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MUSLIMS IN DIALOGUE

The Evolution of A Dialogue

Edited By

Leonard Swidler

The Edwin Mellen Press

Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Muslims in dialogue : the evolution of a dialogue / edited by Leonard Swidler.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-88946-499-5

1. Islam--Relations--Christianity. 2. Christianity and other religions--Islam. 3. Islam--Relations. I. Swidler, Leonard J.

BP172.M83 1992

297'.1972--dc20

92-9459

CIP

This is volume 3 in the continuing series

Religions in Dialogue

Volume 3 ISBN 0-88946-499-5

RD Series ISBN 0-88946-379-4

A CIP catalog record for this book

is available from the British Library.

The Edwin Mellen Press

Box 450

Box 67

Lewiston, New York

Queenston, Ontario

USA 14092

CANADA L0S 1L0

The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd.

Lampeter, Dyfed, Wales

UNITED KINGDOM SA48 7DY

Printed in the United States of America

RELIGIONS IN DIALOGUE

Religion can be described as “an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life-based on the notion of the transcendent-and how to live accordingly.” A comprehensive ideology, such as Marxism, can also function as a religion. The difference is that an ideology is not based on the notion of the transcendent-that is, that which “goes beyond” the ordinary (which we grasp with our senses and discursive rational minds)-however it may be perceived and described. Religions, and ideologies, thus are the most all-embracing of human structures, fitting all aspects of life within their “explanations of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly.”

Being so all-embracing, religions, and ideologies, have also tended to be absolutistic and exclusivistic. If some persons or institutions did not agree with our “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life...,” they were simply judged wrong and dealt with in a manner ranging from simple indifference through conversion, hostility and violence, to war and even genocide.

In a world poised on the brink of the third millennium after the birth of that Jew who thought of himself as the bringer of peace, such attitudes toward those who differ from us in that all-embracing paradigm through which we perceive, interpret and act on the world, religion (or its functional equivalent, ideology), are no longer viable. Tens of millions of us travel all over the world every year, our economies are increasingly globally interlinked, persons of every culture and religion are daily guests in our homes through radio and television.

We can no longer ignore “The Others,” but we can close our mind and spirits to them, look at them with fear and misunderstanding, come to resent them, and perhaps even hate them, leading to hostility and eventually war and death. Today nuclear or ecological, or other, catastrophic devastation lies just a little way further down the path of monologue. It is only by struggling out of the self-centered monologic mindset into dialogue with “The Others” as they really are, and not as we have projected them in our monologues, that we can avoid such cataclysmic disaster.

It is to that end that this series of volumes on religions, and ideologies, in dialogue is conceived: To help move us out of the Age of Monologue into the Age of Dialogue.

Leonard Swidler

Temple University

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE EVOLUTION OF A DIALOGUE

Leonard Swidler

MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE: MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES

ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY: DIATRIBE OR DIALOGUE

Isma’il Ragi al Faruqi

THE DIALOGICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

Hasan Askari

INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND THE

ISLAMIC “ORIGINAL SIN

Khalid Duran

MAHMUD MUHAMMAD TAHA AND THE CRISIS IN

ISLAMIC LAW REFORM: IMPLICATIONS FOR

INTERRELIGIOUS RELATIONS

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im

MUSLIMS AND NON-MUSLIMS

Khalid Duran

POSSIBILITIES AND CONDITIONS FOR A BETTER

UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN ISLAM AND THE WEST

Mohamed Talbi

ISLAM AND SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT:

REFLECTIONS INSPIRED BY MOHAMED TALBI

Khalid Duran

CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM DIALOGUE: CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES

CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE WITH NON-CHRISTIANS

108

Leonard Swidler

ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS... AND MOSLEMS

111

George H. Tavard

10.

TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF ISLAM

114

Richard H. Drummond

11.

ISLAMIC-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE: APPROACHES TO THE

OBSTACLES

130

P. Jacques Lanfry

12.

THE DOCTRINAL BASIS COMMON TO CHRISTIANS

AND MUSLIMS AND DIFFERENT AREAS OF

CONVERGENCE IN ACTION

145

Maurice Borrmans

13.

CHRISTIANITY AND WORLD RELIGIONS: DIALOGUE

WITH ISLAM

161

Hans Küng

14.

HANS KÜNG’S THEOLOGICAL RUBICON

176

Paul F. Knitter

15.

CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM DIALOGUE: A REVIEW OF

SIX POST-VATICAN II CHURCH-RELATED DOCUMENTS

182

John Renard

MUSLIM DIALOGUE WITH JEWS AND CHRISTIANS

16.

BASES AND BOUNDARIES OF JEWISH, CHRISTIAN,

AND MOSLEM DIALOGUE

202

Zalman Schachter

17.

BASES AND BOUNDARIES FOR INTERFAITH DIALOGUE:

A CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT

212

Monika Konrad Hellwig

18.

NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR A JEWISH-CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM

DIALOGUE

224

Mohammed Arkoun

19.

JESUS IN JEWISH-CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM DIALOGUE

230

Fathi Osman, Zalman Schachter,

Gerard S. SIoyan and Dermot A. Lane

20.

THE QURAN AND THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST

245

Kenneth Cragg

21.

THE LACK OF JEWISH-ARAB DIALOGUE IN ISRAEL

AND THE SPIRIT OF JUDAISM: A TESTIMONY

253

Haim Gordon

MUSLIM DIALOGUE WITH HINDUS

22.

THE BASIS FOR A HINDU-MUSLIM DIALOGUE AND

STEPS IN THAT DIRECTION FROM A MUSLIM PERSPECTIVE

262

Riffat Hassan

23.

EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITY OF A HINDU-MUSLIM DIALOGUE

277

Kana Mitra

MUSLIM DIALOGUE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

24.

ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE QURANIC PERSPECTIVE

292

Riffat Hassan

25.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY: A MUSLIM PERSPECTIVE

305

Mohamed Talbi

26.

A BUDDHIST RESPONSE TO MOHAMED TALBI

317

Masao Abe

27.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN EGYPT: UNDER THE

SHADOW OF THE ISLAMIC DHIMMA SYSTEM

320

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im

28.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE SUDAN

335

Khalid Duran

INTRODUCTION

THE EVOLUTION OF A DIALOGUE

Leonard Swidler^*

Dialogue as the term is used today to characterize encounters between persons and groups with different religions or ideologies is something quite new under the sun. In the past when different religions or ideologies met it was mainly to overcome, or at least to teach, the other, because each was completely convinced that it alone held the secret of the meaning of human life.

In recent times more and more sincerely convinced persons of different religions and ideologies have slowly come to the conviction that they did not hold the secret of the meaning of human life entirely unto themselves, that in fact they had something very important to learn from each other. As a consequence they approached their encounters with other religions and ideologies not primarily in the teaching mode-holding the secret of life alone-but primarily in the learning mode-seeking to find more of the secret of the meaning of life. That is dialogue.

I. The “Journal Of Ecumenical Studies”

This book is about the entrance of one of the world’s major religions Islam, into dialogue. It is a very special approach to that slow, painful, at times quite reluctant move to dialogue; it is a particular “empirical” approach that will trace that hesitant journey to dialogue through the pages of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (JES). Gathered here are almost all the articles dealing with Islam that appeared in JES or books spun off from it over the past generation.

Bringing these essays together in a single book will serve several purposes: One, it will present in “empirical” fashion the development of the entrance of Islam into dialogue; two, as such, it will provide strong encouragement, for the progress made in these two decades will be apparent to the reader; three, and most important, these essays are still extraordinarily pertinent today. They will act as a primer for both Muslim and non-Muslim to enter into the dialogue of Islam with the rest of the world’s religions and ideologies.

The entrance of Islam into the dialogue in the pages of JES occurred in the first issue of 1968. This of course was not the first time any Muslim engaged in dialogue with non-Muslims. However, it does mark the period when Islam began to enter onto the more public stage of dialogue. It is interesting to note that the Journal of Ecumenical Studies began ¹ with the subtitle “Catholic- Protestant-Orthodox,” which disappeared already in the second volume (1965). The very next issue, the first in 1966, Rabbi Arthur Gilbert became an Associate Editor of JES and all during the years of Vatican II (1962-65) and afterwards JES carried many articles dealing with Jewish-Christian dialogue.

In that first 1968 issue I wrote an editorial on Christian dialogue with non-Christians, arguing for the necessity thereof. When I read that brief essay today I am slightly surprised that I still agree with it entirely, and that more than twenty years later it is still “out in front” of the great majority of religious, ideological thinkers today-which is discouraging-but whose theme is being sounded by a rising crescendo of religious and ideological scholars today-which is encouraging.

That issue also contained for the first time articles by a Hindu and a Muslim. The latter was Isma’il Ragi al Faruqi, a Palestinian-born Muslim who was to join the Temple University Religion Department (where I was then-and now am-teaching and editing JES). The following year Isma’il became an Associate Editor of JES. Faruqi was a traditionally orthodox Muslim (he and his wife Lois were tragically murdered in 1986 by an American Black whom he had befriended and converted to Islam while in prison), a highly knowledgeable Islamicist who did an immense amount to break open Islam to dialogue.

It was Isma’il’s very traditional orthodoxy that allowed him to accomplish this so effectively. His often highly skeptical religious confreres trusted him implicitly not to “give away” anything Islamic, and hence were open to being coaxed into joining the dialogue, although most often rather defensively.

It was not easy, however, to find Muslim Islamicist scholars who were willing to enter openly into dialogue with critical-thinking non-Muslim religious scholars. Modern critical-thinking, religiously knowledgeable and committed Muslims open to interreligious dialogue seemed to be in extremely short supply in the world. It seems that they began to appear-or develope-in the last decade or so. This fact is reflected in the appearance of only a single additional JES article by a Muslim until 1977-and it must be remembered that JES had been judged in a worldwide survey of all the institutions devoted to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue as far and away the most valuable publication to them in any language.

A perusal of the many hundreds of book reviews during these years and the even more hundreds of articles summarized in JES dealing with interreligious dialogue corroborates the dearth of Muslims involved in interreligious dialogue. However, in the past dozen years, despite, or perhaps ironically partly because of Khomeini, Muslim scholars have been increasingly participating in interreligious dialogue. This has also begun to happen on the grass-roots level as well.

II. Sources Of The Dialogue:

Dialogue Of The Abrahamic Religions

I would like to look at why this evolution of Muslim dialogue has occurred, starting with the underlying reasons. Since the impetus for dialogue in the contemporary world in general has come, and continues to come, mainly from Christians, and then secondly from Jews, the encounter among these religions is the obvious place to begin to look for reasons for the rise of dialogue. The need for dialogue between Islam and Hinduism and even Buddhism is underlined almost daily in the newspaper reports of mutual hostility and killings. But it is the encounter of the three Abrahamic religions that have been the motor driving Islam toward dialogue.²

As a prolegomenon it is important to list at least some of the major elements these three Semitic or Abrahamic religions have in common.

1) They all come from the same Hebraic roots and claim Abraham as their originating ancestor: the historical, cultural and religious traditions all flow out of one original source, an Urquelle.

2) All three traditions are religions of ethical monotheism, that is, they all claim there is one, loving, just, creator God who is the Source, Sustainer, and Goal of all reality and that S/He expects all human beings, as images of God, to live in love and justice; in other words, belief in the One God has ethical consequences concerning oneself, other persons, and the world. This is a common heritage of the three Abrahamic religions, which is by no means shared by all elements of the other major world religions.

3) The three traditions are all historical religions, that is, they believe that God acts through human history, that God communicates through historical events, through particular human persons, preeminently Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Historical events, like the exodus, crucifixion, and hijrah, and human persons do not at all play the same central role in many other world religions, as, for example, in Hinduism and Taoism.

4) Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all religions of revelation, that is, they are persuaded that God has communicated, has revealed, something of God’s own self and will in special ways through particular persons, but for the edification, for salvation-or said in another way, for the humanization, which is also the divinization-of all humankind. In all three religions this revelation has two special vehicles: prophets and scriptures.

a. Clearly in Judaism the men prophets Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, and the women prophets Miriam and Huldah, etc., are outstanding “mouthpieces” of Yahweh (prophetes in Greek, one who speaks for another), and the greatest of all the prophets in Judaism is Moses. For Christianity Moses and the other prophets are God’s spokespersons -but also numbered among the Christian prophets are Anna (Lk. 2:36-8), and the two daughters of Philip (Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. III.31), and most of all Jesus-though most Christians later came to claim something beyond prophethood for him. For Islam all these Jewish and Christian prophets are also authentic prophets, God’s revealing voice in the world -and to that list they add Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets.

b. For these three faiths God’s special revelation is also communicated in “The Book,” the “Bible.” For Jews the Holy Scriptures are the Hebrew Bible, for Christians it is the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and for Muslims it is those two plus the Qur’an, which is corrective and supplemental to them. For Muslims, Jews and Christians have the special name “People of the Book.”

There are many more things that the three Abrahamic faiths have in common, such as the importance of convenant, of law and faith, of the community (witness in the three traditions the central role of the terms “People,” “Church,” and “Ummah,” respectively). But just looking at the list of commonalities already briefly spelled out will provide us with an initial set of fundamental reasons why it was eventually perceived as imperative for Jews, Christians and Muslims to engage in serious, ongoing dialogue.

First, if Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that there is only one, loving, just God in whose image they are and whose will they claim to try to follow, they need to face the question of why there are three different ways of doing that-obviously that question can be faced only in dialogue.

Second, if Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that God acts through human history, that God communicates through historical events and particular human persons, they need to face the question of whether all religiously significant historical events and persons are limited to their own histories-put colloquially: Do Jews, Christians and Muslims really believe that they have God in their own historical boxes, or that, by their own principles, God transcends all limitations, including even their sacred historical events and persons?

Third, if Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe that God communicates, reveals, Her/Himself to humans not only through things, events, and human persons in general, but also in special ways through particular events and persons, they are going to have to face the question of whether God’s will as delivered through God’s spokespersons, i.e., prophets, and the recording in writing of their teachings and kindred material in what is known as Holy Scriptures, is limited to their own prophets and scriptures. Concretely, Jews will have to reflect on whether Jesus and the writings of his first-Jewish-followers (the so-called New Testament) have something to say about God’s will for humankind to non-Christians (and themselves?). Jews and Christians will have to reflect on whether the prophet Muhammad and his “recitation,” i.e., “Qur’an,” have something to say about God’s will for humankind to non-Muslims (including themselves?!). Muslims of course already affirm the importance of the Jewish and Christian prophets and scriptures.

Obviously these questions, and others of serious importance to the ultimate meaning of life, can be addressed only in dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Once this is recognized, however, it also immediately becomes clear that all the questions just listed which challenge the absoluteness and exclusivity of the three Abrahamic traditions’ claims about having all the truth, about God being found only in the boxes of their history, prophets, scriptures, and revelation, also apply to the non-Abrahamic religions and ideologies, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Marxism.

III. Different Dialogues -Different Goals

Pragmatically, however, one cannot engage in dialogue with all possible partners at the same time. Moreover, all the goals of one dialogue with a certain set of partners can never be fulfilled by another set of dialogue partners. For example, the goal of working toward denominational unity between the Lutheran Church in America an the American Lutheran Church would never have been accomplished if Catholics had been fall partners in that dialogue with Lutherans. Or again, Jews and Christians have certain items on their mutual theological agenda, e.g., the Jewish claim that the Messiah has not yet come, that will not be adequately addressed if Muslims are added as full partners. And so it goes with each addition or new mix of dialogue partners.

There is a special urgency about the need for Christians to dialogue among themselves to work toward the goal of some kind of effective, visible Christian unity: the absurdity and scandal of there being hundreds of separate churches all claiming “one foundation, Jesus Christ the Lord,” is patent. The need for intra-Jewish dialogue I will leave to my Jewish sisters and brothers to inform me about in specifics, but it nevertheless appears apparent in general. However, for Christians dialogue with Jews has an extraordinarily high priority that cannot be displaced, and where it has not been both initiated and continued, it needs to be undertaken with all possible speed and perseverance. If nothing else, the twentieth-century Holocaust of the Jews within the heart of Christendom makes this dialogue indispensable.

Nevertheless, there is something like-though not precisely-a relationship of parent and offspring which compels Jews and Christians to enter into dialogue with Muslims. Furthermore, there are today all the external reasons for Jewish-Christian dialogue with Islam that flow from the reality of the earth now being a global village and the unavoidable symbiotic relationship between the Judeo-Christian industrialized West and the partly oil-rich, relatively non-industrialized Islamic world.

IV. Expectations from the Dialogue

A special word of caution to Jews and Christians entering into dialogue with Muslims is in order. They will be starting such a venture with several disadvantages: 1) the heritage of colonialism, 2) ignorance about Islam, 3) distorted image of Muslims, and 4) culture gap.

The vast majority of Muslims trained in Islamics are non-Westerners, which means they very likely come from a country that was until very recently a colony of the West. Many Muslims are still traumatized by Western colonialism and frequently identify Christianity, and to a lesser extent, Judaism, with the West. Jewish and Christian dialogue partners need to be aware of this and move to diffuse the problem.

Jews and Christians will need to make a special effort to learn about Islam beyond what was required for them intelligently to engage in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, for in the latter they usually knew at least a little about the partner’s religion. With Islam they will probably be starting with a negative quantity compounded from sheer ignorance and massive misinformation.

Most often the current Western image of a Muslim is a gross distortion of Islam. Indeed, it is frequently that of some kind of inhuman monster. But the Khomeini distortion of Islam is no more representative of Islam than the Rev. Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland is of Christianity in general or Richard Nixon was of the pacifist Quaker tradition.

Most difficult of all is the fact that a huge cultural gap exists between the great majority of Muslims and precisely those Jews and Christians who are open to dialogue. In brief. Islam as a whole has not yet really experienced the “Enlightenment” and come to terms with it, as has much of the Judeo-Christian tradition, although obviously not all of it. Only a minority of Muslim Islamics scholars will share the “deabsolutized” understanding of truth needed to be able and want to enter into dialogue with “the other,” that is, to converse with the religiously “other” primarily to learn religiously from her or him-which means that many efforts at dialogue with Muslims will in fact be prolegomena to true interreligious dialogue. Frequently such attempts will be not unlike “dialogue” with many Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christians-or with Catholics before Vatican II.

But the prolegomena must be traversed in order to reach authentic dialogue. In this case surely the words of the Vatican and Pope Paul VI apply to all Christians and Jews, who “must assuredly be concerned for their separated brethren ... making the first approaches toward them .... dialogue is demanded nowadays... by the pluralism of society, and by the maturity man has reached in this day and age.”³ It is toward that end all Christians and Jews must strive, first among themselves, then with each other, and then with their quasi “offspring,” Islam.

V. Muslim Critical Thinkers

Despite the facts of the cultural gap and that only a minority of Muslim Islamicists have a “deabsolutized” view of truth, there are today many more of them than is usually recognized. Often, however, they live outside the Muslim world. Let me recall a personal experience exemplifying why: An Egyptian Muslim Islamicist spent a number of years studying and teaching in America. At that time he made his own the historical-critical mentality and was very open to interreligious dialogue. We spoke quite specifically about a “dialogic” article he wished to write for the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Suddenly, for family reasons, he had to return to Egypt and shortly thereafter took a position teaching Islamics at a university in Saudi Arabia. After two years of correspondence and coaxing he wrote in despair that he could not write the article we had worked out together so long as he was in the Arabian world; the intellectual atmosphere was just too restrictive for him to be able to think the thoughts he would have to in order to write the article.⁴

This point was made poignantly by Fazlur Rahman: “Free thought and thought are synonymous, and one cannot hope that thought will survive without freedom .... Islamic thought, like all thought, equally requires a freedom by which dissent, confrontation of views, and debate between ideas is assured.”⁵

Professor Rahman, who until his death in 1988 was for many years at the University of Chicago, knew well whereof he spoke. He was the Minister of Education of the newly created Pakistan from 1947 to 1957, and from 1962 to 1968 he was Director of a newly formed Islamic Research Institute (established by President Ayub Khan).

But even as the institute was a little less than halfway through to the initial stage of its goal, it became the victim of a massive attack of the combined forces of the religious right and the opposition politicians. I resigned in September 1968 and the Ayub Khan government fell six months later, and, although this group of progressive scholars has done its best to maintain itself, it has since been overwhelmed by the forces of reaction.⁶

Nevertheless, critical thinking among Muslim Islamicists has broken through. The Yugoslavian Muslim Smail Balic wrote that,

In regard to research into the real occasions for the individual revelations of the Qur’an and the consequent legal philosophy, not enough is done seriously to distinguish the time-bound elements from the enduring. The knowledge that the Qur’an is in part also a collection of time-related documents from the early history of Islam has not yet been able to move beyond pure theory.⁷

The Indian Muslim Asaf A. A. Fyzee stated that,

For me it is clear that we cannot “go back” to the Qur’an. Rather, we must go forward with it. I want to understand the Qur’an as the Arabs of the time of the Prophet did only in order to interpret it anew, in order to apply it to my living conditions and to believe in it insofar as it speaks to me as a human person of the twentieth century.⁸

The Professor of Arabic Language and Islamic Culture at the University of Paris and Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Muhammad M. Arkoun, severely criticized at a Christian-Muslim dialogue in Bonn in 1981 the kind of dialogue wherein the conservative and fundamentalist elements of ‘each side simply reenforced each other; rather, he wanted modern critical scholarly thought brought to bear on both religions and their dialogue: “For this reason I demand in what concerns me a critically new reading of the Scripture (Bible, Gospels, Qur’an) and a philosophical critique of exegetical and theological reason.”⁹ Professor Arkoun recently argued this point even more forcefully and with great stress on the need to study religions together:

In this context where struggling ideologies are at work, it seems ‘totally romantic, irrelevant, and useless to engage in debates between religions about traditional faiths, values, or dogmas. Positive and efficient initiatives should be taken in the field of education: primary and secondary schools, universities, the mass media, non-governmental organizations and other private and public institutions, so as to promote a new teaching of history, comparative cultures, comparative religions, comparative philosophies and theologies, comparative literature and law.¹⁰

After spelling out in some detail how this comparative study should be carried out with the aid of modern critical scholarly tools, Arkoun concluded:

This is, in very short allusive terms, my proposal as a Muslim scholar-ot to contribute, I repeat to an encounter that would mean that we think and work within the framework of I and we vs. you and them but to the creation of a new space of intelligibility and freedom. We need to be emancipated from inherited traditions not yet studied and interpreted with controlled methods and cognitive principles.

Muslims are currently accused of being closed-minded, integrists, fundamentalists, prisoners of dogmatic beliefs. Here is a liberal, modern, humanist, Muslim proposal. I await the response of Jews, Christians, and secularists to my invitation to engage our thoughts, our endeavors, and our history in the cause of peace, progress, emancipation, justice through knowledge, and shared spiritual values.¹¹

One of the most thoroughgoing exponents of the historical-critical method’s being indispensable to ascertaining the correct meaning of the foundation of Islam, the Qur’an, was Fazlur Rahman. He clearly argued that the text can be understood only in context:

The Qur’an is the divine response, through the Prophet’s mind, to the moral-social situation of the Prophet’s Arabia .... It is literally God’s response through Muhammad’s mind (this latter factor has been radically underplayed by the Islamic orthodoxy) to a historic situation (a factor likewise drastically restricted by the Islamic orthodoxy).¹²

Like Asaf Fyzee, Rahman too wished to get to the original meaning of he Qur’an so it can be applied, mutatis mutandis, now:

There has to be a two-fold movement: First one must move from the concrete case treatments of the Qur’an-taking the necessary and relevant social conditions of that time into account-to the general principles upon which the entire teaching converges. Second, from this general level there must be a movement back to specific legislation, taking into account the necessary and relevant social conditions now obtaining.¹³

This is very much like the “two-pole’ theology of many contemporary Christian theologians (e.g., Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx). From this there follows another logical step-again like that of many progressive Christian theologians, and similarly criticized from the respective bastions of orthodoxy-namely, that “the tradition will therefore be more an object of judgment of the new understanding [of the Scripture] than an aid to it.”¹⁴

Moreover, Rahman rejected the notion that, “any significant interpretation of the Qur’an can be absolutely monolithic... the Prophet’s companions themselves sometimes understood certain Qur’anic verses differently, and this was within his knowledge.”¹⁵ Further, “It is obviously not necessary that a certain interpretation once accepted must continue to be accepted; there is always both room and necessity for new interpretation, for this is, in truth, an ongoing process.”¹⁶

It is precisely this last point that was raised to the level of a critical hermeneutical methodological principle in dealing with the Qur’an by Ustaz Mahmud Muhammad Taha -from the Sudan. Taha was an engineer and a sufi mystic who worked tirelessly for the reform of Islam both inwardly and outwardly. He was tragically executed at age 75 in January of 1985 in a final outburst of violence by General Nimieri before his overthrow a number of weeks later. However, Taha’s thought continues in his followers, such as the jurist Abdullahi Ahmed An Na’im.

Taha argued that the shift from the earlier revelation of principles in Mecca to the later one in Medina is essentially reversible. The Mecca principles are fundamentally open, liberal, liberating principles, whereas the Medina principles are specific and restrictive. The shift was made because in the concrete circumstances-both the external ones and the then internal capabilities of the Muslims-the Mecca principles could not yet be implemented in all their openness. They were the ideal, on the way to which Medina was but a way station; it is now time for the Muslims to leave the Medina way station and move forward toward fulfilling the liberating Mecca ideal. This in brief is the heart of the teaching of Taha, filled out with Qur’anic citations and argumentation of course.¹⁷

Mohammed Talbi of the University of Tunisia at Tunis has for years been active both nationally and internationally in dialogue with Christians, receiving the Lukas Prize for his contributions to interreligious dialogue from the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen in May, 1985 (the funding for the Lukas Prize comes from the son of Rabbi Lukas, who had been a student at Tübingen). Representative of Talbi’s self-critical, yet Islamically-committed, thought are his reflections on “Religious Liberty: A Muslim Perspective”:

In short, from the Muslim perspective that is mine, our duty is simply to bear witness in the most courteous way that is most respectful of the inner liberty of our neighbors and their sacredness. We must also be ready at the same time to listen to them in truthfulness. We have to remember, as Muslims, that a hadith of our Prophet states: “The believer is unceasingly in search of wisdom; wherever he finds it he grasps it.” Another saying adds: “Look for knowledge everywhere, even as far as in China.” And finally, it is up to God to judge, for we, as limited human beings, know only in part. Let me quote: “To each among you We prescribed a Law and an Open Way. And if God had enforced His Will, He would have made of you all one people. But His plan is to test you in what He hath given you. So strive as in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is to God. Then will He inform you of that wherein you differed” (Qur’an, V, 51)....

At the heart of this problem we meet the ticklish subject of apostasy ... the Qur’an argues, warns and advises, but never resorts to the argument of the sword. That is because that argument is meaningless in the matter of faith. In our pluralistic world our modern theologians must take that into account.

We can never stress too much that religious liberty is not an act of charity or a tolerant concession towards misled persons. It is a fundamental right of everyone. To claim it for myself implies ipso facto that I am disposed to claim it for my neighbor too.¹⁸

Hasan Askari, formerly Chairperson of the Sociology Department of Muslim University of Aligarh, India, and recently a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Islam and of Christian-Muslim Relations, Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, U.K., has long espoused authentic interreligious dialogue, placing at the base of which a deabsolutized understanding of truth:

One who does not allow for alternatives within one’s own religious tradition may not allow for more than one religious approach.... [But we must] hesitate to absolutise any of the approaches within one or other plurality as the only true approach.... All religions, and all approaches within each one of them, are relative to the Absolute Truth [God].... The worst of all defiance is to be locked up within one’s own tradition and refuse to embrace each and every one, whatever his or her race and creed.¹⁹

Likewise deeply involved as critical-thinking committed Muslims in interreligious dialogue not only with Christians but also with Jews-and others-are the Moroccan Khalid Duran (long at the Deutsches Orient Institut at Hamburg and more recently at Temple University, the American University and the University of California, Irvine),²⁰ and the Pakistani/American Riffat Hassan (now at the University of Louisville in Kentucky).²¹ Duran has been active for years in Jewish-Christian-Muslim trialogue, first in England, then in Germany, and now in the United States, whereas Hassan has been active in the trialogue in America since 1979, and has recently established an ongoing Christian-Muslim dialogue in her native Pakistan.

With such dialogue partners, and others not here mentioned, authentic dialogue, and not just prologomena, thereto, between Islam and other religions is possible-and actual.

However, important as this scholarly level dialogue is-and it is extremely important, for these scholars are the shapers of the shapers of opinion-the dialogue must also be translated onto the middle and grass-root levels. I hope that this primer of Muslims In Dialogue will help to promote that dialogue on all levels, the scholarly, middle and grass roots.

I urge the reader to begin to make use of the work of these pioneer scholars in dialogue, both through their writings, and even in person. I urge you to begin, or continue, the work of dialogue with sensitivity for your “other” sister and brother and persevere in it, for it will not only contribute to a cessation of hostilities and a resolution of tensions, but also to a deepening and enriching of your own inner and communal life.

MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE:

MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES

ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY: DIATRIBE OR DIALOGUE^*

Isma’il Ragi A. Al Faruqi^**

This is not the place to review the history of Christian-Muslim relations. This history may now be read in the erudite works of Norman Daniel.¹ The reading is sad and agonizing. The conclusion which may be safely drawn from this history is that Christianity’s involvement with the Muslim World was so full of misunderstanding, prejudice, and hostility that it has warped the Western Christian’s will and consciousness. “Would to God Christianity had never met Islam!” will reverberate in the mind of any student patient enough to peruse that history.² On the other side, Muslim-Christian relations have been determined by the Qur’an.³ Doctrinally, therefore, these relations have seen no change. Throughout their history, and despite the political hostilities, the Muslims revered Jesus as a great prophet and his faith as divine religion. As for the Christians, the Muslims argued with them in the manner of the Qur’an. But when it came to political action, they gave them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they followed the Christianity of Jesus or of the Church. Muhammad and ‘Umar’s wager for a Christian victory over the Zoroastrians, the Meccan Muslim’s choice of, welcome and protection by Christian Abyssinia and Muhammad’s personal waiting upon the Christian Abyssinian delegates to Madinah, the Prophet’s covenant with the Christians of Najran, ‘Umar’s convenant with the Archbishop of Jerusalem and his refusal to hold prayer on the premises of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lest later Muslims might claim the place, the total cooperation of the Umawis and ‘Abbasis with their Christian subjects, and of the Umawis of Cordova with Christians who were not their subjects-all these are landmarks in a record of cooperation and mutual esteem hardly paralleled in any other history. Some persecution, some conversion under influences of all sorts, some aggression, some doctrinal attacks going beyond the limits defined by the Qur’an, there were, without a doubt. The Muslims in all places and times were not all angels! But such were scattered cases whose value falls to the ground when compared with the overwhelming spread of history which has remained true to this Qur’anic position.

I. The Present Problem

Perhaps nothing is more anachronistic-indeed absurd-than the spectacle of the Western Christian missionary preaching to Muslims the Western figurization of the religion of Jesus. The absurdity is twofold: First, the West, whence the missionary comes and which sustains him in his effort, has for decades stopped finding meaning in that figurization which is the content of mission. Indeed, in the missionary himself, that figurization determines but one little portion of his consciousness, the remainder falling under the same corroding secularism, materialism and skeptical empiricism so common in Western thought and culture. Second, the missionary preaches this figurization to Muslims who, in North Africa and the Near East, were thrice Christians. They were Christians in the sense of preparing, through the spiritualization and interiorization of the Semitic religion, for the advent of Jesus. It was their consciousness and spirit which served God as human substrate and historical circumstance for that advent. Naturally, they were the first to “acknowledge” Jesus and to believe in him as crystallization of a reality which is themselves. They were Christians in the second sense of the Western figurization of Christianity when, having fallen under the dominion of Byzantium, they flirted with that figurization and in fact adopted all its doctrinal elements regardless of whether or not they officially joined the churches of Western Christianity. After living with this figurization a while, they welcomed and embraced Islam. But they remained, even as Muslims, Christians in the sense of holding the realization of the ethic of Jesus as the conditio sine qua non of Islamicity and of realizing a fair part of the Jesus-ethic in their personal lives. The comedy in evidence today is that the missionary is utterly unaware of this long experience of the Muslim with Jesus Christ.

This Western missionary, whether monastes or other, has associated himself with, and often played the role of colonial governor, trader, settler, military, physician and educator. In the last two decades, after the Muslim countries achieved independence, he found for himself the role of development expert. Expertise in poultry breeding, neurological surgery or industrial management, and the crying need of the Muslim as yet underdeveloped countries were callously taken as God-sent occasions to evangelize, thus stirring within the Muslim a sense of being exploited and producing still more bitterness. Besides, such an expert-missionary is often sponsored by, if not the direct employee of, the aiding agency of the Western government; and a fair harmonization of his tactics and purposes with those of that government were safely presupposed. The Western World knows of no Christian who, moved by the Sermon on the Mount, came to live among Muslims as a native, who made their burden his burden, their hopes and yearnings his hopes and yearnings. Albert Schweitzer, the idol of the modern West in Christian self-giving to the natives of Africa, was as unchristian as to condemn all the Africans’ search for liberty;⁴ indeed, publicly to request President Eisenhower to prevent a United Nations debate on Algeria. The Africans ought to be helped and their suffering relieved, this saint of the twentieth century commanded his fellow Christian whites-but as our colonial subjects! Moreover, where it dissociated itself from imperialism and was purely religious, Western Christian mission to the Muslim World was never a mission of Jesus, but a mission of the Western figurization of Christianity arrogantly asserted in words, hardly ever exemplified in deeds. Modern Christendom has produced a Mrs. Vester who really gave and, fortunately, is still giving of her life to the orphans of Jerusalem.⁵ There probably were and still are other isolated individuals of this caliber. Nonetheless, the persistent effort needed to establish an ethically respectable relation with Muslim society has been neglected. Since it has brought hardly any significant conversions and aggravated the alienation of the two world communities, and since the Muslims, as well as Muslim World Christians, regard it as pouring ideological salt into political wounds inflicted by the Crusades and a century of colonization, the mission chapter of Christian history, as we have so far known it, had better be closed, the hunt called off, the missionaries withdrawn and the mission-arm of the Catholic Church and of the World Council of Churches liquidated.

To say all this is not to advocate isolation. In fact, isolation is impossible. The world is simply too small, and our lives are utterly interdependent. Not only our survival, but even our well-being and happiness depend on our cooperation. Mere diplomatic courtesy or casual coalescence of political interests will not suffice. No genuine and effective cooperation can proceed without mutual esteem and respect, without agreement on purposes, final objectives and standards. If it is to last through the generations and withstand the excruciating travails that it must and will face in the construction of a viable world-ecumene, cooperation must be firmly based on a communi