The Transforming Greatness of God

IN DECEMBER 1989, I went on a transforming pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine, the birthplace of transformation. The West Bank and Gaza, Nazareth and Sepphoris, gospel and intifada drew me into the depths of a question that has been present since I awakened to nonviolence 30 years ago: Can humanity be transformed through nonviolence in the nuclear age, through the discovery of a power beyond power, before it destroys itself?

The December journey took me to three places in particular which emphasized the question of our nonviolent transformation: Beit Sahour, a Palestinian Christian town in the West Bank that is now the setting for a tax revolt; Beach Camp, Gaza, a refugee camp where a deep Muslim spirituality sustains daily life-and-death confrontations; Sepphoris, the remains of an ancient city beside Nazareth whose destruction may have inspired Jesus' prophetic vision of the kingdom of God or the destruction of Jerusalem.

Although Sepphoris was the end of my pilgrimage, that dead city is the beginning and symbol of our predicament. So I will begin this reflection at Sepphoris.

As an experiment in the truth of Jesus' history, I walked to Sepphoris from its former suburb, Nazareth. The winding, five-mile walk through the Galilean countryside took a little less than two hours. Jesus probably did it in less.

Jesus grew up in the shadow of a destroyed Sepphoris, the culmination and symbol of a failed revolution. As a client king of Rome, Herod used Sepphoris as his Galilean headquarters. His royal palace and garrison at Sepphoris were a focus of the resentment of exploited Galilean peasants. When Herod died in 4 B.C.E. (around the time of Jesus' birth), violent uprisings occurred throughout Judea to thwart the continuation of Herod's oppressive rule under his sons. The attack on Sepphoris was led by the messianic Galilean revolutionary Judas, son of Hezekiah.

Judas raised his people's army from villages "around Sepphoris" (in the historian Josephus' phrase), thus probably including residents of Nazareth. His forces were successful in overcoming the Herodian garrison at Sepphoris, but it was a short-lived victory. Its outcome provides a striking parallel to Rome's future destruction of Jerusalem in retaliation for the Jewish revolution of 66-70 C.E. Roman legions swept down on Sepphoris from Syria, re-took the city from the revolutionaries, and then as an imperial lesson, burned Sepphoris down and made slaves of its people--just as it would in Jerusalem in 70.

I walked to Sepphoris as a pilgrimage into Jesus' consciousness of that nearby event, with its prefiguration of the destruction of Jerusalem which he prophesies in the synoptic gospels. In the ruins of Sepphoris, a city destroyed by revolutionary and imperial violence (and rebuilt by Herod Antipas when Jesus was a young man), Jesus would have seen the future of Jerusalem. In order to save his people in a specific, historical sense, Jesus set out to realize an alternative, transforming vision, "the kingdom of God." I visited the site of ancient Sepphoris in the hope of finding further connections between its history and the gospels. What I discovered instead was the perennial significance of Jesus' prophetic alternatives, nonviolent transformation or destruction.

As I climbed the rocky dirt road leading up the hill of Sepphoris' archaeological diggings, I was beside the road, under newly planted trees, a few scattered remnants of destroyed Arab houses. These modern ruins are among the scant visible remains of the 4,000 or so people who lived in Sepphoris' successor community, the Arab village of Saffuriya, which dates back to the 12th century. Just as Rome razed Sepphoris in 4 B.C.E., Israel razed Saffuriya in 1948.

On the night of July 15,1948, in Israel's War of Independence, three Israeli planes bombed Saffuriya. As Israeli shelling and artillery bombardment continued sporadically through the night, about 6,000 people (including 2,000 refugees already fleeing the Israeli advance) evacuated Saffuriya to take refuge in the orchards two kilometers northeast.

The next day, 150 remaining Palestinian men fought the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), house-to-house, inflicting 20 percent casualties. After Saffuriya was taken by the IDF, the new state of Israel, in a pattern repeated at more than 300 Arab villages, destroyed the village and barred the Palestinians from returning. Trees were planted to hide the remains of the old village.

The Jewish settlement of Zippori took over the land of Sepphoris and Saffuriya. In recent years, American archaeological expeditions to Israel's Zippori have dug up more evidence of the ancient city of Sepphoris than remains of the 20th-century people of Saffuriya.

The recycling of violence represented by Sepphoris-Saffuriya-Zippori has, in the nuclear age, reached an end of the line. In Jesus' contingent prophesy of the destruction of Jerusalem, Jerusalem has become the world. The ruthless, hopeful realism of Jesus leaves us no other alternative: transformation or annihilation. The kingdom of God is at hand.

I SAW THAT transforming alternative at Beit Sahour.

My first encounter with Beit Sahour was on November 1, 1989, when a headline in that morning's Birmingham Post-Herald caught my eye: "State of Siege Ends in West Bank: Property Confiscated in Face of Tax Revolt." The article told the inspiring story of Beit Sahour, a Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that had been under a six-week military blockade because its people refused to pay taxes to their occupying force.

"The residents of Beit Sahour were cheering last night," I read, "proclaiming victory as Israeli soldiers cleared roadblocks and ended a six-week state of siege."

One month later, thanks to an invitation from Scott Kennedy, of the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California, I walked with the first Mid East Witness delegation into an again-barricaded Beit Sahour. On the two-year anniversary of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, December 8, 1989, the Israeli government had closed Beit Sahour to visitors in order to discourage any outside support of demonstrations.

The five of us succeeded in entering the hillside town on a side street, above the soldiers guarding the main access who had already turned us back a few minutes earlier. We walked single file, 10 meters between us, so as to be less conspicuous to the army's rooftop sentries posted across Beit Sahour.

Suddenly our guide motioned to us to take cover. Soldiers up ahead were firing tear gas canisters into a women's demonstration. If the soldiers saw us, they would eject us from the town as unwanted observers. We ducked into the nearest home and were welcomed warmly by its surprised family. We were in Beit Sahour.

We were thus in the heart of the intifada--and of the gospel as well.

In the month since my introduction to Beit Sahour, I had learned that this intifada birthplace of nonviolence was a similar birth-place in the gospel of Luke. Beit Sahour is right next to Bethlehem (whose filthy jail Sahouri tax resisters know well). Beit Sahour is the traditional site of the shepherds' field in Luke 2:8 where an angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds bringing them the trans-forming "good news of a great joy which will come to all the people," the birth of a messiah, or revolutionary leader, whose future meaning is spelled out further in the angels' song as "peace on earth among people with whom God is pleased" (Luke 2:13).

According to Luke, the particular occasion for Jesus' birth in Bethlehem was in itself not good, joyful, or peaceful news to his people. Matthew's setting for the birth, though 10 years earlier under Herod, is just as repressive. In Luke, it was the Roman Empire's forcible enrollment of a colonized people in a repressive tax census in 6 C.E. ("when Quirinius was governor of Syria," Luke 2:2) that made it necessary for Joseph and Mary to travel almost a hundred miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

Because Joseph's family of David was from Bethlehem, not Nazareth, he and Mary, like thousands of other displaced Jewish peasants, were forced by Roman decree to leave their current home and undertake a difficult journey to an ancestral home district in order to be properly enrolled. This census enrollment, whose purpose was to lay the groundwork for Rome's exploitative taxation of the colonized Jewish nation, was the cause of a tax revolution in 6 C.E. led by Judas the Galilean.

The Lucan context for the "good news" first given to all the people at the shepherds' field (now Beit Sahour) is, therefore, a setting of imperial government repression. The Greek word gospel ("glad tidings" or "good news") had become a propaganda term used by Rome for military victories. The imperial sense of gospel was played upon and turned around by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who used the word for their genuinely good news of a nonviolent victory. In Luke's case, the envisioned good news of peace on earth that is proclaimed in the infancy narrative comes within, and counter to, the specific repression of a taxation system laid upon a subject people.

To the modern, predominantly Christian residents of Beit Sahour, the shepherds' field had once again become a place of conflict between "good news to all the people"--today the good news of the intifadas heard and carried out in Beit Sahour--and the repressive, propagandistic news of a military power occupying their land, taxing their possessions, and killing their children. The Arabic word intifada means "shaking off"--shaking off the occupation. The shaking off of oppression is literally a gospel, "good news," to the oppressed. The Beit Sahour story, mirroring and updating its own shepherds' field story, had in turn become good news to "all the world"--or at least enough of the world to have moved the occupying government to close off the town to outside observers.

BUT WE WERE NOW IN BEIT SAHOUR, in the home of a warmly welcoming Palestinian family--and soon in several such homes, as the town's communications and logistics network moved the five of us swiftly along to different households so that we might have the widest possible sharing with the people during our two days there.

We learned quickly the basis for the nonviolent power of Beit Sahour. The town is a family. The people of Beit Sahour are one.

Beit Sahour is in fact made up largely of five huge Palestinian families that have lived and intermarried there for centuries. The town is an effective reminder of the basic truth of our world--one family, one world, one life--that profoundly simple and transforming truth that nonviolence calls upon in each of its actions. Beit Sahour is that basic truth of oneness in continuous nonviolent action, the active expression of one living family. To be in Beit Sahour for even a few hours is to experience what is possible and necessary for us all.

On my first night in Beit Sahour, I was taken door to door to meet as many members as possible of the "Rishmawi clan," that larger Beit Sahour family in one of whose homes I was being given hospitality. I was soon immersed in a transforming vision made up of Rishmawis, Jesus, and Gandhi.

Although I met many Rishmawis that night, including the leaders cited in the Birmingham newspaper article that had introduced me to Beit Sahour, it seemed as if I was meeting just as many other Rishmawis by their absence. Every home I visited had immediate family members in prison. I was told their stories--by their fathers, their wives, their children.

Beit Sahour's intifada had its costs. One of these was prison. It was a cost readily accepted by the people of Beit Sahour as the price of their whole people's freedom.

Throughout this house-to-house lesson on the "cost of discipleship," I not only felt the spirit of Jesus and Gandhi. I saw them.

Because Beit Sahour is the shepherds' field of Luke's gospel, and because a number of its citizens have become master carvers (whose work is sold especially in Bethlehem to Christian pilgrims), the town is full of olive wood figures of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The Israeli government, by its tough confiscation tactics, must have gained a multitude of holy families, now kept in storage.

I was given one carving by a Beit Sahour artist after I watched him in his basement workshop "release" the figure he had in his mind from a block of wood in an incredibly short time. As he completed the carving, a process in which I had become absorbed, I was startled by the baaing of sheep--the carver's sheep, kept in a basement stall immediately behind me. As artist-shepherds give birth to holy families in Beit Sahour, their sheep keep watch over the scene.

Gandhi was also visibly present in each home I entered. As I heard story after story of nonviolent resistance to the occupation, I saw simultaneously in the background the image of Gandhi: burning government-imposed ID cards in South Africa, striding toward the sea in the Salt March, fasting for Hindu-Muslim unity. Every family in Beit Sahour seemed to be watching the film Gandhi, which was being shown that night on Jordanian television with Arabic sub-titles.

The juxtaposition of the Rishmawis' nonviolent testimony, lives present and absent, gospel and satyagraha images was over-whelming--is overwhelming, as I recall it now. The world of nonviolence--spanning prison walls, borders, cultures, and religions--seemed present in each Beit Sahour home. I take it now, as then, not as illusion but as a revelation of what we are all called to be as a people.

On our second day in Beit Sahour, our Mid East Witness group was cut from five persons to three, as Israeli soldiers succeeded in apprehending Scott Kennedy and Deena Hurwitz and ejecting them from town. The way in which this event ended was a parable of nonviolence.

The soldiers had again been breaking up a women's demonstration when they spotted the two illicit American witnesses on the street, first Scott, then Deena. As the soldiers drove Scott out of town in their jeep, one of them recalled angrily having refused him entry to Beit Sahour at the military checkpoint the day before. What especially concerned the soldier, however, was another, still obviously missing member of our group.

"Where's the rabbi?" he demanded.

He meant Rabbi Michael Robinson of Sebastopol, California, who had engaged him in a friendly conversation while being barred from the town. Mike felt deeply the confusion and suffering of these young Jewish soldiers carrying out criminal orders. But this soldier recognized such a rabbi's presence in Beit Sahour as a distinct threat.

"Where's the rabbi?"

Scott hadn't seen Mike since the night before. But as the security jeep went out Beit Sahour's main street, Scott saw a familiar figure standing in front of the Greek Orthodox church--smiling and waving at him, unnoticed by the soldiers.

It was "the rabbi"--now wearing a red checkered kuffiyeh, or headscarf, transformed for the moment into a Palestinian. Yet that was also the rabbi's nonviolent threat to the soldier who failed to recognize him, his willingness to stand in the place of the other.

Where's the rabbi? Where the soldier for his transformation needed to be also, in the kuffiyeh of Beit Sahour.

ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, Ann Hafften, Mike Robinson, and I said farewell to our friends in Beit Sahour and rejoined Scott and Deena in Jerusalem, where they had gone after the soldiers had released them in Bethlehem. Our Mid East Witness delegation then proceeded together to our second destination, Gaza. There Palestinian friends smuggled the five of us into different refugee camps.

Gaza. I say the name and its reality returns. The question of transformation took on awesome proportions in Gaza. Yet at those very moments when Gaza's violence seemed to freeze the heart, a nonviolent alternative was already present and emerging. The transformation of Gaza will transform the world.

For two days and nights I was hidden by a Palestinian Muslim family in their home at the center of Beach Camp, one of the Gaza Strip's three largest refugee camps. Roughly 50,000 Palestinian refugees are wedged into Beach Camp's one-kilometer-long strip beside the Mediterranean.

Beach Camp had been closed to the outside world by the Israel Defense Forces for 318 days in the two years of the intifada. Like the rest of Gaza, it had been under curfew from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. every night since the intifada began. People on the street in those hours are liable to be shot. But many have also been shot in Beach Camp during non-curfew hours, as Israeli patrols sweep through several times a day. Beach Camp is under a constant state of siege.

I saw the reality of Beach Camp through the cracks of shutters. On my first afternoon in the camp, as my host family was serving tea, the eldest son, Mohammed, seemed to be listening intently. He put his fingers to his lips and motioned to me to follow him into the next room. There slowly, cautiously, he opened the shutters a fraction of an inch. Then he stood aside. I looked out.

The dusty road, which had been teeming with people when Mohammed brought me in by car an hour earlier, was now deserted and silent. Then I saw the soldiers appear in the crack.

The soldiers came in two jeeps. They wore camouflage uniforms and flak jackets. All of them carried rifles at the ready. They fanned out from the jeeps, stopping periodically with their rifles trained on the silent houses. Two older women walked carefully at a distance, not looking at the soldiers.

Sometimes the soldiers would run to a corner. The jeep would follow. After sweeping through the empty area and firing a random shot or two, the soldiers would mount the jeep to move to another area.

No one challenged the soldiers. The scene was like a village in Vietnam, with U.S. troops on a search-and-destroy mission. Now as then, occupying troops and weapons are financed by U.S. dollars. Without billions of U.S. military aid, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza could not be sustained. That night, while soldiers outside the courtyard walls continue to fire their rifles and sweep through the dark roads, Mohammed's family and friends sit around the room sharing quiet, halting conversation with me. A Beach Camp teacher translates their Arabic and my English.

At one point we hear two shots fired just outside. We fall silent.

We know the soldiers may burst in at any moment. They have done so before, to humiliate the elders by forcing them to wash away slogans written on the walls outside by the shebab (the Palestinian youth). If the soldiers enter, they will find me. That would mean serious repercussions for the family.

After five minutes of silence, Mohammed says something softly and everyone laughs. The interpreter leans over, smiles, and whispers to me, "We are afraid."

The conversation resumes. I ask Mohammed about differences between Beach Camp and other parts of the intifada. Why did I see no burning tires, no rock barricades set up by the shebab?

Mohammed explains: When tires are burned in Beach Camp, the soldiers take them and throw them over the walls into the people's homes. The burning tires are very bad for the respiration of older people. They are bad for everyone's health.

So the camp leadership and the people have agreed that tires should not be burned except after someone has been killed by the soldiers. Then they will be burned to express the people's anger. But normally there is no burning of tires in Beach Camp.

I saw no rock barricades because during the last extended curfew the soldiers came with trucks and machines that stripped the roads of stones and scrap objects that could be used to blockade their patrols.

The three-year-old son of a friend of Mohammed comes in and snuggles between his father's knees. He watches me in fear, wondering if I am like the ones outside.

Mohammed tells me the story of a confrontation between the Beach Camp shebab and the soldiers. One day the shebab had run forward, throwing stones at a heavily fortified local building occupied as a command post by the soldiers. The Israeli forces fired back with their rifles, picking off the shebab one by one until there were 50 wounded and one young girl dead.

Mohammed says every family in the camp has had at least one shebab shot or beaten by the soldiers.

While his 13-year-old brother is serving us a delicious dinner, Mohammed asks if he will please show me the bullet scar on his cheek where he has been shot by the soldiers. The boy bends over, pointing to the scar. Then he opens his mouth. I can see the hole left from a bullet-shattered tooth.

Because the intifada has renounced any use of guns against the occupiers, it has neutralized Israel's far superior firepower of nuclear warheads, Phantom fighter planes, tanks, artillery, and virtually inexhaustible U.S. weapons technology. The Israeli army has been forced by its opponent's refusal of guns and choice of predominantly nonviolent tactics to fight the intifada instead with the reduced violence of "rubber" bullets (their core is in fact metal), gas, and clubs.

But I see how immense the cost in suffering from this "low-intensity conflict" has been to the shebab. As other young men, curious to meet the visiting American, filter into the room, Mohammed points out their scars--and in some cases, shortened limbs.

The wounds are shown in silence. This is the accepted cost of the intifada. They all know that if they give up resisting the occupation, the cost will be far greater.

ON MY SECOND AFTERNOON IN Beach Camp, I witnessed the shebab in their David-versus-Goliath role. The term "children of the stones" took on flesh.

Again I was given a vantage point where, without being detected, I could witness the events going on outside. This time Mohammed invited me to climb a high ladder braced in a corner of the courtyard where wall louvers met beneath a corrugated tin roof. By standing near the top of the ladder and shifting my attention from one slightly opened louver to the other, I could see below me a dusty crossroads of the camp and the life extending several blocks in each direction.

In the middle of the dusty intersection are eight young men, the shebab. In the course of the next hour, their number will go as high as 15 and as low as two, as the young men come and go. The shebab range in age from 9 or 10 years up to their early 20s.

Each of the shebab at the crossroads has a rock or two held lightly in hand. There are no stockpiles by the side of the road. As I watch one of the shebab, he throws away his only rock and remains standing, waiting, at the center of the road. I realize that this young man is preparing to be shot.

A small plane is circling overhead. I ask Mohammed, who is in the courtyard below me, what the plane is doing. He says it is a military surveillance plane telling the soldiers where the shebab are located.

A United Nations ambulance passes through the crossroads. The flag on its rear fender is lit up and flying. The U.N. ambulance is followed by a Red Crescent Society ambulance.

Eventually the two ambulances return. They sit with motors running at one spoke of the intersection, a few feet from the shebab who pay no attention to them.

The ambulances are waiting to take whichever of the shebab will be shot today. But while the sounds of shooting continue, this afternoon the soldiers do not come to the crossroads I am watching. The toll from other sites in Beach Camp, Mohammed says later, is three shebab shot--one of them hit in the eye and taken prisoner by the soldiers.

This has been the 734th afternoon of the intifada in Beach Camp.

I have become more and more conscious, during my two days and nights in Beach Camp, of the presence of the tower. The tower rises from a corner of the mosque across from Mohammed's home. But from the family courtyard, the tower seems to be almost directly above us. At least that is the sense of its presence. At night, as I walk across the courtyard, the tower and the moon are together in the dark sky over us.

At the top of the tower there is a crescent open to the sky, and beneath the crescent a roofed balcony. It is from the loudspeakers on this balcony that the tower calls the people of Beach Camp to prayer five times a day, in a thunderous, static-crackling voice:

"ALLAH AKBAR!" ("God is great!") "ALLAH AKBAR!"

At dawn is the day's first call to prayer. We awaken to it each morning. I hear the sunset call to prayer, on my second day in Beach Camp, against the background noise of rifle fire.

As I watch the shebab standing at the crossroads waiting, with the sounds of death approaching, the tower in the darkening sky calls us all to remember: "ALLAH AKBAR!"

I wonder how many shebab have been shot or beaten while listening to "ALLAH AKBAR!" from the tower, or hearing it within.

THE INTIFADA, I LEARNED.was capable of greater violence than the stone-throwing of the shebab in the face of rifle fire.

After the five members of our Mid East Witness delegation had reunited, a representative of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) drove us through Gaza. We toured Raffah, an area where reportedly more than 40 "collaborators" have been killed by Palestinian "strike forces."

At Raffah we entered an UNRWA clinic. Posted on an electrical pole was a leaflet that we stopped to read. It was a warning against anyone collaborating with or helping the enemy.

A moment later, we saw the enforcers of this warning to collaborators, presumably also the posters of the leaflet. I cite here Scott Kennedy's graphic description: "As we turned from reading the notice, four to six people, dressed from head to toe in black, carrying axes in one hand, with chains around their necks, knives tucked into their belts, and Palestinian flags on their shoulders, strode by. Even their feet were covered by plastic bags to make it impossible to identify them. Their faces were completely covered, but for tiny slits in their eyes. As they passed by us in single file a few feet away, without slowing or turning, I could hardly believe my eyes. We were witnessing one of the masked 'strike forces' about which so much is written in the Israeli and other press. Such groups are responsible for enforcing discipline in the intifada and dispensing 'justice,' including the 'cleansing' of collaborators."

From conversations with Palestinians, I found the"strike forces" widely accepted in the Occupied Territories as a necessary evil in dealing with those who repeatedly work with Israeli authorities to kill or imprison other Palestinians. The process was for the strike forces first to issue a general warning, such as the one we had read. Then three individual warnings were to be given those identified as collaborators from people who knew them. The fifth, final step was execution.

The intifada did not arise from an ideological commitment to nonviolence. It arose as a people's response to decades of lethal violence, within one of the most explosive situations in the world, in Gaza and the West Bank. The specific act which gave birth to the intifada could just as easily have moved thousands of Palestinians to take up arms rather than renounce guns against their occupiers for the sake instead of strikes, boycotts, tax resistance, the flying of the Palestinian flag. The intifada came as a people's transforming, increasingly nonviolent response to a profoundly violent situation. It requires a spiritual explanation.

Before I left Beach Camp, a friend of Mohammed told me the story of how the intifada began. On December 8,1987, four Palestinians were killed and seven injured when an Israeli Jew drove his semitrailer into their two cars at the entrance to the Gaza Strip. Palestinians believed the crash and killings were deliberate.

A funeral for the four victims was held at Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp on December 9. The thousands of Palestinians who attended the funeral united in protest to the deaths. The people burned tires as a memorial to the four victims. They flew the Palestinian flag everywhere they could, violating the Israeli law against the flag ever being shown. Finally, they threw stones at Israeli soldiers, who fired back with their guns. A 17-year-old Palestinian boy was killed.

On December 10, the people in Beach Camp also took many tires and burned them as a funeral memorial. When the soldiers came in response, the people threw stones at them. Then thousands of Beach Camp refugees went out on their roads, carrying symbolic coffins topped with wreaths of flowers and pictures of the four December 8 victims and chanting, "ALLAH AKBAR! ALLAH AKBAR! ALLAH AKBAR!"

Within hours, a spiritual tidal wave had rolled through the Gaza Strip, across to the West Bank, and eventually back over the "Green Line" (dividing Israel and the Occupied Territories) into the Arab population of Israel itself. The prisoners were free. The intifada was born. "ALLAH AKBAR!"

Can the former prisoners now continue to shake off their occupation in such a way as to free their jailers as well? The question may seem inappropriate. The prisoners' natural response would be to raise an indignant counterquestion: What responsibility do we have for our jailers?

But if God is truly great--great enough to save humanity from its self-destruction--then the prisoners do have a responsibility toward their jailers. The human beings below the tower, all of us, need to pray and act deeply enough to draw fully on the transforming greatness of God's being. Other wise, the fate of Sepphoris and Jerusalem in Jesus' time will become the fate of the Earth today.

In the nuclear age especially, we need to be transformed by the greatness of God to love those whose injustice we shake off, so that we and they might be saved together from our violence.

"And remember the favor of Allah on you when you were enemies, then Allah united your hearts so by Allah's favor you became brothers and sisters; and you were on the brink of a pit of fire, then Allah saved you from it; thus does Allah make clear to you Allah's revelations that you may follow the right way" (The Holy Qur'an, III.103).

"ALLAH AKBAR! God is great! We are all one!"

When this article appeared, James W. Douglass lived in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was involved both in tracking the trains that carry Trident submarine missile shipments and making connections to the suffering of people who live in the cities from which these economic resources have been diverted. This article is adapted from a chapter of Douglass' book, The Nonviolent Coming of God, which was published by Orbis in the fall of 1991.