sit and
listen to a series of speeches by local people. At first, it was unclear
what was going on, but slowly Zhanat and two of her friends understood
that these were former Muslims who had converted to Christianity. Zhanat
and her friends—like most of those in the room, in the city—were
Muslim, and they grew increasingly angry as they listened. Finally, in
the middle of one person’s “witnessing,” they stood up and walked
out. Zhanat later told me that she had felt deceived that this group
would advertise as an English club what was essentially an evangelizing
meeting.
Other problems arose. Radio ads began
airing, offering free English lessons with Peace Corps
volunteers—except the Peace Corps knew nothing about these ads. My
students and other local friends told me of meeting “Peace Corps
volunteers,” but when I asked who, the names and descriptions of these
people matched no one I knew. There were only six of us in our oblast
(administrative region) at the time, so obviously some group was
spreading disinformation in order to justify or perhaps cover its own
activities. Alarmed by this, the Peace Corps sent two of its local staff
members to investigate, and they eventually discovered that the radio
ads had been paid for by missionaries. I took it personally because it
had the potential to color my work.
Then in late February 2004, I was unable to
attend my regular English club that week, but a fellow volunteer did,
and he reported that Diana and another young woman also attended. By
this time, even local people who hadn’t had direct contact with these
Americans were beginning to suspect that they were missionaries. At one
point during the club, Anatoly, a jolly but also very direct ethnic
Russian, turned to the young women and asked, “Are you
missionaries?” Without hesitation, Diana did what on the surface would
seem to be a very un-Christian thing to do.
She lied.
“No,” she stated bluntly.
♦♦♦
How does one distinguish between the
broadcasting of constructive new ideas and the subversive undermining of
existing traditions? And how should a sensitive human react to the
latter? For all cultures, in order to remain vital, must have their
traditions challenged, else they risk becoming isolated or irrelevant.
I didn’t know how to feel when I heard
the story of Diana at my English club. On the one hand, I was angry, for
she and her organization were not conducting themselves “in a
transparent and reasonable manner.” On the other hand, this was
understandable. Many missionaries have been kicked out of their
respective Central Asian countries, or worse, once their true intentions
have been discovered.
In Turkmenistan, where its
president-for-life has appointed himself “Turkmenbashi,” or
“Father of All Turkmens”—a title both political and
spiritual—dozens of missionaries have been deported. In particular,
Turkmen officials openly declared that they would “strangle” local
Baptist churches and in fact deported the last Russian Baptist
missionary in May 2000. From October to December of that year, three
Christian churches were bombed in Tajikistan—and in the first bombing,
which killed ten and injured some fifty, twelve members of the church
were arrested, beaten, and denied visitors (they were eventually
released and three Islamic extremists charged).18
Even in more liberal Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan, political and social pressure often drives religious groups
underground. Occasionally, this can result in violence, such as on New
Year’s Eve 2000, when a crowd prepared to burn the house of two
Protestant brothers in Suzak, Kyrgyzstan, if they and their families
didn’t give up their new religion. More recently, in July 2004 in
Zhaksy, Kazakhstan, Presbyterian missionaries were twice attacked and
robbed. In the second incident, “the attackers demanded that the
missionaries should accept Islam.”19
Fortunately, such outright and inexcusable
persecution is rare. But all five post-Soviet Central Asian countries
have laws requiring religious groups to register with the government,
and these laws are sometimes used to harass or deport missionaries, even
when their activities are otherwise lawful and peaceful.
Such governmental attitudes are poor
reflections of the centuries-old tradition of enlightened Islamic
scholarship and culture and the millennia-old tradition of religious
tolerance indigenous to the Silk Road. Authorities justify it with the
rationale that missionaries come on false pretenses and use deceitful
methods to attract members.
A battle over process
Is it moral for missionaries to come to
Central Asia on false pretenses? Is it justifiable to provide false
pretenses for anything? The answer is, most would agree, a pragmatic
yes, at least sometimes. For example, had Stalin-era Soviet Muslims and
Christians admitted to the authorities that they met clandestinely, they
would have been imprisoned, possibly killed, and their mosques and
churches appropriated or destroyed (those that were left after
Sovietization, that is). In Central Asia, these two faiths held many
people together in the face of extreme hardship and allowed the line of
cultural transmission to remain open. These benefits easily justified
secrecy.
Today, missionaries also do good work. But
do their good works justify what is essentially a lie? This is an
especially intriguing question given that many Christian sects, at least
the fundamentalist ones, would argue that good works alone do not
justify anything—only belief in Jesus will bring salvation. This
stands in sharp contrast to the Sufi idea that self-development is
essential in growing closer to God. Following only the letter of the law
isn’t enough; good works also count. Or, as a verse from Imam Malik
recounts,
Whoever has the outer Law without the
inner Reality has left the right way;
Whoever has the inner Reality without
the outer Law is a heretic;
Whoever joins the two of them has
realisation.
Both Islam and Christianity acknowledge
God; in fact, Islam recognizes this as the same God, for like
Christianity and Judaism, it traces its roots through the same line of
prophets all the way back to Abraham. In other words, this isn’t a
battle over God. It’s a battle over process—who has the best
path.
Admittedly, the differences aren’t small.
Christians see Jesus as God incarnate, one-third of the Holy Trinity;
Muslims see Jesus as a prophet, albeit an important one, in a long line
that finally ends with the Prophet Mohammed.
Interestingly, while in my personal talks
with Muslims here they have consistently opposed Christian missionaries,
at the same time they have consistently expressed the belief that the
Muslim God and Christian God are the same. To many Christians, this is
perhaps not so clear. But such doctrinal differences shouldn’t detract
from both religions’ shared spiritual goal—reunion with the Source
of everything, to “burn one’s self before the One.” If you’re a
Muslim, Christian, or Jew, live your path fully, but why try to force
others into the footprint your foot is in?20
This battle over process isn’t just being
waged in Central Asia but all around the world—sectarian fighting is
almost as likely to feature Christians versus Christians as it is Hindus
versus Muslims or Muslims versus Jews. “The most drastic example I can
think of is Rwanda,” my missionary friend Susan declared of the
fighting that in 1994 killed 800,000 in one hundred days. “On the
Sunday before the genocide started, something like 80% of the
population, from both tribes, was in church, calling themselves
Christians. And these were enthusiastic churches, with loud, lively,
passionate singing, and lots of passionate preaching. But the problem
was that many of those people had signed up for a cheap gospel that said
accept Jesus in your heart and you’ll go to heaven. They hadn’t been
challenged that becoming a Christian means Jesus will ask you to lay
down old hatreds and prejudices. They hadn’t been told that there was
no longer any choice about loving your neighbour.”
It really comes down to the question of
what makes people want to change others. With respect to Christians, I
don’t believe it can be explained by simply stating that they want to
bring the Good News to the world as directed by the Bible. If that were
the case, why did one conservative Protestant I know call Catholicism
“a cult,” a contemporary echo of old Protestant-Catholic tensions
that have split America for more than a century and resulted in
thousands of deaths in Great Britain and independent Ireland?
A policy of plunder: The larger cultural
context
“Why do Americans hate Muslims?”
Several of my friends and I have been asked
this on numerous occasions, particularly right after the United States
invaded Iraq.
It is not an idle question on the part of
the local people. For many, a very real and great fear motivates their
asking. In the fall of 2003, one friend (later a colleague) of mine was
attempting to recruit applicants for a special program to send Islamic
leaders to the United States for several weeks. He had a tremendously
difficult time doing so because of the potential applicants’ deep
distrust of the U.S. government.
“Will you put us in a concentration
camp?” they asked seriously. “Will we be allowed to come back to
Kazakhstan? Why do Americans hate Muslims so much?”
While America’s war in Iraq continues to
be supported by the governments of all five post-Soviet Central Asian
nations, their citizens remain overwhelmingly against it. It is not the
place of this essay to examine the reasons—both right and wrong—for
the invasion. But living here, I can report that it has had a disastrous
effect on our image with the Islamic world. It has not helped to win the
“hearts and minds” of the people. Nor have the words of many
American religious leaders, who often seem to deliberately widen the
rift between Muslims and Christians rather than attempt to close it.
“This is a religious struggle, a clash of
cultures,” Pat Robertson declared in the lead-up to the war. Fellow
evangelist Jerry Falwell one-upped him by calling the Prophet Mohammed
“a terrorist.”21
Admittedly, these men and others like them
do not represent all Christians in America. But they do wield tremendous
influence and so carry an equally tremendous responsibility. Leaders in
their position should show greater sensitivity, more awareness of the
wider world around them. Eight people were killed and some fifty injured
in India in rioting during a protest of Falwell’s statement.
Such insensitivity is not new, however, nor
is it limited to America. The Russian government in Tsarist times often
struck a similar attitude toward its Muslim subjects, whom it viewed as
fodder to feed its growing empire. One October 1864 memo from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Tsar, written in the midst of a push
to capture several cities ever deeper on Central Asian soil—Turkistan,
Shymkent, Tashkent, Samarkand—admitted that the Russian empire,
“influenced by the insistent demands of our trade, and some mysterious
but irresistible urge towards the east, was steadily moving into the
heart of the Steppe”—very poetic language for naked imperialism.22
This same mysterious but irresistible urge
seems to have beckoned the Bolsheviks who followed. At a 1921 party
congress, they declared that “if the strengthening of the centre
requires it, a policy of plunder in the borderlands [i.e., Central Asia]
would be proper and correct.”
Once their Muslim citizens were plundered
and subjugated, the Soviets stepped up their efforts, attempting not
just to expel Islam from their new socialist experiment but religion in
all of its sundry manifestations, what they called “mediaeval
hangovers.” People were targeted for recruitment as allahsizlar,
or “Godless people,” to assist the Movement of the Godless in
Sovietizing the local cultures that had been absorbed into the new
empire.
Ironically, Communism, while materialistic,
actually turned Marxist values into a religion, with all of its
attendant dogma and blind faith. Its “missionary work” was
ruthlessly unsubtle and efficient. One American professor who taught as
a Fulbright Scholar in Uzbekistan relates that he heard stories “from
students and colleagues of parents and/or grandparents being forced to
drink or eat during Ramadan [the Islamic month of fasting], of pressures
to publicly consume alcohol during Communist Party or Komsomol
functions.…” Of the more than 26,000 mosques in the Russian empire
in its last years, only a few hundred survived into the 1980s.23
From the ancient Silk Road, that massive,
interconnected network of missionary routes, to what has been called the
New Silk Road, the massive oil and gas pipelines that connect the region
to the rest of the world, foreigners have always looked to Central Asia
for something: grazing land, access to trade routes, a strategic
location, natural resources—or souls to be saved.
Given this larger cultural context, it is
little wonder many Muslims here feel threatened by Christian
missionaries. For however peaceful their intentions may seem, the
suspicion always lurks that there’s still a battle going on, not over
turf but over “hearts and minds”—over differing ways of life.
Business, bombs, books, or beans: Everyone
is a missionary
Although being a religious missionary can
be risky in Central Asia, they still come by the hundreds. In
Kazakhstan, Christian proselytizing is possibly the number two
profession of Americans in the country, behind only
oil—“evangelicals and oilmen,” as I once overheard someone at the
U.S. embassy in Almaty remark. In Kyrgyzstan, gold and other mineral
resources are the lure, gas in Turkmenistan; in all five countries,
it’s airbases or schools or the opportunity to offer humanitarian
aid—“business, bombs, books, or beans,” as my friend Greg put it.
“They each have a purpose that can be described as missionary.”
As I mentioned earlier, I believe all
missionaries have a message, engage in persuasion, and expect to gain
something for their efforts. Under that definition, who is not a
missionary?
My answer is that everyone is a missionary.
This includes the governments of the Central Asian republics as well as
the foreigners, secular and scientific enterprises right along with the
more overtly religious ones. “Even proponents of the Linux operating
system use terms like ‘evangelism,’ ‘advocacy,’ and
‘conversion’ in relation to spreading their ideas,” notes Greg. So
do American businesses, to whom “free-market enterprise” is the
Gospel and The Wall Street Journal the Bible.
Certainly, every teacher is a missionary.
There is no way to present objectively the sum of all knowledge in any
field in any classroom, and deciding which bits to throw out and which
to pass along inevitably relies on personal biases. In short, teachers
teach what they think is right and thus propagate their own
beliefs in their students, who then knowingly or unknowingly spread
them.
The Soviets understood this function of
education well; many fundamentalist schools and universities today do,
too, both Christian and Islamic.
♦♦♦
All of this leads me to wonder: What did I
expect in return for coming to Central Asia? What do I expect for
writing this?
My idealism was a major reason I joined the
Peace Corps. What may seem naively optimistic ideals to some, I truly
believe, ideals of the basic spiritual unity of humankind despite
outward religious, social, and political differences. But to leave it at
that is to tell only half the story. I was also well aware of my desire
for adventure and challenge, which living within a foreign culture and
my related travels have certainly provided. As a writer I knew this
stimulation would be good for my creativity. It has been and still is.
As a native speaker with previous teaching
experience, I may have given my talents freely, but despite my title
“volunteer,” I didn’t give them for free; most Peace Corps
volunteers will tell you that they received at least as much in return,
and I was no exception. The experiences I had, the friendships I made,
the growth I experienced in my two years are unforgettable, and I
can’t imagine my life without them.
As a teacher here, I was a missionary, an
educational missionary. When I taught Emerson and Thoreau in my advanced
American literature class, I taught about more than the stout American
individualism they espoused—I exposed the transcendentalist ideas that
lay behind this, the German and Indian philosophy which informed it all
(both authors were ardent students of the Bhagavad-Gita, the
cornerstone of Hindu spiritualism).
In my current job, I manage the Kazakhstan
and Kyrgyzstan region of a program that sends Eurasian professionals to
study at the graduate level in America. I think it’s one of the best
ways that the United States spends its foreign aid dollars, and I want
this idea to grow; I’m a propagandist, an educational missionary
still.
As to what I expected in writing this… I
wanted to write about history and human possibility, to explore a
difficult and controversial issue and offer some alternative ways to
think about it, to help others form informed positions on it, whatever
those positions may be. I especially wanted to present information that
many Americans—in particular, many American Christians—don’t
generally encounter through the mainstream media.
In the end, I am offering my view of the
world and exposing myself for who I am—a true believer in the inherent
potential of all humans to find their way to God, on their own terms, in
their own time.
Perhaps this is even a plea, a plea for
religious pluralism. Or maybe a prayer with end notes.24
Conclusion: Traveling, the universality of
religions, and my feeling on what this all means
When I was sixteen, due to my church’s
overemphasis on emotion and inability to engage my intellect and
intuition, I left. It’s only now, twenty-three years later, after a
long, broad study of other religions and philosophies, that I’ve begun
to recognize some of the universal truths represented in Christianity,
though this recognition has come on my own terms and only in comparison
to the universal truths in other religions.
My search has led me to explore other
cultures not only in books but directly, physically. In my previous
travels throughout the British Isles, I visited some of the famous and
inspiring places of the Christian world: St. Patrick’s Cathedral and
Christ’s Church Cathedral in Dublin, Westminster Abbey in London. More
recently, I’ve visited some of the famous and inspiring places of the
Muslim world: the Sultan Ahmet Camii (better known as the “Blue
Mosque”) and Süleymaniye Camii in Istanbul, the Jama Masjid (“Great
Mosque”) in Delhi. I will admit, my personal tastes tend to favor the
exquisite simplicity of Islamic holy places—the clean lines, airy
spaces, and seamlessly integrated ornamental details—but I felt a
tangible sense of peace at each no matter the religion or sect
represented.
Throughout history, the holy places of one
culture have always been built atop the ruins of another culture’s.
Symbolically this is supposed to show the power of the new religion over
the old. But this symbolism means nothing if the old religion isn’t
recognized as being a threat to the new one. It saddens me to think that
the search for truth is so often seen as a competition where only one
team can win rather than a party to which we’re all invited.
The more I travel, the smaller the world
becomes but the larger my wonder of it grows. I’m reminded of a saying
of Shaykh Muhiy’ud-Din ibn Arabi, “Whoever engages in travel will
arrive!” Though it’s a metaphor for one embarking on a spiritual
journey, ultimately, all of life is a spiritual journey.
Of course, one doesn’t need physically to
travel halfway around the world to find his or her spiritual truth.
Every major religion, in some form or another—when its holy words are
distilled to their very purest form—teaches that outer reality is
simply a manifestation of inner reality, and that outer reality is
ultimately all illusion anyway. The real way to get somewhere is to
travel through one’s own soul.
♦♦♦
Last autumn, a friend still serving in the
Peace Corps experienced problems similar to those I faced upon first
arriving in the region, though hers held far deeper implications.
Despite having taught successfully for more than a year at her
university in Turkistan, being respected both by her peers and her
students for leading a variety of academic activities outside the
classroom, including a highly popular English club, the university’s
president accused her of being a missionary and expelled her from the
campus. He later recanted and apologized, but it was too late; she now
teaches two hundred and eighty kilometers to the northwest in Kyzylorda.
The incident is a stark reminder that in my three years here, the deep
suspicion of anything foreign, and particularly of missionaries, real or
imagined, is as strong as ever.
Are missionaries genuinely exposing local
populations to broader ideas than they otherwise have access to, and are
the locals then allowed to choose freely from among these ideas—the
old and the new? If so, then these missionaries are truly doing nothing
more than any good teacher would—revealing the wonder of the world by
offering options and helping their “students” develop the
intellectual tools to make good choices.
But if missionaries present their ideas in
the context not of offering a choice but of presenting “the truth,”
then they are doing what bad teaches and dictators do—demanding blind
obeisance to the party line. It can be a belief in transcendentalism or
communist materialism; it doesn’t matter.
In my opinion, Christianity—at least its
fundamentalist sects—could benefit from the Sufi idea that personal
growth and good works do count. The idea that all we need is to
accept Jesus in our hearts may save souls but does little to help those
still stuck on earth. And Islam—at least in Central Asia—could
benefit from more interaction with other faiths, just as it once did
during its Golden Age. There needs to be a give and take, an opening, on
both sides. As it is, both are too closed.
Living in another culture has helped me to
understand my own culture better. Studying other religions has helped me
to understand my religion, the religion of my childhood, better. The
process isn’t, and shouldn’t be, threatening.
It has led me to believe there is no such
religion as “mine” or “yours” or “theirs.” In today’s
Information Age, I have access to the wisdom of all the faiths of
recorded history. The Internet doesn’t recognize the clannishness that
kept one faith tied to one geographic region; the ideas themselves no
longer recognize this skin color or that last name or those modes of
dress. In this sense, we may have finally arrived at a time when “all
will hear the word of God.”
In the end, no one really has his or her
own religious heritage—Islam for Central Asians, Christianity for
Euro-Americans, Buddhism for East Asians. All we have is the religious
heritage of the world and what we as individuals make of it. The path
isn’t as important as the sincerity of the seeker.
Notes
1 Geographically, Central Asia has been
variously defined. When speaking of it historically, I am referring to
the region known well into the twentieth century as Turkestan (“The
Land of the Turks”), which was composed of all or part of today’s
Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, and China’s autonomous Xinjiang province, or Chinese
Turkestan. When speaking of current developments, however, I am
referring specifically to the middle five of those countries, or the
five post-Soviet “’stans.”
2 Almaz Ismanov, “Protestants in
Kyrgyzstan face hostile reception,” 8 Dec. 2003, (19 Dec. 2004); William Fierman, “Perceptions of Threats from ‘Alien
Faiths’: An Analysis of Reactions in the Kazakh-Language Press,” Central
Asia and Islam, eds. Andrea Strasser, Siegfried Haas, Gerhard
Mangott, and Valeria Heuberger (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut,
2002) 159-171. Fierman is currently a professor in the Dept. of Central
Eurasian Studies at Indiana University and director of its Inner Asian
and Uralic National Resource Center. Interestingly, he notes “that the
Kazakh-language press displays virtually no alarm about Russian
Orthodoxy in Kazakhstan as a prominent religion.… Nor does the Kazakh
press reveal apprehension about propagation of non-traditional religions
among non-Muslims; rather, the focus of attention is
overwhelmingly on members of groups that traditionally practiced
Islam.”
3 Maria Utyaganova, “Dangerous gaps in
Kazakhstan’s religion laws,” Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 2
Aug. 2000, (23
Dec. 2004). The Analyst is a bi-weekly publication of the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute, John Hopkins University.
4 This and a subsequent Bible verse are from
the Holy Bible, New International Version, revised ed. (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Co., 1984).
5 Two excellent sources on this subject that
may be accessed electronically are the
Silkroad
Foundation, a non-profit organization established to promote the study and
preservation of cultures and art on Inner Asia and the Silk Road; and
Silk Road Seattle, which
features essays, historical texts, extensive annotated bibliographies of
resources, an electronic atlas, and a virtual art exhibit.
6 To be sure, it was also a time of repeated
invasions and often strict autocratic rule. Many Muslim rulers then were
corrupt and cruel, and while there was a substantial middle class of
merchants and traders, democracy as we know it today was nonexistent.
Still, in Silk Road Central Asia, spiritual and humanistic knowledge
were arguably as thoroughly integrated as in any culture since.
7 These and all following excerpts of
Islamic poetry and sayings are from Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, The
Elements of Sufism (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1999).
Though compact (only 118 pages with index), it is a remarkably
thought-provoking introduction to basic Sufi history and concepts.
8 Central Asians are, despite their
nationalistic pride, far more similar than their different ethnic names
would suggest. For example, the Kazakhs and Uzbeks were the same people
until what was essentially a family feud split them in 1468, and the
Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek languages are all Turkic tongues.
None of today’s five post-Soviet Central Asian countries existed as
separate political entities named after any form of their respective
ethnic groups until the 1920s; before then, they were historically part
of Turkestan. Today’s somewhat arbitrary borders in Central Asia are
the legacy of Stalin’s ploys to divide and conquer the region’s
people.
9 Sam van Schaik, “The Buddhism of
Khotan,” (25
Nov. 2004). This is from the website of the International Dunhuang
Project, which aims to make freely available on the Internet more than
100,000 manuscripts, paintings, and artifacts from Dunhuang and other
Silk Road sites.
10 Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, Embassy to
Tamerlane 1403-6, translated from the Spanish and with an
introduction by Guy le Strange (New York and London: Harper, 1928), qtd.
in Daniel Waugh, “Samarkand and the Silk Road in the Time of the
Timurids and Their Heirs,” (7 Dec. 2004). Waugh is an associate professor of history and
international studies at the University of Washington and director of
Silk Road Seattle.
11 Qtd. in Suzanne Haneef, What Everyone
Should Know About Islam and Muslims, 14th ed. (Des Plaines, IL:
Library of Islam, 1996) 196. Haneef, an American, is a formerly devout
Christian who converted to Islam.
12 This description of the Pax Mongolica,
or “Mongol Peace,” is from Daniel Waugh, “The Pax
Mongolica,” (23 Dec. 2004). My
dates of the Mongol empire in Central Asia correspond with their
conquest of Samarkand to Tamerlane’s establishment of a capital there.
13 James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
(New York: Touchstone, 1996) 41. The sections on Islam and Islamic
history cover only a handful of pages, but in general I recommend this
book to anyone interested in learning how American thinking has been
shaped by falsehoods that are perpetuated largely for unstated reasons
of cultural and religious imperialism.
14 Again, I am writing in general terms.
Central Asia, like the rest of the world at that time, was often
embroiled in war, and many of its leaders were models of tyranny. But
looked at broadly today, we can see that Central Asia also set a
standard for the peaceful co-existence of different cultures and
religions that our “enlightened” Western world has since too often
failed to match.
15 Personal email to the author, 24 July
2004. In order to protect the identity of the writer, I have changed her
name and intentionally left out many identifying details. A subsequent
quote from her is also from this letter.
16 Personal email to the author, 18 July
2004. Again, I have changed the name of the writer in order to protect
his identity. Two subsequent quotes from him are from this letter and
one dated 21 July 2004, respectively. While leaving his words intact, I
have taken the liberty of editing his punctuation for clarity.
17 “Freedom of Religion and Interethnic
Accord,” Embassy of Kazakhstan to the United States and Canada,
(19 Nov. 2004).
18 “Turkmenistan deports last Russian
Baptist missionary,” Worthy News, 23 May 2000, (19 Dec. 2004); “Asia:
Tajikistan,” International Christian Concern,
25 October 2001, (19 Dec. 2004).
19 Ismanov; Igor Rotar, “Kazakhstan: Do
Police and KNB want to catch criminals?”, Forum 18 News Service, 12
Oct. 2004, (19 Dec.
2004).
20 Despite the obvious differences between
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, even a cursory read of the Qur’an
reveals many teachings on their essential unity. I will limit myself to
two here, both taken from ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Ali’s free-verse
translation, The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, 10th ed.
(Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1999). The citations refer first to
the surah (chapter) and then to the ayah (verse): “It is
He Who sent down / To thee (step by step), / In truth, the Book, /
Confirming what went before it; / And He sent down the Law / (Of Moses)
and the Gospel (of Jesus)” (3:3); “And dispute ye not / With the
People of the Book [Jews and Christians]… / But say, ‘We believe /
In the Revelation which has / Come down to us and in that / Which came
down to you; / Our God and your God / Is One….’” (29:46).
21 Carla Power, “The Age of
Fundamentalism,” Newsweek, 9 Dec. 2002: 49; “Falwell sorry
for bashing Muhammad,” CBS News, 14 Oct. 2002, (19 Dec. 2004).
22 Qtd. in Rowan Stewart and Susie Weldon, Kyrgyzstan
(Hong Kong: Airphoto International Ltd./Odyssey, 2002) 19-20. Material
in the two subsequent paragraphs in the text is also qtd. in or drawn
from this source, 26-7.
23 Reuel Hanks, “Civil Society and
Identity in Uzbekistan: The Emergent Role of Islam,” Civil Society
in Central Asia, eds. M. Holt Ruffin and Daniel C. Waugh (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1999) 165, 176.
24 As the Quranic translator Yusuf ‘Ali
wrote in the preface to his 1934 first edition, “It is good to make
this personal confession, to an age in which it is in the highest degree
unfashionable to speak of religion or spiritual peace or consolation, an
age in which words like these draw forth only derision, pity, or
contempt.”
Originally published in
Rock &
Sling
Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Jeff Fearnside
