In the Footsteps of Abraham: From Jerusalem to Nijmegen
by Karim Balcı*
As a student of inter-religious relations and a journalist who has been commenting regularly on religious conflicts, I have always admired the position of Patriarch Abraham within the traditions of three monotheistic religions. Wishful thinking put aside, Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in different Gods. The Christian Lord has a Son; the Jewish YHWH is ethnically biased; and the Muslim Allah is so purified that His contacts with the human sphere of life can only be by means of miracles and calamities. These are of course generalizations that most of the mystics in each of these religious traditions would resent. But the general public has generalized beliefs. What is admirable about Patriarch Abraham’s position in the eyes of the general public is that, compared with Lord-YHWH-Allah, Abraham is a figure more agreed upon. Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in the same historical and legendary Abraham. With the sole difference on ‘Who was chosen to be sacrificed? Isaac or Ishmael?’, the three monotheistic traditions are almost identical on the personality and life-endeavour of Abraham. Hence Abraham offers a unique role model to walk in the footsteps of.
I personally have had the chance to see most of the places Patriarch Abraham had visited or settled in. Walking in his footsteps is not only a journey through a life-story, but a journey through the whole of history. Walking from Ur of the Chaldeans, in modern southern Iraq, to the city of Harran in south-eastern Anatolia, to Damascus, to Bethel, Nablus, Jerusalem, Hebron, Beersheba, Sinai, Egypt, and finally Mecca, one would visit the capitals of four ancient civilizations, seven modern countries, holy cities of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and will meet peoples with different colours, cultures, languages and beliefs who all admire Avraham-Abraham-Ibrahim.
Patriarch Abraham was not a tourist wandering in search of amusement. A regular tourist would see many wonders in such a route, but would not leave his or her stamp on the demography, belief-system and even topography of that route. That was exactly what Patriarch Abraham did. Thanks to him, places that would otherwise have stayed as wilderness, turned out to be centres of civilization and worship. Cities that would probably have lost their importance and attraction by the fall of their founders stayed alive even after the names of their founding nations have been forgotten. For most of the world population, ‘Chaldeans’ would make no sense if it were not for the city named Ur of the Chaldeans, where Abraham is reported to have been born. Had Abraham stayed in Ur or Harran, Urushalem (Jerusalem) would have stayed as a small hilltop city with no particular importance for the believers in monotheism; and Beersheba would not have existed at all.
Most of the biblical places do not contribute to today’s modern cities named after the biblical passages mentioning them. Worse than that, most of these modern-day substitutes do not even contribute to any kind of perception in the minds of the readers of the biblical stories and/or their post-biblical, Muslim, Mormon and archaeological parallels. For the bulk of the faithful, apart from Jerusalem and Mecca, the cities of Abraham exist only nominally. This fact imprisons the story of Abraham in the range of legends which have occasional contacts with the actual world.
A journey in the footsteps of Abraham promises to transform the nominal existence of these places into actual realities, and make the issues of faith touchable and perceivable by the five senses. Hence, such an endeavour would be a journey into the perfection of faith. The idea to offer a multimedia presentation entitled ‘In the Footsteps of Patriarch Abraham’ came to me with these considerations in mind, and I felt my role on the stage as a ‘multi-faith missionary act’ as the same presentation was offering increased religious consciousness and faith perfection to the believers of all the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Thus, when I was invited to Nijmegen, I felt like a rabbi, a priest and an imam called to preach, at one and at the same time.
The work of a rabbi, a priest or an imam is hard enough to accomplish without disturbing the religious sensitivities of the audience. Trying to do these three works together necessitates not only an inclusive knowledge of all the three traditions, which I presumed to have, but also an understanding and tolerating spectator. The differences among the Jewish, Christian and Muslim versions of the story of Abraham are ‘nominal differences’. All three agree that Abraham tried to sacrifice his beloved son, but disagree on the name of the ‘chosen’ son. All three agree that Abraham left Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness of Paran, but disagree on whether Paran is in Sinai or in the Arabian Peninsula. The examples can be multiplied. As the differences are ‘nominal’, acquisition of an inclusive knowledge of all the three versions is not a consuming work. The real challenge is to be able to gather hundreds of people, from different religions and of different levels of religiosity, that have enough patience and understanding to listen to the ‘other’ versions of a story, the ‘true one’ of which they know so well. And that was perfectly done by Islam en Dialoog, the organization that hosted the conference held in Nijmegen on June 8, 2003.
‘In the Footsteps of Patriarch Abraham’ consisted of fifty carefully selected pictures. The first screen gave the map of the ‘footsteps’. On a map of the Middle East, the travel route of Abraham roughly overlaps with the famous ‘Fertile Crescent’. The route starts from the City of Ur, generally accepted to be on the south bank of the River Euphrates, some 50 kilometres north of the confluence of this river with her northern sister the Tigris. There is a local tradition among the south-easterners in Turkey claiming that Ur of the Chaldeans is in Northern Mesopotamia, and the birthplace of Abraham is said to have been closer to Harran. This version seems to be more plausible, as Harran would only then be on the route between the City of Ur and the Holy Land. Though more plausible, this version is not supported by clear biblical descriptions. Added to this, walking from the Southern Ur to Harran first, and then turning back to the South to reach the Holy Land, was not so problematic at that time, as this was the path of the main trade routes at the turn of the second millennium BCE. We have to add to this the fact that Abraham was moving with a flock of sheep that would need watering frequently, and he was certainly a ‘Man of Water’, as his youth had passed in the swamps of Babylon; also he used to watch the sky during his lengthy search for God, and sky-watching is certainly an attribute of people living on the banks of blue waters.
The same path would enable Abraham’s nomads to visit cities and market-places on their way to sell their wool and dairy products, and to buy salt, sugar and other goods of the sedentary life. This would bring them to the cities of Babylon in modern-day Iraq, Mari in Syria, Harran and Charchemish in Turkey, and certainly Damascus in Syria. A modern day traveller of this route would see the ruins of these ancient cities. Not all of these ruins are from the age of Abraham, but all of them have some kind of relation to the life or faith of the founder of monotheism. The South-Mesopotamian swamp dried up to a large extent in the last century, but what is left gives an idea of what it was like then. The Ziggurat in the City of Ur was certainly not the shrine of the idol-worshippers, whose idols were broken down by Abraham, but the Ziggurat itself manifests the religious zeal and devotion of the Mesopotamian peoples. The Ishtar Gate of the ruins of Babylon is dated to a later period than that of Abraham’s passage through the City of Babylon, but its glamour and grandeur attest to the architectural advancement of the Babylonian Civilization. Harran’s ruins of the oldest university of the world are of the same sort of evidence of the level of civilization. The traditional conical houses of Harran show the wisdom of the ancient peoples and that, in the East, settlement features may last longer than thousands of years. The statues on top of the Nimrod Mountain of Urfa were sculpted almost a thousand years after Abraham. But their existence is evidence of the spread of idol-worship even after the age of Abraham.
The words ‘manmade’ and ‘temporary’ are almost synonymous. The generation of Abraham did leave us all they made, but almost all were buried in the graveyard of time. Only one thing, that is not manmade, remained intact: the natural world. The traveller walking in the footsteps of Abraham will see the same sky, the same sun, the same moon and the same waters flowing through the wide valley of the Euphrates River. Adding to this lyric scene some sheep and camels, one would feel the same way Patriarch Abraham felt, and would understand the zeal in his heart to find the One God.
Though the post-Abraham ruins in Ur, Babylon, Mari and Harran are reminiscent of the phenomena related indirectly to the life and faith of the Patriarch, some of the buildings on the remaining parts of this journey are directly related to him. The Fish Lake in the City of Urfa is believed to be the lake that was miraculously formed amidst the fires into which Abraham was thrown by the men of Nimrod. A beautiful mosque and its several minarets declare to the world that though Abraham had to leave Harran after his encounter with Nimrod, the final combat between monotheism and idol-worship, then embodied in the persons of Abraham and Nimrod, was won by monotheism. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is yet another witness to this.
Abraham’s way to the Holy Land had to pass through the Golan Heights, and Mount Hermon would have been the highest mountain he had ever seen in his life. It is highly possible that on this mountain was the first time in his life that his feet had touched that cold, soft, and wet thing covering the surface of the earth, called snow. Abraham would not have liked to stay for long under such conditions for the sake of his flock. He, we are told in the Bible, continued his journey towards Bethel, and there set his first tent in the Holy Land. He liked that place so much that he would turn back to this place from time to time and would watch the sky in the night-time. In Nablus, on his way to the South, he fixed standing stones as the first altar ever built in the Holy Land in the name of God. Once again, we do not know for sure whether the standing stones in the vicinity of Nablus (Shechem in the language of the Bible) that my spectators in Nijmegen saw, have anything to do with the period of the Patriarch. But we are pretty sure that, if it had not been for Abraham’s faith in the One God, they would not have been erected, or would carry the signs of a manmade god or goddess.
The Nijmegen travellers then proceeded in the footsteps of Patriarch Abraham towards the city of Jerusalem. On their way towards this city, on the top of the Judean mountains, they saw the modern-day Bedouin tents and sheep wandering around, and realized that some part of Abraham’s life has been preserved within the traditions of these desert people.
Jerusalem offers only a single story from the life of Abraham, the sacrifice of Isaac. And this was done, again we are told by the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the stone over which stands the glamorous Dome of the Rock, commemorating the Ascension of Prophet Muhammad in the Night of the Mi’radj. Muslims believe that the son chosen to be sacrificed was Ishmael, the older brother of Isaac by thirteen years. To be chosen to be sacrificed had been often perceived as a sign of holiness, a holiness that would pass to the siblings. The Islamic science of Hadith has a way to join two distinct traditions so as not to give way to contradicting traditions. If the same story has been told about two different persons or places, and if both the traditions are strong enough in terms of source and quotations, then it may be accepted that the same story took place twice. A possible solution for the sacrifice of ‘the son’ can be to believe that both sons were chosen to be sacrificed, once in Mecca with Ishmael, and once in Jerusalem with Isaac.
Abraham’s life in the Holy Land was neither a life of continuous nomadic movements, nor a settled one. He raided the local kings in the Golan Heights, he moved to Beersheba and left his mark with a water-well (actually there are two wells named Abraham’s Well), and he went to Egypt. We know that Abraham was the guest of the Pharaoh in Egypt, and would have heard the stories of huge pyramids being built and of the Sphinxes, the beautiful Nile and the Mediterranean Sea. Abraham being a traveller, it would be naive to assume that he had not visited those places.
Travelling in the footsteps of Abraham, no place can be given enough time. With the Nijmegen group we had to jump to the Arabian Peninsula and see the places where Abraham left his older son Ishmael and his mother Hagar. Mecca was an empty desert place when God ordered Abraham to leave Hagar and Ishmael there. The Chapter of Abraham in the Holy Qur’an tells us that Abraham left Mecca with prayers on his lips asking the Almighty to turn this wilderness into a peaceful settlement, where Hagar and Ishmael would find a way to manage their lives and would have friends and followers. His prayers have been accepted, and Muslims gather every year in Mecca as an answer to Abraham’s call for people around Ishmael and Hagar.
Kaaba, we are told, was rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael. After the construction job, God commanded Abraham to climb the Abu Qubays Mountain nearby and call the peoples of the world to pilgrimage in Kaaba. Abraham was the Friend of God, Khalilullah, and used to question revelations he did not understand. Once again he said that the people of the farther lands would not hear his voice. God proclaimed that Abraham’s duty was to call, and it was His own duty to make people hear. Even today, Muslims believe that without hearing the call of Abraham one would not be able to go on pilgrimage, even if he or she wants and plans to.
No life is so short that one can finish its story in one hour. But no life is so long that one can tell its story for ever. After several comings and goings between Beersheba and Mecca, Abraham heard the news of his beloved wife Sarah’s passing away. In order to bury her he came to Hebron, al-Khalil, and bought a cave for her burial. This cave is now called ‘Machpela’ or ‘The Cave of the Patriarchs’, since the same cave became Abraham’s burial place some years later, and his son Isaac and grandson Jacob followed some decades later. This was the last place in the Holy Land on which Abraham put his stamp. But our journey in his footsteps did not come to an end at the Ibrahim Mosque that stands over the Machpela Cave. Upon visiting the cave in the photographs, I told my audience the Muslim belief that whenever the name of a prophet is mentioned with respect, he would visit the place of mentioning. Thus Abraham’s travels in the world would have continued after his death, on a spiritual level, in almost every corner of the world. He would have visited more synagogues, churches and mosques than any other prophet. Nijmegen was one in the series, but not the last. And I was honoured to be one of the inviters.
*Kerim Balcı is a Turkish journalist who served in Jerusalem for seven years. He is currently stationed in London and is the chairman of the London-based Dialogue Society.