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Is it not shameful
and even scandalous that the seemingly endless conflict between Jews
and Muslims (and by extension Christians and Muslims) originated from a
family quarrel? A man called Abraham made love to his house-help and
impregnated her. Because he was such a coward, he refused to accept the
baby as his legitimate child. He conspired with his wife, Sarah, to
send the house-help (Hagar) away with the baby, Ishmael, so that
Sarah’s own baby, Isaac, who was the younger brother, would be his heir.

Thousands of years
later, the descendants of Isaac and the descendants of Ishmael would
have different heroes in their worship of one God, their religious
differences being a continuation of the family quarrel by other means,
a continuation of their prejudices and even a struggle to force God to
take sides on the issue of who are the legitimate heirs in His kingdom.
Abraham’s descendants want to recruit Almighty God into their war for
supremacy and legitimacy.

I have a problem
with Abraham, who is misrepresented in Jewish, Christian and Islamic
theologies as a man of faith. This “man of faith” could not wait for
his God to decide when his wife Sarah would give him a baby. Obviously,
Hagar was being used as a means of getting a baby. If Sarah hadn’t got
a baby boy afterwards, Ishmael would have definitely been Abraham’s
favourite. What sensible man would send his own son, his own blood,
along with the mother, away into the wilderness and claim it is the
will of God? If such a thing were to happen today, wouldn’t Abraham be
arrested and charged to court for scandalous neglect and abuse?

Abraham is further
known as the one who was so faithful that he obeyed his God and tried
to sacrifice his own son, Isaac, to Yahweh. And the memory of this
scandalous and criminal act has emerged as the special feasts in Islam
and Judaism, with millions of rams dying on behalf of Isaac, the
attempted murder of Isaac also highly applauded by Christians in their
remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary.
If Abraham were to try such today, claiming that Almighty God asked him
to do so, shouldn’t he be arrested quickly and charged to court for
attempted ritual murder? And wouldn’t we doubt his sanity?

Abraham was not a
man of faith in my own theology. He is not the father of our faith
either, but the father of the war without end between the descendants
of Ishmael and those of Isaac – the endless animosity that he created
as an irresponsible head of his household.

Abraham was a mumu.
He hardly had a mind of his own; he was simple-minded and left his wife
to manipulate him. He was such a coward that he went to Egypt with
Sarah his wife and lied to Pharaoh that she was his sister. A man of
faith has no business lying and almost leading the pagan Pharaoh to
commit adultery.

Even though we
celebrate Abraham and tend to condone his transgressions or try to
justify them (as a way not doing disservice to our religions), it is
dangerous to try be like him today. An Abraham who tries to play a
trickster with getting a male child cannot win applause as a Christian.
An Abraham who tries to solve his problem of polygamy by exiling some
members of his family, or denying and alienating them in order to be
honoured and buried by the Church when he dies, cannot be our hero in
the Faith.

I am, as a matter
of fact, concerned with the prevalence of other Abrahams that try to
use the Abraham of the Bible as their model today. In some local
communities in Nigeria, some men who married many wives before
converting to Christianity, or while Christians, are told by their
churches that the only way that they can make peace with God is for
them to pick one of the wives and wed her, and to deny other ones. And,
curiously, such Abrahams pick the women that have certain things they
desire most: beauty, tempting breasts, male children, education, and
good cuisine. And the women are also forced to play the dangerous
politics of influence, in order to be the ones favoured and selected as
legitimate wives.

Some, of course,
have to use juju in this war to retain an Abraham as husband. The one
selected becomes the enemy in the house. What do we have then? Simply
this: a holy war, an unending war comparable to the one between the
Jews and the Arabs. The Abraham of our time starts a war without end
only to escape some years later to rest in peace.

I have a problem with Abrahams, ancient and modern.