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| Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb in Abu Dhabi in February 2019. Source: Guardian/Luca Zennaro/EPA |
The UAE promoted itself as a "regional leader in religious diversity and tolerance" where Christians were free to worship at churches and wear religious clothing.
However, Open Doors, which monitors discrimination against and persecution of Christians around the world, said the UAE government does not allow Christians "to evangelise or pray in public. Converts from Islam endure the most persecution as they face pressure from family members and the local community to recant their Christian faith."
A day before three Catholics were slaughtered in Nice's Notre-Dame Basilica, Sheikh el Tayeb demanded an international law banning criticizing or insulting Islam.
Church Militant's Dr Jules Gomes responded in a tweet: If there were no death penalty in Islam for blasphemy and Islam were as tolerant as Pope Francis insists, there would be no need for a global law forbidding criticism of Islam.
Sheikh el-Tayeb claimed that millions of Muslims had paid the price for the actions of “a handful of criminals” following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Persecution.org recently reported: Another Pakistani Christian Girl Becomes Victim of Forced Conversion and Forced Marriage.
It is Christians who are paying the price of intolerance while their leaders continue to take part in 'brotherly love' exercises with Muslims whose religious aim is to convert all to Islam while complaining of Islamophobia to conceal the truth.
Christian leaders would do well to heed the warning of bishop Michael Nazir-Ali who explained back in 2011 how Christianity has become almost extinct in the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, and Islam, the 'religion of peace', has became dominant in the Arab world.
I fear you are confusing naivety for duplicity Ancient Briton.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of duplicity there's no new surprises here.
Deletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54889033
"The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has, at times, shown he cares more about the impact of abuse on the Church's reputation than victims, a report says.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse criticised the leadership of Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, and the Vatican.
It also said bishops had swept abuse under the carpet for decades."
These colloquys with Muslims always call to mind for me the 14th century adage that 'he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon'. Not, I hasten to say, because I think Islam's diabolical. I'd argue that it's merely, at least in its contemporary manifestations, intrinsically irrational and fundamentalist.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that such colloquys shouldn't happen; on the contrary, I think they absolutely should, whenever they're possible. But Christians participating in them should be under no illusion that the fundamental agenda of the Muslims participating is likely to be wholly different from their own.
There have been occasions in the distant past when Christians have adopted coercive tactics in order to enforce conversion: the notorious one in our part of the world was the forced conversion of the Saxon tribes in Germany when Charlemagne conquered them and incorporated them into his Frankish empire; though that was complicated by the fact that the Saxons themselves had no concept of religious allegiance being a matter of individual conscience. If your king or chieftain converted, you were expected to follow suit. And if it didn't work out, you killed, maimed or imprisoned the chieftain and replaced him with somebody different. And if the 'somebody different' chose to revert to the old religious ways - and wasn't forcibly prevented by his own overlord - then everyone reverted to the old ways. Individual conviction didn't count for anything.
If there's any remnant of that sort of thinking within the Church today, I'm entirely unaware of it. The only vestige, perhaps - and even that's very much on the decline - is the residual sense of family solidarity which maintains that 'we' - i.e. our family - has a certain religious allegiance, whether intense or merely vague and nominal, and that it's therefore some sort of breach of family solidarity for a family member to choose, however conscientiously, another religion. My own family, though practically largely secular, had something of that outlook, but that was in the middle of the last century. My sense is that there's much less of it around in western Europe now.
But for Muslims - partly from religious conviction, but considerably also as a consequence of the concept of social solidarity of family and clan which is general in Muslim majority cultures - the notion that individuals who depart from Islam, whether to another religion or to definite sceptism, is anathema.
And most of them will bring that absolute conviction to any colloquy. Along with an uncompromising demand that the rest of the world, whatever its own beliefs and customs, should submit to Islam's basic demands - one of which, of course, is that the Prophet must not be portrayed in any art whatsover, let alone satirical art!
If non-Muslims in any colloquy - whether out of considerations of courtesy or post-imperial angst - bridle their tongues and appear to accept that agenda, I suggest that the colloquy is basically dishonest and probably not worth having.
When has Islam ever been anything other than "intrinsically irrational and fundamentalist"?
ReplyDeleteThere appears to have been a period in our western European high middle ages when there was a sort of enlightenment within Islam - an openness to intellectual exploration and an acknowledgement of the inheritance which the Muslim conquerors - originally primitive desert-dwellers from Hejaz and Nejd - owed to the more thoughtful and sophisticated cultures of Persia and Byzantium whose empires they had conquered Averroes in the 12th century is a typical instance.
ReplyDeleteBut that inheritance was ultimately suppressed in Islam by a resurgence of 'desert ideas' - Averroes lived in Spain, at the extreme west of the mediaeval Islamic world and the part most influenced by different and more subtle ideas and ideals, and the primitive and anti-rational tendencies of desert Arabian Islam ultimately prevailed. They still do.
Diana Darke's recent book 'Stealing from the Saracens' is a good example of how much Medieval Christianity owes Islam - notably Gothic architecture. As well as our system of numbering, there is widespread recognition that Thomas Aquinas's indebtedness to Aristotle was only possible because of the influence of the Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd (remember that next time you sing Tantum ergo at Benediction!). Some might argue that Islam was an archetype for Puritanism. Certainly, it has given the Christian world alchemy, astronomy, algebra and the origins of modern physics - as well as artichokes, apricots, aubergines and spinach. That's just for starters.
ReplyDeleteThis is by way of context to say that the mindless diatribes against Islam (as if all Islam equates to Islamic fundamentalism) that appear on this blog from time to time are as much a reflection of the authentic thing as saying Bible-Belt Texans and the people who have just set up the Resource Church in Cathays are the same kind of Christians as St Anselm, Martin Luther, St Teresa of Avilla, St David, John Henry Newman or Pope John Paul II.
A little more intelligent, historically-informed and theologically-nuanced content would afford you greater credibility - and respect. The Medieval world was more complex, and the cross-fertilization between Christian, Jewish and Islamic scholarship more mutually influential than is often acknowledged. That alone should place a huge question mark over the visceral urge to denounce the 'Other.'
We are not living in the Medieval world professor but it must seem so for victims of the Sword.
DeleteDenouncing the "Other" as you put it isn't the issue as far as I am aware.
DeleteI don't think I have ever seen either this blog or it many contributors "denounce" Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, agnostics, atheists, Catholics, Wiccans, Druids, Methodists, Jesuits or even Puritans.
However, any who engage in beheadings, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, polygamy, terrorism, stoning hypocrisy and the general oppression of women, homosexuals and other minorities are all fair game regardless of which cult or religion they claim to belong.
A link between Islam and protestant puritanism is a tempting speculation, but it's rather hard to demonstrate it convincingly. It's hardly easier, either, to show any direct relationship between Islam and the iconoclast movement in Constantinople but it's always struck me as a curious coincidence that the latter occurred so soon after the beginnings of Islam and its expansion northward beyond its desert heartland.
DeleteThere are of course thoughtful, courteous and respectful Muslims - I think, for instance, of Mona Siddiqui, the Karachi-born academic at Edinburgh who regularly broadcasts on Radio 4. I imagine that there always have been. But they don't seem to be typical in our era, nor do they appear to represent the current climate of popular religious opinion in Muslim majority countries.
What about the large group of young, second-generation Muslim men who stood guard outside the Cathedral in Ludove (France) to reassure the local Catholic population going to Mass on All Saints' day (for the last time before lockdown began) that they are committed to their safety and well-being?
Delete"A little more intelligent, historically-informed and theologically-nuanced content would afford you greater credibility - and respect."
DeleteWait a minute. Islam refers to non-Islamic countries as the dar al-harb (abode of war) for a reason.
As to Darke, her argument is nothing new. In an important article 2005 article in 'Architectural History' ('Islam and the West: The Early Use of the Pointed Arch Revisited'), Peter Draper cited none other than Christopher Wren:
"This we now call the Gothic manner of architecture (so the Italians called what was not after the Roman style) though the Goths were rather destroyers than builders; I think it should with more reason be called the Saracen style, for these people wanted neither arts nor learning: and after we in the west lost both, we borrowed again from them, out of their Arabic books, what they with great diligence had translated from the Greeks."
Pointed arches were to be found in the Fertile Crescent prior to the advent of Islam: for example, at the vast Arch of Ctesiphon (built at the order king Chosroes I, 539-71), at the church of Qasr Ibn Wardan in Syria (564) or at the Armenian basilica at Tsitsernakevank. Indeed, it might be argued that the style is far older: note, for instance the temple of Baal at Dura-Europos (first century) or even the stone vaulted chamber at Ugarit near Antioch (thirteenth century BCE). Not was it unique to that region: pointed arches can also be found in the architecture of late Roman and Visigothic Spain.
The first major instance of the pointed arch in Islamic architecture can be found at the Dome of the Rock (Abd al-Malik, completed in 691), but this was arguably designed as a riposte to the Byzantine Holy Sepulchre nearby, and adopted many of the tropes of the latter. Indeed, the Dome was probably built using craftsmen who were Christian, or who had recently converted from that faith. Moreover, the pointed arch became commonplace only gradually: in many instances the horseshoe arch prevailed (for example at the Great Mosque at Cordoba, from 785).
The question is how the pointed arch became prevalent in Europe after the middle of the twelfth century. John Harvey (a Nazi sympathiser, it should be noted), conjectured in a 1968 article in the 'Antiquaries Journal' that the crusaders were impressed by the style when they saw it in Saljuq Cappadocia. Certainly, the crusaders would have encountered the style, as would the Normans in Sicily. The cathedral at Le Puy, for instance, has a number of stereotypical Islamic motifs.
However, there may be a more mundane explanation for the appeal of the pointed arch, as Roger Stalley has noted in of the massive third church at Cluny 'Early Medieval Architecture' (1999):
"[it had] one of the first uses of the pointed arch in western architecture, a form commonly thought to have been borrowed from the Islamic world ... [which] must be linked to the scale of the building and to the realization that the pointed arch offered structural advantages. Pointed forms were used only in load-bearing positions, not for windows or doors, indicating that the change was made for structural rather than aesthetic reasons." (139)
The argument that Aquinas and other medieval thinkers owe 'everything' to Islamic scholars is also tendentious. Everyone has been borrowing from everyone else: if Europeans borrowed from Arabic mathematicians, those Arabs had in turn borrowed from Syriac-speaking (usually Christian) officials who had inevitably thronged the courts of the Umayyads and Abbasids in search of employment after the initial conquests, who in turn had their mathematical erudition from the ancient Greeks. And so it goes on. Titles like the one chosen by Darke seek to subvert Europeans' sense of their own superiority (and to legitimate recent immigration into the bargain), but in attempting to do so they help to stimulate the very chauvinism and racism they intend to challenge. Very cynical, but also somehow stupid.
I wonder.
ReplyDeleteRob
St Ramon Lull spent his life studying Islam. He studied Arabic in Mallorca and even discovered islamic thinkers who believed a doctrine akin to the Blessed Trinity. He ended his life murdered on a missionary trip to North Africa.
ReplyDeleteDoes one really need to ask, but murdered by whom and why?
DeleteBy the natives because he proclaimed Christ. They objected.
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