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Poverty

A professional beggar

My friend spends his days walking through the city neighborhoods singing verses from the Koran. At gates he knows are kind, he stops and asks for a few pennies or a piece of bread. Aziz is a professional beggar. He comes from a proud ethnic group that used to be nomadic. They called themselves Muslim gypsies. Today they are reduced to living in two large, squalid neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city whose streets and bazaars they wander while chanting the Koran for alms.

Aziz’s introduction to a life of begging came harshly. He was a throw-away child. After his father died, his mother remarried when he was 7 years old and she simply left him in an empty little hovel to fend for himself. Thankfully a neighbor family gave him food from time to time, on the days that he came home from his “work” empty handed.

He is married now with three small children. They live in the same little mud-brick house, which is about the size of many American’s walk-in closets. Its window opening has no glass in it, and the “door” is a only curtain. And remember, this in a region where the winter lows drop down to around 0 degrees Farenheit.

On an average day their diet consists of two to four flat, round loaves of bread and some weak tea—that’s it. Occasionally they enjoy some rice cooked with oil, but that kind of meal is more expensive than bread so they don’t get it too often. No meat, no vegetables. Those are luxuries they only eat when someone is particularly generous, such as at a Muslim festival.

Aziz’s wife used to beg too, at one of the main intersections in the city. That was before a big black Mercedes ran over her, and then casually drove away. Now she spends most of her time limping around the little courtyard to cook meals and care for their three children. Even if it was not for her being crippled, she does not have the strength for walking and begging all day because she also has Central Asia’s curse of the poor—tuberculosis.

This is what it means to be one of the poorest of the poor in the Muslim world. Most of Aziz’s neighborhood, 30,000 to 40,000 people, pretty much live this way. Some are a little better off, but the vast majority live at a bare subsistence level that keeps their short lives full of sickness and disease.

My friend has tried hard to be a good Muslim. He diligently learned to recite portions of the Koran from memory, and he tries to follow all the proper rituals. Nevertheless, the imams at the mosque disdain him and his people, and will only come to say funeral prayers in their neighborhood if they are paid.

Aziz and I have been friends a little over a year now. I regularly give them alms, and have bought medicines when his wife was in the hospital. We also talk a lot about the meaning of knowing God.

One day he told me, “Some of the men in my neighborhood accused me of having a Christian friend. But I don’t care what they say. You are not a ‘Christian’ to me. You are a true Muslim, like one of the prophets. You may not have been to Mecca, but your heart is like someone who has already been on the Hajj, except you have been on a true spiritual hajj—to God.”

Soon after this Aziz and several of his neighbors watched the Jesus film that we gave them at Christmas. Then they watched it again and again. He came to me a few weeks later and excitedly said, “Now I understand. Now I know the prophet Isa is God’s own son. He was sent to show us who God is. But those evil men pierced his hands, beat and killed him. It was so terrible! But he is not dead! No, he returned again to life and is now in heaven. And someday he will come back for us.”

“In this life I have no one except my wife and children, no one who cares about me. But I saw that Isa loves people like me! He loved and did many wonderful things for the poor. Now I know that God wants to be a father to me, and that’s why he sent Isa. And now I know why you live the way you do, you are trying to walk on the Isa road. I want to walk on the Isa road too.”

In this life, Aziz will not get anything out of following Jesus—except persecution. He will never be wealthy or successful by the standards of anyone I know. The kind of “gospel” that is preached by many in the West would be completely unintelligible to him. Our multi-million dollar churches would only leave him cold, another sign religious people don’t care about the poor.

But even though Aziz has nothing, don’t cry for him. Weep we should, for the millions of Islam’s poorest-of-the-poor who have not heard that God wants to be a Father to them. Aziz has received eternal life. His name is now written in the Lamb’s book of life and someday he will receive a crown of righteousness that will never fade.

Gene Daniels and his family have been serving among an Unreached Muslim people group in Central Asia since 1997. Gene Daniels is a pseudonym.

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© 2006 Momentum Magazine.
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