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Q & A
Q&A: Faith’s middle ground Mary Jacobs, Sep 28, 2007
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Omar Al-Rikabi
It’s no surprise when people take sides over the Middle East conflict, but Omar Al-Rikabi’s “side” is somewhere in the middle. Mr. Al-Rikabi is the Houston-born son of an Iraqi Muslim and a Texas United Methodist—and he’s married to a woman of Jewish heritage. He blogs from this unusual perspective at www.firstbornson.blogspot.com.
A recent graduate of Asbury Theological Seminary, Mr. Al-Rikabi is campus minister and director of community for the Wesley Foundation at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Ark. He spoke recently with Staff Writer Mary Jacobs.
Given your parents’ interfaith marriage, why did you become a Christian? I didn’t really choose Christianity over Islam, I just grew up in the church. My parents had an agreement that with any children they had, my father could name us and my mom could raise us in the church. I spent most of my life in First UMC of Carrollton, Texas, and technically I’m still a member there.
And why did you decide to be a pastor? The simple answer is that I was called. I grew up very active in my church and youth group. The youth group was very active in terms of worship, mission and discipleship. So it just grew from that.
How did your Muslim father react when you decided to become a pastor? He has no problems with it. His biggest concern had nothing to do with spiritual issues. He said, “Son, you’re not going to make a whole lot of money as a pastor.” My father’s family comes from more traditional Islam, one that says, “If you’re a Jew, be a good Jew; if you’re a Christian, be a good Christian.” He was always supportive of my church involvement as a kid, as long as it didn’t interfere with homework. Tell me about the ministry you are developing out of your unique background. I was fairly certain I wanted to do youth or pastoral ministry. Then 9/11 happened and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. So my ministry started to evolve. I now see a large part of it dealing with this situation. My background has caused me to search for a lot of things and try to understand.
What makes people want to hear what you have to say? You have a lot of Christians or Americans writing about the Middle East, whether it’s historians or newsmakers. And you have former Muslims from the Middle East who have converted and who are teaching on it. I don’t know of many people who can say they have a foot in both worlds. My father’s side is Muslim Iraqi; my mother’s side is Methodist from Texas. I grew up in Texas, but I’m close to my Iraqi family and I’m a pastor. That makes people want to hear about my situation.
Tell me about your blog. Why the name “First Born Son”? My blog had originally been titled “the Balaam Factor.” I said that if God could speak through Balaam’s ass, he could speak through me. It was a self-deprecating way of saying who knows what might come out. [But] I’d been through my own healing journey, and realized God was saying, “Omar, you are important to me.”
Omar is a name usually given to the first-born son. If we follow through our Bible, we see the responsibilities and significance of being the first-born son. The name comes from the root word for “one who builds or maintains.” In the Middle East, your name says everything about you. Where I come from in Texas, there’s a lot of really bad theology about the Middle East and Arabs in general. A lot of it comes from that story in Genesis about Ishmael, the first-born son, being sent away. People lump all that together with the current situation. But I saw that on this side of the cross, Ishmael is redeemed to the father.
What would you like American Christians to understand about Islam? When you look at the Middle East, 90 percent of what we hear is filtered through what’s in the best interest of the U.S. There’s this complete ignorance of history and culture. One of the greatest misconceptions is people say, “Oh, they’ve been fighting each other for the last 5,000 years, since the days of the Bible.” That’s not true. If I sit down with somebody and map out the history of the Middle East since World War I, and the involvement of the West—France, U.S., Britain—that alone makes people say, “I had no idea that we did that” or “The reason this is happening now is because of something that happened back then.”
There’s also ignorance of theology about Muslims and Arabs, and what our response as Christians is. Dispensationalism, the “Left Behind” theology, is very pro-Israel and anti-descendants of Ishmael. That has seeped into mainline denominations. I hear it in United Methodist churches. So automatically you have this anti-Arab, anti- Muslim theology that says, “It’s a good thing that we go to war.” Then 9/11 exposed our idolatry of nationalism. I’m not trying say that patriotism is wrong—but somehow 9/11 catapulted what it meant to be a Christian into the same sphere of what it means to be an American. So when you put all that into one big pot... it’s doomed from the beginning.
All of the misunderstandings would take hours to tease out, and we live in a talking-points society. We want the quick, easy answer, the easy explanation, and that leads to war. To really understand the situation and how we should deal with it requires a lot of teasing out of these historical issues. Clearly that doesn’t happen very much. Just sharing my story has a huge impact.
So what’s the message you’d like people to hear? Recently, Asbury had a three-day lecture series. On the first day, a professor gave the pro-war argument. The next day, a professor gave the pro-pacifist argument. On the last day, they gave me the final word. I shared stories on both sides. I tried to cast this bigger net to say, “Here’s who we are supposed to be as God’s people, as the representative of the cross.”
I feel Christians are the ones who’ve been called to a higher standard. Christians shouldn’t lower themselves to the level of name-calling and rock-throwing. We’re the ones who are called to say, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” Serve them and take care of them and that’s how you’ll bring the kingdom of God in heaven. There will have to be confession and repentance.
After the lecture, I was surprised by the comments from very committed Christians such as, “I never saw the Arabs as human beings or thought to pray for them as human beings” or “I thought I knew about the Middle East.”
As a Christian, do you see yourself as a missionary to Muslims? Maybe somewhere down the line, but I feel called to the church. That’s where I have the biggest impact. My quasi-mission is to get church members to see the Middle East through the bigger kingdom picture, to see the Middle East in a more biblical way.
The first week of the war in Iraq, I was talking to J.D. Walt [a friend and Asbury’s dean of the chapel]. I said jokingly, “Why didn’t my Mom marry somebody from Lubbock?” He said, “Because the world needs to hear what you have to say.” I’ve been given an opportunity to say, “This is my story, but this is who Christ is and this is who he’s called us to be in the Middle East.”
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So what’s the message you’d like people to hear? 
