The Cross and the Crescent

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Dallas

Thursday through Saturday, I was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I spoke Thursday night to a meeting of the Dallas chapter of Legatus, the association for Catholic businessmen, and Friday I gave a series of presentations on church communications for the “Ministerium” of the Diocese of Fort Worth, an annual gathering of parish and diocesan ministers, ordained, religious and lay, along with Bishop Kevin Vann. Saturday night, I delivered the Landregan Lecture at the University of Dallas on “The Cross and the Crescent: The Relationship between the Church and Islam under Benedict XVI.”

The heart of my argument in that lecture is that Pope Benedict XVI may well be the last, best hope for serious dialogue between the West and the Islamic world, because he is the lone figure of global standing in the West with the spiritual and theological credentials to address Muslims from within their own thought world. Hence when Benedict challenges Muslims to embrace reason and to respect religious freedom, he does so from within a shared space of commitment to religious truth.

I think I can say that this argument met with enthusiasm from many Catholics desperate for some sign of hope in the relationship with Islam – as well as fairly deep skepticism from others, who believe that the pope finds himself addressing people largely closed to his voice.

Given Benedict’s upcoming Nov. 28-Dec. 2 trip to Turkey, it’s a discussion with obvious topicality.

Excerpts from that lecture are below.

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There are four points which I believe are important to make about the relationship with Islam under Benedict XVI.

(1) Violence and Reciprocity
Benedict will continue to press Muslims, in a far more explicit fashion than John Paul II, on two points: the rejection of religious violence, especially terrorism; and the need for Islamic states to respect the religious freedom of their minorities, a cause which in the Vatican is known as “reciprocity.”

Though this story is woefully underreported in the West, the effort to convince moderate Islamic leaders to denounce terrorism has recorded some progress. In the wake of 9/11, for example, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo – sometimes known as the “Vatican of the Islamic world” – dismissed Osama bin-Laden’s credentials as a jihadist and warned young Muslims against heeding his call to battle in Afghanistan. The Egyptian militant group Al-Jama’a, which fielded more than one hundred thousand fighters in Islamic causes around the world in the 1990s, condemned the 9/11 attacks on the grounds that Islamic law “bans killing civilians,” and denied the hijackers the status of martyrs, among other reasons, because the U.S. government had admitted them as guests, and hence they had broken the obligations of hospitality.

Polls conducted in Muslim nations found broad majorities that would agree with the sentiment. Such data suggests the battle here may not so much be conceptual as political, of galvanizing Islamic governments to take serious action against extremist movements, and of resolving the foreign policy imbroglios such as the conflicts in the Holy Land and in Iraq that sometimes give those extremist movements cover.

Reciprocity may prove a tougher nut to crack, because it does pose a direct doctrinal challenge to the mainstream Muslim understanding of what we in the West would call church/state relations. The track record in majority Muslim states is not encouraging. Consider the following examples:

•tSaudi Arabia: In the 1990s, the Saudi government spent $25 million to build the largest mosque in Europe, in Rome, with the full support of John Paul II. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia today, the Koran is officially the country’s constitution, with public religious expression other than the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam prohibited. This ban is backed up by the mutawaa, or religious police. Christians cannot build churches anywhere in the country, and area five times the size of Texas, and they cannot worship in public or private. In 2005, the mutawaa conducted at least four raids of Christian “house churches,” according to the Center for Religious Freedom. Christians cannot import Bibles or wear religious symbols, and clergy cannot wear religious dress. Capuchin priests charged with pastoral care of several hundred thousand Catholics, mostly Filipino, Vietnamese and Korean guest workers, cannot minister openly.
•tIran: The constitution proclaims Shi’a Islam the official religion. It recognizes Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians as protected minorities, but all face discrimination in education, government, and the armed services. Common law applies the death sentence for trying to convert Muslims. Over the past 13 years, at least eight evangelical Christians have been killed by government authorities, and more than 20 are reported “disappeared.” Last year, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, secretary general of the powerful Council of Guardians, stated that “non-Muslims cannot be described as human beings, but as sinning animals come to earth to disseminate corruption.”
•tSudan: Everyone in the north of the country, Muslim or not, is subject to Islamic law. Although permits are regularly granted to build mosques, permission to build churches is denied. The death penalty for apostasy from Islam remains the law, even if it’s rarely enforced. Converts typically cannot remain in Sudan. Since President Omar El Bashir came to power in 1989, alcohol has been forbidden, which makes use of wine illegal even in the Catholic Mass.
•tEgypt: The constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but Islam is the official religion and shariah the main source of legislation. Coptic Christians, who represent 15 percent of the population, are limited to roughly one percent of positions in parliament, military and police academies, the judiciary and diplomatic corps, and teaching. Family law is also an issue. If a Christian father converts to Islam, his minor children must follow suit. The mother’s custody rights, which otherwise take precedence, are ignored. Recently, a civil court ruled that the Coptic Church must remarry a divorced person, despite church teaching to the contrary. Another court ruled that polygamy is permissible in Christianity.
•tNigeria: Since October 1999, 12 northern Nigerian states have extended sharia into the state’s criminal courts. Some states have sanctioned quasi-official Hisbah, or religious police, to enforce violations. Christians suffer discrimination in building or repairing churches, access to education and media, representation in government, and employment. In August 2005, the Hisbah forced 15 Christian churches to close in one state alone.
•tTurkey: Although officially tolerance is the law of the land, religious services without authorization are illegal, and religious communities cannot own property. The government often deposes religious leaders not to its liking. Seminaries of the Armenian Apostolic and the Greek Orthodox churches were closed in the 1970s, and the government has resisted attempts to reopen them. Foreign religious workers face harassment, and religious communities are under state surveillance.

To be sure, the motives for such repression are political and ethnic as much as religious, and the primary victims are often other Muslims. Yet the lack of a developed Islamic theology of pluralism certainly contributes to the mix. Benedict XVI, along with a broad cross-section of opinion inside and outside the Catholic Church, sees all this as an intolerable violation of human dignity, and will continue to demand a reckoning.

(2) Committed to Dialogue
Despite all this, Benedict is deeply committed to dialogue with Muslims, so that any exploitation of his Regensburg remarks to promote a politics of xenophobia misses the mark.

The fundamental “clash of civilizations” Benedict sees in the world today is not between Islam and the West, but between belief and unbelief – between a culture that recognizes the supernatural and a role for religion in shaping both public and private life, and one which does not. In that struggle, Benedict regards Muslims as natural allies. He has said repeatedly over the years that he admires their moral and religious seriousness, and he believes the West has something to learn from Muslims about resisting secularization. He believes that the Church and Islam can also be partners in the social, cultural and political arena. The experience of the Holy See in building coalitions with Islamic governments in the mid-1990s at United Nations conferences in Cairo and Beijing, successfully resisting the attempts of the Clinton administration and others to create new entitlements to abortion and other “reproductive rights” under international law, certainly buttresses this conviction.

It is in this sense that I believe Benedict XVI is the last, best hope of the West for a serious dialogue with Islam. Benedict is the lone figure of global standing in the West who speaks from within the same thought world that Muslims who are sympathetic to the strong religious identity of the jihadists themselves inhabit. Thus when he challenges Islam to reject violence and to embrace a healthy form of pluralism and the lay state, at least potentially he does so from within a common space of traditional moral values and deep religious commitment. He lays down his gauntlets as a concerned friend, pushing Islam to realize the best version of itself.

It is important to make this point, because in some quarters Benedict has been enlisted as an intellectual patron of a rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment, a sort of chaplain for a new anti-Muslim “Cold War.” While Joseph Ratzinger is certainly a reality, and while he harbors his doubts about the capacity of Islam to develop a culture of rational theological reflection given the basic commitment to a literal reading of the Qu’ran, he nevertheless also believes the stakes are too high, and the potential contribution of enlightened Muslims to the global debate are too important, to succumb to a zero/sum dynamic of permanent conflict. What Benedict XVI hopes to stimulate, in other words, is an Islamic reform, not a new Crusade.

(3) The Turkey Trip
The upcoming Turkey trip, Nov. 28-Dec. 2, looms as an important watershed in this regard. Among other things, it will likely be the most-covered papal trip since John Paul II visited Israel in 1999, and in this case it will be widely followed not just in the West but all across the Islamic world. Benedict’s visit will be carried live, virtually bell-to-bell, on Al Jazeerah and other television networks. It will therefore be the first time that millions of Muslims have the opportunity to hear the pope speak live, in his own voice, rather than filtered through after-the-fact media accounts. In that sense, it is a crucial test of his capacity to redirect the dialogue with Islam down a frank but constructive path. While obviously the work of an Islamic reform is obviously one for Muslims themselves to carry out, Benedict’s Turkey trip could provide an important stimulus. The trip merits your careful attention and, if I may dare suggest, your prayerful support.

(4) The United States
Fourth and finally, a word about what we in the United States can do. Catholics in the United States, I believe, may be in a unique position to help advance the kind of “sincere and frank” dialogue Benedict has advocated. While estimates vary, there are said to be around four million Muslims in the United States, and that number is rising. Two-thirds of the mosques in this country are supported directly or indirectly by the Saudis, meaning by the Wahabi form of Islam – which has long provided much of the intellectual, spiritual and logistical infrastructure for Islamic radicalism.

Yet in the wake of Regensburg, there was no violent Muslim backlash in the United States analogous to what one saw in parts of Europe. What this suggests is that Muslims in America may be going through a transition analogous to that of American Catholics, who prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had an official doctrine of church/state relations they couldn’t reconcile with their experience of living in a pluralistic society in which religion nevertheless thrived. American Catholics led the way for the universal Church towards a new understanding of religious freedom, and perhaps American Muslims, in their own fashion, can make an analogous contribution to the global Islamic debate. Since Catholics have walked this path before, we may be in a special position to encourage American Muslims to find their voice.

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tI concluded with this thought:

In the wake of Regensburg, the climate for Muslim/Christian exchange, I would submit, has been made more poisonous. If many Muslims harbor unresolved resentments about the pope’s language, many Christians and others in the West are experiencing a kind of fatigue about Muslim outrage. Seeing images of the pope burned in effigy, of Muslims irrationally associating Benedict XVI with the foreign policy of President George Bush despite the Vatican’s long track record of opposition to both Gulf Wars, and of violent attacks against churches and missionaries, many in the West may be tempted to conclude that dialogue with these people is impossible, that the best we can hope to do is to prepare for the cataclysmic showdown that seems to be looming.

If Benedict XVI is to lead us out of this blind alley, that project will require the energy and imagination of committed women and men of good will, including all of you in this room tonight. It is a challenge that all of us together must face – but one we must pray, along with Pope Benedict, that all of us together can face.