#The melbourne anglican series#

“My Muslim friends would say even more than that they would say if we are going to interpret the Quran fully and faithfully we need to recognise that every surah in the Quran except one begins with Bismillahir-Rahman ir-Rahim – in the name of God the most merciful and gracious and compassionate. When interpreting the Bible or the Quran, Dave says context is crucial. You have to guard against the death of any innocent civilians, never use force to coerce people into conversion and if there’s any sign of a willingness to make peace, you make peace, even if you’re sceptical about whether people mean it or not because peace is what Allah wants”. “Where it is associated with violence, it is the sort of violence that in the West would be permitted according to the theory of just war: if, in a struggle for justice you need to use force, you should never be the aggressor, it should only be defensive then in the conflict you should make sure that you protect other people of other traditions and religions, never destroy their holy places or property. So they’d say the overwhelming emphasis of the idea of Jihad in the text itself affirms a non-violent struggle for justice. They would say the words Jihad and Jihada are used 35 times in the Quran, and only four times is the word associated with violence. “My Muslim friends say that the extremists have co-opted the word ‘Jihad’ and used it as a by-word for terror in a way that’s not true to the original understanding of Jihad in the Quranic text. He believes understanding the term ‘Jihad’ is critical for Christian/Muslim dialogue. In explaining his confrontational title for the book The Jihad of Jesus, he writes: “Jesus embodied the original Jihad of non-violent struggle for inspirational personal growth and transformational social change… demonstrates a life of radical non-violent sacrificial compassion as the only way of life that can save us from destroying ourselves and our societies”. This is also to enter a place of humility, and of taking the log out of my own eye before I try to take the speck out of somebody else’s.” “So entering that deeper place of love becomes the formative way of shaping the way I engage with the Muslim community and the conflict between Christians and Muslims. “But what’s really important is that I learn it by heart and it becomes the prayer of my heart, and I can pray it without thinking, as a way of focusing and centring on the love of God revealed in Jesus.

He repeats it silently during his time of prayer and meditation each morning and evening. The heart of this practice, he says, is his own version of the Jesus prayer: “Jesus, Saviour, may I know your love and make it known.” “For me, the most important place for that prayer is in the nanosecond between action and reaction, where I try, rather than react and retaliate, to slow down, to create a space between action and reaction and in that place I critically reflect on myself and I pray that prayer.” This human capacity and potential for violence, he says, has made him confront his own dark side, and develop a spiritual practice which allows him to be centred and focused in the midst of turmoil. “I know how quickly things can turn and how the mob mentality can take over and how we can scapegoat people and end up slaughtering innocent people in the process.” This experience is one of the reasons, he explains, why he stands up for Muslims. But we looked into their eyes, we begged them, we prayed desperately, and they hesitated… before running off in search of others. The mob screamed and yelled and came closer and we knew that if they had begun to hit us, then it would have ended in us being cut to pieces. “Amidst the chaos and terror we stood at the door with our hands together pleading with them not to hurt the family.

“Hearing the screams of a terrified young Sikh family on the roof of their home which was being attacked by an angry Hindu mob intent on murder, I and some neighbours decided to try to prevent them from entering. Following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh body guards in 1984, Hindus were slaughtering Sikhs in their thousands in retaliation. He spoke to Roland Ashby from The Melbourne Anglican, December 12 2015.ĭave Andrews experienced first-hand what happens when inter-religious tensions erupt into savage violence when he lived in India in the early ’80s. In his new book The Jihad of Jesus – the Sacred Nonviolent Struggle for Justice, writer and community worker for TEAR Australia, Dave Andrews, warns of the dangers of ‘closed set religion’.

#The melbourne anglican series#

The recent disturbing events in Paris are the latest in a global series of religiously motivated terrorist acts.