Finding Jesus and Mary in Ramadan
In which a Muslim in Ramadan reclaims Christianity from colonial Empires and prays for liberation for the homeland of Jesus and Mary, and for all oppressed peoples.
Searching in the rubble that colonialism made
"The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of 'divide and rule' and for Europe's guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years."
— James Baldwin, 1979. The Nation.
Despite double pneumonia last month, Pope Francis in his critical condition continues to make phone calls to the only Catholic parish in Gaza every day, a practice he started soon after the settler occupation reinvigorated their colonial violence in late 2023 with a bloodlust greater than the 40+ years since James Baldwin's count.
In 2024, Christmas was canceled for the second year in a row in Bethlehem. From a church that is 55 years older than the violent entity attacking it, Reverend Munther Isaac says in his sermon that Christ is still in the rubble: "It has become entertainment to them. They don’t see us as human. Because in the logic of settler colonialism, despite knowing there were always people here, the land was 'empty' of who they deemed human." He also said:
- "Palestine is a human and moral cause. For the church, it is also a theological crisis, as a friend of mine recently suggested. It is about the credibility of our witness. It is here that we come face to face with the tragic consequence of bad theology. Actually, this is way beyond 'bad theology' or ideology. Zionism and Christian Zionism are ideologies of supremacy. It is racism. They turned God into a racist tribal deity of their image. They must be named for what they are."
- "While there are some who talk about their 'Roman Empire,' or glorify Herod as 'great,' we Christians are the ones who sing of a child born to refugees escaping a massacre. And you cannot worship both. I pray that the image of the Child in the Rubble will be deeply rooted in our hearts and minds. He was born among us and entered our world under the most difficult and harsh circumstances."
Yet there are no churches in Gaza, if you believe the deputy mayor of Jerusalem in December 2023. Sure babe! Since then, I witnessed an ig carousel listing old churches that the Zionist entity destroyed there. I saw occupying soldiers joyfully broadcasting their mockery of Mary and desecrating a church in Lebanon. I cheered through rage when Palestinians tackled an ethnosupremacist to the ground for invading a church and attacking a statue of Jesus.
"What is under my hands"
The Qur'an, 2:136: So [believers], say, ‘We believe in God and in what was sent down to us and what was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and what was given to Moses, Jesus, and all the prophets by their Rabb. We make no distinction (nufarriqu) between any of them, and we devote ourselves to A!!ah.
One thing that kept me sane through the lockdowns of global modern pandemic Year One was months of weekly online Qur'an classes. My beautiful teacher was very fond of Mary. It was my first time discovering a religious woman who spoke this much of her, so I showed up every week curious and enthusiastic. I learned of a girl-child who was not what her mother expected (3:36) but entered the temple anyway, enthusiastically welcomed and raised by God (3:37). Being in her presence at the temple inspired her guardian Zakariya to wish for offspring (3:38), and so she inspired the birth of Yahya too (John the Baptist). The idea of parenthood, first as unimaginable to her senior guardian (3:40, 19:8) was similarly unimaginable to Maryam herself years later (3:47). "Our lives are interlinked and flow from one another," said my teacher.
We pored over the Maryam sura together. I realised what a mood she was; perhaps if you asked a religious ethnosupremacist today to describe the perfect woman, they would describe a serene, permanently-accepting obedient blank slate, an NPC who stays at home politely while everyone around her chooses their fate.
But the woman chosen over all women of the world (3:42) wasn't this person. Instead, the blessed girl-child became a woman compelled to travel away from family (19:16-17), who told a presumably very handsome man disturbing her peace to back off (19:18), who dared to have follow-up questions for an actual angel just doing his job (19:20), and who was in so much pain delivering on the most planned pregnancy on earth that she wished out loud that she was not only dead but fully and totally forgotten long before any of it all (19:23), only to be swiftly judged by her community upon her return for what they saw as scandalous behaviour (19:27-28).
Yet in multiple narrations, Muhammadﷺ maintains Mary was the best of women in her lifetime. In fact, a Muslim's belief would be incomplete without a belief in her and in her son. I was privileged to share some niche joy with my native Christian friend in a more obscure story saved from my notes, compiled in narrations dating to at least the 8th century: it was reported that when Muhammadﷺ reclaimed the Kaaba, he entered and ordered all false idol imagery inside it to be wiped clean, erased— "except for what is under my hands." His hands were placed over an image of Mary and Jesus.
Enemy of the state
Jesus was a divinely-guided revolutionary political dissident who lived and died in a police state for challenging the legitimacy of the Roman Empire. His teachings and actions as recorded in the Gospels often disavow greed, wealth hoarding, and exploitation— key ingredients of capitalism as colonial looting. It is as my teacher said, "prophets don't come with very complicated agendas."
So of course the Roman Empire viewed him as a significant enemy of the state. His arrest and classically Roman public execution was meant to serve a warning to his Jewish followers who dared to challenge oppressive systems and state violence. A few centuries after the failed attempt to make an example of him, the Roman Empire collapsed (as all empires do). Europe moved into a Dark Age, that is: wealth inequality led to shrinking government services, breakdown of law and order, decay of trade and education systems, and a spike in illiteracy. In the decline of central governance, Christianity emerged as a unifying force in western Europe, the primary institution binding disparate regions together. In Roman cities like Germany, France and Britain, society simplified down to serfs, warriors, priests.
Sometime in the 15th century, the Catholic Church issued a series of decrees called The Doctrine Of Discovery: Europeans were encouraged to control and dominate Indigenous people and land— an invitation taken up enthusiastically by the casual mass enslaving, converting, expelling of millions ever since. All this to say, ideas of extermination are a shared heritage long before Nazi Germany or Zionist Israel. The colonial principle of selective humanity has never gone away. But neither has the Indigenous people, who continue their generations of resistance to protect the planet.
Christianity's home
“Christianity’s home is Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, and Galilee and Qana, South Lebanon. This is the path of Christ. We are the indigenous Christians of the world. What the Zionists have been doing to the indigenous Christians of the Levant for all these decades is not different from what they’ve been doing to the Muslims. Their colonisation and apartheid on the Indigenous peoples doesn’t have to do with religion. This is why the struggle for liberation does not have a religion, […] they do not want to see the Christianity of the actual holy land, they prefer to see the Zionist Christianity that was birthed and made in their books by their scholars in the 17th and 18th century. They renewed the whole idea of Christianity and used it to colonise us. They are lying.”
— Christian-Lebanese journalist Ghadi Francis, October 2024
Believers don't believe in coincidences. Therefore, what I've learned is:
- It is not a coincidence that the surge of Christian Zionism— with its main goal of gathering and expelling Jewish people to a place where they could usher in the Last Days— took place in the same 1800s that saw the idea of Manifest Destiny (1845) to describe a widespread belief that white settlers were destined by God to colonise and remove Indigenous peoples from their lands.
- It is not a coincidence that in 1840, when the British Royal Navy were out to test its most advanced fighter ship yet, it was the shores of Lebanon and Palestine that they set out to terrorise. It was the first time British-led forces occupied Palestine, even if briefly. The Royal Engineers swiftly produced a map of Gaza city in 1841. You can see Shuja'iyeh on it.
- It is not a coincidence that my friend says the US Empire doesn't allow her people to retrieve their gas from the sea. That they never really had electricity since she was born. Or that her people are still under economic sanctions today.
- The early 1840s destruction of the Palestinian town of Akka using the newfound technology of steam power fascinated much of early Victorian Britain. It is not a coincidence that Christian Zionism was already popular with the political elites there, or that even today, Empire continues to hold tight to fossil fuels and weaponised technology.
- It is not a coincidence that the 1917 Balfour Declaration came from the same Britain that saw a surge of Christian Zionism in the 1800s. It is not a coincidence that most Zionists are Christian, not Jewish. It is no coincidence that Zionist Christian groups today have more money, more members, and more power than any other pro-israel lobby across the board. It is no coincidence that the settler colonial entity violently formed in 1948 uses war rhetoric laced with biblical references that gather US Christian Evangelicals like moths to a flame.
- It is not a coincidence that Gen Z women in the US Empire are ditching church as the Empire enthusiastically funds its internal decay with tech battle-tested on the eradication of indigeneity where Jesus was born, or that they went from a genocidal president to re-electing a convicted felon and rapist who said at his inauguration: "I was saved by God to make America great again."
To live not to kill
"I'm a Palestinian Christian. And we know as the first Christians, as the Christians of Palestine, that no one who sends bombs, no one who sends weapons to kill families in tents in Palestine is a true Christian... the real Church, the first church— the Palestinian church, the Palestinian Christian church— was born in Palestine, where Jesus of Nazareth was also born. Jesus of Nazareth a Palestinian Jewish rabbi, tells us to love not to hate, to live not to kill. We call out all churches who refuse to stand for peace. We call out all churches who refuse to use the right words to call what some people call a genocide, and what others call bombing families in tents."
— Palestinian Christian seminarian John Na'em Snobar, 2 November 2024.
A blessing born to bloom against Empire
“The resilience of Jesus is in his meekness; weakness, and vulnerability. The majesty of the incarnation lies in its solidarity with the marginalized. Resilience because this very same child, rose up from the midst of pain, destruction, darkness and death to challenge Empires; to speak truth to power and deliver an everlasting victory over death and darkness."
— Reverend Munther Isaac from Gaza, in his Christmas 2023 sermon.
The Qur'an in the Maryam sura recounts a story not mentioned in the canonised Gospels. In it, Jesus speaks his first words to his people from the cradle in defense of his mother, who was being questioned for returning to her community as a single mother but was Divinely instructed to say nothing— So she pointed at the baby. They said: How can we talk to someone who is a child in the cradle? He said:
I am a servant of A!!ah
He has granted me revelation and made me a nabi
He has made me a blessing wherever I go
And bid me to establish prayer
and to give away my wealth for as long as I live
and to be kind to my mother.
He has not made me arrogant
or graceless.
Peace be upon me
the day I was born
the day I die
and the day I am raised back to life!
That is Jesus, son of Mary. This is the truth about which they doubt. (19:29-34)
X
My first prayer mat as a child was one of the many that family would use when praying at our home. One time I came back to it after a cousin had used it, only to find he had changed it with a marker he found in the room: Part of the stitching where the mosque was had a dark silver X pressed down over it, converting a + into an asterisk. He must have thought it looked too much like a ♱ for his comfort. I wonder if it worked in making his prayer more comfortable, because I couldn't gaze downwards without looking right at that X after. Even when I close my eyes right now to reimagine that prayer mat of my youth, I still see it there, more vividly than I can recall any of its architecture.
Bad things
Christians are a minority where I live. Muslims are documented as more than half of the population, the same number of the dominant ethnicity by political design. That is, by design the narrative is there are no Malay Christians, only Malay Muslims (assigned at birth, politically dominant) and only non-Malay Christian Malaysians. To 'convert' to Islam here (usually necessary for marriage or proximity to power) is sometimes colloquially called to 'enter Malayness.' It was in this world that I was negotiating with my mother one teen Christmas. My school friend— and I had few of these to begin with— invited me to see a play she is starring in. The address was a church of course, one of the 90+ churches in the country. There are thousands of mosques here. I had never been to a church before, so why not on Christmas? To show up for my friend? I could not digest the concern I was getting from her— "What bad things do you imagine will happen? That one step past the gate and I face God's disapproval?" I faced her disapproval. Today, I still don't believe in this kind of danger. There are churches that have kept Muslims safe. There are churches I hope I can visit in my lifetime. Not for a seasonal theatre production; I've done that. Today I long to sit in sacred spaces that hold generations of old love.
Mary as guardian
When I asked my native Christian friend to describe her Mary, she speaks of Maryam the warrior, guardian, lady of the sea. Mary of the sacred feminine and the moon. Mary and the hymn of the Fridays, Mary depicted as glorious support in the struggle for liberation. Not a docile white lady, but embodying a different kind of chastity: "her chastity is that she did not choose the sin of violence and evil."
My friend showed me this picture and said: see, Maryam has the same expression my badass great-grandmother did.
A native messenger
Jesus was a 1st-century Levantine Jewish messenger who regularly referenced ancient sacred traditions that were part of the desert's rich spiritual and cultural heritage where he was born. He mostly spoke Aramaic: the common language of his homeland and main regional language (Greek was introduced by Alexander the Great). The structure of Aramaic allows for many meanings in one word, which adds depth to his teachings that Greek and Latin translations miss. Fabre D’Olivet, a Hebrew scholar, pointed out that Bible translations often miss the rich, layered meanings found in the original languages. It is possible to consider then that Greek versions of the Gospels are not as accurate or complete as previously thought. The oldest and most trusted version of the Bible in native Christian traditions is the Peshitta, if not the oldest then still "much closer to the thought forms of Jesus than any Greek version," says Neil Douglas-Klotz, who then references pioneering Aramaic scholar George M. Lamsa: "Most of the idomatic confusions in the parables of Jesus are instantly cleared up when looked at from the Aramaic point of view. These confusions arose when translators worked from Latin versions of Greek versions that themselves misunderstood the Aramaic."
Neil Douglas-Klotz's deep dives into Aramaic led him to uncovering generous and beautiful ways of articulating the Lord's Prayer and the teachings of Jesus. I see how his efforts at befriending an Aramaic Jesus "contains the seeds of a revolution."
There is a tradition narrated by Abu Dawud that Sunni Muslims find historically uncomfortable to spread further. In it, Muhammadﷺ recited a dua very similar to The Lord's Prayer as it appears in Matthew 6:9-13, yet his remix of it is Qur'anically compatible. Instead of asking for daily bread, Muhammadﷺ is narrated to have said: "Forgive us our sins and trespasses, you are the Lord of the good folk. Send down a mercy from your mercy, and a healing from your healing upon this pain so that it may be healed."
A vision of how heaven and earth mingles in us
"[Jesus] offered a new vision of how heaven and earth mingled in us, and of what a human being could become." — Neil-Douglas Klotz, 2022. Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus.
I remember since at least the 2010s, the most vulnerable Christians in my country were harassed and taken to court by ethnosupremacists for using the name A!!ah in their prayers (the ridicule when that made broader news is always deserved). Only ethnosupremacists believe they have unique claim to divide and rule over THE Name of the Indivisible. They would foam at the mouth to see anything in the mother tongue that does not support or validate their own continuous constructed power.
The same local ethnosupremacists would probably fritz their brains to comprehend the nameless Lebanese village Nadine Labaki presents in her 2011 film Where Do We Go Now, a movie that felt like a fever dream of truths I was not raised to recognise. I wasn't looking for the village imam and village priest making a shared announcement to the town that starts with "In the name of A!!ah, the all-Merciful." The film came into my radar because I was going through a phase of watching only movies with older women in lead roles or as directors. For many reasons this movie extremely delivered; "every single woman in that movie really DID DO THAT", I said when rewatching in 2022.
It was the first time I saw Muslims and Christians looking the same, sounding the same, the village's women strategising against their men descending into violence from forgetting they have always been neighbours. Some reviews criticised that the movie's tone was all over the place: turning too rapidly from grief to laughter, love to shocking tragedy, holding sharp and tender wit for both Muslim and Christian realities. And sometimes they even burst out in song!?! I could see why people would find whiplash in that. But after this new interfaith friendship I revisit that capacity as both a marvel and necessarily mundane reality. How messy it is to be human! It seems impossible for a heart to hold multitudes, but we must continue holding hands and learning joy in this chaos together. It is honest, as British-Palestinian Isabella Hammad said in Recognising The Stranger: "We who are not there [in Palestine], witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak."
My teacher who loves Mary shared a bit of Rumi in Mathnawi commenting on a beautiful story of Maryam from the Gospel of Luke, saying that Muslims who reject it outright for not being in the Qur'an could be short-sighted for not being able to imagine the story as taking place in another realm of existence, or even an allegorial extended metaphor for our own soul. "Besides," she added, "sometimes truth can only be told in fiction."
Salam wahai Maryam
If Mary had to travel through the Holy Land today, her path would be violated at every turn by several checkpoints' worth of religious ethnosupremacists simply for still being alive and native to stolen land. If she sought refuge where I live, she would face waves of religious ethnosupremacists whose racism disables us from ratifying the refugee convention and enables denial of classed realities. If she had to flee to somewhere in the 'west', I imagine she would suffer unnaturally overstuffed and overpriced supermarkets, the colonial Eurofication of her and her son's image, and how she is rendered powerless to stop her taxes from funding the industrialised murder of her people and all the oppressed.
In the last day of the Maryam series of Qur'an classes online, we all translated the first half of Shlom Lech Maryam from Aramaic into our own languages, since it has no contradiction with the Qur'an: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Salam wahai Maryam, diberkati rahmat,
sesungguhnya Tuhan bersamamu.
Engkaulah yang dirahmati antara wanita,
cahaya matamu Isa dirahmati juga.
A genuinely enchanting else
When Reverend Munther Isaac said in his 2023 sermon that Christ was under the rubble, he also said Gaza has become the moral compass of the world, that Jesus, "born among the occupied and marginalized, he is in solidarity with us in our pain and brokenness."
Palestine's freeing is simultaneously entwined with the freeing of Indigenous and Black people in Turtle Island. To end Palestinian occupation, the bewitched American/Canadian false dream must fall and be replaced by a genuinely decolonial enchanting else.
— Mohamed Abdou, author of Islam and Anarchism, in Palestine's and Turtle Island's Liberations are Entwined.
In this first week of Ramadan, the month of facing Reality, I sit with my friend in silence across great global distances, facing liberation. This year, the ethnosupremacist colonial entity cut off water and food as Ramadan started in Gaza. Every experience I have of food or thirst brings me back there every time, to a people who are already forbidden by their colonisers to collect even rainwater. On my land, ethnosupremacists conduct their annual Ramadan antagonism, arrogant and graceless, patrolling non-Muslim eateries to persecute anyone whose skin colour matches theirs, or turning away groups of Muslims at mosques from breaking fast with them for being migrants with skin darker than theirs.
I remain steadfast to throw any stone I have at the inevitable downfall of all religious ethnosupremacy, that colonial ideology of death production that corrupted centuries of belief from the homeland of the beloved nabi Isa and his blessed mother Maryam. Let us wipe lies and false worship clean. Erase except what we believers lovingly cover under our hands.
References channel
For more notes and sources: are.na/liy-y/finding-jesus-ibn-maryam
Liy Yusof
