Human Trustees

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese became a Jesuit priest in 1964 after earning a PhD political science at UC Berkeley, but he has mostly served as a journalist and academic. I find his pieces in Religious News Service consistently informing and thought provoking—including this one from a couple of months ago, “Amos, a prophet for social justice, is a prophet for today.” I quote,

“Anyone who thinks the Scriptures are not political has never read the Prophet Amos hurling invectives at the rich and powerful of his time.

Amos was not a professional prophet, but an uneducated shepherd who preached social justice and denounced exploitation of the poor by the rich. He was especially harsh on the rulers, priests and upper classes. His words sound like a political activist ranting on MSNBC.”

Amos blasted the rich who used their power to grind the poor into the ground, while stealing from them to enrich themselves even more. “They trample the heads of the destitute into the dust of the earth, and force the lowly out of the way,” he declared. Judgment will come because they live in luxury while turning away from the suffering of the destitute and oppressed in the land.

Religion won’t save them. Only repentance and a commitment to practicing justice will:

“‘Take away from me your noisy songs,’ Amos had God saying. ‘The melodies of your harps, I will not listen to them.’

‘Rather let justice surge like waters, and righteousness like an unfailing stream,’ he said.”

Rached Ghannouchi’s post-exilic political trajectory

Tunisian cleric, writer and politician Rached Ghannouchi would agree with Amos. Religion properly understood—Islam in this case—cares about good governance, which is about distributing power justly so as to alleviate poverty and finding ways for all to thrive.

I mentioned him in my last post, while exploring some of the common theological resources in Judaism, Islam and Christianity for making this world a more peaceful and just one. I cited Ghannouchi, whose classic book, Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, I was privileged to translate. Since then, I ran across an article by one of his daughters, Soumaya Ghannoushi, an accomplished British journalist. This piece was published a couple of weeks ago in Middle East Eye with the title, “My father’s ideas will outlive this shameful era in Tunisia.” But first, a bit of background will help.

Ghannouchi, whose only crime was to have co-founded a religious party that did so well at the polls that it posed a threat to Tunisia’s autocratic ruler, spent most of the 1980s in prison. He was fortunate to escape his death sentence but was exiled for twenty years in the UK. From there he was invited to speak to Muslim audiences around the world advocating democratic governance based on human rights and the dignity of the human person as taught by the Qur’an and modeled by the Prophet Muhammad’s rule in Medina (622-632). In essence, Ghannouchi is an Islamic religious leader (he is referred to by many as “Shaykh Ghannouchi”) who has specialized in political theology. But he was more than an academic.

As the “Arab Spring” swept through Tunisia in December of 2010 and the daily mass protests literally ousting dictator Ben Ali the next month, Ghannouchi returned to his country to a hero’s welcome, and his party, Ennahda (“The Renaissance”), became the ruling party in the parliamentary elections that fall. At a time when neighboring Libya was falling into chaos and civil war, some of that violence spread to Tunisa and his party was blamed for two high-profile assassinations.

That is when Tunisia’s three largest trade unions and its League for Human Rights came together (the so-called "Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet”) to call the political elites to the drawing board in order to draft a new constitution that would enshrine the recent democratic gains and point the way forward in that time of crisis. Ghannouchi, the leader of the ruling party, led the way by leaving the government and joining the process of rewriting the constitution. When that new constitution emerged, Ennahda agreed to ratify it, despite its little mention of Islam and the absence of the word “shari’a” (a key word relative to Islamic law).

The following year (2015), the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to the “Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet.” Here was my commentary shortly after it was announced:

“That said, the Quartet’s work could not have succeeded had their advocacy with Ennahda, the ruling party, not borne fruit. Ennahda did what rarely any party has done anywhere else, by stepping down from power before their mandate had come to an end. True, the country had been shaken by the assassinations of two secular opposition politicians that year. Still, the fact that Ghannouchi’s Ennahda willingly gave up power to join the other political forces in the country in drawing up a new constitution and reconvene a new set of parliamentary elections in the next year is nothing short of phenomenal.

Ennahda, among all other political currents, was justified in taking some credit for this honor [the Nobel Peace prize]. Thanks to all the political factions, the so-called Arab Spring would continue to live on – with all its ups and downs – in the land where it was born.”

Then, in his opening speech at Ennahda’s Tenth Congress in 2016, Ghannouchi declared that Tunisia no longer needed “political Islam.” Democratic institutions, if well-crafted and guarded, will always ensure that the people will elect those who embody their values. The Tunisian nation is overwhelmingly Muslim and if the majority prefers a more secular interpretation of what that means politically, then Ennahda will cooperate with secular parties to forward the common good for all Tunisians. It thereby was relinquishing any promotion of its own interpretation of Islam in the public sphere and was announcing it would function just like any other political party vying for support for its public policies.

At that stage, Ghannouchi himself decided to run for election. He easily won a seat in the Tunisian parliament and in 2019 was elected by his peers as speaker of parliament. But then the specter of dictatorship reared its ugly head once again. As his daughter puts it in her article, “Tunisia’s misfortune is that into the space opened by that democratic experiment stepped a populist fanatic who understood democracy only as a ladder. [President Kais] Saied climbed it to reach power - then kicked it away.”

A political outsider, Kais Saied was elected president in 2019 but then suspended the Ennahda-led parliament in 2021 and ruled strictly by decree from then on. He imprisoned several opposition leaders, but as his rule was facing fiercer resistance in February 2023, Saied launched a harsher campaign of repression, arresting two dozen opposition leaders, activists, journalists and judges. Finally, he arrested 82-year-old Ghannouchi himself in April. And two years later, Ghannouchi still sits in a small cell behind an iron door, one of the oldest political prisoners in the world.

Ghannouchi’s current hunger strike

Soumaya, his daughter writes,

“Last week, my 84-year-old father, Rached Ghannouchi, embarked on a hunger strike.

His body is frail, his health fragile; yet from his narrow cell, he chose hunger - not as escape, but as solidarity. He did it for Jawhar Ben Mbarek, a left-leaning professor of constitutional law, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front and a central figure in the opposition to Tunisian President Kais Saied’s coup.

Ben Mbarek had already been on a wildcat hunger strike for a week, hovering between life and death, when my father joined him. Since then, the strike has spread across Tunisia’s prisons, gathering a growing number of political detainees who refuse to bow to the cruelty of the regime.

It is the last language left to those whom tyranny has silenced: the language of the body, the eloquence of refusal.”

This costly act of solidarity for the sake of his country is Ghannouchi’s clarion call for unity in opposition to the man who chose to monopolize political power in his own person. Will Ben Mbarek—or will he himself—survive this ordeal? They may not, but as his daughter notes, “Even now, the cracks are visible.” She adds, “The regime is hollow, exhausted, without a future. There is a growing conviction that change is inevitable; that the darkness is already thinning at its edges.” This “shameful interlude in Tunisia’s long story” will soon end, and no matter what happens in the weeks and months to come, “My father’s ideas will outlive it, as they have outlived every prison, every slander, every tyrant.”

Upon receiving his death sentence in 1987, Ghannouchi said, “As for my execution - if my blood is shed, I pray to God that it will be the last blood spilled in this country. And I pray that my blood may turn into a rose from which freedom blossoms.” This remains his prayer, 38 years later, once again in prison and now engaging in a hunger strike.

Good governance, from Amos to Ghannouchi

Political theology, simply put, is to think about what makes good governance using the resources of our sacred texts, whether we be Jews, Christians and Muslims. Amos, as we saw, castigated Israel’s rulers, religious leaders and the rich for trampling on the rights of the poor. In the book I just wrote (see this), political theology is one of three main themes. I will simply quote here from the only psalm attributed to Solomon, which is very much about political theology. Solomon is plainly expressing the views of his father, King David:

“Give your love of justice to the king, O God, and righteousness to the king’s son.

Help him judge your people in the right way; let the poor always be treated fairly . . .

He will rescue the poor when they cry to him; he will help the oppressed, who have no one to defend them.

He feels pity for the weak and the needy, and he will rescue them.

He will redeem them from oppression and violence, for their lives are precious to him” (Psalm 72: 1-2, 12-14, NLT).

Importantly, political theology is also applying the principles of just rulership to one’s specific historical context. Solomon, like his father, was a king with nearly absolute power. This psalm is actually a prayer, asking God to grant the king his own love for justice and compassion for the poor and oppressed. To what end? To ensure that all might prosper as much as possible—in the name of equity and equality. But without this commitment to ruling according to God’s commands, kingship tends toward despotism. And in fact, the Israelite monarchy did devolve into despotism politically, and, despite a few good kings along the way, Israel’s kings became more and more corrupt, rebelling against the law of Moses and thus leading the people into the idolatry of the nations around them. And so, God’s warning to the prophets came to pass: Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the people were taken into exile.

Ghannouchi’s political theology, by contrast, starts with God’s love of justice as taught in the Qur’an and modeled by Muhammad, the prophet and ruler of Medina, but then takes stock of the world as it is today. The principles of democratic rule, along with the development of international law based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are the result of the world’s nations coming together after two cataclysmic world wars and declaring that peace is only possible on the basis of strong institutions. Only a stable democratic polity can guarantee freedom and justice for one and all, and thereby ensure a peaceful society. This is why Ghannouchi fought despotism all his life in his beloved Tunisia, convinced that this was the teaching of Islam.

I’ve been to several “No Kings!” rallies this year in Washington, DC, Wilmington, Delaware, and locally as well. The dramatic rise in authoritarian rule and intentional erosion of democratic institutions in the United States is certainly concerning. But we still have the freedom to publicly air our views and protest! That is not an option in Tunisia and many other nations. Let us take inspiration from Shaykh Ghannouchi’s lifelong integrity and courage, and ask God to preserve his life, cause this despotic regime to fall, thus freeing all political prisoners and embarking Tunisia once again on the path of freedom and democracy.

And may his life also inspire us to keep freedom and justice for all burning bright in our own nation!

I end this series of eight posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the prospects of ending it by framing the issue theologically. I am a Christian theologian, after all, and I spent my second career researching and writing about Muslim-Christian dialogue. And since the first and greater part of the Bible is the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, and since Jesus himself was Jewish and considered his message to be in line with the Hebrew prophets, we Christians recognize (or should, at least) that we do theology starting with the Hebrew scriptures. My conclusion, therefore, draws strands from all three traditions and argues that there is plenty of common ground to inspire, guide and sustain our collective efforts as aspiring peacemakers.

Prominent Jews who prioritize a more peaceful and just world

Arguably one of the most influential Jews in the world, Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, economist and public policy analyst, directs Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and has been a special advisor to the last four secretary-generals of the United Nations—first, on the eight Millennial Development Goals (MDGs, 2000-2015) and then on the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030). Having devoted most of his life to find ways of eradicating extreme poverty, he has expanded that goal with scientists and policy makers from all over the world based on the conviction that only through global cooperation can we solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

Besides the specter of climate change, the pollution of our air and seas, the challenges to agriculture and the health of our great cities, the festering of wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Israel-Palestine also loom large on the global horizon. Despite the shaky ceasefire underway in Gaza, for instance, the prospects for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are still dim, to say the least. Israeli settlers in the West Bank continue to kill Palestinians as the IDF looks the other way; more homes are demolished and more families are internally displaced. I read this morning that Israel is poised to approve 2,000 new settlements in the West Bank! Meanwhile, at least 150 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the ceasefire and the IDF shows signs of digging into their positions for good.

Jeffrey Sachs has also been speaking out on the Gaza conflict. Watch him being interviewed on Breaking Points at the end of August 2025. What he says still applies: “In this most dangerous moment since WWII,” he recommends that the UN General Assembly suspend Israel’s membership in the UN, “because I believe this is a completely lawless, murderous, genocidal regime. I don’t think there’s any other country in the world remotely doing what Israel is doing in terms of the violence, the mass murder and the mass starvation.”

Just a week ago, 460 “former Israeli officials, artists, and intellectuals” called on heads of state to respond to “the underlying conditions of occupation, apartheid, and the denial of Palestinian rights” that are left unaddressed by the current ceasefire. Notice that as they appeal to the UN secretary general and all world leaders, they’re urging them “to uphold international law, halt arm sales and impose sanctions, as well as insuring the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.” This demonstrates a “universalist” vision of Jewish identity rather than a nationalist one.

A Jewish American theology opposing Jewish nationalism

While many American rabbis during WWII actively called for Jews to fight for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine still under British Mandate, many Jewish Reform leaders in 1942 founded the American Council for Judaism. Under the “Who We Are” tab on their website, we read that the ACJ aimed “to uphold Reform Judaism as a tradition dedicated to universal ethics and justice at a time when many Jewish institutions began centering Jewish nationalism through Zionism.”

Its current executive director, Rabbi Andrue Kahn, wrote a piece for Religious News Service on the occasion of the Jewish New Year this fall, “Rosh Hashana helps us envision a Judaism beyond nationalism.” This is a theological move. What do I mean by that? First, Rosh Hashana reminds Jews that they are part and parcel of the world God created, writes Kahn:

“On this holiday, Jews do not celebrate the birth of a single people, but the creation of the world. The image is expansive: Every creature passes before the Creator, every being is judged, every life matters.

That vision undercuts the narrowness of a falsely homogenizing peoplehood. It reminds us that the Jewish story is bound up with the story of all humanity — as Jews have dwelled among all humanity. Torah is a wisdom tradition carried in Jewish form and meant to be tested, adapted, shared and lived out in relationship with the rest of the world.”

I would add that this universalist vision dovetails with many passages in the Hebrew Bible. The Psalms, for example, proclaim God’s care for all nations (and all of his creatures):

“Worship the Lord in all of his holy splendor. Let all the nations tremble before him.

Tell all the nations, ‘The Lord reigns!’

The world stands firm and cannot be shaken. He will judge all peoples fairly” (96:8-9, NLT).

The Hebrew prophets often give messages that concern other nations, and at times, all of creation. In this passage in Isaiah, one of the messianic “Servant of the Lord” ones, we read:

“Look at my servant, whom I strengthen. He is my chosen one, who pleases me.

I have put my Spirit upon him. He will bring justice to the nations . . .

He will not falter or lose heart until justice prevails throughout the earth.

Even distant lands beyond the sea will wait for his instructions” (Is. 42:1, 4 NLT).

Jesus picks up this universal strand and John translates it through a vision he receives at the very end of the Bible:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . . And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband . . . I saw no temple in the city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light. The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the world will enter the city in all their glory” (Revelation 21:1-2, 22-24 NLT).

Rabbi Kahn then makes a second related point, not directly theological, but as a historical application of that first point’s theology:

“For most of Jewish existence, there was no unified ‘Jewish People.’ Jews have lived and thrived heterogeneously in places as widespread as Aleppo, Mtskheta, Addis Ababa, Baghdad, Sanaa and Cochin, each with distinct practices, customs and self-understandings. They often disagreed sharply with one another, and rarely imagined themselves a single, homogeneous nation.

Instead of nationalism, Jewish collectivity was mythopoetic: a spiritual understanding of covenant via Torah, which expressed itself in many differing, and often mutually exclusive, forms throughout the world.”

The “Jewish story,” he remarks, “is bound up with the story of all of humanity. Thus, the towering twelfth-century Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar Maimonides who lived in Spain, Morocco and later in Egypt, once said to a convert that “Abraham’s lineage is spiritual, not genetic.” Rosh Hashana teaches Jews that “Jewish distinctiveness is real, insofar as it complements the distinctiveness of each facet of the whole of humanity.” The linking of Judaism and Jewish identity with a modern nation-state is just that—a modern invention, says Kahn.

The universalist message of the Quran

This will be brief, as I have written extensively on this topic elsewhere, and in two books, in particular. Though the Islamic tradition is just as diverse as the Jewish and Christian ones, all Muslims will agree that God created humankind and delights in its many hues and cultures:

“People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware” (Q. 49:13, Abdel Haleem).

The only difference God makes among human beings is the degree to which they choose to obey him. Another central theme of the Quran is that of justice. About fifty verses teach how important justice in human relations is to God, and many more proclaim how detestable injustice is to him, and especially social injustice. Here is perhaps the most famous verse:

“You who believe, uphold justice and bear witness to God, even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives. Whether the person is rich or poor, God can best take care of both. Refrain from following your own desire, so that you can act justly – if you distort or neglect justice, God is fully aware of what you do” (Q. 4:135, Abel Haleem).

I wrote a series of blog posts on justice in 2013, mostly summarizing a series of lectures I had given at a Muslim-Christian conference in Singapore just before (Justice and Liberal Democracies; Jesus and Justice; Justice in Islamic Law and Ethics; and Justice, Shari’a and Hermeneutics). I concluded “that ‘justice’ as the convergence of such ideals as fairness, dignity for all human beings, human rights and equality before the law, and especially vindication, redress and affirmative action for the downtrodden – justice is a basic aspiration that all people share.”

Justice, then, is not only an ethical ideal we strive for in our relationships with others as we navigate family relationships, or in our dealings with neighbors, or with bosses and colleagues at work. It is also not just about courts of justice where crimes are prosecuted, disputes are arbitrated and victims compensated. Justice, crucially, concerns governance—whether on a municipal, city, regional, national or global scale.

I was commissioned to translate a book written by Tunisian activist Rached Ghannouchi who had co-founded a political party to contest the autocratic rule of the dictator in power since Tunisia’s independence from France, Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987). Happily for Ghannouchi, their political party, steeped in the discourse of political Islam (or Islamism) that was growing in popularity in North Africa and the Middle East since the 1970s, was growing rapidly. Sadly for him, that success cost him his freedom, and while in a state prison most of the 1980s, he wrote a well-researched book, Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, arguing that if rightly understood, the Islamic tradition teaches the importance of democracy (people hold ultimate sovereignty in any state), human rights, and the rule of law, including international law.

While working on this ambitious project (the English version has 570 pages), I wrote a trilogy of blog posts on Ghannouchi, the first, to trace the rise of Islamism in North Africa since the 19^th century; the second, to sketch Ghannouchi’s biography; and the third, to explain the trajectory of his influential thought, from a young aspiring politician to the leader of the main political party now in power after the popular uprising (the very first in the so-called “Arab Spring” of December 2010) that forced Tunisia’s second dictator to flee the country.

Then in 2016, at the Tenth Congress of the Ennahda (Renaissance) Party, Ghannouchi declared in the opening speech that “political Islam is no longer needed in Tunisia.” As I explained in a later post, “Ennahda was no longer a religious party but a democratic party among others, whose members nevertheless found inspiration in the ethical values of their Islamic faith.” The book’s original title could have been revised. He no longer wanted an “Islamic state,” but rather a democratic one in which the large majority of citizens are Muslim and are free to express their own preferences for how it should be governed. Ghannouchi also declared in that speech that members of the party would have to desist from leadership positions in their mosque, and that religious leaders could no longer be involved in the party. In other words, no more overlapping of religion and state. And no Islamic nationalism***.

I will just quote a passage near the end of the book, some of which was revised, as you can imagine before its publication in English in 2022 to give you a feeling of the universalism of Ghannouchi’s thought—and indeed of many leading Muslim leaders, scholars and politicians today:

“God has also made the loftiest declaration to humanity, that they are all His creation, and that they all come from one origin and are equally honored and urged them to be as He intended—that is, one family that competes in doing good and repelling evil, in discovering the treasures of this universe and using them to fulfill their material and spiritual needs through many sorts of clues He has graciously dispersed through His creation. Some of these are useful for bettering their lives and others are simply signs of beauty that point to His majesty. Equally, He has forbidden them to arrogantly put anyone down and discriminate against one another on the basis of race, skin color, gender or class, or a claim to piety. For all are brothers and sisters, and thus must get to know and help one another without injustice, and He has granted their minds absolute freedom of conscience and a full responsibility to choose their own destiny” (p. 428).

Wrapping up this series on Israel-Palestine

I began this series by explaining why there had been a 14-month hiatus in my blog writing—after several years of reading, interviewing, and taking notes, I devoted nine months to actually writing the book that became, The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and Global Governance. I mention this again because I wrote this series very much in the spirit of that work. The Apostle John’s vision recounted at the end of the Bible in which the nations of the world stream into the city where heaven and earth have finally become one and where God now literally lives among his people—that city, where human beings from all ages, nations, races and cultures flourish together in God’s presence amidst a creation now completely renewed, serves as inspiration and even blueprint for the kind of world he calls us to work for now.

I argued that it was God’s Holy Spirit who engineered the founding of the United Nations and the drafting of Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the ashes of World War II, both of which inaugurated a long period of relative peace and the drawing up a body of international law. I also urged Christians, often tempted as Jews and Muslims are to resort to religious nationalism, which inevitably tramples on the rights of minorities, and in the case of the United States, builds on the myth of American exceptionalism and intentionally tears down the institutions and treaties that have upheld global cooperation now for decades. Finally, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it takes the side of Israel and rubber stamps its extreme religious nationalism which has recently veered from generic apartheid to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Yet peace is eminently possible, if only the State of Israel complies with numerous Security Council resolutions since 1967 by dismantling its military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and negotiates in earnest with its Palestinian counterparts a just and sustainable two-state solution. In the meantime, just as the international community did to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa, we must all work together to apply maximum pressure on Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS). With God’s help, we can get this done together and achieve a lasting peace.

*** Rached Ghannouchi was elected speaker of Tunisia’s parliament in 2019, but as a result of a coup engineered by President Kais Saied in 2021, he was jailed along with other opposition figures and in 2025 sentenced to 14 plus 6 years on several trumped-up charges. Join me in praying for his release. He is now 84.