Posted on 11/05/2003 6:11:11 AM PST by SJackson
Both the European Union and the Vatican have used this period to call on Muslims, Jews, and Christians to heal their ruptures.
From Granada, Spain, and Aubervilliers, France, to Cairo and Jakarta, more than a billion Muslims are this month marking the "handing down" of the Koran.
Through daytime fasting, Ramadan is a time to subjugate the body to the spirit. Both the European Union and the Vatican have used this period to call on Muslims, Jews, and Christians to heal their ruptures.
That's good advice – assuming the source of the trouble is correctly identified. The Western tendency is to assume, consciously or not, that because we have been attacked, we must have done something wrong.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, offers this explanation: "Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low." Such pandering to Muslim militancy begs the question of how 9/11 happened in the first place.
The truth is that the West has not wronged Islam – militant Islam has wronged the West. We are not responsible for the poverty, backwardness, and oppression in the Muslim world. If the West is to blame, it is not for being too interventionist, but for treating the Muslim world as if it is a legitimate exception to the universal yearning for freedom and human rights.
There is nothing wrong, per se, in US President George W. Bush holding an event at the beginning of Ramadan with Muslim leaders (so long as they do not represent or apologize for Islam's militant strain). It is understandable that the United States is at pains to demonstrate that it is not at war with Islam, but with those who have adopted a particularly virulent strain of what remains one of the world's great religions.
But such outreach, if it is to make any sense and not contradict the war against terrorism, must also be honest and make demands of the other side. Islamic leaders, after all, should answer for outrages committed in the name of Islam that they are unwilling to condemn in no uncertain terms. It is such unapologetic leaders, not the US, that should be on the defensive for their behavior.
Outreach efforts, for which the US intends to spend millions, need to keep in mind that being too apologetic and defensive can actually backfire, by reducing pressure for internal soul-searching in the Muslim world. That said, pursuing an accommodation between civilizations on the religious level is not necessarily a naive policy, but can be quintessentially realpolitik. In an October 21 Jerusalem Post op-ed, Rabbi Michael Melchior wrote that the West should seek out leaders who favor achieving peaceful coexistence with non-Muslim civilizations.
He suggests building an inter-denominational coalition of religious moderates that can wage intra-civilizational war – a fight for the soul of Islam (and, from the dovish Melchior's viewpoint, for Judaism's soul, too).
The argument that religion is at the core of the civilizational divide, and that, as Melchior says, "political leaders alone cannot stop the bloodshed," strikes us as wise.
It may take piety to fight fanaticism. In Morocco, reformist King Muhammad VI was able to coopt the theological Right and employ religious tenets – cited from the Koran and hadith – to push revolutionary reforms granting political equality to women. Amid his message of Jew-hatred, Mahathir Mohamad also castigated "interpreters of Islam" who emphasized theology over science, thereby contributing to Muslim backwardness.
Religions are inherently conservative; change must always be wrapped in an explanation of how reforms are actually a return to God's true chosen path. The point is that, when the Muslim world becomes convinced it must reform, it will do so by tapping religious concepts and principles to justify the change.
Outreach efforts make sense only with the realization that persuasion can work only if it is pressing on an open door. As much as advocates of a softer approach are loathe to admit, the most powerful door-opener is the realization that the West believes in itself and will not be defeated.
Ecumenicism plus tactful outside support can bolster religious reformers. These reformist forces from within – political and theological – are critical, because only they can ultimately rescue Islam from the fanatics. But we abandon these same reformers if we do not simultaneously do our utmost to defeat the radicals who are their enemies and ours.
Arab Christians are becoming an increasingly scarce commodity and in most of the Arab world more concerned about their existance than evangelizing their Islamic neighbors.
If the poster decides to take a Christian group to the Arab world, I wish him luck. Remind him he has to leave the Bibles at home.
And the converse is what??
Oops: an accident......
We DID do something wrong...
We did something right, the attackers just don't like us.........
We didn't do nuthin'... this was just practice......
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