It’s easy to see why many people don’t care for religion. Religious adherents have perpetrated many of history’s most horrific injustices and unfair judgments. A recent spate of polemical books by western intellectuals has sharply driven the point home: God is not good. Religious faith is a delusion — a violent, manipulative and anti-human delusion.
Then you see a film like The Imam and the Pastor, and it becomes harder to dismiss religious belief as destructive. The 40-minute documentary tells the powerful story of two Nigerian men who went from trying to kill each other to becoming friends and peacemakers who work together for religious reconciliation. James Wuye, a Pentecostal pastor, and Muhammad Ashafa, an Islamic imam, both fought for bitterly opposed religious militias in Nigeria’s Kaduna state in the early 1990s. Each of the men lost family and friends in the conflict, which fuelled their hatred even more.
However, both Wuye and Ashafa eventually realized they were living in a way that didn’t exhibit their religious faiths, but distorted them. “I believed in an exclusive approach,” says Ashafa, adding he only cared about Muslims. “Until I started thinking about an inclusive approach. The true sprit of Islam is a spirit of inclusiveness.” Around the same time, Wuye attended an evangelism workshop and was confronted by one of its leaders. “He said to me that I cannot preach Christ with the kind of mind I have,” says Wuye, “that I need to forgive people, and that I need to preach Jesus with love.”
Instead of tossing aside their religious beliefs, both Wuye and Ashafa dug deeper into their traditions to embrace these truths of inclusiveness. “The same Bible that I used to encourage people to fight is the same Bible that also changed me,” says Wuye, who had his hand cut off in the conflict. After Ashafa began visiting Wuye’s sick mother in the hospital — a gesture that deeply impacted the pastor — the two men slowly and cautiously built a friendship that would transform not only each other, but their communities as well.
Today, Wuye and Ashafa run a Muslim-Christian interfaith mediation centre that’s been praised by political and religious leaders worldwide. The centre’s staff brings the message of religious reconciliation to Nigerian communities where Christians and Muslims eye each other with disdain and fear. “We want to remove the world of stereotypes and let the other person tell you who he is,” says Ashafa.
Wuye and Ashafa have also taken their story directly into the halls of western power — places their message of hope is sorely needed. The Imam and the Pastor has screened to audiences at the UN in New York, the House of Commons in the U.K. and the World Bank in Washington, D.C., as well as churches and schools around the world. The story embodies a wisdom that struggles to take hold in the West, where racism and discrimination are still deeply rooted, despite much talk about tolerance. “Tolerance has a connotation of negativity,” says Ashafa. “I say we have to go beyond tolerance to acceptance. Acceptance is what we need.”
Pastor James and Imam Ashafa will both be present at Monday’s screening, which is hosted by Initiatives of Change and the Mennonite Central Committee.
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