AN OVERVIEW OF ISSUES

I begin this treatment of the issues leading to proper understanding of Islamwith a quotation from the American heartland. Leighton Ford was a long-timeassociate of Billy Graham in various Christian evangelistic ministries. He mayproperly be called a conservative evangelical Protestant, of moderate and irenicstance (that is, concerned with securing Christian unity), and, with BillyGraham himself, may be classified as a person of the highest integrity withinthis tradition of Christian faith and practice.

In these days of very great concern for the events and persons of the MiddleEast, Leighton Ford was trying to build bridges of understanding, especiallyamong his own constituency of supporters. He writes, in the modest report-periodicalregularly sent out to these supporters, as follows:

In truth, we who follow Christ have more than we realize in common with Muslimsand Jews. Our faiths were born in the Middle East. We all believe in one God.And ... we all look to Abraham as one of our great spiritual ancestors. Not onlyis Abraham the father of believers, in the New Testament he is strikingly called"the friend of God" (James 2:23).

So far, so good. But then Leighton Ford goes on to do what many in Western landshave long been accustomed to do, move into a kind of "put-down" of Islam basedon incorrect information. Ford continues:

Few Muslims, however, would call themselves God's "friends." For the MuslimAllah is totally apart from sinful humans. In contrast, the God of the Bible isnot remote but one who has drawn near.

Are these latter statements correct? Not entirely, not even for the Bible. Wemust remind ourselves that the Bible itself is by no means a seamless robe ofmonochromatic sameness in moral and spiritual content or tone. Taken as a whole,the Bible shows us images of God our Creator, now near, now far. So does theKoran, the Holy Book of Islamic faith.

Now, the content of the Koran, its nuances of style, and its religious emphasesare both similar and dissimilar to those of the Bible. It is not easy to makecomparative statements about these two great collections of religious faith andaffirmation. But in the tenth chapter, or surah, of the Koran, significantlyentitled "Jonah," we find a striking affirmation that believers—not just Muslimsin the historical sense but apparently all authentic believers in one God—arefriends of God:

Surely God's friends—no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow. Thosewho believe, and are god-fearing—for them is good tidings in the present lifeand in the world to come (K 10:64–65).

The Koran is an exceedingly practical book, vitally concerned from its earliestmaterials with the whole life of humans in this world. It puts that life,however, in a transcendent setting and makes its primary orientation the fact ofGod, the Creator, the Merciful, the Compassionate, and of the reality of theunseen world. We may even note at this point that, for all the Koranic emphasison the unity and uniqueness of God (called by the ancient Arabic word for "God,"Allah), it portrays an unseen world replete with angels and archangels, Withjinn, shaytan, and other spirits, not to mention the spirits of humans afterphysical death on earth. For Muhammad, the spiritual world was richly peopledand was, like the world on the plane of human history, under the lordly controland providential disposition of the Maker of all, the Lord of the Worlds.

The Koran, however, is also concerned with aspects of intimate personalreligion. We find many verses that express a vivid sense of the presence of God.These verses seem to have had central meaning for Muhammad himself in hispersonal life as a religious man and in his public role as God's Messenger andProphet. God is indeed cited as "the Protector of the believers" (K 2:258). Buta verse that is frequently recited by devout Muslims is the famouspronouncement: "We [Allah] indeed created man: and we know what his soulwhispers within him, and we are nearer to him than the jugular vein" (K 50:15).

We are reminded of Alfred Tennyson: "Closer is He than breathing, and nearerthan hands and feet." Another Koranic verse of similar import is "He [Allah] iswith you wherever you are" (K 57:4).

But the text that has appealed to devout Muslims in a special way, to those inparticular who may be classed as participating in that great stream of Muslimspirituality known as the Sufi movement, is the Koranic verse that reveals God'sgreat goal to bring forth "a people He loves and who love Him" (K 5:59).

Admittedly, the Koranic term (hubb, or the mahabbah of the Sufis) that iscommonly translated into English as the word "love" is not totally consonantwith the nuances of meaning of the New Testament terms for love (agape, philia).It often seems to emphasize approval from God's side and, from the human side,is more akin to "adoration" (ibadah). As Frithjof Schuon has put it, theessential virtues of the ideal Muslim life of faith are rooted in a blending offear, love, and knowledge of God. Indeed, Islam itself claims to be a"manifestation of truth, of beauty and of power." But Islam is more than thereligion of the Absolute, and the Koran teaches more than obedience to the willof God. It teaches not only submission to what may at first appear as aninfinitely distant God, or sheerly overwhelming Power, but also commitment tothe goodness of God and a return for refuge to "God within us, at the deepestlevel of our heart," one who is "infinitely near."

It is important to realize that the previous is not representative merely of asmall elite in the course of the history of Islam. As Bishop Kenneth Cragg, thenoted British specialist in Islamic studies, reminds us, "Sufism ... has oftenbeen the major element in the religious history and the popular experience ofIslam. It served over long centuries to interiorize the terms of Islamicdogma." And Louis Massignon, the distinguished Roman Catholic scholar whodevoted 55 years to the study of Muslim spirituality, said that "Muslim theologywas essentially a mystical structure deriving from the Koran itself as theprimary source of its development." Influences from pre-Islamic PersianZoroastrianism and Eastern Christian monasticism probably played significantroles in the development of historic Sufism, but powerful elements of religiousinteriority lie within the Koran itself—and in the life of Muhammad.

This also means that the more obvious aspects of the Koran and of the Prophet'spublic ministry, especially in his last ten years in Medina—aspects that KennethCragg denotes as "dogmatism, autocracy, power"—are by no means the whole storyof either the Book or the career. It is indeed remarkable and historically verysignificant that what Cragg calls "a system so instinctively authoritarian andabsolutist as Islam, and so essentially confident about political sanctions inreligion," should bear within it this stream of religious interiority andvitality that seems to give inner—and at times also outer—freedom for believersto find their own way in human life, against theologians, however dogmatic, andagainst rulers, however autocratic. The ultimate quest of Islamic faith andpiety may well be to "seek the face of God," a quest wherein relationship withGod is properly, indeed inseparably, associated with compassionate conducttoward and sharing materially with fellow humans (K 2:272; 13:22; 92:20).

We see, therefore, that Leighton Ford, who wants to be fair and to buildbridges, is only partly right. He is also partly wrong. For today, and over longcenturies, the spiritual way (tariqah) of innumerable Muslims has taught thatGod is very near, and in close communion with his "friends" (wali), as indeedthe Sufi like to characterize themselves.

Some Muslim representatives contend that many Westerners are trying to demonizeIslam. Westerners, of course, recall the late Iranian Ayatollah RuhollahKhomeini's description of the United States as "the Great Satan," a termevidently intended to convey a critique with religious, cultural, and politicalovertones. On our side, former Vice President Dan Quayle is alleged to have saidthat the three greatest evils of the twentieth century are Communism, Fascism,and Islam. Quayle of course is admittedly not the most knowledgeable orperceptive among our political leaders, but his statement may represent wideranges of public opinion in the United States and beyond. With deeper insight,conservative journalist George Will, after the suicide bombing of the USS Coleon October 18, 2000, and in the context of the Israel-Palestinian crisis,asserted that we are witnessing not adjustments over small pieces of land butthe clash of two civilizations.

We talk of Islam and the Judeo-Christian West, but these terms do not have thegeographical significance they once did. In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran,and even more in lands of larger Islamic population to the East, such asPakistan, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, there has continued to be aninstitutional Christian presence (in the form of churches claiming apostolicorigin) and, far less, a Jewish one. And the West has seen a large growth ofMuslim populations in Europe and North America since the end of the Second WorldWar. Continental Europe saw the influx of North African and Turkish workers andtheir families. The United Kingdom saw the coming of relatively large numbers ofpersons of Islamic faith from British Commonwealth lands. The result is anapparently abiding presence of perhaps 25 million Muslims in Europe. The numberof Muslims in France, mainly of North African origin, is between three and fourtimes the number of French Christians adhering to the Reformed tradition, achurch reaching back to the period of the Reformation and making historicallynotable contributions to every aspect of French political, cultural, andreligious life. In the United States, Islam is said to have overtaken Judaism innumbers of adherents, to become the second largest religious community in theland.

These large-scale movements of populations and consequent shifts in the internalmakeup of contemporary nations and cultures make clear that the issue of "badfeeling" needs to be addressed for the sake of domestic peace and cooperationand for international harmony. That bad feeling is held and directed toward thehistoric West by not a few Muslims, especially in the Middle East, has beengraphically portrayed in television shots of angry crowds denouncing the UnitedStates in the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, in Jordan, or more recently inPalestinian territory, Yemen, or even Egypt. Admittedly, these demonstrationshave more often than not been "staged" by government policy and arrangement (andsometimes by nongovernmental groups) in Iraq and elsewhere, but the sights andsounds of the demonstrations have created powerful images and abidingimpressions in the psyches of millions of viewers around the world in this dayof "instant and universal" communication.

That bad feeling is held in the West toward historic Islam and Muslims inparticular is clearly evidenced by widespread revulsion revealed in the mediaagainst Muslim holding of Western hostages and, even more, against the acts ofself-styled Muslim terrorist groups in recent decades. But the activities ofthese terrorist groups must not be seen as representative of all Muslims, nor ofIslam itself. Anwar Sadat, the late president of Egypt, did not hesitate to sayin public that the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini was not a good example of Muslimfaith or character. He clearly regarded the support of terrorist activities bythe Iranian government under Khomeini's leadership as abhorrent to the Muslimmoral sense.

In our contemporary world, one-third of the world's governments use torture "asa routine method of suppressing political dissent." The twentieth century saw aseries of genocides that began with the Turkish massacres of Armenian subjectsin 1896 and continued beyond the ending of the First World War. It resurfacedmost virulently in the Stalinist policies that led to the death of 13 or moremillions of Russian citizens in the 1920s and '30s, and in the German NationalSocialist elimination, under Adolf Hitler, of over six million Jews and other"minority groups." The list continued with the post World War II blood-baths ofmillions of their fellow Cambodians by the Communist Khmer Rouge, the bloodyChinese military invasion and ongoing occupation and subjection of Tibet fromthe early 1950s, and the brutal Indonesian invasion and illegal annexation ofEast Timor in 1975—after which at least one-third of the population was wipedout. No continent is exempt, as evidenced by events in Idi Amin's Uganda,Rwanda, and Burundi, or in the Americas, north, south, and central.

Events in the Middle East, and especially Iraq, force us to a deeper level ofevaluation, however. John Healey, executive director of Amnesty International,in a letter written to members of the organization in the early 1990s, pointedout that there is a "human rights crisis of massive dimensions not just in Iraq,but in most countries throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world."Healey's letter went on to report that, for years, Amnesty had "publicized well-documentedevidence of gross violations [of human rights] by the governments ofIran, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and evenKuwait."

Healey lamented the relative indifference of the government of the United Statesto these human rights abuses, and identified examples "almost too numerous tolist," including routine incommunicado detention and torture in Morocco, tens ofthousands of political prisoners held and tortured in Turkish jails, thousandsof detentions without charge or trial in Egypt, a constant pattern of Israeliabuses of Palestinians, and 10, 000 to 25, 000 Syrians killed under Hafez AlAssad.These alleged violations of human rights are largely, although notexclusively, perpetrated by Muslims against fellow Muslims. Is there some kindof ineluctable connection between Islam, defined by Kenneth Cragg as "a systemso instinctively authoritarian and absolute," and this multitudinous andgeographically widespread pattern of human rights violations?

Muslims may take umbrage at the idea.

Some, perhaps many, will at once remind us of Western colonialism in historicMuslim lands in the past three centuries. Some will certainly want to go back tothe six Crusades. I myself—at this point making a countercharge—am forced toremind readers both Muslim and non-Muslim that the major expansions of Islamicfaith, especially in its earliest centuries, were made in the context of priormilitary conquest. Remembering this massively significant historical fact isimportant not only to inform Western peoples, but to help Muslims engage in thekind of severe historical, cultural, and religious self-criticism that Westerncivilization has engaged in, however imperfectly, with increasing momentum sincethe time of the Crusades. Beginning as a small trickle with the criticism of thereligious motivation and the military methodology of the Crusades by personslike Roger Bacon, Raymond Lull, and Francis of Assisi, this broadly culturalself-criticism from the West has not yet found a comparable public parallel inhistoric Muslim lands.

Islam arose in Arabia in the early seventh century of our common era as areligious movement with a distinct, although not totally exclusive, self-identityand a "definite thought and behavior pattern" relatively wellestablished by the time of the death of Muhammad on June 8, 632 C.E. The Arabianpeninsula, however, was a largely barren land of rocky desert and sand. Comparedto other parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean littoral, it wasculturally backward. Muhammad himself may or may not have been illiterate in thestrict sense of the term, but he and the other Arabic-speaking inhabitants ofeven the towns of the Arabian peninsula south of the Fertile Crescent could notbegin to compare in formal education or cultural sophistication with theeducated classes of the citizens of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire to thenorth, the Persian-speaking Sassanid Empire to the east, or the Latin-speakingpeoples to the west.

No one could therefore have foreseen what has been called the "lightning-like"appearance of Islam in the years immediately after the death of Muhammad. Thisemergence of Islam, first on the edges, then in the very heartlands, of theseancient and highly developed civilizations, primarily through militaryoperation, impelled by the force of a political religion and lust for booty, hasbeen called one of the most astonishing events in world history. Within 20years, the victorious Muslim armies were able to conquer and, by the mostskillful methods of military occupation, to rule permanently the greater part ofthe Middle East and North Africa. This almost unimpeded series of militarymarches resulted in the destruction of the Zoroastrian Empire of the Persiansand the reduction to half its former size of the Christian Byzantine Empire.Within two to three generations, the momentum of this extraordinary outburst ofphysical and psychic energy, which also included elements of more authenticspiritual dynamism, expanded into a vast area extending from the borders ofIndia and Western China across the whole of North Africa and Spain to thePyrenees Mountains, with incursions into southern and central France. And unlikethe periodic explosions of the later "Mongol hordes" from the steppes of Asia,Islam was there to stay.