A Hindu Led a Muslim to Jesus

In the 1950s, a young Syrian soldier stationed on the Golan Heights picked up the writings of Mahatma Gandhi. That soldier, Mazhar Mallouhi, came from a Muslim family whose framed family tree traced its line back to the Prophet Muhammad. To him, the Christian faith of the West looked like a Crusader's sword aimed at Arabs. Gandhi changed that. Mallouhi read about a Hindu taking the teachings of Isa ibn Maryam, the son of Mary, and living them out. Gandhi used nonviolence and the willingness to suffer as a weapon against an empire that claimed those same teachings but did not follow them. In Gandhi he saw Jesus, the Quran’s “sign for worlds” (21:91), whom sufi devotees had been venerating for generations. To the Hindu, Yesu is a satguru who lived what he taught. So Mallouhi began reading Allah’s Early Books (Bible). After a year of reading in his army post, he concluded that Isa al-Masih (Jesus the Anointed) was unlike every other religious teacher he had studied, because his life matched his words. At 24, Mallouhi gave his life to Isa. His family rejected him, and later he was exiled from Syria. Still, Mallouhi never stopped calling himself a Muslim who follows Isa/Jesus. He prays in mosques, visits imams who are his friends, and refuses to take on Western religious labels or dress. Of a lifetime spent serving others, he says simply, "The opposite of love is indifference." His publishing house is called Al Kalima, "the Word." The name echoes the Quran's title for Jesus, Kalimatullah, the Word of God. Al Kalima publishes Allah’s Early Revelation as the Middle Eastern book it is, sold openly in Arab bookstores. One of its titles, an Eastern reading of the Injil (Good News) of Luke, became a required text in a North African university's Islamic studies department. Gandhi helped India picture Yesu walking its village roads. Mallouhi has taken that example to the Arab world, showing Isa, Ruhullah, the Spirit from God, as a man of the Middle East, at home among its people. Source: mkgandhi.org.