A New Take on a Budweiser Story

There's a story going round on the Internet that on September 11, 2001, a Budweiser employee in California entered a shop to find its Arab owners whooping and hollering in appreciation for what the terrorists had done. Shocked and disgusted, the Budweiser employee stepped out of the door and called his boss to tell him what he had discovered. His boss told him to remove all Budweiser merchandise from the store, which the employee promptly did.

News spread quickly to other suppliers as to what had happened, and soon managers from other companies began withdrawing their goods. Without products to sell, the Arabs managers of the store were forced to close their shop and leave town. Moral of the story: here's an effective way to respond to supporters of terrorism.

The story, it turns out, probably isn't true. Management at Budweiser denies it ever happened. But it raises an important question. Imagine with me that this encounter really did take place. It's true that what the employee did was better than responding with violence. But the message the Arabs received by companies boycotting them was simply that they weren't wanted there. It did nothing to change their attitude towards Americans; on the contrary, it likely hardened their hatred of America.

I'm reminded of the story of Jonah in the Bible, where Jonah was keen on seeing the city of Ninevah destroyed because of its sinfulness. Ninevah was the capital of the Jews' primary enemy at the time, Assyria. We know from sources external and internal to the Bible that Assyria annihilated the northern kingdom of Israel, and that the Assyrian army attacked the southern kingdom as well. Jonah really didn't want to see the people of Ninevah repent of their sin and be saved. He wanted to see them obliterated. But God did want Ninevah to repent and he didn't want to kill these people. When the people of Ninevah turned from their sin and God spared them his judgment, Jonah got angry.

Arabs love stories, and they're remarkably open to biblical stories, since the Qur'an hints at them but rarely gives any details. What if the Budweiser employee had been a Christian, and what if he had approached these Muslims and said he wanted to tell them a story? Jonah, or Yunus, is considered a prophet in Islam, so hopefully these men would have agreed to listen. And what does the story teach? That God wants people to turn from their sin, and he doesn't want to destroy them.

Many of the people in the Trade Centers likely didn't believe in God. Some of them probably had hostility toward Christ. Yet God would rather shower mercy on repentant people than destroy them.

I don't know how these Arabs might have responded to this. They might have simply shrugged off the story. But it may have got them thinking more deeply about the nature of God. And it may have created an opening to talking about the love of Christ.

When Sex Brings Death

It’s made news headlines. Human rights organizations have denounced it. It’s caused riots and all manners of protest. It might be the one thing you’ve heard about Islamic law. It’s the penalty for zīna, or sexual sin that applies to Muslims convicted of having sex outside of marriage.

Several months ago, I watched a film called The Kite Runner set in Afghanistan before and during the Ṭalibān regime. In a particularly wrenching moment in the movie, the protagonist is present for the stoning of a couple caught in adultery. The two are tied up and covered in the back of a truck, are brought to a sports stadium full of hundreds of people, then forced to their knees where the authorities begin to stone them. The producer of the film doesn’t leave the film’s viewers to their imagination but coldly depicts the brutality of the execution—the screaming, the impact of the stones, the blood. It is perhaps the most shocking moment of the entire film, though it is only a passing story in the film’s overarching plot.

For anyone who has seen the movie, the scene is sure to provoke lots of questions. First some facts about how zīna is prosecuted. According to sharī‘a, four male Muslim witnesses must be present at the scene of the sex act in order for zīna to be confirmed and the death sentence pronounced—a pretty strange scenario, to be sure. But three of the four schools of Sunni law allow the court to admit circumstantial evidence, and Malikis (which are dominant in North Africa) hold that if an unmarried woman becomes pregnant with child, that this is evidence of zīna. A woman who claims she has been raped must show evidence that she tried to get help if she is to be believed. And how likely is a woman to succeed in that? In their book, Partners or Prisoners, Ida Glaser and Napoleon John noted a study showing that in 1995, 140 women in Pakistan (where sharī‘a is part of the law) complained to police they had been raped, and of these only six proceeded to a full investigation (see pg 271). Clearly women are facing an uphill battle on this one.

And where does this practice of punishing zīna come from? Punishment of zīna by stoning does not actually originate in the Qur’ān (though some Muslim jurists think that it was in the canon following 4:15 but was later lost when a goat ate the papyrus containing it). Chapter 24:2 instructs that the woman and man guilty of adultery or fornication must be flogged ‘each of them with a hundred stripes.’ Nevertheless Islamic scholars have come to accept stoning as the expected punishment for zīna. Some scholars have suggested it may have come from Jewish law in the Old Testament (see Leviticus chapter 20), but that is just speculation.

I am reminded of the story of Jesus in John 8:1–11, in which the religious leaders of the Jews brought a woman caught in adultery before Jesus. (I’ve always wondered where the guilty man was. Perhaps the woman was showing with child, which is why she got singled out?) The leaders prepared to stone her, but asked Jesus what he thought they should do with her. Jesus responds, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ A stunning response for these leaders, for who among them was without sin? John reports that everyone but Jesus left the court, whereupon Jesus refused to condemn her as well but told her to go ‘sin no more.’

In the West, we tend to read this story with a sense of historical distance. What government in the West kills people for sexual sin nowadays? But given the punishment for zīna in sharī‘a, Jesus’ question is a piercing one. Who among Muslim clerics are without sin? Indeed who among any of us?

*For a good academic treatment of before (though someday I would like to), but I can imagine it’s a far cry from the one place I have been to in North Africa—Cairo, Egypt. I’m not thinking of the fact that the city of Cairo alone has a massive population (roughly 9 million), compared with the 10 million that call the entire land of Tunisia home. Or that Cairo is polluted from heavy industry and hazy with smog, while Carthage sits daintily on the Mediterranean coast, beckoning to tourists with its picture-perfect blue skies and sea shimmering in the background.

No, I’m thinking about the different paths that Christianity took in these places following the Islamic conquests of the seventh century. The biblical scholar F.F. Bruce once famously argued that the church in North Africa (who birthed such luminaries as Tertullian, Cyprian, and especially Augustine) did not survive the coming of Islam because it was “the religion of the dominant Roman caste, rather than of the native [Berber] races, and the Bible was read only in Latin.” Bruce contended that for a church to survive, the Bible must be read in the vernacular by indigenous populations. Go to Cairo today, and you’ll find ample evidence that the Coptic church, while not flourishing, nevertheless retains a significant foothold in Egypt. No comparable church exists in Tunisia today.

This past week, I picked up Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests again, after putting it down for more pressing matters earlier this spring (see my prior blog for first impressions of his book). Aware of Bruce’s argument, I came with real interest to Kennedy’s chapter on the Islamic invasion of the Maghrib (the western part of North Africa). While the chapter isn’t about the disappearance of Christianity, per se, he does fill in some historical and cultural details that are not widely known.

For example, he writes that North Africa was in the first few centuries of Roman rule the empire’s wealthiest province and remained so until the early fifth century. The province cultivated a lucrative trade in olives, which it grew and then sold via its capital Carthage to Rome. But in the early fifth century, the province was lost to German tribes known as the Vandals (Augustine of Hippo dreaded their coming), and that trade pattern was disrupted and not restored, even when the Byzantines won the area back from the Vandals in 533. Carthage (and surrounding cities) went into irrevocable decline, and was a mere shell of its former self when Muslims finally captured the city in 698.

In his essay, Bruce had assumed that the church’s reliance on Latin alienated the ‘native’ peoples [ie the Berbers] from Christianity. But Kennedy observes that when the Byzantines returned to take North Africa back from the Vandals, they imposed Greek on the peoples of Carthage. He writes that this ‘foreign tongue’ must have “made the imperial authorities seem more like alien invaders than restorers of past glories.” Now you could argue that doesn’t change the core argument of Bruce—that the Berbers didn’t accept Christianity because it wasn’t in their vernacular. But that foreign tongue wasn’t necessarily Latin by the time Muslim armies arrived—it was Greek.

Kennedy’s chapter also makes at least a few references to Christian Berber tribes. He mentions that Uqba bin Nafi al-Fihri, whom Muslims credit as leading the Islamic conquests in the Maghrib, discovered and attacked a Christian Berber tribe in the town of Aghmat, deep in the remote Atlas Mountains. He also notes that Kusayla, the most powerful Berber leader in the Maghrib and who presented the Muslims with their greatest military challenge, had ‘many’ followers who were Christians and who had good relations with the Byzantines. It's true that Berbers didn't reliably ally with the Byzantines against the Muslims, but they didn't welcome the Arabs either.

While it may be true that the Berbers never accepted Christianity wholesale, the Church certainly made significant inroads into the Berber tribes. Why Christianity did not survive among these groups is a more difficult question that Bruce’s argument doesn’t really address. That remains for another generation of scholars to answer.

Memoirs of a Traveler Extraordinaire

I remember clearly my feeling of exhilaration the first time I stepped onto an airplane and flew across the Atlantic. I was caught up in the spirit of adventure, going to places I had only read about but never experienced. In the space of a couple months, I had visited and studied in five different countries on three continents, traveling on a biblical studies tour organized by my college. It was a truly amazing experience to step out of one country and culture into another just a few hours later.

But while my experience was amazing, it was hardly extraordinary, especially in this day and age when globetrotting boils down to whether you have the time and money, and some spare Immodium in your luggage. Not so during the Middle Ages. Travelling was dangerous—one often had to go in armed caravans to protect oneself against hostile locals and wild beasts. Travel could be arduous, taking weeks to cross deserts or tundra, all the while trying to avoid or in some cases enduring sandstorms or blizzards. Reception by local authorities could be uncertain, especially if you didn’t know the local customs or language and might easily offend. Local diseases could be fatal, as doctors were hard to come by especially in rural areas.

The last couple weeks I’ve been reading intensively the rihla (journey) of Ibn Battuta in preparation for my upcoming exam (I’ll be translating an excerpt of his writings from Arabic to English). Ibn Battuta was born in what is today Morocco in 1304, and at the age of 21, left by caravan to travel to Mecca to go on hajj. Nothing extraordinary there, as every Muslim is expected to go on hajj at least once in his life, provided he is able. But Ibn Battuta didn’t come right home. Rather he kept on traveling … for the next 30 years of his life.

The man would go on to visit nearly every corner of the Muslim world—North Africa, Egypt, Syria, the Saudi peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, the East African coast, the Persian Gulf, Turkey, the Crimea, parts of Central Asia, Afghanistan, India, Malaysia, parts of China, and near the end of his life, Spain, the western Sahara, and Mali. That’s extraordinary—even by today’s standards. And at the end of his life, he recounted his travels to a man named Ibn Juzayy, who wrote it all down. (The map to the left shows both Ibn Battuta's travels and those of a rough contemporary of his, Marco Polo. Click on the map to blow it up. Note that not even Marco Polo traveled as far south as Ibn Battuta did during his travels in Africa.)

Ibn Battuta’s writings provide insights into people and places all over the Muslim world. In the Middle East and North Africa, he was able to communicate easily in Arabic, but in places like Turkey, India, and Mali, only a few could speak Arabic, and Ibn Battuta sometimes had real difficulty communicating. Yet he rarely had difficulty finding lodging, for as a man of some standing, he could impose upon the governor or qadi (judge) of the town and request his hospitality. In Turkey especially, the zawiyas (Sufi hospices) would vie with each other in providing him with a place to stay, feeding him, and entertaining him. In India, Ibn Battuta enjoyed such largesse from the ruler that he stayed in the capital of Delhi for several years and rose to become the qadi of the city and quite a wealthy man.

To read Ibn Battuta’s writings, though, is to also grasp what kind of man he was. As a Sunni Muslim, he spoke derisively of the Rafidis (refusers), or Shi’ite Muslims that ‘refused’ the first three caliphs of Islam (Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthmaan). He went so far as to even avoid entering cities in Iraq where Shi’ites were in the majority. In Turkey, Ibn Battuta expressed outrage that a Jewish physician would presume to sit across from the sultan he was caring for and above some Muslims reciting the Qur’an. He expressed disgust at the way Muslim women in Mali walked around publicly showing their breasts, and was incredulous that men and women there mixed freely—in the Middle East, men and women could only socialize together if they were close relatives. He called Christians in Europe, Hindus in India, and Africans outside Islam ‘infidels’ and even acquired slaves in his travels, some of whom were non-Muslim women he used as concubines.

In some ways, I understand Ibn Battuta. Like him, I started my travels with a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Rome and Greece. And like him, I've gone on to visit many other places. But I much prefer the life of a family man and the stability of a home. And I don't share his prejudices, for many reasons!