Conversion
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, one of the more brutal prisons in the world, eighteen in solitary confinement. The South African government considered him the primary force behind the armed struggle of the African National Congress to end apartheid and transform the face of South Africa. When Mandela was finally released, he had a radically different vision of how to liberate his people. The vision entailed a passionate desire to heal the oppressor as well as the oppressed; the two were inextricably entwined. This liberation could not be achieved through armed struggle but by a compassion and love for the oppressor and oppressed that initiated an avalanche of humanity crying for justice. When Mandela was installed as President of South Africa, he invited his jailers to stand alongside him. The story, were it not true, sounds like a bad novel. Bishop Tom Gumbleton used the example of Mandela recently to illustrate the force of nonviolence. It is as though Mandela’s mantra was Pope John Paul II’s famous, “There is no peace without justice, and no justice without forgiveness.” Two twentieth-century men who had a huge impact on the transformation of their native lands, against all odds. Bishop Gumbleton introduced a Syrian Rite Catholic sister from Iraq by the name of Sister Olga, who is studying in the U.S., a woman in her thirties who as a young girl lived through the horrendous eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, 1980-1988. Iraq received massive U.S. support against the demon Iran, so that, as Henry Kissinger suggested, “they can kill each other.” Sr. Olga, as a girl in the church choir, was always singing daily funeral masses—no delayed burials in a desert climate. The loss of life was so huge that even the small minority of Iraqi Christian soldiers suffered catastrophic losses. Olga’s family fled from their city during the first Gulf war of 1991 to the desert to escape the massive bombing. Twelve years of sanctions followed that so devastated the Iraqi infrastructure and health systems that the death rate of children escalated into the tens of thousands. All documented by UNESCO. All this by way of introduction to this tiny prophetic woman, founder of a new congregation of sisters in Iraq. Olga’s eyes-wide-open exposure to the brutality of war created this inimitable voice for peace that embodies the love of Christ. One exposed so intimately to death, the death of her people, brought Olga to an early maturity and a vocation, strenuously resisted by her family, to serve the most bereft of her people, to incarnate the love of God in a nation soaked in blood. As one a bit jaded about church and religion these days, I bring this woman to your attention as a sign; the Spirit is at work in strange ways to renew our hope in alternatives to killing. In the words of Wendell Berry, to “restore a sense of possibility.” Sr. Olga is the real thing; she would gladly die before taking the life of another made in the image of God We know the flip side to this pious picture in books like The Sorrows of Empire, reviewed by David Graham, and another excellent book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, by Mahmood Mamdani, Director of African Studies at Columbia University. Political terror attributed to Islamic fundamentalists is not intrinsic to their faith; rather their mentors, trainers, anmd bankers were the CIA and U.S. military to a quintessential degree in Afghanistan. It is best to let Mandami, a recognized scholar, speak,
How did right-wing Islamism, an ideological tendency with small and scattered numbers before the Afghan War, come to occupy the global center after 9/11? The answer lies in the Afghan jihad, which gave it not only the organization, the numbers, the skills, the reach, and the confidence, but also a coherent objective….Until the Afghan jihad, right wing Islamists out of power had neither the aspiration of drawing strength from popular organization nor the possibility of marshaling strength from any alternative source. The Reagan administration rescued right-wing Islamism from this historical cul-de-sac. The American jihad claimed to create an Islamic infrastructure of liberation, but in reality forged an “infrastructure of terror” that used Islamic symbols to tap into Islamic networks and communities. We are reaping what we sowed. A closing thought, again from Wendell Berry, “If change is to come, then, it will have to come from the outside. It will have to come from the margins.” Joe Bradley |