1. Ignatius Insight (http://ignatiusinsight.org)
Christians and Muslims, Living Together （n.d.）
Preface to English Edition of 111 Questions on Islam, Samir Khali Samir, S.J. on Islam and the West, Interviews conducted by Giorgio Paolucci and Camille Eid
It Is a Fact That Muslims Are Now Part of Western Society
Due to large-scale immigration to Europe and the Western nations from Muslim countries since World War II, Islam is no longer a distant, exotic religion. In fact, Muslims are present throughout Europe and in many parts of the United States. Demographers project that the number of American and European Muslims will increase in the immediate future.
At present, Europeans are dealing with the challenge of protecting their values while seeking a solution to the social ills of alienation, segregation, poverty, and terrorism associated with the Muslim immigrants. Europeans express concerns about the rapid development of Eurabia.
Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center "Twin Towers" in New York City on September 11, 2001, Islamophobia has spread through the Western nations. The following pages were prepared to help readers understand three things:
1. how Muslims and Christians can coexist peacefully;
2. what are the causes for the deep unrest that pervades the entire Muslim world;
3. and what are the means to promote greater dialogue and understanding between Muslims and Christians that will lead to a joint social, universal, and political effort for the benefit of all people.
In order to remain sensitive to and balanced in discussing the past and present situation, a question-and-answer format is used. The author responds to a series of questions posed by two journalists, one Italian and the other Lebanese. The intent of this balanced approach is to offer readers a clear portrait of Islam.
Muslims and Christians: How to Live Together
Islam shares some common elements with Christianity but also has many differences. The Muslim culture is quite different from that which emerged in the Western world as a result of the influence of Christianity. Because of massive demographic movement, both groups are now obliged to live together in contemporary society.
The Muslim world today faces one of the most profound identity crises in its entire existence. Comprising nearly 1.5 billion people living on all continents, it is struggling to find a common position for all Muslims. The search for identity has become particularly acute since the abolition of the khalifate (the office of Muhammed's successor, as head of Islam) on March 3, 1924, by Kemal Atatürk. The khalifate was the last representative symbol of unity of all Muslims. Therefore, contemporary Islam has no single recognized authority that would accomplish Muslim unity.
What are the foundations of Islamic faith? Why does Islam seem to be growing so fast today? What is the true meaning of the word jihãd, in the Qur'ãn and Islamic tradition, and in modern Arabic? Is it correct to say that men are superior to women in Islam, or is it just a cliché? Does religious freedom exist in Islam?
Furthermore, how does the Qur'ãn present the life of Jesus? What is the Qur'ãn's view of Mary? And of Christians and Jews? And of other religions? Is Islam a religion of peace, or one of violence? Can we reconcile Islam with democracy and modernity? Can we reinterpret the Qur'ãn for our era? Does Islam distinguish between politics and religion?
Modernity Is Difficult to Accept
After having passed through centuries of stagnation, the Muslim world is experiencing great difficulty in facing modernity. The Christian world has had the leisure of several centuries since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, since the French and American revolutions, and since industrialization to assimilate modernity slowly. Modernity is a concept that is foreign to many Muslims. This is exacerbated due to the fact that most Muslim countries suffer from widespread illiteracy and are governed by authoritarian political regimes or dictatorships. The concept of "human rights" is foreign to a large segment of the population.
There is an additional psychological barrier to accepting modernity. Many Muslim countries have experienced diverse forms of European colonization over the past two centuries. As a result, their attitude toward the West, modernity's birthplace, is ambiguous. This is a mixed attitude, one of simultaneous attraction and rejection. Moreover, because the West has become increasingly secularized in modern times, that is, rejecting many ethical principles and values that were common to both peoples, modernity appears to Muslims as a breeding ground for atheism and immorality.
Finally, the memory of the glorious period of the Middle Ages, especially between the ninth and twelfth centuries, when intellectual and scientific activities in the Muslim world had peaked and actually exceeded the achievements of the West, makes the current scientific and intellectual decline even more difficult to accept.
The Seeds of the Malaise
This current state of malaise results from the very sources of the Muslim faith: the Qur'ãn, the sunna (Islamic traditions connected to Muhammad), and tradition.
Many Westerners fear Islam as a "religion of violence". Muslims often call simultaneously for tolerance and understanding as well as for violence and aggression. In fact, both options are present in the Qur'ãn and the sunna. These are two legitimate manners--two distinct ways to interpret, to understand, and to live Islam. It is up to the individual Muslim to decide what he wants Islam to be.
It is necessary that we return to the very sources of the Muslim faith (the Qur'ãn and the sunna) and proceed rapidly through history until we arrive at this very day. This book, therefore, aims at presenting the Islamic faith in an objective manner, at providing a sure knowledge of this faith, and at helping people to engage in a profound reflection from a double point of view: that of history and that of modernity.
To Live and Build the Future Together
This volume intends to promote understanding and encounters between Muslims and Christians. It aims to provide the groundwork for dialogue, in the true meaning of the word, not as a search for some compromise between these two worlds but in a sincere and unswerving commitment to truth, with openness to the other side. Ambiguous speech serves neither Muslims nor Christians but creates only more confusion. The commentary shows that both of these cultural and religious traditions have many things in common, as well as many differences. Accepting the differences of another group does not mean surrendering one's human, spiritual, or religious convictions.
Muslims and Christians can surely live together if they want to do so. Neither group has to give up its identity, dogma, or faith, because at that level no compromise is possible. As the Muslims' prophet says in the Qur'ãn: "You have your religion and I have mine!" (Q 109:6).
Building a society together is certainly possible but also demanding, and that is precisely why it is worthwhile and rewarding!
Living together in a preexistent sociopolitical system means to accept the given system as it is but to remain open to improvement. This is the only way to grow together in wisdom and humanity and to build a future world open to everyone.
SAMIR RHALIL SAMIR, S.J. and WAFIK NASRY S.J.
2.World wide Religious News (http://wwrn.org)
Jesus vs. Allah
Dahlia Lithwick ("Newsweek," November 19, 2009)
Washington, USA - Pop quiz: which of the following names represents a non-sectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?
If you answered "none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered "Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered "Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee. (Click here to follow Dahlia Lithwick).
Hamilton, nominated last March, has seen his confirmation stalled until last week in the U.S. Senate, in part because his opponents claim he's a judicial activist for an opinion he wrote about God's proper secular title. In a 2005 case, Hinrichs v. Bosma, Hamilton determined that those who pray in the Indiana House of Representatives "should refrain from using Christ's name or title or any other denominational appeal," and that such prayer must hereinafter be "nonsectarian."
Bosma questioned the practice of opening state legislative sessions with sectarian Christian prayers that included a prayer for worldwide conversion to Christianity. Hamilton found this to be a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause because it was government speech that favored one religious sect over another. In a post-judgment order, Hamilton also wrote that the "Arabic word 'Allah' is used for 'God' in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures" and that 'Allah' was closer to "the Spanish Dios, the German Gott, the French Dieu, the Swedish Gud, the Greek Theos, the Hebrew Elohim, the Italian Dio, or any other language's terms in addressing the God who is the focus of the non-sectarian prayers" than Jesus Christ. Hamilton, himself a Christian, also added that "if and when the prayer practices in the Indiana House of Representatives ever seem to be advancing Islam, an appropriate party can bring the problem to the attention of this or another court."
For these words of clarification, Hamilton has been pilloried for months as a judge determined to chase Christians out of the public square in order to make more space for Muslims. In an interview last spring with Christianity Today, former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich said Hamilton had ruled that "saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK." That's factually true but hopelessly misleading, which was of course the point. But as a result, Hamilton for months awaited an up-or-down vote despite a distinguished record as a U.S. district judge in Indiana for more than 15 years, the highest ABA rating, as well as endorsements from the president of the Indianapolis chapter of the Federalist Society and his home-state senator Richard Lugar.
The real problem here isn't Hamilton but the fiction, built into the Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence, that there can be such a thing as a neutral, nonsectarian religious invocation that will make everyone present feel both included and respected. It has led to a crazy quilt of Establishment Clause doctrine that, depending on the judge and the weather, permits public Christmas displays of secular religious symbols (Santas, reindeers, teddy bears in Santa hats) so long as they have been drained of any strong sectarian meaning. This compromise leaves both deeply religious and deeply skeptical Americans outraged in about equal measure. It also leads to bizarre claims about secular religious symbols, such as Justice Antonin Scalia's insistence at a recent oral argument that it's "outrageous" to conclude that "the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead." In his view, a Christian cross on government land honors Christians and non-Christians alike. It's a secular symbol, in his view, because it doesn't offend him.
The Supreme Court has sliced and diced religious symbols and prayers into the impossible-to-apply paradoxes of secular-religious and heartfelt-thus-unconstitutional. For the millions of Americans, both religious and secular, left standing out in the public square with just a teddy bear in a Santa hat, this is an insult.
Opponents of Judge Hamilton should acknowledge that he was not privileging Allah over Jesus. He was trying to thread the constitutional needle that deems God's name—whatever the language—secular, but Jesus' name sectarian. The truth is, Hamilton has gone out of his way to impose a constitutional test that defies both logic and common sense. That makes him more "neutral umpire" than "judicial activist" by my lights. It takes a brave man to impose a test guaranteed to promote the unpopular fiction that America is one nation, under a secular deity to be named later, indivisible.
・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.
3. Common Ground News （http:// www.commongroundnews.org)
Overcoming religious prejudices through education: the experience of Bethlehem University，19 November 2009
by Fr. Jamal Khader
BETHLEHEM - A Christian professor teaches about Jesus Christ, the Church, and the Holy Trinity at a Catholic university. It may seem normal to do so, except that 75 percent of the students are Muslim. This is a required course at Bethlehem University, and the course titled “religious cultural studies” is co-taught by a Christian professor and a Muslim one.
Christians and Muslims live side by side in Palestine. A significant part of a Palestinian’s identity is shaped by his or her community of faith. Most of what Muslims know about Christianity is what their religion teaches them, which is different in many respects to what Christianity says about itself; and most of what Christians know about Islam is what they are taught at schools and what members of their community say about their Muslim neighbours. Some tend to see Islam as a threat, at least a demographic one, and they presume that Islam includes an anti-Christian component. Hence, students often enter the gates of Bethlehem University with misunderstandings and prejudices about the religion of the other.
When they join the university, these students, both Christians and Muslims, embark on a new experience. They study together, they live under the same conditions, they face the same problems—both in the University and outside—and sometimes they ask each other questions about their faiths, often without receiving satisfactory answers. Joint religious studies provide an opportunity for students to understand the position of the other and begin to respect the differences.
The Christian part of the course, which I teach, has three major components: the Bible, the main Christian doctrines, and contemporary issues. The students ask a lot of questions. Discussion topics include: women’s dress codes and other gender issues, the Crusades, the relationship between faith and culture, violence, and mutual misunderstanding.
There is a tendency for people to view their religion as the only legitimate one. Some students join our course with fixed ideas about their own beliefs and the way they see the other; with these students, we try to engage in a dialogue—a difficult, yet necessary one. In some cases, the outcome can be limited. To see positive things about the other’s religion takes a lot of courage. So when a student makes a positive discovery about a religion that is not his or her own, it demonstrates an openness and shift in attitude. When I ask my students, for example, to tell me what they like in the Gospel (which they read in the first week), some find it difficult to answer. So I rephrase my question: what do you find in the Gospel that will make you a better Muslim? This allows them to feel more relaxed and seek out elements of the Gospel that they like.
Real progress is made when we realise that the divide on a given issue can cross religious differences and Christians and Muslims may find themselves on the same side of a discussion.
At Bethlehem University, students have a right to celebrate their own faith publically. Muslims decorate the gardens of the university on the first day of Ramadan, and when Christmas approaches, the main hall of the university is filled with students, both Muslim and Christian, celebrating the birth of Christ. On Fridays, classes stop for the “prayer hour”, so Muslims go to a hall to pray, and Christians to the chapel to celebrate the mass, before returning to the classrooms.
In our course we intended to teach about Judaism as well, but due to the difficulties of employing a Jewish teacher (Jewish Israelis are not allowed by Israel to go to the Palestinian Territories), the teaching of Judaism is limited to the Hebrew Bible and history as it is told in the Old Testament—from Adam to the Maccabees. Although, the section on Judaism is limited, we feel that the course tries to promote the common values of all three religions and that the students learn to appreciate Judaism as the first monotheistic religion, or as the Muslim students put it: the first heavenly religion. A more in depth course on Judaism is offered to students in the department of Religious Studies and to students of tourism.
The four years spent at Bethlehem University mark the students for life. We know about the difficulties the students face in their lives outside the university; we know about the difficulties of living under occupation and the anxiety of not finding a decent job when they graduate. They have real concerns about their future. But when we see their openness and determination to build a better future, they give us the courage to continue.
・Fr. Jamal Khader, a Palestinian Catholic priest from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, is a professor of theology at the Latin Seminary (Beit Jala), Chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Bethlehem University. This article is part of a special series on freedom of religion in Israel and the Palestinian Authority and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
・Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews)
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