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God in a World of Christians and Muslims | Matthew 5:38-48 | September 30, 2001 |
The second person? Over a quarter of a century ago, I lived in India and struggled to learn Arabic from Hayath Khan, prayer-leader at Malakpet, a suburb of the city of Hyderabad, which, in my dreams, is still my city. In appearance, he was many people’s idea of a Muslim: white coat and trousers, long white beard, black cap on his head. In our lessons, as he recited words from the Koran, Islam’s holy scripture, in a Muslim’s view the exact words of God, tears flowed down cheeks and into his beard. I caused him problems. He liked me. He knew that I respected Islam, and loved some Muslims, but that I’d no intention of converting to Islam. So he worried and fretted lest, in the life of the world to come, I should be among the losers and miss out on paradisal joys. Like lots of religious people, Hayath Khan had to make a choice about whether God loved the many or the few. His heart told him one thing; bits of his tradition taught him something else. I remember him with much affection.
Sabiha Latifi was also a Muslim friend from my Indian days. She was a frail woman, who worried about my health, not hers. She often fed me, gave me a wonderful recipe for Lentil curry and, if she had a sin, it was an overwhelming love for chocolate. In later years, whenever I visited India from England, I had to bring lots of chocolate for her and hope that it wouldn’t melt under the glare of the Indian sun and of custom’s officials. Her daughter converted to Christianity, which caused her pain, but, because she loved her child, she coped. Her daughter used me to talk through her process of conversion. How could I refuse her, though I felt in a false position out of love for her mother? Yet Sabiha, whom I called Ummi (mother), never ceased to care for me. She was a saintly woman, whom I mourned greatly when she died. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
Last, but not least, I remember my father. In one sense, he provided me with my love of Islam, since, due to his work, I lived in Aden when I was nine through eleven years old. Aden: that entrancing, barren heap of land at the heel of the Arabian peninsular, where I met Muslims, saw them at prayer, and had my imagination and respect kindled for a faith that gave much to its practitioners and demanded a great deal of them. Years after I began my long acquaintance with the world of Islam, my dear old dad told me that he almost became a Muslim when he fought alongside Arabs in the Second World War, so taken was he with their life and faith.
There are other forms of Islam than that observed, with gratitude and delight, by my father, and those practiced by Mohammed Alam, Hayath Khan and Sabiha Latifi. I expect that, on September 11, the pilots of the hijacked planes died thinking that they’d done a religious deed, and with the words ‘Allahu akbar’ on their lips, which mean ‘God is greater’; greater, presumably than, in their judgment, America, the great Satan.
The thing is: all religions are complex realities, offering a variety of choices to believers as they reflect upon them and live by them. Am I, a Christian, compelled to approve the deeds of the inquisition in the late medieval and early modern eras, that expelled Muslims and Jews from Christian lands, or even tortured or killed them in the name of the prince of peace? Absolutely not: I prefer to make very different choices from my religious past
If I were a Muslim, I would be aware of the fact that Islam was, in its origins, the most successful of religions. After the Prophet Muhammad’s death on June 8 632, the Muslims quickly overthrew the Persian Empire and reduced the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, to a shadow of its former self. Christian and Jewish heartlands fell before Muslim invaders: Jerusalem, Alexandria, North Africa, Spain: all succumbed to the Arab invaders, fuelled by their fervent belief in the One God and the last and greatest of his prophets, Muhammad. Exactly one hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 732, Muslim forces were defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers, in south-western France. It’s fascinating to speculate what would have happened had the battle taken a different turn. Europeans today would likely be Muslims, and history would have taken rather a different course than it has.
For one thousand years, Europeans lived in fear of Muslim conquest. No wonder, then, that Muslims have filled the European imagination with fear. The fall of Constantinople to Muslim Turks in 1453 ended Christian rule in Eastern Europe for almost half a millennium. As late as 1683, Ottoman Muslims laid siege to the gates of Vienna. Such events led to deadly suspicion between Christian and Muslim in the Balkans, which, always liable to be fanned into a conflagration, has engulfed Kosovo and elsewhere, appallingly, in the last decade.
Islam is not, however, entirely or even mostly a violent religion. The largest Muslim-population country in the world is Indonesia. There, most people were converted to Islam by traders from abroad, traders who preferred mysticism to market-forces and bartering to battering. Even when Islam has countenanced and practiced violence, its scholars have, for the most part, emphasized defensive struggle rather than aggressive and offensive wars.
Of course, Muslims fear Christian militarism, too. The crusades are but one example, when violent, oversexed, landless and fanatical soldiers of faith set off to rescue the Christian Holy Land from infidel Muslims, and killed lots of Jews and different sorts of Christians before ever they reached the Middle East and saw a Muslim. That’s one sort of Christianity, but let’s not go there, for God’s sake.
For the sake of God: not, let me underline, for the sake of religion. Contrary to much popular opinion, religions, the one or the many, are not God. They are human creations, attempting to map out as best they can, in mortal life, the ways of the immortal God among his creatures. At their best: religions are porous to the divine presence, they provide us with homes within which the human spirit can flourish, and help us grow in holiness. At their worst: well, think of the Aztecs who, for all their remarkable accomplishments, raided other nations for youngsters to kill as human sacrifices. They would hold up the still beating heart of their victim as an offering to God.
The prophet Muhammad made choices from his religious past. He rejected polytheism, the worship of many gods, and, building on the belief in one God that a few Arabs followed, he brought Islam to people. Islam means submitting to the one God and, in submitting, finding peace and meaning. Jesus also made choices from his religious past. He said: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy”. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’.
Muhammad and Jesus made choices from the religion of their day, rejecting some things and accepting others. So, also, like all people, whether we admit it or not, like it or hate it, we have to choose elements from our religious heritage upon which to construct our life. On what basis do we make our choices? No doubt, personal factors come into play, but I reckon it’s best done on the basis of what the majority of the evidence seems to suggest. Remarkably, most religions argue, suggest or just assume that Transcendent reality presses down upon us, beckons us, allures us into hearing and following what he has to say. In other words, God reveals himself to us: not always with the clarity we would like; but I guess that’s a deliberate attempt to get us thinking about and engaging with what she desires for our good.
When some idiot sub-Christian tells us that September 11 was God’s wake-up call to America, commanding us to get rid of gays, new agers, Muslims, feminists or whomever, I remind myself that it’s more important to attempt to hear God’s word than the damnable drivel of one of his self-appointed spokespersons who, instead of listening to God, project onto him all their unpleasant stuff. That fascinating conversation between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson told me more about them and their hang-ups than about God; far more about them, indeed, than I ever wanted to know.
If God speaks through the scriptures of the great religions, as I believe him to do, then I am entranced by Jesus’s teaching of the fatherhood of God, who is not some unpleasant, bossy patriarch but a loving parent. I’m mindful that every chapter of the Muslim scripture bar one begins “in the name of God, the merciful one, the source of mercy”. Scriptures don’t always provide an edifying read. We can find bad-temper in most scripture, or the emphatic assertion or casual assumption of a cultural practice that has now past its sell-by date, or illogical reasoning, or a pile of other irritating or even offensive things. Scriptures, too, like religion, are liable to be confused by many people with Transcendent reality. I prefer to invoke the Taoist image that it’s the foolish man who mistakes the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. The finger may be a little crooked and uncertain, but the reality to which it points is sublimely real.
The choices we should make are not eccentric, or self-serving. They are ones that have been sifted by time and found to work. Christians, by and large, know that God is love, even though it’s usually best to get them to leave the statement there and not hear all the qualifications they make, which usually betray their pride and prejudice rather than their wisdom. Muslims fundamentally know that God is merciful, even though, again, they often hedge it round with reservations that tell us more about them than about God. Oddly, most people find it easier to deal with an ornery God that a gracious one, but we shouldn’t succumb to that ease. Religions are most amazing when they tell us that the one who made the stars is wonderfully kind rather than as crabby as we are.
My father, of blessed memory, nearly became a Muslim. I have never wanted to make that choice but, in a world more closely bound yet more complex than ever before, we need to respectfully learn about the other, not to undermine but to understand. Islam is too important to be left to Muslims, and Christianity too complicated to yield its secrets only to Christians. We can learn from the other, even about ourselves.
We are brought face-to-face with true religion when, just occasionally, we meet a goodly and a godly person, Christian or Muslim or whomever. Then I am reminded of a favorite saying of mine, by William Penn. He was a difficult man, to be sure, hardly saintly, but certainly a wrestler with God. He wrote:
The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls are everywhere of one religion, and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another though the diverse liveries they wear here make them strangers.
Dr. Martin Forward,
Executive Director of Aurora University’s Center for Faith and Action
| Copyright © 2001 by Dr. Martin Forward. All rights reserved. |