Month: November 2014

Local professor, Covenants Initiative hope to bring peace to Middle East

By Kevin Kilbane of The News-Sentinel

You wouldn’t expect a book by a professor at Ivy Tech Community College-Northeast to be placed in the hands of Pope Francis, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Muslim and other scholars around the world.

But that is the case with “The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World,” by Professor John Andrew Morrow, who hopes the book will help end persecution of Christians and others in the Middle East.

“We are with the oppressed and the persecuted, and we are against the oppressors and persecutors,” said Morrow, 43, a professor of foreign languages.

By “we” he means the Covenants Initiative, an effort he started with poet Charles Upton of Lexington, Ky., to make world leaders and Muslims aware of six covenants Islam’s great prophet, Muhammad, signed with Christian groups before his death in 632 AD and before Islam expanded across the Middle East and beyond. Muhammad signed similar agreements with Jewish and other groups, Morrow said.

In return for agreeing to live under the civil government of a Muslim confederation, the covenants with Christians guaranteed they would retain their rights, property and freedom of religion, Morrow said. The documents also said the groups’ clergy, churches and religious sites should be protected.

Muhammad guaranteed this protection until the end of the world, said Morrow, a Montreal, Canada, native who now lives in Auburn and has been teaching at Ivy Tech-Northeast for five years.

“I believe these covenants are critically important,” Morrow said. “They serve as a model,” showing how Muslims and Christians lived together in peace for more than 1,000 years.

That peace broke down after first France and then England chose to ignore them beginning about the late 1700s during those nations’ quests to create colonial empires, Morrow said. Many people now don’t know the covenants exist.

“The terms of the covenant(s) agree with the teachings of Islam,” Nuhu Abdulai, a scholar at the Fort Wayne Islamic community’s Universal Education Foundation, said in an email. “However, the attribution of the covenants as mentioned in the post or the book to the Prophet cannot be verified. I did not come across it in our reliable sources.”

Muhammad lived peacefully with Christians and Jews and … “he had peaceful agreements with them, some of which are mentioned in the authentic books of history,” Abdulai said. Islam’s holy book, the Quran, also contains many references encouraging Muslims to “deal justly and kindly” with people of different religions and to protect those who don’t know God, or Allah, so they can hear his word, Abdulai said.

Morrow, who said the covenants have been authenticated “by scores of scholars,” first learned of them about 1990 while writing a paper on jihad, or Muslim holy war, in college. He started his book in fall 2012, and it was published last November.

The 466-page book since has been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Italian, Morrow said. A Muslim scholar affiliated with the Covenants Initiative gave a copy to Pope Francis in September.

The six covenants now are being translated into 12 languages for distribution as e-books around the world, Morrow said. E-book translations in a few languages now are available for free at the Covenants Initiative website, www.covenantsoftheprophet.com.

Morrow hopes knowledge of Muhammad’s covenants will inspire true Muslims to stand up to and throw out extremists, such as the Islamic State and rebel groups fighting in Syria.

When they take over an area, Islamic State and rebel groups fighting against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad — including rebels backed by the United States — have ordered Christians to convert to Islam or die, Morrow said. The extremist groups also have killed clergy and destroyed churches and monasteries.

Such actions “are an insult to the Prophet’s name” and go against the Quran, which prohibits indiscriminate killing and killing noncombatants, Morrow said.

To spread awareness of the covenants, Morrow has spoken at universities, before a committee at the House of Lords in London and at Canadian embassies in Paris, Belgium and London. He’s willing to speak before any group not hostile to what he has to say.

Morrow hopes in some way to help save lives and bring about peace.

“I’m not the type of person who can sit still in the face of injustice,” he said.

http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20141112/NEWS/141119929

GARY KRUPP ON THE COVENANTS OF THE PROPHET

ZENIT: How was that experience for you, to be not only knighted but then raised in rank by Pope Benedict?

Krupp: It was incredible because we adamantly never expected that to happen. We had a private lunch with then Cardinal Bertone at the Paul VI residence, in the rooftop garden there…When he [Benedict] raised me in rank, it was fantastic because what that does…These honors are more important for people of other faiths because they find it so unusual. I get their attention and enable us to initiate our projects. In 2006 I was invested into the Anglican order of St. John of Jerusalem. So that’s very, very rare as well. So the idea is that these wonderful honors do have a serious obligation.  Our ultimate goal is to remove or lessen the use of God’s holy name for private agendas. That’s what we do. That’s how all this got started

The Muslims especially find it absolutely fascinating, which has given us the ability to help the Greek Orthodox Church. We eliminated the Muslim objection to open the Halki Seminary in Turkey. Through the Covenants of Protection ordered by the Prophet Muhammad.

Currently, we especially see this through what are called the Covenants of Protection ordered by the Prophet Muhammad in 628 AD to protect the people of the book (Jews and Christians) their churches, synagogues and holy shrines until the end of days.  We have images of the original covenants on our Web sites (www.ptwf.org). Since our friends in media do not seem to think this is religious news, Pave the Way is about to pay for an international advertising campaign in the international New York Times. Only a handful of Muslim scholars know of these covenants, which carry the same legal authority as the Quran.  We’re dealing with Islamic Extremism against Christians which, according to the covenants, are insulting the prophet Muhammad and insulting Islam. This has all been researched by Dr. John Andrew Morrow, such as Imam Ilyas Islam. There have been hundreds of Islamic scholars and leaders who have signed on to this.