Christians/Muslims/Jews
and September 11th
Talk
by David Kilgour at
A
Breakfast Meeting at the Kanata
Baptist Church
Kanata,
Ontario
November
16, 2001
A seminar at the National Prayer
Breakfast in Ottawa was told
several years ago that one of
the major causes of violence
in the Middle East was the widespread
view there that Muslims and
Jews do not worship the same
God.
This misunderstanding,
we were told, encourages members
of both faith communities to
dehumanize and thus to demonize
followers of the other. When added to other regional issues, the result
is terrible murders, bloodshed
and mayhem.
In reality, we Muslims,
Jews and Christians worship
the same God, albeit in different
ways and with differing emphasis.
Each of our great monotheistic
faiths believes that life has
profound value and meaning.
But how many Christians,
for example, know that the Koran
makes numerous and favourable
references to Jesus?
This profound ignorance
about each other is a major
obstacle to mutual respect and
building harmony.
All of us must work harder
in this new century to eliminate
this knowledge deficit.
Groups like the Muslim-Christian
Dialogue of Ottawa are doing
good work to light candles of
mutual understanding.
There is another important
area of misunderstanding among
all three religions:
the large differences
of viewpoints within each of
them.
No one has written about
this issue more perceptively
than Karen Armstrong in her
book, The Battle for God,
which examines reasons why fundamentalism
has grown in all three faiths.
The Arab-Israeli conflict
is one example she cites.
It began as a secularist
dispute on both sides, but today
it is seen through an almost
exclusively faith prism by both
Muslim and Jewish protagonists.
By the late 1970’s, each
of these faiths saw fundamentalism
among its followers take centre
stage.
Christianity
The rise of Christian
fundamentalism, says Armstrong,
parallels that of the two other
religions, although for time
reasons, I’ll only mention a
couple of features she cites
of the American experience with
it.
The 1787 Constitution
of the Unites States does not
mention God at all; the First
Amendment formally separated
religion from the state. By the middle of the 19th century,
however, our neighbours had
become strongly Christian.
I recall reading not
so long ago that fully half
of the U.S. population today
belongs, not merely adheres,
to a church. The American Evangelicals, who seek a “righteous
empire” based on Godly, not
Enlightenment, concepts became
increasingly influential in
the early part of the 20th
century.
As
Armstrong puts it, fundamentalism
in all three faiths “exists
in a symbiotic relationship
with an aggressive liberalism
or secularism, and under attack,
increasingly becomes more extreme,
bitter and excessive.”
During the 1960’s and
the 1970’s in the U.S., faced
with such an ethos, Protestant
fundamentalists there grew much
more vocal.
One of their major concerns
was that the First Amendment
was to protect religion from
the state, not vice versa.
Islam
The Battle for God notes that in the 16th
century Muslims constituted
approximately one third of the
world’s population.
Three new Muslim empires
were founded in that century
alone:
the Ottoman, the Safavid
and the Moghul, with all three
providing a cultural renewal
for their nationals comparable
to that provided by, say, the
Italian Renaissance.
I fast forward to the
year 2000 because of my limited
time available.
According to Armstrong
and many other commentators,
fundamentalist Muslims around
the world are today deeply concerned
about two features of Western
society:
-
the
separation of religion from
government/ politics;
-
they
want their own communities
to be governed by the laws
of Islam (the Sharriah)
It
is interesting that the five
essential practices of Islam
(prayers five times daily, declaring
faith in the unity of God and
the prophethood of Muhammed,
paying a tax to ensure the fair
distribution of community resources,
observing the fast of Ramadan,
which began yesterday, as a
reminder of the difficulties
of the poor, and visiting Mecca
[if circumstances allow])
have some quite similar features
in Christianity and Judaism.
Equally, some sacred
events and other essences of
these latter two faiths seem
quite acceptable to Muslims
generally.
I’d
argue that believers of all
three religions, each holding
that humankind is no mere molecular
accident, should agree on a
host of issues, including the
growing inequality of world
incomes, the need to protect
the natural environment, human
dignity, and the necessity for
peace and harmony among all
peoples and nations.
Judaism
How many Canadians, I
wonder, know that about 50,000
Spanish Jews were welcomed by
the Muslim Ottoman Empire when
they were expelled from Spain
after 1492?
Yet centuries later,
notes Armstrong, reform Judaism,
especially in the U.S. after
1870, was progressive, liberal
and disposed to privatize faith.
Many believers in traditional
Judaism felt themselves besieged
and some even refused to participate
in secular education or to participate
in modern communities.
Many Zionists who led
the movement to create a Jewish
homeland in Palestine, she asserts,
were in fact atheists, who lacked
an understanding that the land
they sought was occupied by
750,000 Palestinian Arabs,
who would be expelled from their
homes in 1948.
Religious Jews countered
that secular nationalism in
the Middle East or anywhere
is usually a recipe for disaster. As we know, the past
century is full of horrific
acts, including genocides, committed
by secular nationalists.
Post
September 11
I’ve already gone on
too long and provided only a
sample of the points made in The Battle for God.
The author’s conclusion
is that fundamentalists in all
three religions have succeeded
in rescuing their respective
faiths from attempts to privatize
or to suppress each of them.
Fundamentalism is now
part of the modern world and
is here to stay.
Armstrong
notes:
“…the liberal myth that
humanity is progressing to an
ever more enlightened and tolerant
state looks as fantastic as
any of the other millennial
myths we have considered in
this book.
Without the constraints
of a higher mystical truth,
reason can on occasion become
demonic and count views that
are as great, if not greater,
than any of the atrocities perpetrated
by fundamentalists.”
Armstrong wrote her book
before the events of September
11th, but some of
the related points she makes
at the end of it still seem
valid. First, liberals and fundamentalists
in all three faiths must build
bridges and attempt to avoid
future confrontations.
Each side must maybe
try to understand what motivates
the other. Fundamentalist must develop a more compassionate
assessment of their opponents
to be true to their religion’s
traditions.
Secularists, says Armstrong,
“must be more faithful to the
benevolence, tolerance and respect
for humanity which characterizes
modern culture at its best,
and address themselves more
emphatically to the fears, anxieties,
and needs which so many of their
fundamentalist neighbours experience
and which no society can safely
ignore.”
Can
any of us this morning disagree?
