You might recollect the Danish cartoons that got the jihadists all crazy, and sparked a world-wide “Lego-burning” phenomenon. Well, I’m publishing them out of principle.

America has self-censored itself plenty, along with the rest of the world, because members of Islam are offended by cartoons. Muslims burn American and Israeli flags, and extremists incite violence and terror on the civilized world, yet the Islamic world takes offense when a Danish cartoonist draws their Prophet. They should take more offense when a suicide bomber blows himself up in the name of their religion, their prophet, and their Allah.

Can anything even come remotely close to this preposterous? I don’t mean to bash Islam–though I guess, actually, yes I do mean to bash Islam, in a sense. I mean to bash Islamism, which is the attempt by Orthodox Muslims and radicals to bring about a global Caliphate.

I’m not big on organized religion in the first place. Radical Christians scare me. There are plenty of moderate Christians, though, who can shrug off any satire of their religion. They may not like it, but they can take it with a grain of salt.

They aren’t too concerned that Jesus will be offended, using the logic that he is probably above such things, you know, being a divine entity and all….

Can’t You Take a Joke?

Muslims are so prickly when it comes to Muhammad that they threatened to behead a school teacher when she lets her class name a Teddy Bear after him. Half the Muslim world is named Muhammad but if you name a toy after the Prophet, that is obviously a crime against Allah, and punishable by lashings, imprisonment, and death.

Like Jesus, I’m pretty sure the Prophet himself wouldn’t have been too concerned with a stuffed animal sharing his name. He might have even thought of it as cute. What’s cuter than a Teddy Bear named after a Prophet? And after all, when Mr. Muhammad showed up on the Mesopotamian scene he came as a reformer.

Muslims today seem to forget this, using the inherent Orthodoxy of Islam, and the Prophet’s writings as a means to subjugate the masses, elicit violence, and justify all sorts of violence against women, members of other faiths, and innocents across the globe. You can even use the Koran to justify “wiping Israel off the map” if you try hard enough.

This is not to say that all Muslims are bad. Far from it. Many are educated and moderate.

But “many” here equates to a minority–at least in terms of the ripple effect that Islamism is having on the world, if not in actual numbers. Moderation is not accepted in this religion. Adherence to extremism, salafism, and blind orthodoxy are the status quo. Perhaps this isn’t the religion itself; perhaps Islam is undergoing its own Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, like the Catholic Crusades, the Islamism of today seeks to bring about the institution of Sharia, or Islamic Law, across the globe.

(more…)

TEHRAN — A man wrapped in a shawl stood at the door.

“This is Jesus,” said another man.

Jesus sat and peeled an orange as his companion, Nader Talebzadeh, began to speak, precisely, so as not to be misunderstood on a matter so sensitive. The Iranian director’s new film is based on the Islamic version of the life of Jesus, depicting the man Christians believe to be the messiah and son of God as a tormented Judean prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim faith.

One might imagine such a tale may not screen well in the red states of America. The film, nearly 10 years in the making, draws on the Koran and the putative Gospel of Barnabas, considered by many Western scholars a medieval fable. The premise of “Jesus, the Spirit of God” is that Jesus was compassionate and performed miracles, but was not crucified or resurrected from the dead. The message implies that Christianity, a faith of 2 billion people and the core of much Western philosophy, is based on a falsehood.

“I pray for Christians. They’ve been misled. They will realize one day the true story,” said Talebzadeh, whose film has been screened at international film festivals and is being marketed for wider release.

“People might use this film as a strategy to further demonize Iran,” he said. “They may succeed. But I hope once you see that the focus of the film is sacred, it will overwhelm. No one would have imagined that an Iranian would make a film to glorify Jesus.”

Not to mention an Iranian who supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and believes 9/11 was partly a U.S. government conspiracy. “Someone masterminded something,” he said. “And this is the cause for a lot of evil America is doing in this part of the world.”

There is another irony. The actor who plays Jesus, Ahmad Soleimani-Nia, once was a soldier in the Iranian army and later a welder for Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, which the Bush administration accuses of pursuing nuclear weapons. Such footnotes don’t seem odd when talking with Talebzadeh, who has kept Nia in Jesus character — flowing hair, beard, mystic pose — for seven years because he never knows when he might shoot new sequences for the film.

“Jesus, the Spirit of God” comes out of Iran at a time of hostile rhetoric between Washington and Tehran and a divide between Islam and the West that has produced jihad websites, DVDs on the apocalypse, editorial cartoons lampooning Muhammad and a recent Osama bin Laden tape condemning Pope Benedict XVI for a “new crusade” against Islam.

Religion has long been at the heart of tensions between East and West, but it is being swept into a wider cultural war played out on the Internet, film and satellite TV in which icons and sacred texts have been attacked and manipulated. A new Dutch film by a right-wing politician, who compares the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” depicts Islam as a violent faith. In response, a Saudi blogger posted a video suggesting that the Bible could be read as a document for war.

Talebzadeh knows that his Jesus walks on volatile terrain; one wonders, given the tenor of the times, how many fatwas would be issued if a Western director made a film suggesting that Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden under Islamic tradition, was someone other than the prophet.

“There is so much wrong with this man’s understanding of Jesus and Christianity,” wrote an incensed Christian blogger, referring to Talebzadeh in a conversation about the film that is unfolding in cyberspace. “It’s another piece of Satanic propaganda intended to accomplish no meaningful purpose in this world.”

The rough, choppily edited $5-million film, condensed from a 1,000-minute-long series that will soon air on Iranian TV, reveres Jesus as a blessed prophet speaking parables and moving through soft light and angelic chants amid a ruckus of zealots and conspiring Pharisees. The narrative and dialogue are attributed to Islamic teachings and Jesus’ disciple Barnabas, whose gospel the director said was hidden by church authorities so as not to undermine the established Christian faith.

Scholars believe that the gospel, not included in the canon of the early Catholic Church, was written by others centuries later and ascribed to Barnabas. It overlaps with the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but it does not present Jesus as the son of God. Barnabas’ tale resonates with Muslims who believe that it supports the Koran’s teaching that Jesus, though born of a virgin, was not divine, but one of the last great prophets. Talebzadeh’s film shows Jesus ascending to heaven before Roman soldiers come for him; Judas, the disciple who betrays him, is transformed into the likeness of Jesus and crucified. According to Islamic traditions, Jesus is alive and will return to defeat evil.

“Barnabas is a missing link the world is not ready to accept. It’s a piece of literature we should look into,” said Talebzadeh, a man with a graying beard who sat in his office the other day before a bowl of fruit.

Draped in a shawl and legs crossed as if in meditation, Nia-as-Jesus lingered behind Talebzadeh looking very much like a 1970s rock star. He was quiet, serene, a former welder with a thespian calling drifting between the Koran and the New Testament. He had never acted before, but his light skin and angular features mixed with Middle East repose conjured an aura of Western aesthetics and Eastern spirituality.

“I’ve never been able to resolve why I am so drawn to Jesus,” said Nia, a Muslim born in the western mountains of Iran near Iraqi Kurdistan. “It goes back to when I was a boy of 7 or 8. I saw a painting of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and I identified with Jesus. He has always been with me. In my neighborhood, with my long hair and beard, I am known as Jesus.”

Talebzadeh grew up in Iran under the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1970, he moved to the United States, where he says he studied at American University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University in New York. He witnessed a convulsive American decade of antiwar protests over Vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon.

For much of that time, Iran was a U.S. ally. That changed in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic revolution that toppled the shah and resulted in 52 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

“I returned to Iran feeling there was a huge misunderstanding in the West about my country,” he said. “Iran was being demonized.”

Talebzadeh directed a number of documentaries on themes such as the Bosnian conflict and the Iran-Iraq war. In 1999, he began filming “Jesus, the Spirit of God,” which grew out of a passion that began decades earlier when he attended a school in Tehran with Christians and continued over his fascination with the purported writings of Barnabas.

“If there’s one thing in my life I wanted to do, this film is it,” said the director, whose Jesus movie won an interfaith dialogue award at the 2007 Religion Today Film Festival in Italy. “I didn’t say Jesus wasn’t crucified, God did. It’s in the Koran. . . . The film is made with faith. I tried to do it as beautifully as I could.”

He added that he hoped his 35-millimeter film would start a conversation between religions: “In the 21st century, the arts and the media have to create an area for more cordial discussions between faiths at a time when information is moving in the blink of an eye. . . . We should be joining people together, not giving distortion and misunderstanding. We have to say, ‘Have you looked at this door to know the truth about Jesus?’ ”

Some Americans have peeked through Talebzadeh’s door. He showed the movie to four audiences in the United States, and it was recently screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. He said many people were open-minded and intrigued by the historical and religious questions it raised.

“The truth has a whole, different vibration to it,” he said. “If you enhance it with artistry, you can create a discussion.”

Not according to the website of the Worldwide Church of God in Fairfield, Calif.: “Attempts by the Iranians or anyone else who try to deny that Jesus Christ is the true messiah will ultimately fail. The Holy Bible confirms the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in numerous ways, and no amount of filmmaking or lecturing or rhetoric to the contrary can defeat that fact.”

Nia-as-Jesus finished his orange. Talebzadeh, whose office was warm in the afternoon sun, kept talking about the film, about divinity, about how to capture truth.

He turned in his chair toward Jesus, and was still, after all these years, amazed at the likeness, the highlighted hair, eyes of fervor. He joked that he had been searching for his lead character for a long time when his assistant director spotted Nia on the street one day and said, “I found your Jesus.”

~from The LA Times

I just have to add that the preview for this movie looks so incredibly cheesy–I just laughed and laughed when I saw it.  Too bad Mel Gibson isn’t a Muslim–he could do this concept justice.  Oh my, oh my.

Seriously.

Christianity is a difficult subject for me on many levels.  I find it hard, for many reasons, to utterly abandon any notion of Christianity in my life–I am not a Christian, true, but Christianity’s roots are still very much a part of me.  I was raised Christian, and not in a fierce or fanatical way, but in a very deep way.  I think my recent study of Judaism has brought up many things in me regarding Christianity and Jesus.

For one, reading the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, the Torah, and so forth–I realize what the New Testament brought to the concept of God, at least for me.  The Old Testament is rather hard and cold–the Torah, though it is celebrated by the Jewish people in ways I have yet to understand, can be a very Commanding book, and very authoritative in a truly impersonal way.  Jesus and the Gospels brought a “closeness” and a warmth that the Old Testament doesn’t have, at least to me.  Of course, this warmth I speak of has also been used to create war and hate, but the uses of a Holy Text and the intentions of one are often very much at odds.

I find myself still trapped, perhaps, in the notion that the Old Testament just leads naturally to the New Testament–this is very ingrained in me, and while I have considered converting to Judaism because I admire so much the Jewish people, the intellectualism inherent in their culture and faith, I believe that this deeply rooted sense of the truth of Gospels will be hard for to shake–perhaps too hard.  The other problem I’ve felt lately with Judaism, is while they do not believe in Hell, there is still the notion of the “chosen” people.  And I think as a convert, I’d never really be considered “one of the group” as it were, and least not in the way I would want.  So there’s another form of exclusivity that turns me off–not Hell, but rather Life in general.  As much as I admire the Jewish people, I think I would always feel like an outsider–even if I was a well-liked, well-treated outsider.

So back to Christianity–I guess as I explore my spirituality I don’t want to limit the outcome.  I could never experience Christianity the way my parents do, or the way I once did as a child.  But there are good examples of Christians whose practices and belief appeal to me.  My mother-in-law is a good example.  Hers is a very personal, inward sort of faith.  I like that.  That’s one of the things I admire and respect most about her.  I also have read a little about Quakerism–and that also is something that is quasi-Christian but very different from the way I learned the religion.  There is something very appealing about Quakerism in its abandonment of clergy and mediators, in its mystical approach toward connecting with God.

Also, there is the notion of allegorical faith.  Many modernists believe in the allegorical qualities of the bible, unlike Evangelicals who believe it word for word.  Nevertheless, many modernists still accept that Jesus is the “son” of God; they believe in a place called Hell–and in the necessary “salvation” from this Hell.

The only way I think I could ever accept Christianity–perhaps the way that I do accept it–is with an interpretation that moves beyond the modernist/liberal views.  I think Jesus is a fine role-model, with a great deal of wisdom to offer, and a strong moral code to follow–and viewing him as the allegorical son of God is one way I think I can be at ease with the whole Jesus concept.  Nothing really proves that he wasn’t using metaphor when he spoke of himself as the son of God.  After all, most of what Jesus taught was in parable format–the use of extended metaphors was basically his very own Socratic method.

Regarding Hell, too, I think it’s important to think of this concept from within an allegorical framework.  First of all, most modern publications of the Bible no longer include references to Hell.  The Old Testament does not–so it is only sensible that the New Testament, birthed out of the Old, would not either.  Rather, the King James and earlier interpretations latched on to the very Greco-Roman concept of Hades, and translated that into Hell.  The notion of salvation, then, was also transformed.  Initially it simply meant closeness to God.  Jews believed in a very personal relationship with God.  There were many old, outdated ways (sacrifices) that they could make to apologize for doing bad things.  Here it is important to recall that Jesus was Jewish, though a very unorthodox Jew to be sure!  I think Jesus was simply trying to “modernize” or perhaps simplify the process, saying that all you need to do is believe to be “saved.”  This of course was later twisted into salvation from a Hell that had prior never been a part of either the Jewish religion or the message of Jesus.  Salvation was simply getting back in God’s graces.  There was no threat of Hell.  I believe there is no threat of Hell–only a life without God, or distant from God.  Salvation is, to me at least, simply a path to God and spiritual contentment.

So, to me, the only way I could accept Christianity is to view Jesus as a messenger who personalized the relationship with humankind and God–and used allegory and extended metaphor to describe our relationship to God as a very personal, even familial one.  Hell was a later invention, used to strike fear into the hearts of the unbeliever and “transgressor” and to make the concept of salvation more desperate, more essential, than it was ever intended to be.  Jesus was a reformer, trying to cast out old outdated methods of reaching closeness to God–his biggest enemies were the High Priests and the Tax Collectors, after all….

In this sense, I can see myself calling myself a Christian–one who believes in a close, personal, and individual relationship with God; one who doesn’t believe in the exclusivity of one man or one faith over the other (recall the Good Samaritan); and one who  disbelieves utterly in the concept or notion of a Hell that we need to be saved from–salvation, to me, is a deeply personal  thing, an awakening of our own inner spirituality  and our own  inner connection to God.