Pakistan observer (http://pakobserver.net)
Christian soldiers, Views From Abroad, 22 March 2010
by Robert Wright
Last Friday night a New York Times headline underwent an online transformation. The article formerly known as “A Christian Overture to Muslims Has Its Critics” acquired a new billing: “A Dispute on Using the Koran as a Path to Jesus.”
For my money this was a big improvement, and explaining what I mean will illuminate a dirty little secret: some American Christians are fostering religious strife abroad. They mean well, but the damage they’re doing can be seen all the way from Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims are killing each other, to Malaysia, where Muslims are trying to keep Christians from using the term “Allah” for God.
The Times story is about an outreach technique that some Baptist missionaries use with Muslims. It involves stressing commonalities between the Koran and the Bible and affirming that the Allah of the Koran and the God of the Bible are one and the same. You can see how a headline writer might call this an “overture.” And certainly the Christians who deploy the technique see it in sunny terms. Their name for it — the “Camel Method” — comes from the acronym for Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life.
But a more apt etymology would involve the “camel’s nose under the tent.” The “overture” — the missionary’s initial bonding with Muslims via discussion of the Koran — is precision-engineered to undermine their allegiance to Islam.
These missionaries start out by noting that the Koran depicts Jesus and his mother, Mary, in a favourable light. Indeed, they point out, the Koran depicts Jesus as a great prophet and a miracle worker who can even raise the dead. In contrast, the Qoran doesn’t show Muhammad himself doing that sort of thing. Hmmm . .. kind of makes you wonder who the top prophet is, doesn’t it? In some cases even the “camel’s nose” image doesn’t do justice to missionary wiliness. “Trojan Camel” might be better; some Christian missionaries call themselves Muslims — or at least Muslims — because, after all, “Muslim” literally means one who surrenders to God. A few have gone way undercover, growing beards and abstaining from pork. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose you were a Christian parent in America and you heard that someone who called himself a Christian had bonded with your son via genial Bible talk and then tried to convert him to Islam. That would be annoying, right? Might even lead to some blowback?
The “overture” — the missionary’s initial bonding with Muslims via discussion of the Koran — is precision-engineered to undermine their allegiance to Islam. I wondered after reading the Times piece whether the disingenuous use of “Allah” by Christians might help explain a recent news item: In Malaysia, Muslims are demanding that non-Muslims not be allowed to use the word “Allah” for God. I consulted my go-to authority on Christian-Muslim tensions around the world, Eliza Griswold (whose book “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam,” is scheduled to come out this fall).
She said tensions between Muslims and Christians in Malaysia are complex and longstanding, but, yes, when Muslims demand exclusive use of the word “Allah,” one source of their pique — and, indeed, their stated motivation — is that Christians sometimes use this linguistic bridge to pull Muslims over to the Christian side of it. One of them, Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., said in a recent podcast, “There’s nothing that the two gods — the god of the Koran and the god of scripture — have in common. Nothing.” Well, to look at the bright side: Maybe that’s a basis for interfaith rapport; Caner can sit around with Malaysian Muslims and agree that they worship different gods. Still, I like to think that their gods would beg to differ.— The New York Times
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