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Another scholar on the same topic, as reported by David Virtue

YALE MISSIONS SCHOLAR SAYS RELIGION IS BASIS FOR ISLAMIC ATTACKS ON WEST

"The foundation of Islam is not the word became flesh but the word became book."

By David W. Virtue

CHARLESTON, SC--A Yale Divinity School Missions and Islamic scholar says there has been a resounding silence from the left and the right about the religious basis of the attacks on America by Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda.

Dr. Lamin Sanneh told more than 200 Anglican theologians, priests and concerned laity at a conference here, that the response to the terrorist attacks is a religious hostility towards the West and that snapping their networks and driving them into the blade of military action and closing financial accounts is a "sadly mistaken" view of how the West is dealing with these fundamentalists.

"We must get into the mind of the terrorists. The fundamentalists are making a religious case for their hostility towards the West. Blaming the attacks on the US because of objectionable foreign policy or belated moral decline in the US, domestic moral promiscuity, or the failure to address poverty and giving attention to gay and feminist agendas, is to miss the point."

Blaming American support on corrupt Muslim regimes, is not the whole truth, said Sanneh. "All sides agree America is long overdue for judgment because of its sins and shortcomings, something the terrorists have stated. Defending the sexual status quo and taking refuge in the Enlightenment in the hope that a similar fate will overtake Islam and throw out the Mullahs is another form of dodging the issue."

"Islam has a particular religious creed. We must ask what are the fundamental questions. Perhaps we should not be surprised that secular culture lost. The religious habit of dancing around the religious issue is costly, and avoiding the religious issues is too great."

"It's not that the West has not got a religious heritage anymore but that this religious heritage such as it is has been privatized and marginalized and comodified, rendering the West tone deaf. Islam has not suffered the same fate.

"Christianity's private subjective faith commands no respect. Islam is out front in public life. The problem of Islam in the West is not Christian hostility but Muslim overconfidence. Islam has the ability to overcome obstacles, to overcome defenses. It is only a thin secular wall that prevents the Islamic tide from sweeping over the west, it is the only the thing that prevents a pan Islamic global triumph.

"The religious West has suppressed its own religious heritage. Christianity has been modernized and subject to personal opinion. The challenge of Islam is that they see Christianity being trivialized and taken advantage of and moved to fill the vacuum."

Sanneh, an historian by training is the author of several books on Islam. He said the two fundamental questions Americans asked themselves following the attacks are why America and why do they hate us so much. Who are they, and where are they?

"I am not sure we have gotten any closer to answering these fundamental questions. We are scrambling to understand competing ideologies and adjacent cultures. Europeans have a hard time understanding Islam. Islam is a modified reflex of Judaism and Christianity. Islam might be called a religion that has almost no questions and no answers. Islam is a religion of absolute surrender to God almighty. It is a religion of revelation of scripture in the Koran. That revelation is externalized and fossilized. Islam is set of immutable divine laws and immutable acts"

"The foundation of Islam is not the word became flesh but word became book. Islam feeds on a mechanical idea of revelation. There is superficial treatment of sin and salvation. It is an eventless relation between God and man. Nothing happens in that relationship."

Sanneh said the treatment of faith and words is not very profound in Islam. "Islam encourages an intellectual conception of God and faith is a mental assent to tenets rather than inner conviction. There is no relationship between the inward and outward. In this sense it is a religious, social and political community but not in a deeply profound personal sense. Islam does not examine the motives and heart."

Citing the missionary scholar Kramer, Sanneh said that even in moderate Islamic states like Indonesia, Islam maintains a grip on its adherents.
"A Muslim is never an agnostic. Even disillusioned Muslims will kill someone who is a defiler. It maintains absolute religious superiority. Islam has a deep theocentric emphasis. God is white-hot majesty, omnipotent and unique. God personally evaporates in the burning heat of his aspects. Islam is an intense devotion to a god you cannot know because he is unknowable and because god is transcendent majesty."

"You please this god by your devotions, but you can never know if you truly please this god. It is not like Christian devotions. It is a routine cycle, the more you do the more you have to do. There is no fellowship between god and human beings in Islam. God is a theocracy, thoroughly secularized. There is no vision of god, but only a desire to achieve fuller community. Islam is a religious imperialism."

Sanneh said it was political controversy that split Islam not theological. "Islam is a religion of the natural man. Pascal said in a statement that Mohamed shows the way of human success, while Jesus Christ shows the way of human defeat. Mohammed was driven by the need for religious certitude. Revelation is fixed. God came down in the Koran. Law is mutable. The Koran is untranslatable. It is the word of god. It was created in heaven. If eternal how could it be created? It is a medieval religion. Only the pages are created. According to Islam God demands our obedience and worship but we cannot have fellowship with him. It leaves man in a desolate position. Faith is submission to its creeds and tenets. Muslim authorities create a social community and thereby minimize religious truth claims. Its fierce monotheism and uncompromising conviction that god is great invokes immunity. Muslim worship is not an enactment of divine human encounter but submission. In observance it is not a sacramental enactment of salvation. Its austere ascetic view of God inspires intense devotion and loyalty. God worked on the outside and the devil worked on the inside, therefore subjective feelings are the work of the devil."

Sanneh likened it to the Apostle Paul on Mars Hill where the Athenians poured out their hearts to the unknown god, gods they could never name. Their gods were unknown. "Islamic modernists have responded to the West by personal involvement of religion. Their structures are not divinized. It is a defensive attitude."

Sanneh said we must respond to the terrorist attacks with goodness not with evil. "The modern West has to come to terms with its Christian heritage. We are for good or ill formed in the western Christian tradition. The time to speak a religious voice now is the language of the church. We need to assess the Anglican experience. The Anglican experience helps us to tease out the issues."

"The problems we face with Muslim and the Muslim world are the issues of pluralism. Islam flourishes in the modern world of difference and diversity. Islam cannot separate religion and politics. Madison put it right: Christianity was a divine religion but the proof of the religion was that Christianity came into existence not by virtue of the state, but in spite of every attempt by the state to oppress it."

"The issue is not oil but the moral nature of the enterprise itself. God delights in our freedom and not in our enslavement. Freedom is at the heart of the matter."

"The basis of dialogue with Islam are the two global forces of Islamicization and Americanization. The shrinking ground because of the spread of these two forces is cornering fundamentalists."

Questioned about the Middle East situation, Sanneh said that that the failure of peace in the Middle East had to do with the extremist policies of Ariel Sharon. "He is not helpful and under his leadership the Middle East has been prone to more and more violence. The Palestinians need a state not a guerrilla war."

"The American support for Israel is not the reason for Islam attacks, Most Arab governments don't want a radical Arab state on the back door. Most Arab governments are nervous about the establishment of an Arab state. In East Timor and Kashmir, Israel is not an issue."

"Unrest in Algeria and the Sudan and for two million Christians and non-Muslim animists Israel is not an issue. For Americans it looms large, but in a global framework it is very marginal. Nor is it a question of poverty or wealth but a moral crisis that targets women and children. America is not the enemy of Islam but Americans have trivialized their Christian Faith, that is the issue. Islam is not containable. The Declaration of Independence talked about "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It should have been the pursuit of justice. Secular America thinks religion is the enemy and they are wrong."

Dr. Sanneh spoke to more than 200 Anglican scholars, clergy and concerned laity at SEAD, the Scholarly Engagement for Christian Doctrine conference in Charleston, SC this past week.