I've gotten a couple of whole-mailing-list emails lately from Muslim co-workers, inviting me to learn more about Islam. One of them invited me to attend a seminar; the other, advertised an upcoming History Channel special (which I won't watch because I do not have television). I have to admit that my initial response to both emails was irritation.
In the first place, I was irritated because workplace evangelizing is normally in bad taste. Discussing religion with interested co-workers is fine; nothing wrong with a free discussion. Trying to get everyone to come to your church and hear The Truth, however, is annoying to people -- regardless of which Truth is on offer. For one thing, if I want to go to your church, I can probably find the way on my own. For another, a mass email or a flier distributed to everyone is plainly not the work of a friend who cares about you and wants your salvation; they aren't even thinking about you, in terms of preparing arguments and considering your particular case. They're just beating the bushes, to see if any game flushes -- and I don't like to be treated like prey. You flush a grizzly bear, you might wish you hadn't.
In the second place, it seemed to me that this wasn't the month to be evangelizing on behalf of Islam. This seemed like a good month for embarrassed silence on behalf of American Muslims, what with the US Embassy being attacked in Jakarta, embassies of Denmark burned along with American and Danish flags, Muslims blowing up each other's shrines and holy places in Iraq (and other Muslims blaming America for it, as if the 101st Airborne hadn't permitted fire from the Shrine of Ali to go unanswered rather than attack the shrine in the early days of the Iraq war; and as if the US Army hadn't continued to do so during the uprising in Najaf, to the point that Mehdi Army mortarmen didn't even bother to fortify their positions in the shrine because they knew there would be no counterbattery fire), torture and murder in France, a scholarly conference on Islam in Holland that is considered a national security emergency (with death-threats in the dozens for thinkers who participate), Islamic countries attempting to derail intervention in Darfur that might stop the killing (by Muslims) of minorites (who aren't), worldwide riots over cartoons, the recent election of a terrorist group to the leadership of Palestine, etc., etc.
One can go on essentially forever. If I were a Muslim, I'd be feeling pretty quiet just now. So, when I got instead a couple of mass emails directed at "educating" me about Islam, I was irritated by them. "This isn't the week," I thought, "for teaching me about the glories of Islam."
Yet as I think about it more, I believe I was being unfair. I have known these people for years. They're not evangelizing: they've never approached me before, nor to my knowledge have they ever been interested before now in pushing educational efforts of this sort. Also, they too are aware of the news, just as I am. It is not an accident that they suddenly became interested in outreach at this time.
They're scared.
They are afraid of what lessons you and I are learning from the news. They're afraid of the outrage over the ports deal in a way that they weren't afraid of the outrage over 9/11. They're afraid of the hostility directed at America by Muslims worldwide, and about the hostility increasingly -- and rationally -- felt by Americans toward much of worldwide Islam. They want us to know that there is a lot more to Islam that what is appearing in the news, that there is a beautiful and a peaceful side to it that has informed and brightened their lives.
Fair enough: America wants the Islamic world to know that there's a lot more to America than what they see on the news, particularly if they get their news from the conspiracists who seem to run the press in so many parts of the world. Yet, just as Karen Hughes has made a poor messenger to Islam, so too these efforts by Muslims to reach out to us are ineffective. They rather too obviously come from outsiders; they are rather too obviously biased. We might, and they might, be susceptible to an independent reading -- or a positive reading from one of our own. But tensions are too high for a sermon from within the other's camp.
So I'm going to tell you what I know about Islam. I think it's important that they have an advocate in one of us: and I will take up that cause, which is not my own, out of sympathy and a desire to ease the fear they feel. It is right to do this, as at least the fictional Lionheart held:
"I should in that case hold you," replied the yeoman, "a friend to the weaker party."The first Muslim friends I had I met in college. Most of them were from Pakistan. Pakistan is divided sharply between its ruling, educated class and the classes and tribes that are not. These were of the educated sort: military men, some of them, including a good friend I had who was an F-16 pilot. He was brave and smart and clever, as a fighter pilot ought to be; and well read, as a college student ought to be (but so rarely is). I enjoyed the conversations, which were challenging because they arose from a genuinely different point of view: their embedded interests in every political question were those of the Third, rather than the First world; those of Muslims, rather than the Christians I had mostly known; those of Pakistan, rather than America. They were a challenge, but an intellectual one. They were capable of, interested in, and passionate about intellectual inquiry and argument.
"Such is the duty of a true knight at least," replied the Black Champion.
Pakistan worries about what might happen if the uneducated, tribal groups should gain control of the state from the educated class. They are right to worry: but we should also remember that the educated class exists, and are natural allies of ours. This is not to say that they have the same interests: as I just finished saying, they have almost always different ones. But it is to say that the parts of Islam that worry us also worry them, and are a bigger threat to them than to us. We, alike, want to see that population educated and lifted into what we think of as the modern world.
At my wedding, one of my groomsman was a Muslim: a Scot who had converted from Presbyterianism. Yet he did not refuse friendship with non-Muslims, any more than had these Pakistani Muslims, regardless of what prohibitions may be in Islamic law. We have all read of such things, and they have a hold on the imagination of the radicals. Yet I have seen that it is not always that way, and that there are many Muslims who wish to be, and can be, good friends.
In China, I lived in a foreign residence hall at Zhejiang University -- this is where many of the few foreigners in the city of HangZhou were kept. We came from all over the world, centralized in one building because China wanted to keep watch on any foreigners in their country. There was little in the way of a common language: most people there spoke little or no English; most yet spoke little or no Chinese. I could manage French with the West Africans, who spoke it far better than I did.
Buddhists and Hindus and Christians all lived there, but there was no obvious community to them. Not so the Muslims. We talk a lot about the tribal aspects of much of those parts of the Islamic world where there is trouble, and indeed, much of Islam is still tribal. Yet it is also the case that Islam is the bridge across that tribalism, and an effective one. The Muslims -- from Pakistan, from Africa, from island nations, wherever they came from -- banded together at once in a bond of friendship. They washed and prayed together daily; they never failed, that I witnessed, to share equally food or cigarettes or whatever was needed by their brother Muslims.
Christians said and did little in the way of such things, knowing how the ever-present authorities in Communist China looks with suspicion on faith; but the Muslims prayed fearlessly and in public. If they had lost their scholarships and been thrown out of the country, particularly the Africans, it would have meant real poverty and a collapse of their dreams: but they never let that stop them. That was a high and fine thing to see, prayer in defiance of fear.
There is much good to be said for Islam. I will not hesistate to say it. I do not think Islam is a true faith, but that is for me to decide only for me. The road forward for the West is not to tear down the Crescent, but to raise up our own banners again. We are called, not to defile what they believe, but to recover again our own faith. We must, if we are to see the freedoms and virtues of the West survive into the next century and beyond.
Yet, in becoming a defender of the West, do not make yourself an enemy of Islam. Richard the Lionheart fought against the Muslim warriors more than most of us shall ever do, and yet he came to respect and honor Saladin. No Muslim every fought harder or more successfully against the West's armies, yet Saladin came to love and honor not only Richard but Western knighthood. That must be the model for us: defiant to the very last against any tyranny, Islamic or otherwise; yet prepared to be friends, in honorable disagreement, if we are received in friendship.
It is not impossible. I have been so received, now and then, and am proud and glad to say it.
UPDATE:
It appears BlackFive and I are on the same page again:
After the first crusaders took Jerusalem in the eleventh century, a Kurd Sunni from Tikrit by the name of Saladin took it and much of the crusader gained territory back. Saladin, even seen as a conquering enemy, was revered by European courts for his grace, kindness and intelligence. They regarded him as a Knight. In actuality, he embodied more of the gentle and honorable traits of a Knight than most of the European gentry sent off to rid the world of non-Christians.Well said.
In the Reverse Crusades, our Saladin is not a "who", but a "what". Our Saladin must be the idea that all men and women were created equal and free.
We need to wage both war and peace at the same time. Both require strength of will, both require passion and understanding. Both require love.
No comments:
Post a Comment