After closing his store for the evening, Zana Zangana greets me with a firm handshake. He shows me to a seat in his office and deftly slices some vegetables and cheese onto a platter, and places two forks on it.

Reporters don’t accept gifts. Are a few chunks of cucumber and tomato from a produce store, eaten on site, an ethical violation?

Then he produces a bottle of wine. “I like this. It’s from Sicily,” he says. “It’s not bad. You’ve got to give it a little air.” He pours some in our glasses and takes a practiced whiff.

I explain the ethical dilemma. “You can buy the cheese,” he finally says, exasperated at the petty negotiation that is snarling his graceful unspooling of Middle Eastern-style hospitality.

I feel off balance myself. In my experience, Middle Eastern-style hospitality doesn’t include a bottle of wine, a cross-gender handshake, and a tete-a-tete about the most violent sections of the Koran.

Zangana, who owns ZZ’s Produce on Packard near Carpenter, is a Kurd from Kirkuk, Iraq–or, as he calls it, Kurdistan. Raised Muslim, he has come to ignore a lot of the customs of the faith. Of the Muslim ban on alcohol, he sighs: “In ancient times, we had the best grapes around, and now they’ve cut them all down.”

Zangana reaches for a side-by-side English/Arabic edition of the Koran, and turns to an ayah (like a Bible verse) that has bothered him for a long time, 5:33. It gives gruesome step-by-step directions for killing “those who fight Allah.”

Very few humanitarians tack this direction when discussing religion and violence. It’s much more common to make the opposite argument–that all religions, practiced correctly, are peaceful ones. But, Zangana points out, violence is embedded in the Koran and the Bible. In the Jewish Bible, he cites Numbers 31:35 and surrounding verses: “Moses is probably the biggest mass murderer in recorded human history, as far we know. He killed 5 percent of the world’s population–of course he probably didn’t do it, but the Bible says he did.”

The New Testament similarly devolves into violence when Paul comes into the picture and Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians take up arms against each other–Acts 22:22 (“Away with such fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should live …”) “The people of this book, they believe in that culture,” Zangana says.

To Zangana, such passages highlight a paradox within the major monotheistic religions: they “repeatedly say that this one God is a peaceful God and a good God. God is everywhere, and in everything … So if God is good, and God is everywhere, why do all these religions tell us to kill those who don’t believe? Isn’t God in them too?”

Zangana, fifty-seven, has just published a book probing that paradox: Where Was God Hijacked?: Violence & Human Rights in the Holy Books of Islam, Christianity, & Judaism. What prompted a produce merchant to tackle such a thorny and dangerous issue?

Before he was a merchant, Zangana got a master’s degree in economics from EMU. He wanted to continue on to a PhD, but “when you become a father, your responsibility is to feed your kids,” he says. He opened ZZ’s in 2001 and started a second in Lansing six years ago.

Now that his kids are grown, in his free hours he’s returned to intellectual pursuits. Books and ideas, he says, make him feel “like when you are a child and you go hunt a treasure.” He leafs through several volumes trying to find a reference to a recent discovery that delights him: something about Thomas Jefferson remarking on the Persians appropriating the Medians’ habit of wearing high-heeled shoes. (I think–I got lost en route. It was arcane, involved several languages, and I was surreptitiously looking up “Medians” on my phone.)

“That’s what my job should be. Not selling tomatoes, right?” he smiles.

One of Zangana’s earliest memories is of Iraqi troops demolishing his family’s home in 1963. “I remember a lot of screaming. They put us on a cart.” In 1974, the family fled to a refugee camp in Iran, then moved to an area on the Caspian Sea. But Iran, too, was suspicious of the Kurds, and Zangana had a run-in with SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. He says it was only by luck and quick thinking that he escaped the country in August 1977. “Right after that, the revolution started.”

Bad as the Shah was, Zangana says, “the Ayatollah Khomeini was worse.” After the Islamic Revolution, his family moved to Saqqez, a town in Iranian Kurdistan where they had relatives. In 1984, Khomeini’s followers raided Saqqez to punish Kurdish activists.

By then, Zangana was safely in Miami. So he stops telling the story himself and phones his younger sister Goli, who’s visiting from Ottawa, asking her to describe to me the attack.

She says it came on the heels of another raid that killed eight Kurds. This time fourteen were taken. “I’Il never forget the moment we went to the jail, and we see the names [posted] of people killed,” she says. The dead included their brother Barzan.

The killers “didn’t allow [the victims] to be buried in a normal graveyard,” she says. “They found a place away from the city to bury them.”

Goli was only fourteen at the time, but says she, too, might have been killed had she not been out buying bread: the victims included young girls like her, all of them raped before they were executed. “Muslims believe virgins will go to heaven, and [the killers] didn’t want them to go to heaven,” she says.

She joined a group of neighbors who unearthed the bodies, which had been rolled in plastic and dumped in shallow graves. They identified many of the dead, but never found Barzan.

The war on the Kurds is just one of the waves of violence that have washed over the Middle East for millennia, often in the name of religion. “The problem is not this pope or that pope, or this imam or that imam,” Zangana says. “The point is, when the time comes, they can use the book [Koran or Bible] to justify killing.” His office in the Lansing store–where we are sharing the now well-aired bottle of Sicilian wine–is stuffed with the volumes of ancient religious texts.

Though Where Was God Hijacked? is meticulously sourced, Zangana was unable to interest an agent or publisher in a controversial book by an unknown writer. He hired a freelance editor, Andrew Kuster, who by day edits academic volumes for the U-M music school. “He knows exactly what he wants to say, and is fluent, but English is not his first language and he wanted to be absolutely precise,” Kuster recalls.

In August, the 400-page paperback was available through online publisher lulu.com, amazon.com, and barnesndnoble.com, but not at the ZZ’s stores–Zangana wasn’t sure how or if to roll it out locally. Its message is likely to make him enemies, which is why he doesn’t want to talk a lot about his children or his personal life. “Personally, I take the risk,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it has to fall on anyone around me.”

He says he’s no longer a Muslim–“it was gradual, but you could say by the late 1980s I applied for divorce!” A close reading of his book suggests he might be a Zoroastrian–the original monotheistic religion. Its prophet, Zoroaster (aka Zarathustra or Zardesht), is usually described as a Persian, but Zangana believes him to have been a Median or a Kurd. “It was 1,500 B.C.,” he points out. “The Persians were still an uncivilized tribe.”

But it’s Zoraoaster’s teachings, not the ethnic bond, that draw him. “Maybe I’m on the path” to Zoroastrianism, he says. “This is a God that doesn’t promote violence, who says respect one another, respect the environment.” It teaches, he says, that “God is not involved in your day-to-day operations. It raises you up to be with God, not be God’s slave.”

Calls & letters, October 2016

Acts, Romans, and Matthew

To the Observer:

Your article in the September issue, Where Was God Hijacked? makes the sensationalist and in my opinion, completely unfounded claim, that “Moses is probably the biggest mass murderer in recorded human history, as far as we know. Of course he probably didn’t do it, but the Bible says he did.” Correctly interpreting biblical numbers and in particular the Jewish conquest of neighboring tribes, is notoriously difficult. But even granted a significant number of casualties, for those times, in those populations, the claim that is being made is, in my opinion, indefensible.

The whole thesis of the book as reported in the article seems to be that religion, including Christianity, is inherently violent. This ignores the mainstream understanding of the gradual purification of God’s revelation of Himself to the Jewish people, with an accompanying moral purification, that culminates, in the judgment of Christians, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus teaches that what was permitted for the Jewish people in Moses’ time because of their “hardness of heart,” is now surpassed. Jesus now calls all Jews and Gentiles to a higher standard made possible by His presence and the gift of the Holy Spirit. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 6:43)

The author’s claim that it is Christians wanting to kill Christians in Acts 22:22 is just false, and betrays his skewed agenda. It is Jews who are angry with Paul for calling Jews to accept Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, not Christians.

Sincerely,

Ralph Martin

“The article doesn’t represent a whole understanding of the book,” Zana Zangana responds. “Reading the book will give a real understanding of what we’re talking about.” While all his sources are footnoted, he says, his “main purpose is one thing: that we take away the idea in the human mind that you can kill because God is with you.”