Anthropological Poverty | April 12, 2026 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey
- The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
This so-called war with Iran is unfortunate, to say the least. It doesn’t take much to envision angels watching the judgement day replays, and continuing to rewind to the awe-striking moment when God stops everything to ask the Christian Nationalist leaders, “Wait. Before you go, explain to me one more time why and how you as mature, grown adults felt it necessary to attack the same things that you do—when others do them—because others use a different metaphorical structure?”
The Islamic month of Ramadan and the Christian season of Christmas are over now. Christmas ended with the new year and Ramadan ended last month. The two observances are moving very close to one another and will soon overlap. This happens in every generation, because Christmas is observed in confluence with a solar calendar and Ramadan is on a lunar calendar, which appears to move backwards through the solar calendar about two weeks each year.
But what is actually overlapping? Is it possible to step back from the differences and to instead notice the similarity—even more so, the common truth that each cultural metaphor is proclaiming? I think so. About three decades ago, I decided and even wrote a book exclaiming that both the Night of Perfect Measure (or of Power) in Ramadan and Christmas Eve in the Christmas season observe what I called the birth of the Word.
Back then I wrote what might be described as a fiction for young readers that pretty much began with this scenario:
“Why don’t Muslims celebrate Christmas, Dad?” my daughter asked.
As she spoke, we stopped at a red light. I looked across the front seat of our pickup truck only to see the back of her head. She was gazing wistfully out of the window at the brightly colored Christmas lights and decorations. I smiled. I was also hearing her other question, the one she hadn’t asked.
It was a little after sunset, and we were driving past a shopping center near San Francisco. The stores were full of people buying gifts. Even the jazz station on our truck radio was playing Christmas carols. The flatbed of our pickup was full of wood for our fireplace at home. The sunset, the lights, the music. It all felt so … so … magic.
When I didn’t answer right away, she turned to look at me. She saw my smile and returned it. She knew I was going to tell her a story. And I happen to be a pretty good storyteller. Right about then the light turned green and we continued on our way.
“You’ve got a point, Sweetie,” I said, still smiling. “We Muslims believe that Jesus (Peace be upon him) was a Word from God, just like the Christians do. And the night when God’s Word was born was such a good night that we definitely have to celebrate it. No question about it.
“Do you know how good that night was?” I asked, taking her hand.
“No. Tell me,” she said pertly, having fully recovered from her brief moment of surprise.
“It was better than a thousand months,” I said. Then I began to recite to her from Muslim scripture, the Qur’an, which Muslims learn to recite from memory in classical Arabic. After each Arabic verse, I explained the English meaning.
In the name of God who gives before we ask,
Yet if we ask forgives and still gives more.
Surely, We sent it down in a night of perfect measure.
And do you know what the night of perfect measure is?
The night of perfect measure is better than a thousand months.
The angels and the Holy Spirit descend in that night.
With the permission of their Lord on every errand
With peace, until the rise of dawn.
Now this metaphorical language from Islamic scripture delivers a meaning that is not all that different from the prologue to the gospel of John. But the metaphor is different. John says:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This one was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it….
The true light, who gives light to every person, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, and the world did not recognize] him. He came to his own things, and his own people did not receive him. But as many as received him—to those who believe in his name—he gave to them authority to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a husband, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and took up residence among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the one and only from the Father, full of grace and truth…. No one has seen God at any time; the one and only, God, the one who is in the bosom of the Father—that one has made him known.
These two metaphors (Islamic and Christian) differ significantly, but both signify the birth of a “Word” of revelation—the beginning of a religious tradition that will help people make “sense” of life. In the Islamic case, the “it” that was sent down in the Night of Perfect Measure was the first words of the Qur’an. Metaphorical language is used to convey a similar or actually the same message across a wide range of cultures, languages and communities.
Last week, it was Easter Sunday. The symbology or metaphor for Easter is the cross, signifying a horizontal dimension of human life and a vertical dimension of Spirit that is buried below and rises above.
Sometimes, as in the Kongo case, the cross is circumscribed by a curved line, indicating a life cycle. Something like that metaphor can be found Islamically in the hajj or pilgrimage, which occurs next month, when the pilgrims circumambulate a black stone that is said to have fallen from the heavens. The counterclockwise circumambulation has been compared to the African American ring shout.
To add other metaphorical perspectives on the cross from other religions: in the oral West African tradition of Ifa, the cross is a crossroads that offers a choice to the seeker that encounters it; in ancient Egypt (Kemet) the cross is an ankh with a loop at the top, signifying life or the life force. Dianne Stewart points out in Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Experience (a book that was published more than twenty years ago, in 2005, but could have been written today) that the cross “is one of the oldest religiocultural icons In Africa.” So, in African-derived religion in Jamaica,
the theology of the cross is a theology of the eternal manifestation of incarnation [“of a Divinity or Ancestor for the benefit of human community”] and can be understood as an emancipatory theology as it relates to the restoration of well-being (social, personal, spiritual, physical, material, and so on).
In Christian terms this might be described as a theology of crucifixion followed by resurrection. Or it might serve as a brief theological description of Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Or then again, Stewart also quoted from a Black/womanist interpretation of scripture by Delores Williams:
The angel Gabriel tells [Mary], “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:36). Translated in terms of African-American heritage from traditional African religions, one can say, “The Spirit mounted Mary.” The word was first made flesh in Mary’s body.
So here the cross is at the beginning too, at the birth of the Word as well. The point is that all of these metaphors and metaphorical interpretations can work, and indeed different metaphors and interpretations work for different people, cultures, languages, and communities. The different metaphors are in fact needed, so that different individuals, cultures and communities can actually make sense of the world, rather than falling into “anthropological poverty.”
Anthropological poverty is what happens when a wannabe empire forces people to use religious metaphors that don’t work for them—that in fact work against them. Stewart quotes African theologian Englebert Mveng:
There is a type of poverty that I call, “anthropological poverty.” It consists in despoiling human beings not only of what they have, but of everything that constitutes their being and essence—their identity, history, ethnic roots, language, culture, faith, creativity, dignity, pride, ambitions, right to speak … we could go on indefinitely.
That’s what the slave trade did, followed by Jim Crow, followed by mass incarceration. It’s what colonialism and neocolonialism are still doing. It’s like carrying a cross, instead of being enlightened by a metaphorical interpretation. Wannabe empires change things like crosses, from metaphors that can be interpreted in ways that bring anthropological healing, into burdens for victims to carry into anthropological poverty.
I’ve focused on crosses and Euro-Christian empire here, but Islamic and other wannabe empires have done the same things. It can be true for any metaphor and any religion or religious empire. Stewart’s research focuses on African dimensions of religious experience in Jamaica. I reference it because it seems to speak to an entire world—an entire world in trouble right now.
It seems like everybody is carrying crosses, and nobody’s allowed to interpret them. One might say that the anthropological riches of diversity, equity, and inclusion have been outlawed… that artificial intelligence is literally in charge.
But has that always been the case? Do we just now happen to have the digital technology that allows us to see it evolving globally, in real time? People of African heritage have been enslaved, Jim Crowed, and incarcerated in the Americas for more than 500 years. Stewart wrote,
The extant data on African American Christian formation support the position that some enslaved Africans forged intimate bonds with Jesus and Jesus’ cross not because of their reverence for and intercourse with their Ancestors but because of the obvious parallels between their undeserved and unjust suffering and that of Jesus.
But there’s another way to look at this, though, which I think is one of Stewart’s main points. She wrote:
Practitioners of African-derived religions [in Jamaica], such as Kumina, Yoruba/Orisha, and Vodun, do not conceive of humans as being in need of any special redemption or salvation from some intrinsic depraved condition. They understand the human experience as susceptible to chaos, misfortune, disease, and ill will, and their religions are oriented toward identifying and overcoming the specific problems that compromise human fulfillment, well-being, and abundant life.
So, maybe that’s why there are so many different Words. Maybe they are getting born all of the time. Maybe that’s part of what is meant when people say, as scripture says, that God is love.
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