World Wide Religious News (http://wwrn.org）
"The Bible v the Koran"
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge ("The Times", May 14, 2009)
New York, USA - For all their manifold disagreements, Christians and Muslims are both “people of the Book”, and have an obligation to get those holy books into the hands of as many people as they can. Spreading the Word is hard. The Bible is 800,000 words long and littered with tedious passages about “begatting.” Many have claimed that the Koran, though only around a tenth of the length of the Bible, is an even more difficult read. Edward Gibbon complained about its “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept”. Scholars who spend their lives studying them still argue over their ambiguities, literary allusions and obscure references.
Yet there are more Bibles and Korans available in more languages than at any time in history. More than 100 million copies of the Bible are sold or given away every year. The Koran is ubiquitous in the Muslim world. Whole chapters of the book are used to decorate mosques. The faithful transcribe phrases and put them around their necks in amulets, use them on bumper stickers or as letterheads.
This mountain of holy books is a giant refutation of the secularisation thesis. “The Book lives on among its people,” Constance Padwick, a scholar of the Koran, has written. “For them, these are not mere letters or mere words. They are the twigs of the burning bush, aflame with God.” The same can also be said of the Bible.
Christians and Muslims are proving remarkably adept at using the tools of our time — globalisation, the media and growing wealth — to supercharge the distribution of their holy books.
The Islamic world boasts several television channels that do nothing but broadcast the Koran, while at the other end of the technological spectrum, the American Bible Society produces a small audio device that can broadcast the Bible to a crowd of 100. You can consult both books on the internet, read them on a “Psalm Pilot” or listen to them on iPods. (“Podcasting” has given rise to “Godcasting.”) Just because you put a holy book in people’s hands does not mean they will understand it — Americans buy more than 20 million new ones every year to add to the four that sit in the average US house. Yet one Gallup survey found that fewer than half of Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis), and only a third know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount (the evangelist Billy Graham is a popular answer). The situation is worse with Islam. The archaic language and high-flown verse of the Koran, while inspiring to some, can also be difficult to understand for even highly educated Arabic speakers. Only 20 per cent of Muslims speak Arabic as their first language.
The two peoples of the Book face similar challenges and opportunities. The interesting difference lies in how they are overcoming those hurdles. The Bible business is very much a bottom-up affair — an interlinked global network of 140 national or regional Bible societies pools resources to reach its collective goal.
The Koran is also going global. But for that it is unduly indebted to a single political power: Saudi Arabia. Its combination of geology and history — the country’s vast oil wealth and position as the guardian of Mecca and Medina — has turned it into a vast engine for spreading the Word.
At the same time, the Muslim diaspora is also spreading the Word to areas of the world where it has never reached. The Tablighi Jamaat (“Group That Propagates the Faith”), part-time preachers who dress like the Prophet, are behind plans to construct a megamosque in East London, next to the 2012 Olympics site.
But an immediate problem for Islam, much complained about in the Muslim world, is America’s War on Terror, which is certainly making it much more difficult to spread the Koran.
Christians are also much more enthusiastic than Muslims about translating their holy book. Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God — although most Muslims tolerate translations, it is a begrudging sort of tolerance. By contrast, Christians are much keener to get the Word out. You do not have to learn Greek or Hebrew to get the Lord’s word. It has been translated into more languages than any other book in history — including Klingon, spoken only by imaginary space aliens.
The headquarters of the American Bible Society, just north of Columbus Circle in New York City, is a monument to Christianity’s enthusiasm for translation. It houses a collection of 4,500 Bibles in 2,400 languages, to which it continues to add ever more translations, including Barrow, a language spoken by a handful of people in Alaska. Its ambition is that everyone can claim: “God speaks my language”.
The second advantage is Christians’ superior talent for turning their holy book into a commercial enterprise. The “good book” now comes in every colour of the rainbow, including the colours of your college. A “hundred-minute Bible” summarises the Good Book for the time-starved. There are Bibles in everyday vernacular or even street slang (“Even though I walk through / The hood of death / I don’t back down / For you have my back”). Westminster John Knox has revived an old idea, begun in 1965 with its bestselling Gospel According to Peanuts, to give us the Gospel According to everyone from Bart Simpson to Madonna.
In 2003 Thomas Nelson dreamt up the idea of BibleZines — crosses between Bibles and teenage magazines. The pioneer was Revolve, which intercuts the New Testament with make-up tips and dating advice (“Are you dating a Godly guy?”). There are toddler-friendly versions of the most famous Bible stories: The Boy’s Bible promises “gross and gory Bible stuff.”; God’s Little Princess Devotional Bible is pink and sparkly.
The Bible Society has also embraced all sorts of innovations. It gives a free copy of the military edition of the Bible, complete with a camouflage cover to all members of the US Armed Services. It provides booklets of biblical excerpts to people who are trying to cope with tragedies or disasters: the society gave away five million specially prepared booklets after 9/11 and 1.5 million after Hurricane Katrina.
It also uses prominent sports stars to spread enthusiasm for the “good book”. The New Orleans Hornets have been known to distribute copies of the Bible. LeBron James, of the Cleveland Cavaliers, is such an enthusiastic Bible promoter that he has been nicknamed “King James”. Publishing and translating the book is only the beginning. There are now sophisticated dramatisations of the Bible, with well-known actors and state-of-the-art sound effects. Zondervan’s The Bible Experience features every black actor in Hollywood, from Denzel Washington to Samuel L. Jackson as God.
Other businesses are producing films that dramatise bits of the Bible as faithfully as possible. There are Bible quiz books, bingo games, sticker books and floor puzzles. There is even a Bible-based jukebox that plays your favourite biblical passages. A “fully posable” Jesus doll recites famous passages of the Good Book.
The third advantage for the Bible over the Koran is the wealth of its believers. It helps the Bible’s cause that the world’s richest and most powerful country has more evangelicals, missionaries and media organisations than any other country. By contrast, the fact that the Koran’s heartland is relatively poor, with low levels of economic development, technological prowess and popular education, hurts the book’s cause — though Muslims do not see it that way. (What matters is that people are reciting the Koran; not who is doing it.) The fourth advantage is the West’s belief in religious freedom — guaranteed in America by the Constitution, and in Europe by an aversion to religious persecution caused by centuries of it. The heartland of Islam, on the other hand, is theocratic. The Saudi royal family and the official Wahhabi clerisy are intertwined. The Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Call and Guidance employs 120,000 people, including 72,000 imams. Clerics vet school textbooks. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police, frequently arrests Christians for merely possessing copies of the Bible. Filipino Christians, who are usually poor, are a particularly popular target.
Other Islamic countries are almost as bad. Pakistan has witnessed the kidnapping of Christian missionaries. Sudan punishes “religious deviation” with imprisonment.
Christian evangelists complain that this creates an uneven playing field. But, in the long run, uneven playing fields weaken the home players. The West’s open marketplace in religion promotes innovation, even in something so basic as Bible publishing, while the Muslim world’s closed marketplace promotes dull conservatism. The Book and the Koran, by Muhammad Shahrur, which tried to reinterpret the Koran for modern readers, was widely banned in the Islamic world, despite its pious tone and huge popularity.
The Battle of the Books is clearly important in itself: the first obligation of Christianity and Islam is to preach the Word to the faithful. But the battle also tells us something about a bigger issue — the relative ability of each faith to thrive in the face of modernity. Here again Christianity seems to be doing better than Islam.
Many people would regard that judgment as odd. Islam had a much better 20th century than Christianity did. The world’s Muslim population grew from 200 million in 1900 to 1.5 billion today — still about 500 million behind the Christian church, but an enormous catch-up.
Christianity shrivelled in Christendom’s European heart, while Islam was resurgent across the Arab world. Some Christian scholars predict that Islam will overtake Christianity as the world’s biggest religion by 2050.
Islam is also doing a better job spreading to Christendom than Christianity is into the Islamic world and has gained political clout around the world. In 1975 it seemed like a spent force politically in the Middle East: secular Arab nationalism was the vogue. But Iran has been a militant Islamic regime since the mullahs seized power in 1979. Islamic parties have won free elections wherever they have been allowed to participate in the Arab world. Hamas won a stunning victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006. Turkey is ruled by an Islamic party that is encouraging the spread of piety. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many of the former Soviet republics Islam is a potent political force. In other places, such as Egypt and Morocco, Islamists may well be the government in waiting. Morocco’s king styles himself “Defender of the Faith”.
In Europe too, Muslims are developing political muscle. The largest protest in British history — a two million-strong march against the invasion of Iraq in February 2003 — was co-organised by the Muslim Association of Britain. The Prince of Wales once suggested that when he becomes King he will change his title from “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of the Faiths”, partly in recognition of Islam’s arrival on Britain’s shores.
In 2008, Boris Johnson, the new Mayor of London, helped to organise a festival in Trafalgar Square to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Johnson is no fan of political correctness; he was simply being practical. Across Europe mayors have to worry about things such as setting up temporary abattoirs to cope with the slaughter of sheep for the annual Eid al- Adha feast in December, or organising the parking around mosques on Fridays. And an increasing number of those mayors, including the ones in Rotterdam and Leicester, are Muslims.
As for coping with modernity, the Arab world is experiencing not one but two economic booms, in the Gulf and around the Mediterranean. The idea that Islam is incompatible with the modern world is clearly untrue but the plain fact is that the Islamic world is a long way behind the Christian one in its engagement with modernity.
Look at the relative performance of Christianity and Islam in the light of several centuries of history and the latter’s recent growth looks less impressive. Christianity has expanded massively since the 16th century, thanks to the dynamism of first Europe, then the United States. Despite the blessings of oil, the Arab world lags behind the West in most indices of economic success and political maturity, from investment in science to free and fair elections. There is depressingly little evidence of internal cultural creativity. More books are translated into Spanish every year than have been translated into Arabic in the past millennium.
The most important indicator of Islam’s failure in coming to terms with modernity is its ingrained hostility to pluralism. Pluralism is the hallmark of all the world’s most advanced societies. The introduction of religious choice antedated the introduction of democracy in most of the modern world. And most Westerners regard freedom of conscience as just as important as the freedom to vote.
The acid test of pluralism is conversion — the freedom to join a religious community or leave it. Yet across the Islamic world Muslims are either nervous about conversion or adamantly opposed to it.
“Soft” Muslim countries still have some pretty hard laws. For instance, tolerant Dubai has its limits in this respect: non-Muslims are free to pray as they wish, to build churches and temples, but trying to convert Muslims is a criminal offence. In Malaysia, changing religion used to be a formality, just requiring registration; now Sharia courts intervene to stop anybody from leaving Islam. A recent case involved Lina Joy, who asked a federal court to register her change from Islam to Christianity on her ID card. The judges rejected her bid, telling her that one “cannot, at one’s whims or fancies, renounce or embrace a religion.”
The current Pope’s attitude toward Islam is interesting. In his Regensburg speech in 2006 and especially in a later address to the Vatican curia, Benedict XVI made clear that the Islamic world had to come to terms with the Enlightenment. That did not mean weakening its faith but embracing two ideas, which he also sees as preconditions for any serious interfaith dialogue: first, accepting religious freedom as an inalienable right, and second, drawing some separation between Church and State. It is a mark of how far Islam still has to go that this was immediately rejected by many Muslims. But the Pope is not giving up.
On Easter Day 2008, he publicly (and provocatively) baptised Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born journalist who now lives in Italy and who duly described his liberation from Islam at length. The Pope has also publicly defended the right of Christians to proselytise among Muslims.
The Battle of the Books is still on. Two thousand years into the history of the Abrahamic religions, the twigs of the burning bush are still aflame with the fire of God.
・Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
（End）
