Common word – Sheikh Ali Gomaa

By SHEIKH ALI GOMAA

America and the West have been victims of violent extremists acting in the name of Islam, the tragic events of 9/11 being only the most egregious of their attacks. Western officials and commentators are consumed by the question, “Where are the moderates?” Many, seeing only the extremism perpetuated by a radical few, despair of finding progressive and peaceful partners of standing in the Muslim world.

However, reconciling Islam with modernity has been an imperative for Muslims before it became a preoccupation for the West. In particular, the process dates back to the 19th century, when what became known as the Islamic reform movement was born in Al Azhar University in Cairo, Islam’s premiere institution of learning.

At the Dar al Iftaa, Egypt’s supreme body for Islamic legal edicts over which I preside, we wrestle constantly with the issue of applying Islam to the modern world. We issue thousands of fatwasor authoritative legal edicts—for example affirming the right of women to dignity, education and employment, and to hold political office, and condemning violence against them. We have upheld the right of freedom of conscience, and of freedom of expression within the bounds of common decency. We have promoted the common ground that exists between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We have underscored that governance must be based on justice and popular sovereignty. We are committed to human liberty within the bounds of Islamic law. Nonetheless, we must make more tangible progress on these and other issues.

We unequivocally condemned violence against the innocent during Egypt’s own struggle with terrorism in the 1980s and 90’s, and after the heinous sin of 9/11. We continue to do so in public debates with extremists on their views of Islam, in our outreach to schools and youth organizations, in our training of students from all across the world at Egypt’s theological institutions, and in our counseling of captured terrorists. As the head of the one of the foremost Islamic authorities in the world, let me restate: The murder of civilians is a crime against humanity and God punishable in this life and the next.

Yet, just as we recommit to reinforcing the values of moderation in our faith, we look to the United States to assume its responsibility for the sake of a better relationship between the West and Islam.

First, it is essential that the U.S. confront the fear and misunderstanding that has often pervaded the public discourse about Islam, especially in the media.

Second, while we must strive to reinforce the common principles that we share, we must also accept the reality of differences in our values and in our outlook. Islam and the West have distinct value systems. Respect for our differences is a foundation for coexistence, and never for conflict.

Finally, there must a true commitment to the rule of law, and to sovereign equality, as the legitimate basis for international relations. While some of the divide between Islam and the West lies in the realm of ideas, it lies mostly in the realm of politics. The violence and the aggression to which many Muslim countries have been subjected are the main sources of a deep and legitimate sense of grievance, and they must be addressed.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine must be brought to an end; its continuation is an affront to the fundamental tenets of justice and freedom that we all seek to uphold. In Iraq and Afghanistan, full sovereignty and independence must be restored to their people with the withdrawal of all foreign forces. President Barack Obama’s historic address to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4 was a landmark event that opened the door to a new relationship between Islam and the West, precisely because it acknowledged these imperatives. Yet much work needs to be done by both sides.

This week in Washington I am participating in the Common Word Initiative, a group of religious leaders hosted by Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. While the focus of this initiative has been to foster dialogue between Islam and Christianity, I will call for its expansion to include representatives of all the Abrahamic faiths. The road ahead will be difficult, but we can, God willing, arrive at a more peaceful future together.

—Dr. Gomaa is the Grand Mufti of Egypt.

Muhammad

Seeing Muhammad as Both a Prophet and a Politician

By Laurie Goodstein

Dec 20, 2009

The religion with the most adherents on the planet is Christianity, and few people would say they are unfamiliar with the story of its founder and prophet, Jesus. The second largest faith is Islam, and yet there is boundless ignorance among non-Muslims about the story of its founder and prophet, Muhammad, even after 9/11 set off a global panic about whether Islam fuels terrorism.

Since then Muhammad has been defined by his detractors: who have called him a terrorist, a lunatic and most colorfully — by the Rev. Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention — a “demon-possessed pedophile.” Even Pope Benedict XVI, whatever his intention, created an uproar by unearthing a remark from a 14th-century emperor who cited Muhammad’s contributions to religion as “only evil and inhuman.” Is this the prophet of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims?

It may be time then to put down the biographies of John Adams and Ronald Reagan and devote a little attention to Muhammad. But beware. Several new biographies picture Muhammad through the lens of a suicide bomber, and ultimately these books reveal more about suicide bombers than Muhammad.

To glimpse how the vast majority of the world’s Muslims understand their prophet and their faith, Karen Armstrong’s short biography is a good place to start. The volume is part of a series called “Eminent Lives”: small profiles of big-name subjects by big-name authors.

Ms. Armstrong, best known for “A History of God,” is a scholar and a former nun with a genius for presenting religions as products of temporal forces — like geography, culture and economics — without minimizing the workings of transcendent spiritual forces.

She profiles Muhammad as both a mystic touched by God on a mountaintop and a canny political and social reformer. He preached loyalty to God rather than tribe; reconciliation rather than retaliation; care for orphans and the poor; and in many ways, empowerment of women, which will be a surprise to some. The Koran gave women property rights and freed orphans from the obligation to marry their guardians: radical changes at a time when women were traded like camels.

Ms. Armstrong writes: “His life was a tireless campaign against greed, injustice and arrogance. He realized that Arabia was at a turning point and that the old way of thinking would no longer suffice, so he wore himself out in the creative effort to evolve an entirely new solution.” In a nod to her subtitle, “A Prophet for Our Time,” she argues that as of Sept. 11, 2001, we have entered a new historical era that requires an equally thorough re-evaluation.

This notion that we have entered a new era was one of the reasons that Ms. Armstrong decided to revisit a subject she had already covered in 1992 with “Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet.”

Muhammad (570-632) was born in a nouveau riche Mecca. Unlike most Arabs, the Meccans were not nomads but traders and financiers who profited from the caravans that stopped in Mecca for water from its underground spring. The site was holy to the Bedouin because it housed the Kabah, a cube-shaped granite building that was tended by Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh.

Muhammad was orphaned as a child and taken in by relatives, but his fortunes changed at the age of 25 when he married Khadija, an older widow who hired him to manage her caravans. At 40 Muhammad declared he had been seized by a terrifying force and commanded by God to recite scripture.

Khadija was his first convert. At first he shared his revelations with a small group of friends and family members, who became his disciples, “convinced that he was the long-awaited Arab prophet.” As Muhammad, who was illiterate, recited new passages, believers wrote them down: a compilation that became the Koran.

The Meccans were offended by Muhammad’s preaching that the ideal was submission. (Islam means submission.) He taught that the proper way to pray was to bow, forehead to the earth, “a posture that would be repugnant to the haughty Quraysh,” Ms. Armstrong notes. Muhammad also insisted that the Meccans abandon the worship of their three stone goddesses, because there was only one God, Allah.

Muhammad and his followers were exiled to Medina, 250 miles north of Mecca. He did not conquer Medina so much as form alliances and win converts. But there were epic battles with the Quraysh and other tribes, and Muhammad was a fighter and tactician.

“Muhammad was not a pacifist,” Ms. Armstrong writes. “He believed that warfare was sometimes inevitable and even necessary.”

This is why some passages in the Koran are rules for warfare. Terrorist groups cite these selectively — or contort or violate them. The Koran says not to take aim at civilians; some terrorist groups declare all Israelis to be combatants because Israelis are required to perform military service.

Ms. Armstrong declines to stand in judgment of events that have scandalized other biographers; as when Muhammad falls for the wife of his adopted adult son and takes her as his fifth wife. Ms. Armstrong writes: “This story has shocked some of Muhammad’s Western critics who are used to more ascetic, Christian heroes, but the Muslim sources seem to find nothing untoward in this demonstration of their prophet’s virility. Nor are they disturbed that Muhammad had more than four wives: why should God not give his prophet a few privileges?”

Muhammad ultimately took back Mecca and reclaimed the Kabah, still the destination for the Muslim pilgrimage. Ms. Armstrong argues that he prevailed by compassion, wisdom and steadfast submission to God. This is the power of his story and the reason that more parents around the world name their children Muhammad than any other name. – The New York Times

Biography – Reverend Jerry Vines

Jerry Vines was born in Carrollton, Georgia near Atlanta in 1937. Before attending seminary, he pastored his first church, Centralhatchee Baptist Church, at the age of 16. He was educated at Mercer University, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and Luther Rice University before pastoring in churches in Alabama and Georgia. While pastor of Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama he was elected President of the Alabama Pastors’ Conference. He relocated to Jacksonville in 1982 to co-pastor the First Baptist Church with Homer G. Lindsay, Jr., and in June 1988, he was elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention and served two terms. During his first 20 years at First Baptist, he baptized 18,177 people and oversaw the building of an $8 million preschool building, a $16 million auditorium and four parking garages, totaling almost $14 million. Vines also was influential in starting the First Baptist Church Pastors’ Conference which drew thousands of ministers and church works from across the world. Vines announced his retirement from First Baptist in May 2005 and preached his last sermon as pastor of the church in 2006 at the close of the 20th annual Pastors’ conference. He has since started his own ministry, Jerry Vines Ministries. This ministry is an outreach to further educate pastors in different areas of the ministry. Vines is married to the former Janet Denney and they have four children and seven grand children.

Controversy

Vines sparked controversy in June 2002 for remarks he made at a Southern Baptist Convention conference that were critical of Islam. Referencing Ergun and Emir Caner’s book Unveiling Islam, Vines said that “Allah is not Jehovah… Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist that’ll try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people,” and that “Christianity was founded by the virgin-born Jesus Christ” while “Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, and his last one was a 9-year-old girl.”^[1] This reference was to Aisha, who is said to have been about nine when her marriage to Muhammad was consummated, according to several hadith, or stories of Muhammad.^[2] The comments stirred a brief national debate on “Islamophobia” and the demonization of Islam in relation to the War on Terrorism. Vines initially defended his comments and invited “Muslim scholars to explain their own documents to us all.”^[3] He also refused to apologize for the statements or to meet with local Muslim leaders.^[3] He was heavily criticized, but was defended by fellow Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell, who wrote a letter supporting him. Falwell was asked about the letter during a 60 Minutes interview in October, and sparked an even greater outrage by declaring that he considered Muhammad a terrorist.^[4] He later apologized for his comments.^[5] When the story was covered by NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw on February 25, 2003, Vines finally broke his silence on the issue, claiming that his statements had been overemphasized in media reports, and that he had not intended to evoke hate. - Wikipedia

Anwar’s speech at Perth Muslim Youth Forum Convention 11 July 2009

Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

OPEN LETTER TO POPE BENEDICT XVI

Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Your holiness,

With regards to your lecture at the university of Regensburg in Germany on September12th 2006, we thought it appropriate, in the spirit of open exchange, to address your use of a debate between the Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a “learned Persian” as the starting point for a discourse on the relationship between reason and faith. While we applaud your efforts to oppose the dominance of positivism and materialism in human life, we must point out some errors in the way you mentioned Islam as a counterpoint to the proper use of reason, as well as some mistakes in the assertions you put forward in support of your argument.

THERE IS NO COMPULSION IN RELIGION

You mention that “according to the experts” the verse which begins, There is no compulsion in religion (al-Baqarah 2:256) is from the early period when the Prophet “was still powerless and under threat,” but this is incorrect. In fact this verse is acknowledged to belong to the period of Qur’anic revelation corresponding to the political and military ascendance of the young Muslim community. There is no compulsion in religion was not a command to Muslims to remain steadfast in the face of the desire of their oppressors to force them to renounce their faith, but was a reminder to Muslims themselves, once they had attained power, that they could not force another’s heart to believe. There is no compulsion in religion addresses those in a position of strength, not weakness. The earliest commentaries on the Qur’an (such as that of Al-Tabari) make it clear that some Muslims of Medina wanted to force their children to convert from Judaism or Christianity to Islam, and this verse was precisely an answer to them not to try to force their children to convert to Islam. Moroever, Muslims are also guided by such verses as Say: The truth is from your Lord; so whosoever will, let him believe, and whosoever will, let him disbelieve. (al-Kahf 18:29); and Say: O disbelievers! I worship not that which ye worship; Nor worship ye that which I worship. And I shall not worship that which ye worship. Nor will ye worship that which I worship. Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion (al-Kafirun: 109:1-6).

GOD’S TRANSCENDENCE

You also say that “for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent,” a simplification which can be misleading. The Qur’an states, There is no thing like unto Him (al-Shura 42:11), but it also states, He is the Light of the heavens and the earth (al-Nur 24:35); and, We are closer to him than his jugular vein (Qaf 50:16); and, He is the First, the Last, the Inward, and the Outward (al-Hadid 57:3); and, He is with you wherever you are (al-Hadid 57:4); and, Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of God (al-Baqarah 2:115). Also, let us recall the saying of the Prophet, which states that God says, “When I love him (the worshipper), I am the hearing by which he hears, the sight by which he sees, the hand with which he grasps, and the foot with which he walks.” (Sahih al-Bukhari no.6502, Kitab al-Riqaq)

In the Islamic spiritual, theological, and philosophical tradition, the thinker you mention, Ibn Hazm (d.1069 ce), is a worthy but very marginal figure, who belonged to the Zahiri school of jurisprudence which is followed by no one in the Islamic world today. If one is looking for classical formulations of the doctrine of transcendence, much more important to Muslims are figures such as al-Ghazali (d.1111 ce) and many others who are far more influential and more representative of Islamic belief than Ibn Hazm.

You quote an argument that because the emperor is “shaped by Greek philosophy” the idea that “God is not pleased by blood” is “self-evident” to him, to which the Muslim teaching on God’s Transcendence is put forward as a counterexample. To say that for Muslims “God’s Will is not bound up in any of our categories” is also a simplification which may lead to a misunderstanding. God has many Names in Islam, including the Merciful, the Just, the Seeing, the Hearing, the Knowing, the Loving, and the Gentle. Their utter conviction in God’s Oneness and that There is none like unto Him (al-Ikhlas 112:4) has not led Muslims to deny God’s attribution of these qualities to Himself and to (some of) His creatures, (setting aside for now the notion of “categories”, a term which requires much clarification in this context). As this concerns His Will, to conclude that Muslims believe in a capricious God who might or might not command us to evil is to forget that God says in the Qur’an, Lo! God enjoins justice and kindness, and giving to kinsfolk, and forbids lewdness and abomination and wickedness. He exhorts you in order that ye may take heed (al-Nahl, 16:90). Equally, it is to forget that God says in the Qur’an that He has prescribed for Himself mercy (al-An’am, 6:12; see also 6:54), and that God says in the Qur’an, My Mercy encompasses everything (al-A‘raf 7:156). The word for mercy, rahmah, can also be translated as love, kindness, and compassion. From this word rahmah comes the sacred formula Muslims use daily, In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Is it not self-evident that spilling innocent blood goes against mercy and compassion?

THE USE OF REASON

The Islamic tradition is rich in its explorations of the nature of human intelligence and its relation to God’s Nature and His Will, including questions of what is self-evident and what is not. However, the dichotomy between “reason” on one hand and “faith” on the other does not exist in precisely the same form in Islamic thought. Rather, Muslims have come to terms with the power and limits of human intelligence in their own way, acknowledging a hierarchy of knowledge of which reason is a crucial part. There are two extremes which the Islamic intellectual tradition has generally managed to avoid: one is to make the analytical mind the ultimate arbiter of truth, and the other is to deny the power of human understanding to address ultimate questions. More importantly, in their most mature and mainstream forms the intellectual explorations of Muslims through the ages have maintained a consonance between the truths of the Qur’anic revelation and the demands of human intelligence, without sacrificing one for the other. God says, We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves until it is clear to them that it is the truth (Fussilat 41:53). Reason itself is one among the many signs within us, which God invites us to contemplate, and to contemplate with, as a way of knowing the truth.

WHAT IS “HOLY WAR”?

We would like to point out that “holy war” is a term that does not exist in Islamic languages. Jihad, it must be emphasized, means struggle, and specifically struggle in the way of God. This struggle may take many forms, including the use of force. Though a jihad may be sacred in the sense of being directed towards a sacred ideal, it is not necessarily a “war”. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Manuel II Paleologus says that “violence” goes against God’s nature, since Christ himself used violence against the money-changers in the temple, and said “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword …” (Matthew 10:34-36). When God drowned Pharaoh, was He going against His own Nature? Perhaps the emperor meant to say that cruelty, brutality, and aggression are against God’s Will, in which case the classical and traditional law of jihad in Islam would bear him out completely.

You say that “naturally the emperor knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war.” However, as we pointed out above concerning There is no compulsion in religion, the aforementioned instructions were not later at all. Moreover, the emperor’s statements about violent conversion show that he did not know what those instructions are and have always been. The authoritative and traditional Islamic rules of war can be summarized in the following principles:

1. Non-combatants are not permitted or legitimate targets. This was emphasized explicitly time and again by the Prophet, his Companions, and by the learned tradition since then.

2. Religious belief alone does not make anyone the object of attack. The original Muslim community was fighting against pagans who had also expelled them from their homes, persecuted, tortured, and murdered them. Thereafter, the Islamic conquests were political in nature.

3. Muslims can and should live peacefully with their neighbors. And if they incline to peace, do thou incline to it; and put thy trust in God (al-Anfal 8:61). However, this does not exclude legitimate selfdefense and maintenance of sovereignty.

Muslims are just as bound to obey these rules as they are to refrain from theft and adultery. If a religion regulates war and describes circumstances where it is necessary and just, that does not make that religion war-like, anymore than regulating sexuality makes a religion prurient. If some have disregarded a long and well-established tradition in favor of utopian dreams where the end justifies the means, they have done so of their own accord and without the sanction of God, His Prophet, or the learned tradition. God says in the Holy Qur’an: Let not hatred of any people seduce you into being unjust. Be just, that is nearer to piety (al-Ma’idah 5:8). In this context we must state that the murder on September 17th of an innocent Catholic nun in Somalia—and any other similar acts of wanton individual violence—“in reaction to” your lecture at the University of Regensburg, is completely un- Islamic, and we totally condemn such acts.

FORCED CONVERSION

The notion that Muslims are commanded to spread their faith “by the sword” or that Islam in fact was largely spread “by the sword” does not hold up to scrutiny. Indeed, as a political entity Islam spread partly as a result of conquest, but the greater part of its expansion came as a result of preaching and missionary activity. Islamic teaching did not prescribe that the conquered populations be forced or coerced into converting. Indeed, many of the first areas conquered by the Muslims remained predominantly non-Muslim for centuries. Had Muslims desired to convert all others by force, there would not be a single church or synagogue left anywhere in the Islamic world. The command There is no compulsion in religion means now what it meant then. The mere fact of a person being non-Muslim has never been a legitimate casus belli in Islamic law or belief. As with the rules of war, history shows that some Muslims have violated Islamic tenets concerning forced conversion and the treatment of other religious communities, but history also shows that these are by far the exception which proves the rule. We emphatically agree that forcing others to believe—if such a thing be truly possible at all—is not pleasing to God and that God is not pleased by blood. Indeed, we believe, and Muslims have always believed, that Whoso slays a soul not to retaliate for a soul slain, nor for corruption done in the land, it shall be as if he had slain mankind altogether (al-Ma’idah 5:32).

SOMETHING NEW?

You mention the emperor’s assertion that “anything new” brought by the Prophet was “evil and inhuman, such as his alleged command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” What the emperor failed to realize—aside from the fact (as mentioned above) that no such command has ever existed in Islam—is that the Prophet never claimed to be bringing anything fundamentally new. God says in the Holy Qur’an, Naught is said to thee (Muhammad) but what already was said to the Messengers before thee (Fussilat 41:43), and, Say (Muhammad): I am no new thing among the messengers (of God), nor know I what will be done with me or with you. I do but follow that what is Revealed to me, and I am but a plain warner (al-Ahqaf, 46:9). Thus faith in the One God is not the property of any one religious community. According to Islamic belief, all the true prophets preached the same truth to different peoples at different times. The laws may be different, but the truth is unchanging.

“THE EXPERTS”

You refer at one point non-specifically to “the experts” (on Islam) and also actually cite two Catholic scholars by name, Professor (Adel) Theodore Khoury and (Associate Professor) Roger Arnaldez. It suffices here to say that whilst many Muslims consider that there are sympathetic non-Muslims and Catholics who could truly be considered “experts” on Islam, Muslims have not to our knowledge endorsed the “experts” you referred to, or recognized them as representing Muslims or their views. On September 25th 2006 you reiterated your important statement in Cologne on August 20th 2005 that, “Inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue between Christians and Muslims cannot be reduced to an optional extra. It is, in fact, a vital necessity, on which in large measure our future depends.” Whilst we fully concur with you, it seems to us that a great part of the object of interreligious dialogue is to strive to listen to and consider the actual voices of those we are dialoguing with, and not merely those of our own persuasion.

* * *

CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

Christianity and Islam are the largest and second largest religions in the world and in history. Christians and Muslims reportedly make up over a third and over a fifth of humanity respectively. Together they make up more than 55% of the world’s population, making the relationship between these two religious communities the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world. As the leader of over a billion Catholics and moral example for many others around the globe, yours is arguably the single most influential voice in continuing to move this relationship forward in the direction of mutual understanding.We share your desire for frank and sincere dialogue, and recognize its importance in an increasingly interconnected world. Upon this sincere and frank dialogue we hope to continue to build peaceful and friendly relationships based upon mutual respect, justice, and what is common in essence in our shared Abrahamic tradition, particularly “the two greatest commandments” in Mark 12:29-31 (and, in varying form, in Matthew 22:37-40), that, the Lord our God is One Lord; / And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy understanding, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. / And the second commandment is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. Muslims thus appreciate the following words from the Second Vatican Council: The church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to humanity. They endeavor to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own. Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet; his virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting. (Nostra Aetate, 28 October 1965)

And equally the words of the late Pope John Paul II, for whom many Muslims had great regard and esteem: We Christians joyfully recognize the religious values we have in common with Islam. Today I would like to repeat what I said to young Muslims some years ago in Casablanca: “We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection” (Insegnamenti, VIII/2, [1985], p.497, quoted during a general audience on May 5, 1999).

Muslims also appreciated your unprecedented personal expression of sorrow, and your clarification and assurance (on the 17th of September) that your quote does not reflect your own personal opinion, as well as the Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone’s affirmation (on the 16th of September) of the conciliar document Nostra Aetate. Finally, Muslims appreciated that (on September 25th) in front of an assembled group of ambassadors from Muslim countries you expressed “total and profound respect for all Muslims”. We hope that we will all avoid the mistakes of the past and live together in the future in peace, mutual acceptance and respect.

And all praise belongs to God, and there is neither power nor strength except through God. © 2006

SIGNATORIES

(listed in alphabetical order)

1. H.E. Ambassador Dr. Akbar Ahmed

Professor of Islamic Studies, American University in

Washington DC.;Former High Commissioner of Pakistan

to Great Britain

2. Dr.Abdul-Karim Akiwi

Professor, Ibn Zahr University, Agadir, Morocco

3. Dr. Ahmad Mahrazi Al-Alawi

Professor, Qadi Ayad University, Marrakesh, Morocco

4. Dr. Batool bint Ali

Professor, Faculty of Arts, Rabat, Morocco

5. Dr. Salwa El-Awa

Department of Theology, University of Birmingham

6. Dr.Abdullah Mohammad BaHaroon

Head, Ahqaf University, Yemen

7. Dr. Maimon Barish

Professor, Qadi Ayad University, Marrakesh, Morocco

8. H.E. Dr. Issam al-Bashir

Former Minister of Religious Affairs;Secretary General

of the International Institution for Moderation, Sudan

9. H.E. Allamah Abd Allah bin Mahfuz bin Bayyah

Professor, King Abd Al-Aziz University, Saudi Arabia

Former Vice President; Minister of Justice; Minister of

Education and Minister of Religious Affairs, Mauritania

10. Dr.Ali Benbraik

Professor, Ibn Zahr University, Agadir, Morocco

11. Dr.Abdul-Fattah Al-Bizim

Mufti of Damascus, Director of the Fath Institute, Damascus

12. Dr. Roger Boase

Queen Mary & Westfield College, Uni. of London, UK

13. Dr. al-Arabi Al-Buhali

Professor, Qadi Ayad University, Marrakesh, Morocco

14. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham al-Burhani

Faculty of Shari‘a, University of Damascus, Syria

15. Professor Dr. Allamah Muhammad Sa‘id

Ramadan Al-Buti

Dean, Dept. of Religion, University of Damascus, Syria

16. Professor Dr. Mustafa Çagˇrıcı

Grand Mufti of Istanbul

17. H.E. Shaykh Professor Dr. Mustafa Ceric

Grand Mufti and Head of Ulema of Bosnia and

Herzegovina

18. Dr. Jill Cressy

Department of Education, University of Birmingham

19. Dr. Ahmad Fakir

Professor, Ibn Zahr University, Agadir, Morocco

20. Sayyid Abdullah Fidaaq

Islamic Missionary, Saudi Arabia

21. H.E. Shaykh Ravil Gainutdin

Grand Mufti of Russia

22. Dr.Buthaina al-Ghalbzuri

Professor, Faculty of Arts, Rabat, Morocco

23. H.E. Shaykh Nedžad Grabus

Grand Mufti of Slovenia

24. Professor Abdul-Haqq Ismail Guiderdoni

Director, Institut des Hautes Etudes Islamiques, France

25. Ahmad Bin Abdul-Aziz al-Haddad

Mufti, Department of Islamic Affairs, Dubai, UAE

26. Shaykh Al-Habib Ali Mashhour bin Muhammad

bin Salim bin Hafeez

Imam of the Tarim Mosque and Head of Fatwa Council,

Tarim, Yemen

27. Shaykh Al-Habib Umar bin Muhammad bin

Salim bin Hafeez

Dean, Dar Al-Mustafa, Tarim, Yemen

28. Shaykh Abdul-Razzaq Al-Hallabi

Religious Instructor at the Umayyad Mosque,

Head, Fath Institute in Damascus, Syria

29. Professor Dr. Farouq Hamadah

Professor of the Sciences of Tradition, Mohammad V

University, Morocco

30. Dr. Mustapha Bin Hamza

Professor, University of Mohammed I, Morocco

31. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson

Founder and Director, Zaytuna Institute, California, USA

32. H.E. Shaykh Dr. Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun

Grand Mufti of the Republic of Syria

33. Shaykh Seraj Hendricks

Former Chair, Muslim Judicial Fatwa Committee,

South Africa

34. Dr.Mawlai al-Hussayn Al-Hian

Professor, Qarawiyin University, Morocco

35. Dr. Abdul-Aziz Al-Hifadhi

Professor, University of Mohammed I, Morocco

36. H.E. Dr. Saeed Abd al-Hafidh Hijjawi

The Mufti of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

37. Dr. Abdul-Razzaq Hurmas

Professor, Ibn Zahr University, Agadir, Morocco

38. Shaykh Yasmin Mahmoud Al-Husari

Head, Husari Islamic Foundation, Egypt

39. Dr. Shaykh Izz Al-Din Ibrahim

Advisor for Cultural Affairs, Prime Ministry,

UAE

40. Professor Buthayna Al-Ibrahim

Director, Centre for Women’s Leadership Training,

Kuwait

41. Dr.Abdul-Rafi’ Al-Ilj

Professor, Wali Ishmael University, Meknes, Morocco

42. Shaykh Muhammad Naiem Al-Irqsusi

Preacher, Iman Mosque in Damascus, Syria

43. H.E. Professor Dr. Omar Jah

Secretary of the Muslim Scholars Council, Gambia

Professor of Islamic Civilization and Thought, University

of Gambia

44. Dr. Haifaa Jawad

Department of Theology, University of Birmingham

45. Shaykh Al-Habib Ali Zain Al-Abideen Al-Jifri

Founder and Director, Taba Institute, UAE

46. Sayyid Umar Hamid Al-Jilani

Islamic Law scholar, Hadramawt, Yemen

47. H.E. Shaykh Professor Dr. Ali Jumu‘ah

Grand Mufti of the Republic of Egypt

48. Dr. Larbi Kachat

Director, Islamic Cultural Centre, Paris, France

49. Professor Dr. Abla Mohammed Kahlawi

Dean of Islamic and Arabic Studies, Al-Azhar University

(Women’s College), Egypt

50. Dr. Ibrahim Kalin

Director, SETA Foundation, Ankara, Turkey

Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, College of the Holy

Cross, USA

51. Dr. Salah ul-Din Kuftaro

Director, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Foundation, Syria

52. Professor Dr. Mohammad Hashim Kamali

Dean, International Institute of Islamic Thought

and Civilization (ISTAC), Malaysia;

Professor of Islamic Law and Jurisprudence,

International Islamic University, Malaysia

53. Dr. al-Munsif Al-Karisi

Professor, Qadi Ayad University, Marrakesh, Morocco

54. Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller

Shaykh in the Shadhili Order and Senior Fellow of Aal al-

Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought (Jordan), USA

55. H.E. Shaykh Ahmad Al-Khalili

Grand Mufti of the Sultanate of Oman

56. Dr. Mohammad Kharabut

Professor, Qadi Ayad University, Marrakesh, Morocco

57. Dr. Muhammad bin Kiran

Professor, University of Ibn Tufail, Qunaitara, Morocco

58. Shaykh Dr. Ahmad Kubaisi

Founder of the Ulema Organization, Iraq

59. Dr. Karima Laachir

Dept. of French Studies, University of Birmigham

60. Sayyid Ahmad Alawi Al-Maliki

Lecturer, King Abdul-Aziz University, Saudi Arabia

61. Dr.Al-Jilani Al-Marini

Professor, Sidi Mohammed Ben Abd Allah University,

Fez, Morocco

62. Allamah Shaykh Muhammad bin Muhammad

Al-Mansouri

High Authority (Marja’) of Zeidi Muslims, Yemen

63. Dr. Yousef Meri

Scholar -in-Residence, Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic

Thought, Jordan

64. Shaykh Abu Bakr Ahmad Al-Milibari

Secretary-General of the Ahl Al-Sunna Association, India

65. Dr. Jawid Mojaddedi

Assistant Professor, Rutgers University, USA

66. Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Poet and author, USA

67. Mr. Shafiq Morton

Voice of the Cape Radio, South Africa

68. H.E. Dr. Moulay Abd Al-Kabir Al-Alawi

Al-Mudghari

Director-General, Bayt Mal Al-Qods Al-Sharif Agency;

Former Minister of Religious Affairs, Morocco

69. Dr. Ibrahim Rashed al-Murikhi

Head of the Shari‘a Court, Bahrain

70. H.E. Shaykh Ahmad Hasyim Muzadi

General Chairman of the Nahdat al-Ulema, Indonesia

71. Mr. Sohail Nakhooda

Editor-in-Chief, Islamica Magazine

72. H.E. Professor Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr

University Professor of Islamic Studies, George Washington

University, Washington D.C, USA

73. Dr. Aref Ali Nayed

Former Professor at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and

Islamic Studies (PISAI), Rome; Advisor to the Cambridge

Interfaith Program,Faculty of Divinity,Cambridge, UK

74. Professor Sulayman S. Nyang

Howard University, USA

75. H.E. Shaykh Sevki Omerbasic

Grand Mufti of Croatia

76. Dr. Yahya Sergio Pallavicini

Vice President, Comunità Religiosa Islamica, Italy

77. Dr. Eboo Patel

Founder and Executive Director, Interfaith Youth Core,

Chicago, USA

78. H.E. Dr. Muhammad Rashid Al-Qabbani

Mufti of the Republic of Lebanon

79. Dr. Saliha Al-Rahuti

Professor, Faculty of Arts, Rabat, Morocco

80. Shaykh Osama Abd al-Karim Al-Rifai

Scholar and preacher at the Abdul-Karim al-Rifai Mosque,

Damascus, Syria

81. Shaykh Sarya Abdul-Karim Al-Rifai

Imam, Mosque of Zayd bin Thabit Al-Ansari, Syria

82. Al-Habib Muhammad bin Abdul-Rahman

Al-Saqqaf

Scholar of the Islamic Sciences, Saudi Arabia

83. Dr. Muhammad Hasan Sharhabili

Professor, Qarawiyin University, Morocco

84. H.E. Dr. Mohammad Abd Al-Ghaffar Al-Sharif

Secretary-General, Ministry of Religious Affairs,

Kuwait

85. Dr. Muhammad Alwani Al-Sharif

Head of the European Academy of Islamic Culture and

Sciences, Brussels, Belgium

86. Imam Zaid Shakir

Lecturer, Zaytuna Institute, California, USA

87. Dr. Al-Arabi Bu Silham

Professor, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

88. Dr. Milodah Shem

Professor, School of Law, Rabat, Morocco

89. Shaykh M. Iqbal Sullam

Vice General-Secretary, Nahdat al-Ulema, Indonesia

90. Shaykh Dr. Tariq Suwaidan

Director-General of the Risalah Satellite Channel

91. H.R.H. Prince El Hassan bin Talal

Chairman, Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, Jordan

92. Professor Dr. H.R.H. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad

bin Talal

Chairman of the Board of the Aal al-Bayt Institute for

Islamic Thought, Jordan

93. H.E. Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri

Secretary General of the World Assembly for Proximity of

Islamic Schools of Thoughts (WAPIST), Iran

94. H.E. Shaykh Naim Trnava

Grand Mufti of Kosovo

95. H.E. Dr. Abd Al-Aziz Uthman Al-Tweijri

Director-General of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization (ISESCO), Morocco

96. H.H. Justice Mufti Muhammad Taqi Uthmani

Vice President, Dar Al-Ulum, Karachi, Pakistan

97. H.E. Shaykh Muhammad Al-Sadiq Muhammad

Yusuf

Grand Mufti of Uzbekistan

98. Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad Winter

Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies, Divinity

School, University of Cambridge, UK;

Director of the Muslim Academic Trust, UK

99. Dr.Wahbah Mustapha Al-Zuhayli

Head, Department of Fiqh and its Schools, Faculty of

Shari‘a, University of Damascus, Syria

100. H.E. Shaykh Muamer Zukorlic

Mufti of Sanjak

- Islamica Magazine

Interfaith Understanding

An Interview with The Archbishop of Canterbury | Rowan Williams

The Common Word Dossier

An Interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury

The Head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, speaks to Islamica about the challenges ahead in improving Christian-Muslim relations, and his concerns about the direction of the Christian community in an increasingly secular Britain

Islamica | 02 March 2009

ISLAMICA: In your speech at the Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture 2007, organized by the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS), in conjunction with Lambeth Palace, you speak about Islam, Christianity and pluralism. The late Dr Badawi was an ardent proponent of interfaith understanding. Given your experience of the Anglican and Muslim communities, what, in your view, would be the actionable priorities from which we can derive measurable improvements in interfaith understanding?

DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: The two main priorities are at two different levels. At the level of theory, I think we need to go on talking more about our understanding of faith in society: Christians tend to see Muslims as making no distinction between the religious and the political; Muslims tend to see Christians as having no effective doctrine of social morality. At the level of practice, it has to be learning how to inhabit a neighborhood together—how to work together for a moral and humane environment at street level, at city level and in the international context. These questions come together when we try and think through the relation between divine law and the law of the society we’re actually in, for example; or when we reflect on what God’s view is of economic justice and what our current global economy takes for granted. How do we live with the awareness that divine and human law don’t always fit together, without assuming that the only answers are “privatized” religion (a typical Christian temptation), or some attempt at theocracy (a certain kind of Muslim temptation)? How do we work with what is constructive and God-oriented in our social environment, neither ignoring it nor seeking to take it over and dominate it?

The Chair of AMSS UK, Dr Anas al-Shaikh-Ali, spoke at length of the dangers of succumbing to a “climate of fear” and education as the prima facie force of reform. In your own assessment of rising levels of Islamophobia, how far do you believe focusing on effective change through the national curricula is a viable long-term strategy?

It is definitely a long-term strategy, but we need such long-term vision in a world of quick fixes. But it won’t work if the study of Islam becomes the study of some exotic and alien thing. Muslims living in the West and coping with the often-chaotic Western cultural agenda honestly and creatively are the best educators in this connection. Young non-Muslims in schools need to hear from the real-life young, educated and professional Muslims in their environment, not just to have a picture of distant cultures.

The late Dr Zaki Badawi’s visionary leadership of The Muslim College included establishment of interfaith courses to consolidate multicultural understanding and effect intelligent, and enlightened discourse with members of other faiths. In your opinion what wider implications does an award like the Building Bridges Award, presented to you by the AMSS UK at Badawi’s Memorial Lecture, have over and above that of recognizing the outstanding achievements of far-sighted individuals and the merits of their work?

I was humbled and rather astonished to receive the award; but what I think it recognizes is that there are contexts in which it is possible to discuss differences with candor in a spirit of friendship. It’s a happy coincidence that the annual seminar I chair on Christian-Muslim dialogue—a seminar in which Zaki was a deeply valued member—is also called “Building Bridges”. Zaki was always keen to insist that Muslims should learn from Christians about Christianity just as Christians should learn from Muslims about Islam—so that we don’t assume too quickly that we know what the other is talking about! But that means facing our differences with patience—taking real time to understand.

In recent times, there has been a general rise in evangelical movements across the various Christian denominations and increasingly thorny questions posed by progressive theologians, together with the reassertion of conservative faith perspectives, in particular, from Africa, South America and Asia. As head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, how do you propose to address the challenges of maintaining doctrinal unity across this broad spectrum?

I wish I had a neat answer to this! But for me the doctrinal essentials are already contained within the actions we perform—in the sacraments and the disciplines of prayer. When we find ourselves saying things that make nonsense of these basic practices, we have left the doctrinal heart of things behind. And when we find ourselves reading our Scriptures in ways that are in tension with these practices, something has gone wrong. So my constant hope is to bring people back to these essentials—most of all to the central belief that the Christian Church exists not by human choice and planning but because of a specific action and call uttered by God in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If we believe this, we may find it possible to argue our other differences within the Church a bit more patiently. It isn’t just a standoff between people with a “conservative” attitude to doctrine and people who are “liberal”—that’s a lazy bit of journalistic labelling. It’s to do with where you see the centre of things—in ideas alone or in those ideas embodied in the shape of common life and prayer and the constant acknowledgement of our indebtedness to God.

With the emergence of modernity, the values of individualism and freedom of expression have become defining qualities of “enlightened” societies. This seems to have led to tensions between institutionalized interpretation of religion and an increasingly personalized interpretation. Though, of course, all religions must, at some level, operate in the personal domain, it still seems important to strike the right balance between institutionally informed scholarship and individualism. This seems to affect certainly both Christianity and Islam. How do you see this challenge and how do you expect to address it?

This relates very directly to the preceding question, doesn’t it? There is a tendency to approach religious faith in a “consumerist” spirit—what can I get from it?—and to ignore the element of a call to service and loving devotion. Christianity and Islam both have a major task in challenging pure individualism: not in the name of suppressing diversity or liberty of thought, but so as to demonstrate that the fulfillment of the person’s destiny is a shared wisdom, not just an individual set of convictions. One of my favorite Christian writers said that it was crucial to distinguish between the individual and the person—the person being the individual when he or she has grown up into the fullness of relationship with others and with God.

Today, we see some theological schools having their conception of God subordinated to scientific principles and subject to the Laws of Nature rather than being, let’s say, to their Creator. Yet others are comfortable with a divide, externalizing God from His Creation and therefore not subject to His Laws of Nature. What is your perspective on this?

For traditional Christians—and in this respect I am certainly one—the Law of God, both in the processes of nature and in the ordering of human affairs, flows from and reflects the Being of God. God is not subject to any external law or force, and so is the source of all law; yet this does not mean that His Law is only the decision of an arbitrary eternal will. He wills in accordance with His own nature; His commands are the free and untrammelled expression of what He is. I think some of the medieval discussions in which Christian, Jewish and Muslim thinkers were all involved bring this out very clearly. All our traditions have some schools or elements that stress divine will and can make it sound arbitrary or irrational; but all also have elements that connect will and divine nature.

Recently we have heard an increasing amount of voices declaring that the God of Muslims is different from the God of Christianity and Judaism. Others continue to underscore that the God of Muhammad is the God of Abraham and of Jesus (peace be upon them all). Within each of the Abrahamic faiths, while there are debates about nuanced differences of the conception of God, there has traditionally been agreement about His being the same Entity. Do you conceive of God as the same Entity across the three monotheistic faiths?

This is a more complex question than it may seem to be. Certainly, when I look at the way in which God is understood in the Abrahamic faiths, it seems to be the same kind of being that is spoken of—eternal and free and purposive, just and compassionate, sovereign over the universe. We all agree about the divine nature, it seems, and we have much of the same history in common. But between the three monotheistic faiths, there is evident disagreement about how to speak of the divine person. For Christians, it is impossible to speak of—or speak to—God without the acknowledgement of the divine agency in Jesus bestowing upon us through the divine Spirit the freedom to call God our Father. We think in terms of God as first a source of life, but then also as an eternal response to that source—both a giving and a receiving within God’s life, with Jesus Christ as the historical embodiment of that everlasting response of loving devotion to the everlasting gift—and also as the “overflowing” of that divine loving mutuality in the Spirit. And so we speak of God in “three persons”—a very misleading phrase in many respects, as it doesn’t mean that God is three individuals, or that the “real” God is accompanied by lesser beings. It’s more that God is eternally actual in a threefold movement and interrelation, like a chord of music. So I recognize that we are speaking about the same divine nature; yet when we pray a real difference appears. It is this closeness in thinking about what God is and the difference in how we understand our relation with Him and the character of His personal action that makes the dialogue so absorbingly interesting and challenging. I have several times had to speak about basic Christian doctrines in a Muslim context, and the great challenge is to see if I can make what I’ve just been saying at all intelligible to the philosophically educated Muslim. That for me is an enlargement and enrichment in itself.

Since 9/11, Muslims have been feeling increasingly beleaguered. We, the mainstream Muslims, seem to be caught between on one side the indiscriminate collateral damage befalling us from the War on Terror and on the other the efforts of extremists within Islam to define themselves and their religion in one-dimensionally hateful terms. Indeed the War on Terror and the extreme Islamists seem to feed off each other, consuming the middle ground in the process. Many attempts have been made by mainstream Muslims such as with the Amman Message without “moving the needle” or getting noticed more broadly. In your view, what other actions can mainstream Muslims take to help unwind this destructive process and make their voices heard?

I think it is important to help people understand that many Muslim “radicals” are those who have largely turned their backs on the actual tradition and history of Islam, repudiating the whole history of interpretation and discovery—very much like the Christian fundamentalists who behave as if there had never been a history of reading and discussing the Bible. But I think also—and I hope I speak with proper caution and humility here—it matters that the rest of the world hears Muslim voices that are not trapped in a narrow self-image as victims. The reduction of a whole complex set of global conflicts to a series of variations on one theme, the victimisation of the Islamic world, leaves many outside Islam baffled and frustrated. Granted the absolutely un-deniable fact of huge anti-Muslim prejudice and the rhetoric of some in power in the West, the truth is surely more complex. Both the Western Christian and post-Christian world and the Islamic world in the West and East need to be self-critical about their history; both need to get out of reactive and resentful postures. And, to go back to an earlier answer, the active presence of the young and educated Muslim in public debate and in the processes of education and opinion forming is going to be crucial to moving beyond the reactive rhetoric of mutual blame.

What ought to be the role of religion in British public life in the 21st century? Is the emphasis upon restating core Christian values as the bedrock of the nation’s spiritual inheritance, or is it upon an inclusive Christian leadership of public religion in an increasingly multifaith Britain?

We need to be clear that communities of faith are primary contributors to the health and openness of society; and that means that we must continue to challenge the widespread idea, connected to the French variety of secularism, that religion should never be seen in public. A sensible political order, I believe, is one in which the state secures the liberty of religious groups and their freedom of conscience, but also engages them in collaborative projects, educational and social, for the common welfare. In an historically Christian country, where the Church has a specific public identity and therefore a particular sort of “leverage”, it’s natural that the Church should be in something of a coordinating role here: the fact that the Church of England has representation in every community still means something. But this has to be fleshed out—as in practice it regularly is—by the Church being willing to act at times as the defender or advocate of religious minorities in the public sphere. I’m a bit cautious about the language of promoting “Christian values” if those values are seen as exclusive of others or as denying what we actually share with the other faiths. But equally I’m not keen on a pluralism that pretends we haven’t got a largely Christian history or that refuses to use the resources of the mainstream churches creatively in our public life. A culture that recognises its dominantly Christian roots as a matter of history certainly doesn’t have to be hostile towards minorities or ideologically oppressive. I think we have a reasonably good balance in the UK about this; the threat is from a historically and religiously illiterate secularism which imagines that, if we are a “multifaith” society, this means that all religions are equally irrelevant and equally to be tolerated as private eccentricities. Neither the Church nor Islam can regard this as the right way forward. I am strongly committed to the idea that the Church has to use its resources for the sake of all communities of faith in Britain, so that all may play their proper role in public. The support that has been forthcoming from many Christians for Muslim schools is a good example.

As the Vatican has done previously, will the Church of England seek to state in clear theological terms the relationship between Islam and Christianity, as it rightly does quite naturally with Judaism, in the 2008 Lambeth Conference?

­As it happens, we have been working on a document that is meant to clarify our interfaith vision, and we hope it will be discussed at the Lambeth Conference. It is important to remember, though, that the Anglican Church worldwide is a far less institutionally unified body than the Roman Catholic Church, so that we don’t generally have completely binding statements. The important work is done by the international networks of the Anglican Communion, in this case our interfaith network, which seeks constantly to build relations and strengthen local cooperation.

Is the government’s rebalancing of its relationship with British Muslims, in counter-terrorism terms in autumn 2006, as stated by the Minister for Communities and Local Government, unbalancing relations between faith communities in the UK? And if so, how ought the Church of England and the other faith communities respond?

I’d guess that a British Muslim, faced with some of the governmental language of recent months and years, might well feel that he or she was being treated as primarily a problem, and that they might equally feel that it would be welcome to be regarded as simply a particular kind of citizen among other kinds of citizens. I wish we could get to this point. And I’d like the government to think about how it positively encourages Muslim citizenship not only by worrying about it as an issue but by providing—as the Prime Minister has said—a social and international vision that people of deep moral and religious conviction think worth supporting.

Without wishing to appear boastful, the readership of Islamica Magazine tends to be open-minded, intellectually discerning and spiritually aware. Beyond the scope of your answers to the foregoing questions, what would be your most important message to them?

I’d refer back to the very first answer. Carry on contributing to public debate at every level about these basic issues of common moral vision in society; don’t be afraid of self-criticism; in every context, ask, “How do I, with others of different conviction, help to build an inhabitable human neighborhood?”

Do you believe that the Common Word document recently endorsed by 138 leading Muslim clerics and leaders could be instrumental in promoting reconciliation between Muslims and Christians?

The Common Word statement is a welcome contribution, not least because it quotes Jewish and Christian scripture directly and so tries to engage other faiths in their own terms and on their ground, which is essential to proper dialogue. I’m sure it will open some new doors in constructive relations between us.

Dr Rowan Williams was Professor of Theology at Oxford; he was made Bishop of Monmouth and then Archbishop of Wales before becoming Head of the Anglican Church as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002. He has written works on theology, spirituality and poetry- Islamica Magazine

Is violence genetically embedded in Islam? In response to Pope Benedict’s “violence and not acting reasonably is contrary to God nature.”

“The Qur‘an must be put back into the hands of every Muslim…”

by Khaled Fouad Allam

The attacks on the Twin Towers perpetrated by Al Qaeda, the massacre of the children in Beslan by a Chechen fundamentalist group, and the massacres in Algeria for which the GIA has claimed responsibility – are these a product of Islam as such, or are they a product of the present historical condition of Islam? Is violence really genetically embedded in Islam?

Pope Benedict XVI tried to respond to this serious and disturbing question from his former place as a professor in Regensburg by citing suras and verses from the Qur’an, and stories about the prophet Mohammed.

The Holy Father cited a famous verse from the longest sura in the Qur’an, the ‘Cow’ sura, composed of 286 verses. This is a sura which – to clarify the pope’s assertion – is not part of the suras of Mecca, but rather of those of Medina: “No coercion in matters of faith.”

It must be recalled that the Qur’an is composed of 114 chapters called suras, and is subdivided internally according to the origin of the suras. The suras called Meccan correspond to the beginning of the Qur’anic revelation, and depict a solitary Prophet, one without the awareness of forming a community, a development that would take place from 622 until 632, the date of the Prophet’s death.

In the Medina period, in which the first Islamic community was structured, the revelation continues. For Mulims, this means that prophecy continues to inspire the community. The suras called Medinan are the ones that structured Islam from the juridical, political, and social point of view, and are of a less eschatological character than the Meccan ones.

The difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras is, therefore, extremely important, because various debates on this point have arisen within Islam. For example, a few years ago a famous Sudanese theologian and intellectual, Mohammed Taha, asserted that the Medinan suras, which are the most political suras of the Qur’an, correspond to the mental and psychological context of seventh-century Islam, and that the prophet Mohammed, never having seen the definitive compilation of the text of the Qur’an, would probably not have included the Medinan suras in the Qur’an, but in another text.

Following these assertions, the Sudanese regime condemned Taha to death for apostasy, and he was hung in 1983.

The Holy Father is thus bringing up an immense problem concerning the Qur’an’s real position toward the question of violence.

The problem is truly complex, because the text of the Qur’an cannot be thought of like an ordinary book: it requires a special approach to be clarified and interpreted. The famous Averroes, in his treatise entitled “The harmony of religion and philosophy,” asserted: “There exist in the divine law, the Qur’an, passages that have an ulterior meaning, which men must interpret through rational demonstration, and cannot be interpreted literally.”

The tool of commentary on the Qur’an is essential. Already centuries ago, classical theology had brought to light the contradictions within the Qur’an among verses that cancel each other out, and resolved the issue by asserting that when two principles contradict each other, the positive principle overrides the negative one.

The famous verse cited by pope Benedict XVI can be read according to two opposite interpretations.

According to classical theology – and according to theology of the liberal strain – this verse should override all the verses that incite violence.

But today, in a situation characterized by the monopoly of neofundamentalist theology, it is that verse which is in fact abrogated, in the sense that many don’t take it into account at all, like the Salafi, for example.

The problem is therefore not so much what the Qur’an contains, but what inspiration human beings draw from it, from revelation. Because all societies produce violence, but not all of them resolve the question of violence using the same methods.

Christianity, for instance, as brilliantly demonstrated by René Girard, resolves the problem of violence through the figure of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion.

But in Islam, everything rests upon the ability of individual human beings to choose between good and evil, as a verse in the Qur’an says: “God does not change men’s way of life until they first change.”

But for this to happen, the Qur’an must be put back into the hands of every Muslim – which means breaking the terrible chain of fundamentalism that proclaims itself the only bearer of the truth.
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[The articlet was published on September 13 in the most important liberal Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. Its author is Khaled Fouad Allam, an Algerian-born Italian resident, professor of Islamic studies at the universities of Trieste and Urbino, and widely read and listened to in Catholic circles. The date of this commentary should be noted. The article was published the morning after the pope’s address in Regensburg, when much of the Muslim world had not yet unleashed the onslaught of invective and violent acts that would fill the newscasts of the following days, and force the Islamic voices not in agreement to be silent.]  –

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/87841?&eng=y

Alhaj’s note:

Emphasis is Alhaj’s and Allah knows better.

Pope’s Manuel II Paleologus: violence and not acting according to reason is contrary to God’s nature

Wikipedia: Pope Benedict XVI’s lecture

Extract:

The lecture on “faith and reason“, with references ranging from ancient Jewish and Greek thinking to Protestant theology and modern Secularity, focused mainly on Christianity and what Pope Benedict called the tendency to “exclude the question of God” from reason. Islam features in a part of the lecture: the Pope quoted strong criticism of Islam, which he described as being of a “startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded”.

In three paragraphs at the beginning of the speech, Pope Benedict quoted from and discussed an argument made by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in a 1391 dialogue with an “educated Persian” (who remained unnamed in the Pope’s lecture), as well as observations on this argument made by Theodore Khoury, the scholar whose edition of Manuel II’s dialogues the Pontiff was referencing. Pope Benedict used Manuel II’s argument in order to draw a distinction between the Christian view, as expressed by Manuel II, that “not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature”, and an Islamic view, as explained by Khoury, that God transcends concepts such as rationality, and his will, as Ibn Hazm stated, is not constrained by any principle, including rationality.

In part of his explication of this distinction, Pope Benedict referred to a specific aspect of Islam that Manuel II considered irrational, namely the practice of forced conversion. Specifically, the Pope (making clear that they were the Emperor’s words, not his own) quoted Manuel II Palaiologos as saying: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only bad and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Pontiff was comparing the Islamic teaching that “There is no compulsion in religion” with what Pope Benedict described as the newer teaching that allowed “spreading the faith through violence”; the latter teaching being offered by Pope Benedict as an unreasonable one, on the belief that religious conversion should take place through the use of reason. His larger point here was that, generally speaking, in Christianity, God is understood to act in accordance with reason, while in Islam, God’s absolute transcendence means that “God is not bound even by his own word”, and can act in ways contrary to reason, including self-contradiction. At the end of his lecture, the Pope said, “It is to the great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.”

Key paragraphs

Quoted below are the three paragraphs (of sixteen total) which discuss Islam in Pope Benedict’s lecture:

“I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on — perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara — by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between — as they were called — three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point — itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole — which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that sura 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: “For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Muslim R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.^{[4] “}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI_Islam_controversy

Note:

Emphasis is Alhaj’s

Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)

MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE

LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER

Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg Tuesday, 12 September 2006

Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections

Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned – the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason – this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H – controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the 8`(@H”. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, F×< 8`(T, with logos. Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (cf. Acts 16:6-10) – this vision can be interpreted as a “distillation” of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply declares “I am”, already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates’ attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: “I am”. This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria – the Septuagint – is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which – as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated – unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – “8@(46¬ 8″JD,\”", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity – a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack’s central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack’s goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the ew Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant’s “Critiques”, but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be “scientific” would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science”, so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector – the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

***

NOTE:

The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.

© Copyright 2006 – Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Note:

Emphasis is Alhaj’s

Islamica Magazine: interview with Samuel Huntington

by AMINA R. CHAUDARY

Noted Harvard political scientist, Professor Samuel Huntington, best known for his views on the clash of civilizations, died on 24th December 2008, aged 81. In one of his last interviews before his retirement from academia, he talked to Islamica Magazine about clashes, identities, and geopolitic — Editors

For 13 years, three words have dominated the discourse on cultural, international, and religious affairs as they relate to foreign policy in our times. The “clash of civilizations,” as argued by Harvard University Professor Samuel Huntington, has stirred heated debate across the globe, but particularly among many Muslim nations. His theory is often interpreted to proclaim a fundamental incompatibility between the “Christian West” and the “Muslim World.”  The scale of impact it has had on global politics is sometimes difficult to comprehend.  A Google search of “clash of civilizations,” for example, produced 2.62 million hits, and to this day, this famous phrase is quoted in newspapers, books, journals, and articles from around the world.  One of the most recent global acknowledgements of Huntington’s theory is from the United Nations, which under the patronage of Kofi Annan, launched an initiative called the “The Alliance of Civilizations” — presumably as a means of countering this “clash.”  The influence of Huntington’s ideas is readily apparent, and will most likely continue to remain at the forefront of international relations for decades.

I had the opportunity to sit with Professor Huntington and ask him to elaborate on this controversial theory. His home is small and quaint, a historic relic tucked away on a quiet brick-lined street in downtown Boston. One wouldn’t imagine that behind such a controversial and combative theory is someone so quiet and soft-spoken. He introduced me to his wife, kindly offered something to drink, and asked me about the weather. We then began to discuss politics of the day. After about an hour of discussion and questions, I came to better understand not only his famous theory, but also arguments from his more recent works.  I left with a better sense of his views and began to consider that the idea we know popularly to be the “clash of civilizations” may not be the thesis that Huntington originally conceived. Many use the “clash” as a way of supporting a line of reasoning that combines the Muslim world intoone monolithic entity, something he explicitly denies.

I was not sure what to expect before we began our discussion.  Nonetheless, I had a few questions that I dove right in to. I also decided to use “the Muslim World” as opposed to Muslim majority countries or any other simplified title, just to be consistent with his thesis and to facilitate the flow of our, what I hoped to be, engaging discussion.

AMINA CHAUDARY: I’d like to begin with a general question on your book “The Clash of Civilizations.” Your theory on the clash of civilizations argues that “current global politics should be understood as the result of deep-seated conflicts between the great cultures and religions of the world.” This thesis gained momentum as a result of Sept. 11, and now the war against terrorism is often defined in terms of the West against Islam as a fundamental clash between these two civilizations. Do you feel that your thesis is accurately used when describing the war against terrorism as a war of the West against Islam? If not, what modifications to that application of your theory would you make?

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: The argument in my book on the clash of civilization was well reflected in that short quote saying that the relations between countries in the coming decade are most likely to reflect their cultural commitments, their cultural ties and antagonism with other countries. Quite obviously power will continue to play a central role in global politics as it always does. But usually there is something else. In the 18th century in Europe, the issues to a large extent involved questions of monarchy and monarchy versus the emerging republican movements, first in America and then in France. In the 19th century it was basically nationality and people trying to define their nationalism and create states which would reflect their nationalism. In the 20th century, ideology came to the fore, largely, but not exclusively, as a result of the Russian Revolution and we have fascism, communism and liberal democracy competing with each other. Well that’s pretty much over.

The other two (fascism and communism) have not entirely disappeared but have been sidelined certainly, and liberal democracy has come to be accepted, in theory at least, around the world, if not always in practice. So the question really is what will be the central focus of global politics in the coming decades and my argument is that cultural identities and cultural antagonisms and affiliations will play not the only role but a major role. Countries will cooperate with each other, and are more likely to cooperate with each other when they share a common culture, as is most dramatically illustrated in the European Union. But other groupings of countries are emerging in East Asia and in South America. Basically, as I said, these politics will be oriented around, in large part, cultural similarities and cultural antagonism.

So, if your thesis entirely explains relations between states post 9/11, then how do you situate the alliance between, for example, Pakistan and the United States against Afghanistan for example, or similar types of relationships?

Well, obviously Pakistan and the U.S. are very different countries, but we have common geopolitical interests in preventing communist take over in Afghanistan and hence, now that Pakistan has a government that we can cooperate with, even though it is a military government, we are working together with them in order to promote our common interests. But obviously we also differ with Pakistan on a number of issues.

You said in your book, “For 45 years, the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other.” Some scholars have reacted to such an analysis by stating that making such a dichotomous distinction between the West and Islam implies that there is a great uniformity within those two categories. Additionally some argue that such a distinction implies that Islam does not exist within the Western world. I understand that this is a criticism you have often received. In general, how do you react to such an analysis?

The implication, which you say some people draw, is totally wrong. I don’t say that the West is united, I don’t suggest that. Obviously there are divisions within the West and divisions within Islam — there are different sects, different communities, different countries. So neither one is homogenous at all. But they do have things in common. People everywhere talk about Islam and the West. Presumably that has some relationship to reality, that these are entities that have some meaning and they do. Of course the core of that reality is differences in religion.

Is there any reconciliation or point of convergence between, as is often described, both sides of this “Iron Curtain”?

First, you say “both sides,” but as I said, both sides are divided and Western countries collaborate with Muslim countries and vice versa. I think it’s a mistake, let me just repeat, to think in terms of two homogenous sides starkly confronting each other. Global politics remains extremely complex and countries have different interests, which will also lead them to make what might seem as rather bizarre friends and allies. The U.S. has and still is cooperating with various military dictatorships around the world. Obviously we would prefer to see them democratized, but we are doing it because we have national interests, whether it’s working with Pakistan on Afghanistan or whatever.

You have also recently said that communism disintegrated because it relied on ideology as opposed to religion and culture as a means of binding a society together. So as a result, when people became disillusioned by that ideology, as they always do, the countries fell apart. Similarly, you have argued that as civilization changes in America, it has moved toward focusing on democratic liberalism as an ideology.

That always has been the American ideology.

Right. So how do you see this trend developing in America, in terms of the relation to the fall of the Soviet Union as they focused on communism as an ideology and what lessons do you think America should learn from that experience?

That’s a very interesting question. As I said, since the revolution of the 18th century, America has basically had an ideology of liberal democracy and constitutionalism.  Generally, in my other writings, however, I try to avoid the use of the term ideology to describe this. I talk of American beliefs and values. When you mention the word ideology, everyone has communism in the back of their minds, which was an entirely well formulated ideology and statement of belief. You read the Communist Manifesto and you know what the core of it is. What we have, however, is a looser set of values and beliefs, which have remained fairly constant for two and a half centuries or so.

And that’s really rather striking. Obviously changes and adaptations in it have occurred as a result of economic development, industrialization, the huge wave of immigrants that have come to this country, economic crisis, depression, and world wars — all of these have had an effect. But the core of the American set of beliefs has remained pretty constant. If one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence came back today, he would not be surprised about what Americans were saying and believing and articulating in their public statements. It would all sound rather familiar.

Other countries have gone through rather dramatic changes in outlook, from the clash of the monarchies and their replacement by republican regimes or communist regimes in various parts of Eurasia.  Nationalism is a central ideology for people who are trying to establish their own states in which they can play a dominant role. So as far as ideology or political beliefs are concerned, countries are very different. In addition, of course, two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, as you said, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

So how do you think the Muslim world fares in this regard?

I think what I mentioned has all had an impact on the Muslim world and I think we’ve seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change. Obviously Muslim societies, like societies elsewhere, are becoming increasingly urban, many are becoming industrial, but since so many have oil and gas, they don’t have a great impetus. But again, the revenue that natural resources produce gives them the capability and so countries like Iran are beginning to develop an industrial component.

Okay, so given the interconnected world of our day, how do you feel that the Western and Muslim worlds can coexist in a mutually cooperative environment? You state in your book that some Westerners have argued that the Western opposition is not to Islam but to Islamic extremists. But you then say, “1,400 years of history demonstrate otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other.” Do you believe that the “Muslim World” and the “Christian West” will come to a point of partnership?

Again, I think it’s hard to talk about the Muslim world and Christian world as blocks. There will be associations and partnerships between some Muslim countries and some Christian countries. Those already exist. And they may shift as different regimes come and go and interests change. I don’t think it is all that useful to think in terms of those two solid blocks.

Do you think that the “Islamic civilization” will become increasingly coherent in the future?

Again, that is an interesting question. Certainly we’ve seen movements in that direction and certainly there are various trans-Islamic political movements, which try to appeal to Muslims in all societies. I am doubtful that there will be any sort of real coherence of Muslim societies into a single political system run by an elected or non-elected group of leaders. But I think we can expect leaders of Muslim societies to cooperate with each other on many issues just as Western societies cooperate with each other. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Muslim or at least Arab countries developing some form of organization comparable to the European Union. I don’t think that’s very likely, but it conceivably could happen.

So moving on from the clash of civilizations, I’d like to talk on a broader level about the “Western-Muslim” world relations. You say in your book, “Islamic culture explains, in large part, the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world.”  It is not uncommon to hear some scholars argue that Islam is antithetical to democracy. Others counter this argument by stating that the majority of the Muslim world is, it seems, east of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Given that a large part of the Muslim world is participating in democracies — Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, and even India are very strong democracies — do you then think that Islam plays a role in the lack of democracy that we see in parts of the Muslim world? Do you think that this is in stark contrast to their Islamic heritage or can it be somehow connected to it?

I don’t know what the answer to that question is because I’m not an expert on Islam, but it is striking the relative slowness with which Muslim countries, particularly Arab countries, have moved toward democracy. Their cultural heritage and their ideologies may be in part responsible. The colonial experience they all went through may be a factor in the fight against Western domination, British, French or whatever. They were until recently largely rural societies with land owning governing elites in most of them. I think they are certainly moving toward urbanization and much more pluralistic political systems. In almost every Muslim country, that is occurring. Obviously they are increasing their involvement with non-Muslim societies. One peak aspect of this, of course, is the migration of Muslims into Europe.

Right, I’ll have a question about that in a bit, but let me ask you another one first. Your colleagues Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have recently produced a controversial thesis about the Israeli lobby and international relations, arguing that U.S. foreign policy is disproportionately affected by pro-Israeli groups and ultimately not in the best interest of America. How do you evaluate their argument and do you think it has any merit?

They are both extremely knowledgeable and serious scholars so I think it’s an argument that other people have to take seriously. They are not polemicists by any means. I am not entirely persuaded by their argument, but I guess the word that caught my attention is “disproportionately.” I don’t know how you judge that. I mean U.S. foreign policy is in every area impacted by ethnic groups of one sort or another as well as economic groups and regional groups. There has been an Irish lobby that has impacted U.S. foreign policy for a century and a half, and at times made our relations with Great Britain very difficult. Other comparable lobbies exist. So I don’t think that the Israeli lobby is unique. It may differ from the others in the extent by which it is focused on just one issue, which is the survival of Israel, which is understandable, and promoting Israeli development and aid to Israel, and so forth and so on.

There have been many diplomats, scholars, and even human rights activists who all argue that if the tension between Israel and Palestine were resolved, there would be a more stable and peaceful Middle East. Do you believe that the reason for instability is directly and primarily linked to this tension between Israelis and Palestinians?

I don’t know what they are referring to when they talk of instability. Obviously there have been and still are fault lines of conflict in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians, but most of them, of course, have previously been between Israel and Egypt, the struggles between various religious factions in Lebanon, differences between Baathist regimes that exist and opposition movements and so forth. There are lots of conflicts going on in the Middle East. It is unclear as to which country will emerge, if any, as the dominant or hegemonic power in the Middle East.

In South America we have Brazil; in Africa we have South Africa; in Central Africa we have Nigeria; in East Asia we have China and Japan; South Asia, India. Now what is the comparable power in the Middle East? Israel has military capabilities including nuclear weapons, far surpassing any other power in the Middle East, but it’s a small country. The rest of the Middle Eastern peoples are Muslim and Israelis are not, so it is hardly in any position to become the leading power. I mentioned Iran as a possibility. Iran of course is Shiite, while the bulk of the Arabs are Sunni, that is a problem or could be a problem.

Also, there is the simple fact that Iran is non-Arab and most of the Muslims in the Middle East are Arab.  Then there is the question of Turkey, which is an important state, but again it’s not Arab and it has very concrete interests in the oil and gas in northern Iraq and in securing borders against secessionist movements. What are the prospects for an Arab state serving a leading role comparable to the role that other states place in other regions? There is no obvious candidate. Saudi Arabia has the money but a relatively small population. Iraq was a great potential leader, as a sizable country with great oil resources and a highly educated population, but it went off in the wrong direction. Maybe Iraq will come back and become the dominant power among Arab countries. That seems to me as conceivable.

How about Turkey? As you mentioned, they see themselves as a bridge between the Western world and the Muslim world.

I wouldn’t put a great deal of emphasis on that. Turkey has its own interests and historically, Turkey conquered most of the Arab world, and the Arabs had to fight wars of liberation to free themselves from the Turks. That’s in the past and that doesn’t necessarily shape what is going on but it’s there and it’s there in people’s memories. The Turks, as I said, seem to have very specific interests, particularly in those portions of those Arab countries that border Turkey.

Do you think it’s in the interest of U.S. foreign policy to ensure that no hegemonic, at least regionally hegemonic, leader does arise in that region?

That all depends on who that hegemonic leader is. I think in theory, the United States finds it much easier to deal with situations where there is a leading country. You can go to the leaders of that country and say, for example, to India, “There are all these problems in Bangladesh, we really have to do something about it, what do you suggest we can do to work out a common policy?” But when you don’t have the equivalent of India, you have to go capital to capital trying to put together a coalition, which is extraordinarily difficult, especially in the Arab world, because of the historic rivalries and branches of Islam.

If you were to write this thesis 100 years from now, would you still argue that there is a clash of civilizations between the Western and Islamic world?

I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen 100 years from now.

Well, do you think that this thesis is historically specific to contemporary times?

Well, I wrote that book in the 1980s. I was studying global politics and teaching courses on global politics and became convinced that the ideas I set forth in my “Clash of Civilizations” article in 1993 were ideas that deserved attention and many elaboration. They obviously got a lot of attention, much of it critical, but that showed they had a certain bite. So when I went on to elaborate them in the book, I did so in a more systematic way.

In this final part of the interview, I would like to address identity and its relation to global politics. Your colleague Amartya Sen at Harvard recently published a book, “Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny,” in which he criticizes your argument along the lines that “identity is not destiny” and that each individual can construct and reconstruct chosen identities. He argues that the clash of civilizations theory comes from “miniaturization of human beings,” meaning that all human beings are reduced to “unique and choiceless identity made to fit into the boxes of civilization.”  In other words, Sen argues that humans have the ability to define themselves in numerous other ways. What is your perspective on citizens who have multiple identities?

I think that statement by Amartya Sen is totally wrong. I never argue that and I realize that people have multiple identities. What I argue in my book, as I indicated earlier, is that the basis of association and antagonism among countries has changed over time. In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics. I first elaborated this idea over 10 years ago, and much of what I said has been validated during that time.

How do you negotiate people with multiple identities, say, a Muslim or a Jewish person who lives in America and who may have these two identities. How do they negotiate that?

They work out accommodations and that’s been done for the past two or three centuries at least. When you have increased migration of peoples and ethnic and religious minorities, you develop a set of rules and language the larger society can accept and the minority community can accept. The larger society has to recognize some degree of autonomy for the minority: the right to practice their own religion and way of life and to some extent their language. Many of the most difficult questions concerning the role of ethnic minorities centers on language. To what extent are they educated in their own language or in the national language? To what extent does the society formally or informally become a country of two national languages? Or is only one language used in the public proceedings, courts, legislatures, executive branch, and politics? These, as we know, can become very tricky issues.

Your argument focuses on identity as one of the core movers in global politics. How do you think that fundamentalism — the radical idea that one’s own identity is superior to all others — influences global politics today? Do you think there is a particular radicalism that is only associated with Islam or do you think it exists in all faiths?

I think fundamentalism is what you said: this radical attitude toward one’s own identity and civilization as compared to other people’s identities and cultures. Fundamentalist tendencies and movements existed, so far as I know, in all societies and civilizations. Certainly here in the U.S., we’ve had fundamentalist movements that have taken very critical and hostile attitudes toward immigration and the assimilation of immigrants into our society and culture. So these tendencies are fairly universal. The problem is what if they get out of hand and become the dominant factor in a society, which can only lead to the oppression of minorities or even to war with neighboring societies with differing cultures. That’s why it seems to me it’s important to try to keep these tendencies toward extremism under control.

In considering your most recent book, why are there more tensions among Muslims and other groups in European societies as opposed to America, where Muslims seem to be better adjusted? How would this relate to your thesis about identity and culture in regard to Hispanic communities in the United States?

First of all, the biggest difference as far as Muslims in Europe and America are concerned is that the number of Muslims in America is small compared to the number in Europe. Secondly, those that are here have come across several thousands of miles of oceans, not just walking across the border or taking a short boat ride across the Mediterranean. We don’t border on Muslim countries. European countries do and that seems to be a fundamental difference.

As you might have suggested, how does the position of Muslims compare to the position of Hispanics in the United States. That’s an interesting question. I think that again there are fundamental differences, however, because the United States has been an immigrant country. The Hispanics who come here are largely from Mexico and South America. They are Catholics, but that is an American religion. One-third of our population is Catholic so that does not have the same impact as Muslims coming into Europe. They speak Spanish or Portuguese, which are languages we are familiar with, so it doesn’t seem to pose the same types of problems as Arabic-speaking Muslims do in Europe. The major difference for us with respect to Hispanic immigration is that it is so large and that it is coming from neighboring countries rather than those countries off the Atlantic or Pacific. That creates different issues and different problems for us as compared to the past. It is still very different, however, from the situation in Europe where we see people with a very different non-European religion coming from neighboring countries.

As a final thought, do you think your thesis, particularly the clash of civilizations theory, is used by people for their own agendas?

Oh absolutely, all the time. There isn’t much I can do about that. In the past, some of my other writings have also set forth ideas and arguments that people have found controversial and have criticized. Initially, with respect to these past writings, I would try to respond to them, but by doing so, I would call attention to their arguments. Instead of having one article in one magazine, we would have two or three articles in separate magazines and the whole thing would be blown out of proportion. So, except under rare circumstances, I don’t write responses to criticism.

What is one place that you’ve traveled to that you most enjoyed? Have you ever traveled to any parts of the Muslim world?

When I think of countries that I enjoyed visiting, that I would want to go back to, Italy would be one, Japan would be another. I’ve only been to Indonesia once or twice and it seems like such a fascinating country. I guess India certainly. I’ve been to Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait for brief visits at conferences, and they are very interesting countries.

What is one thing about you that most people would be surprised to know?

A lot of people tend to think I’m a dogmatic ideologue, which I’m not.

In general, we hope that this will give people a better idea of what you think as opposed to what everyone else thinks you think.

I understand that and I am very grateful to you for trying to do that.

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University and author of many renowned books including “Political Order in Changing Societies” (1968), “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century” (1991), “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” (1996), and “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004). He is a graduate from Yale and Harvard universities.

____________________

Amina R. Chaudary is a graduate student at Columbia University earning a master’s degree in human rights policy as well as a master’s in liberal arts in government from Harvard University. She has worked in the field of human rights for over five years at organizations such as Oxfam, Women Waging Peace, and others – Islamica Magazine

Ref:

[http://www.islamicamagazine.com/Issue-17/An-Interview-with-Samuel-Huntington.html]

Praying beads/rosaries

Paternosters

Islamic rosaries

Friday, November 03, 2006

The earliest history of the Christian rosary or paternoster is something of a scholastic black hole — there are wisps of data spiraling into the center, but very little scholarship has come out. I don’t know of anyone who has investigated this early history in depth. But the early of history of Islamic prayer beads seems, as far as I can tell, to be an even bigger, blacker black hole. Most of the information I can find takes Islamic prayer beads for granted as something Muslims have “always” had, much like the state of Christian rosary scholarship several decades ago.

Part of the reason I have this impression is undoubtedly because I don’t read or speak the relevant languages of the main Islamic cultural areas, most notably Arabic. I can testify that, at least, very little has been published in English about Islamic rosaries. I am also not myself a Muslim, so there are undoubtedly sources of information that I wouldn’t know about. But I’ve asked a few Islamic scholars for help, and they have also come up blank. If anyone out there has solid information on Islamic rosaries before about 1600 AD, or 1000 AH in the Islamic dating system, I’d love to know about it.

One of the persistent myths about the European Middle Ages is the idea that the Christian Crusaders brought back new customs and ideas from their contact with Islam. In many cases this is demonstrably not true, because there is already evidence in Europe of those ideas before the Crusades. That seems to be the case with the concept of prayer beads as well. There are not a lot of earlier records of Christians using prayer beads, but there are a few.

In fact, there has been some speculation that Muslims got the idea of counting prayers on a string of beads from Christian sources — specifically from the Eastern Christian traditions, which tend to use strings of 99 or 100 beads. The Muslim tasbih or rosary is generally either 99 or 33 beads long, as opposed to the usual European preference for groups of 10 or 50.

As far as I know, prayer beads are not mentioned in the Koran. But the idea may very well have been known to the Prophet’s early followers. Collections of sayings attributed to the Prophet, known as hadith, are a major source of information about Islamic custom, thought and culture, and translations of these are appearing on the Internet, so I went looking to see what I could find.

From this translation of the Partial Sunan Abu Dawud, I found:

Book 8, Number 1495:
Narrated Sa’d ibn AbuWaqqas:

Once Sa’d, with the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him), visited a woman in front of whom were some date-stones or pebbles which she was using as a rosary to glorify Allah. He (the Prophet) said: I tell you something which would be easier (or more excellent) for you than that. He said (it consisted of saying): “Glory be to Allah” as many times as the number of that which He has created in Heaven; “Glory be to Allah” as many times as the number of that which He has created on Earth; “Glory be to Allah” as many times as the number of that which He has created between them; “Glory be to Allah” as many times as the number of that which He is creating; “Allah is most great” a similar number of times; “Praise (be to Allah)” a similar number of times; and “There is no god but Allah” a similar number of times; “There is no might and no power except in Allah” a similar number of times.

Book 8, Number 1496:
Narrated Yusayrah, mother of Yasir:

The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) commanded them (the women emigrants) to be regular (in remembering Allah by saying): “Allah is most great”; “Glory be to the King, the Holy”; “there is no god but Allah”; and that they should count them on fingers, for they (the fingers) will be questioned and asked to speak.

Book 8, Number 1497:
Narrated Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-’As:

I saw the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) counting the glorification of Allah on fingers.

This passage seems to be the main source for the belief that counted prayers go back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed himself. But you’ll note that the first part of it does not, in fact, involve counting, since the numbers recommended are quantities like “as many times as the number of that which He has created in Heaven” which is infinite or nearly so. (Compare the Christian “Pray without ceasing.”)

The number 33 seems to come from another passage in the same collection:

Book 8, Number 1499:
Narrated AbuHurayrah:

AbuDharr said: Prophet of Allah. The wealthy people have all the rewards; they pray as we pray; they fast as we fast; and they have surplus wealth which they give in charity; but we have no wealth which we may give in charity.

The Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) said: AbuDharr, should I not teach you phrases by which you acquire the rank of those who excel you? No one can acquire your rank except one who acts like you.

He said: Why not, Apostle of Allah? He said: Exalt Allah (say: Allah is Most Great) after each prayer thirty-three times; and praise Him (say: Praise be to Allah) thirty-three times; and glorify Him (say: Glory be to Allah) thirty-three times, and end it by saying, “There is no god but Allah alone, there is no partner, to Him belongs the Kingdom, to Him praise is due and He has power over everything”. His sins will be forgiven, even if they are like the foam of the sea. Paternosters