Love and Power Part I

I've been spending the past few weeks immersed in trying to understand Islamic extremist theology. It's not a particularly uplifting exercise, although it is at times fascinating. I also find it very frightening. Those who have seen me do this know that I have been doing my best to buffer this fear with large amounts of chocolate and through trying to get most of my reading done in the church offices, which offer both the quiet space to read and the sense of a safe haven!

But today I had the joy of shifting over to a different story--a narrative by Eknath Easwaran about a Muslim leader named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, or Badshah Khan, a leader of the fiercely tribal Pathans in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was a contemporary of Mohandas Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, the revolutionary Indian leader who practiced a faith-based nonviolence that changed the course of history and freed India from British rule. Badshah Khan was a devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi's teachings, someone who understood and embraced their spiritual roots, and he managed to mobilize a force of over 100,000 Pathan 'non-violent' warriors. I've just started the book, but I was struck by a wonderful passage early on, which I want to share here:



"It is my inmost conviction," Badshah Khan said, "that Islam is amal, yakeen, muhabat"-selfless service, faith and love. Yakeen, faith, is an unwavering belief in the spiritual laws that underlie all life, and in the nobility of human nature--in particular, in the ability of every human being to respond to spiritual laws. It implies a profound belief in the power of muhabat, love, to transform human affairs, as Badshah Khan, like Gandhi, demonstrated with his life. This is not the sentimental notion of love portrayed in films. It is a spiritual force which, when drawn upoon systematically, can root out exploitation and transform anger into love in action." (pg 13, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains, by Eknath Easwaran)

Love as a spiritual force.

This is something I keep exploring here, and hopefully will continue as I carry on with this book.... It seems that we have come to associate power, or force, with violence and domination. We see it as the ability to impose our will on someone else. On the other end of the spectrum, we have love. Love seems nice, harmless enough and desirable of course... but idealistic, utopian even. Not something we want or need in a time of war, in a time of fear. Therefore, most of us do not feel that love and power have much of a relationship.

But it is increasingly coming clear to me that the paradox is that love is the ultimate power. That which seems weakest is in fact most powerful. Is this illustrated anywhere more powerfully than Jesus dying on the cross for His enemies and His subsquent Resurrection? In Christos Victor (and if you haven't heard the sermon by Greg Boyd on this, I highly recommend it) we see that God Himself, making Himself vulnerable to us through Love, vanquishes all that is not Love, all that seems to be so powerful, and rises up again invincible to bring us into the light of the Truth. The door is always open.

But that is easier understood abstractly than it is put into practice. I am grateful to be learning more about a man who found the courage to do exactly that, in a time and place where it was not expected, and with a group of people from whom it was considered impossible due to their 'brutal history' (the Pathans have always been known as great warriors). I am also glad to have found a very different view of Islam than that which I had been reading of late. I look forward to reading and learning more....