Christmas story is ours, Mandera included

In the images of the 28 and 36 bodies of innocent Kenyans murdered in Mandera County, it is too easy to project a son, a husband, a neighbour and a colleague. Here were Christians who had selflessly served the Muslim community, giving essential services mainly in education and health, whose dream of joining family for Christmas was cruelly cut off.

While we are grieving, we still need to say with a strong voice that we recognise our country’s needs to be roused to better listen, to more fully understand, and mourn more deeply. Hopefully, as we grow as a multi-religious mosaic, we will see things more clearly and feel things more deeply.

Debating on whether the Mandera killers are true Muslims or not, is not a fruitful line of argument. We may not dispute Al-Shabaab’s own claim to be Muslims and that they have been motivated by Islamic teaching and history. It is true that Muslims opposed to Al-Shabaab are equally in as much danger as everyone else.

We should note that the aggression on Kenya this time is external, under the hands of Al-Shabaab from Somalia. We need to be wary of the development of these networks within Kenya. Crisis Group Briefings reports of September 24, 2014 (Kenya; Al-Shabaab closer home) and of June (Somalia; Al-Shabaab, pp7-8) point to a growing movement that has led to crisis within Islam; “the steady entrenchment of Wahabbism in the Muslim constituency in Kenya” which has “certainly brought tension between older Muslim elites who are closer to the Kenyan establishment, and the new, more politically assertive and outward-looking ‘Islamist’ ulama (scholars and religious authorities)”.

We must note that some clerics have spoken out against Al-Shabaab at great personal risk to themselves. Sheikh Mohamed Abdi Umal, a rare Salafi-Wahhabi ulama (a popular and prominent Somali cleric based in Eastleigh) received death threats from Al Shabaab after issuing a fatwa (judicial opinion) that decried the Westgate attack and declared it haram (unlawful). In a May 14 2014 speech, the then Al-Shabaab emir, Ahmed Abdi Godane, called on Muslims in Kenya to ignore what he called “evil scholars”.

In the soul-searching taking place throughout the country, there are hints that this could be a defining moment for the second rail: namely greater resolve for progress. We who have borne the brunt of victimisation because of faith must avoid the temptation of collective guilt on the Muslim population in this country. Collective threats are incompatible with our Christian ethics: they ignore the fact that these very Christians have been victims of collective threats and collective accusations for years. We must believe only in individual guilt, not in collective guilt. Let us move in our imaginations to Carthage, in the year 410.

When St Augustine received the news that Rome, the great Rome, had been ransacked and barbarians had taken over, his first thought was to reassure his flock. “If this catastrophe is indeed true,” he told them, “it must be God’s will. Men build cities and men destroy cities, but the City of God they didn’t build and cannot destroy,” he said.

There is much more to the story of Christmas. It is our story too. I invite you to open up to how this proclamation reveals the persistence of our God who knows how we struggle with faith and will give any sign, any grace, to help us believe and live.