Dialogue with Muslims

[Trebor135]

I’m sorry; that was meant as the general ‘you’.

No worries.

How could a person (in this case the author you’ve quoted who used George Habash as an example of a supposed latent tendency in the Christian minorities to “display greater militancy than the Muslim majority”) make such a comparison, even implicitly. It boggles my mind. The Islamic militants are, after all, Islamic. Their religious motives, while certainly not being the sum of their motivations, are not incidental. Christian militants in the Middle East, by and large, are secularists. Heck, they by and large invented “Arab nationalism” as a secular alternative to the Islamic/theocractic militancy that otherwise flourishes in the region (see: George Habash, Jirji Zeydan, Michel Aflaq, etc).

I get what you’re saying now. Actually, I took him to be making a comparison between the Muslim majority and Christian minority as the religio-cultural blocs they were in the 1960s and 1970s Middle East, when Islamism had not become the dominant ideology in the region. Habash and his ilk came to prominence around the same time as Arafat and his comrades, all of whom subscribed to Arab nationalism. These figures and groups were on the ascent decades before the bouts of anti-Christian violence on the part of their Muslim neighbours that we now witness all too frequently, and which didn’t seem to have been on the author’s mind, became commonplace.

I don’t think it’s nearly that simple, but okay.

Well, I neglected to mention–now that I think about it–the presence of four hundred thousand refugees who streamed in from the Holy Land in 1948 to find sanctuary in a religious-patchwork country of a few million souls, the entrance of side-switching Syria into the conflict early on in 1976, the establishment by the PLO of a virtual state within a state, the combat going on between Palestinian militants and their Israeli foes, the long-term occupation by the Zionist state of South Lebanon after its invasion of 1982, the negotiating/signing of a failed Beirut-Tel Aviv “peace treaty” by a Maronite president, and the violent intra-Muslim/intra-Christian squabbling. All of these factors sparked the fire and/or kept it burning. Would you like to amend that list?

My comment was really limited to why I don’t think George Habash is a good example of any kind of latent radical tendency among the Christians that is comparable to that of the Islamic radicals (primarily because I don’t think there is such a Christian tendency; there can be such a secular nationalist tendency that can even work together with Islamist goals, as in the pre-Ataturk Turkey of the “Young Turks” that saw the destruction of the Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks at the turn of the last century, but secular nationalism is not Christianity).

I agree that the term “Christian” doesn’t necessarily fit when applied to Habash and his ilk, and the label “secular” may not be entirely accurate when describing the Young Turks. (The Christian Armenians were slaughtered en masse in 1915, whereas under Atatürk’s republic the Muslim Kurds were allowed to live, but forbidden to speak their language up to 1991, with the ban continuing “in schools, parliament and other official settings on the grounds that it would divide the country along ethnic lines” as late as 2009.)

Worth remembering, too, is that The journalist who penned the obituary for Habash, for a British newspaper, would have been operating under the typical Western assumptions about religion (which either over- or under-emphasize its role), so to comment on the head of the FLFP’s actions with reference to the faith practiced by his family in a less-than-accurate manner is little surprise.

I do not care to discuss the politics of al-Qaeda and their ilk. That presupposes a level of rationality and willingness to compromise that I don’t think we should assume that all who follow such a path possess. They are extremists, after all.

The folks in al-Qa`ida are not the sort that anyone should want to have to cut a deal with. The West has been offered truces, but how would it be possible for compliance by both sides to be measured and policed?

What I’m suggesting is that we have to take into account what bin Ladin and his comrades point to as their grievances and, even more important, to evaluate how much traction those issues have among their coreligionists. As I recall, one comprehensive poll found that eighty percent of the world’s Muslims viewed the U.S. (or the West?) as waging a war on Islam–this is the kind of statistic that merits our profound concern. I won’t say more on the issue considering that we’re going off topic and you prefer not to enter into such thorny territory.

 

[Trebor135]

I see. I apologize for misunderstanding you.

Ma fish mushkila (no problem). I’ll learn to write more clearly.

You are right there are not as many native-born Christians in the Gulf region as expatriates.

Well, I was under the impression that the Arab Christians on the Peninsula had all converted or emigrated by now. Who are these “native-born” Christians in the region–the hidden harvest of Fr. Boutros?

It seems that the Qatar choir in your video are Lebanese,

I figured they were Maronite Catholics given that the rosary features in their name.

and the “related videos” has Konkani (Indian Catholic) hymn performances from inside the same church. Pretty neat to see, really.

Indeed. Christians of different cultures and communions seem to get along better–something one can’t really be opposed to–when they’re in the minority.

 

[Trebor135]

I don’t recommend that Christians bring up any particular issues. From elsewhere in the same post you are responding to (emphasis added):

…

It was the following paragraph (in post #107) that prompted my question:

The only way to engage Muslims in any sort of worthwhile dialogue is to affirm the truth of your own faith, not over or against what they themselves believe, but as something operating outside of the bounds of Islamic theology and epistemology. Every single Muslim I have ever known who has come to embrace Christianity (and they are not many, sadly) has done so not by trying to reach it by reasoning from what Islam says (which is, of course, not possible, as the two religions make mutually exclusive claims), but by coming to see Christianity as true on its own merits. That we have the true God that they do not have. Put simply, you can’t get to Christianity from Islam as Islam is not merely Christianity with a few essential points disclaimed that you, the apologist, then have to prove. It requires a transfiguration of the mind of the believer that you will not get from all the Trinitarian analogies in the world. No amount of clovers will budge a man who is committed to “lam yalid wa lam yulad”.

I took you here to be setting the stage for your later comments. By referring to “engag[ing] Muslims in… worthwhile dialogue”, I inferred that there were some issues in mind that Christians ought to talk about. In concrete terms, how do we “affirm the truth of [our] own faith, not over or against what they themselves believe, but as something operating outside of the bounds of Islamic theology and epistemology” without bringing up some subtle but key points that they have overlooked? Or help our interlocutors “get to Christianity from Islam as Islam is not merely [some deficient variant of] Christianity” without giving them some ideas to ponder which can bring about a paradigm shift? Or facilitate the “require[d]… transfiguration of the mind of the believer that you will not get from all the Trinitarian analogies in the world” without taking an approach which avoids dead-end topics and techniques but sticks to ones that have hope of bearing fruit?

Given that these were the kinds of things which were raised in my mind, I was puzzled to then read,

In my experience, it is best to answer their questions when they have them, with gentleness and sure knowledge and confidence in your own faith, but not to introduce anything on your own accord. A Muslim (Hindu, Pagan, whatever) who is ready to listen to the Holy Spirit confirm the truth of Christ will have plenty of questions that can be answered in due time. You can your part by encouraging what is encouragible (“oh, you read the Bible? How did you find it?”), but anything more than that is hazardous. A potential convert is a potential burn out, one discussion removed. We have had several here on CAF that flirted with Christianity, saw that it didn’t make “sense” as Islam does (to which I say thank God), and so went back to Islam. Realistically, they were not ours to convert in the first place, as they had not been open to the Spirit who does the real work of changing a man.

I hope this clarifies why I failed to grasp correctly what you were driving at.

Continued in next post.

 

[Trebor135]

Obviously, if you have someone who wants to engage in such discussions, chances are they have some questions that they would like answered and are looking to you as a representative of your religion. Going back to my overall point, which appears to also be Kaninchen’s point (and they say Jews and Christians can’t get along!), you answer their questions and encourage good tendencies because you want them to be guiding the discussion about your religion. Because you can’t inhabit their mind and see things as they see them, if you bring up whatever your points are, how do you know that you’ll even answer what they’re actually wanting to know? Christians have, I’m sorry to say, actually been failing at reaching Muslims for so long that Muslims have been able to develop ready set and in some cases quite well researched objections to standard Christian apologetics/talking points. You saw that, for instance, with a person like Ahmed Deedat, who I think was dreadful, but who often bested his (Evangelical) Christian debate partner by appearing to have answers from the Bible that would show how the Christian is wrong (granted they didn’t really do that, but my point is that the Christian usually fell into the trap because they merely went over the same old ground that the Muslim already knew about; Islam does, after all, have its own take on the scriptures and theology of Christianity…the fact that its wrong doesn’t really amount to much if the Christian can be made to appear weak in his knowledge or analysis of his own scriptures).

So rather than bringing up the biggies like the Trinity or the Incarnation straight out of the gate, I would and do accept any question or comment from a Muslim. If you listen carefully to how they phrase their questions even about the well-known topics, it can show you a lot about how they think, but also you need to muzzle yourself a bit so as to not be too eager to destroy their argument. It’s better to find out why they believe as they do than to simply assign a truth value to everything they say. After all, we know that they’re wrong even without having to dialogue, but if you want to open their minds to ways of looking at things that aren’t within the set Islamic epistemology, you have to be sensitive not necessarily to what they believe (cf. my earlier comments about not really being interested in indulging Islamic heresy), but more so how they arrived at it. Dr. Nabeel Jabbour, a Syrian Protestant who lived for some years in Egypt, wrote a wonderful book called “The Crescent Through the Eyes of the Cross” about his experiences there and how they inform his way of discussing theology with Muslims. I recommend that you read it. You might be surprised at how little “hard theology” is in it (not necessarily because Dr. Jabbour is a Protestant, but because he observed that most of his Muslim friends’ objections to and questions about Christianity were on a rather low theological level, and instead revolved around questions of praxis and culture). I don’t know whether he converted anyone, but as I was reading it it struck me that there are many common threads between his approach and my approach (and I’m Orthodox!), simply because we let the Muslim be Muslim, first and foremost. Meet people where they are, not where you expect them to be.

All of this is very interesting. I’m beginning to understand what you’re calling fellow Christians to do. And I’ll have to buy that book; the title rings a bell, though I may be thinking of Norman Geisler and Abdus Saleeb’s “Answering Islam”, which is subtitled “The Crescent in Light of the Cross”.

Of the few Muslims who you’ve seen embrace Christianity, what were the real turning points on their journey? In other words, how has the approach you advocate worked in particular instances?

 

[dzheremi]

Of the few Muslims who you’ve seen embrace Christianity, what were the real turning points on their journey?

I have only known very few Muslims who came to Christianity, but everybody at my church knows at least one (this appears to be very common among Copts, even though it’s not much talked about, for obvious security reasons). From what I have gathered, those who accept Christianity do so out of revelation of God to them that is unique to Christianity. After all, in Islam there is also revelation, but it is to Muhammad, and then it is your job to believe in a particular property of God (namely His oneness/“tawhid”), and the one (Muhammad) who affirmed that property via his book and his preaching, as recounted in the Hadith and Sira.

Compare that with the excellent summation of Christianity in the final testament of Iranian martyr Mehdi Dibaj, who explained his religion before a court that charged him with death for apostasy from Islam in 1993 (he was later freed after massive international outcry, only to be murdered under mysterious circumstances soon afterward; see the film “A Cry From Iran” for more information on his case):

They say, ‘You were a Muslim and you have become a ‘Christian.’ No, for many years I had no religion. After searching and studying I accepted God’s call and I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to receive eternal life. People choose their religion, but a Christian is chosen by Christ. He says, ‘You have not chosen me but I have chosen you.’ From when? Before the foundation of the world. People say, ‘You were a Muslim from your birth.’ God says, ‘You were a Christian from the beginning.’ He states that He chose us thousands of years ago, even before the creation of the universe, so that through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ we may be His! A Christian means one who belongs to Jesus Christ.

(read it in context of the full testimony here)

Isn’t that something? “People choose their religion, but a Christian is chosen by Christ”. It is some variation of this idea that I have heard over and over from converts to Christianity. And that being the case, it really puts the individual’s role in perspective: The people, whether they used to be Muslims or some other religion, are chosen by Christ – you can either help or hinder them, but you cannot choose that they become Christian. They do that for themselves, in cooperation with God’s grace. So the dichotomy is not really between being hands on or hands off (e.g., coming with your own apologetic points out front v. being more subtle, or whatever), but about recognizing Who is really doing the saving here.

 

[IbnFiktur]

Moving post. Thank you

 

[Nooj]

I’m open to debate and dialogue but I don’t get a faith where women are not considered on the same level as men.

I have muslim family. I have seen this in action.

I suspect that any inequality that exists is reducible to the fact that it is men who are the ones doing the rule making. So Muslim men are at fault just as much as Muslim men.