Hidden Agendas in Christian-Muslim Relations
Are all Muslims mad? Are they against democracy? Do they want to kill Salman Rushdie?
When Christians meet Muslims there are so many questions that lie beneath the surface that never get asked. The above are some of the questions Christians want to, but often feel unable to ask Muslims face to face.
Muslims also have questions: Why do you Christians believe God had sex with Mary to produce Jesus? Why have you let Christianity have nothing to do with politics? Why do you suffer such insults to Jesus and do nothing about it?
Any meeting of Christians and Muslims which ignores these “hidden agendas” is no true meeting. People may gather together but they will not meet.
This sets high standards for what has come to be called Christian/Muslim dialogue. It must be authentic, honest and open. Trying to pretend there are no differences, to paper over the cracks, will not only be boring but fruitless as well. Being unsympathetic and hostile to the partner in dialogue is also unlikely to promote understanding. No, talking with people of other faiths is a tightrope walk between superficial niceties and agressive self-promotion. It is also a tightrope walk in that it is a risk. Our comfortable stereotypes of what Muslims are like could be exploded. We may find ourselves learning something about the work of God in non-Christian’s lives; this may not fit well with our theology. So authentic dialogue is honest, open and risky.
One of the interesting things about church life in Britain over the last decade is that all over the country there have sprung up many inter-faith meetings and Christian-Muslim groups. These groups have tried to start a process of dialogue between our communities so that we can understand each other better and work together where we can. This has become particularly important in the last year and a half after the rise and fall of the Satanic Verses affair.
One could say that Christian-Muslim relations in this country will be dated as before and after the SV affair. Any progress made, and any ground lost will always be oriented with respect to the upsurge in emotion surrounding the book.
It is difficult to generalise about Muslim feelings but the SV escapade has thrown up a number of questions which Muslims feel Christians need to answer. Firstly there is the question of preferential treatment for Christians in Britain. Their religion is protected by blasphemy laws, Christian schools have been in existence for centuries, religious education in Britian is, by law, to be “broadly Christian in nature”. So the first question Muslims are worried about is “Why do Christians have their privileges and Muslims do not?”
The second question is one of secularisation. If God is ominpotent, then all sovereignty belongs to “Him”; if all sovereignty is “His” then why do we Christians allow sovereignty in Government to belong to the people and not to God? I have heard Muslims say that a Muslim would rather live in a Christian state than in a secular state, since at least their God would be respected. Muslims in general cannot see why Christians allow the wishes of the people to come before the wishes of God.
A “Western” Christian answer to these questions is not easy. One can explain that the blasphemy law is supposed to cover blasphemy against the Church of England — not Christianity in general. One can explain about the ideas of representative government and how people have a right to be governed in a way that they agree to. But these explanations are unlikely to cut much ice.
What is needed is instead is an understanding of the origins of the conflicts which British Christians have with British Muslims. The preferential treatment of Christians is in many ways superficial. Christians are not treated any better than Muslims today, and their opinions are often theoretical. The only area where this is real is in the area of education whereby it is still so much easier to get a local authority grant to set up a Christian school (Catholic or Protestant), or indeed a Jewish school, than a Muslim school. I feel that anybody committed to a multi-faith society should work to eradicate this injustice — not by making it easier to set up Muslim schools (this, like the extension of the blasphemy law to cover Islam, would be a divisive and impractical move) — but instead to eradicate the Christian basis of the existing grant-supported schools.
The differences of secularisation are more difficult to explain. These stem from a different idea of “sovereignty” in our two faiths. What does “the sovereignty of God” mean to a Christian? That God is the source of creation in this world and “He” demands our commitment and praise because of that? Yes, in part. But does it not also mean that God in Jesus encourages people to take control of their own lives; to work to be what they are. Jesus’s kingdom builds up people to become responsible for their destiny — to take action for truth and justice. The natural extension of this theology of the powerless that Jesus preached is a participatory system of government. People are opressed because they have no control over what happens to them. The gospel message is Good News to the poor — Jesus come to set the captives free.
What does “the sovereignty of God” mean to a Muslim? In mainstream Muslim theology God is so powerful that everything happens in the world according to God’s will. Individuals have a choice whether to go with the will of God or against it. The sovereignty of God is just as all-encompassing as in the Judeo-Christian tradition but is more specific — events in one’s life are seen as “kismet” (fate). This is a theology of power, not of powerlessness and so all power is, and must be, under direct control of God — this means Islamic Government not popular sovereignty.
Understanding these differences in a basic concept like “the sovereignty of God” then helps us to understand why Muslims have these questions — it may not help us to answer them. Indeed the questions are not answerable except from a Muslim perspective — so often we mean different things by the same words (take Billy Graham’s “Crusade” as an example — “Crusade” means something very different to Muslims!).
What communications between Christians and Muslims should achieve is to help each community understand each other, to recognise differences and learn from the other. God willing, this process should repair the division caused by the Satanic Verses affair.