UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE; PROPERTY OF ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER

Michael Cromartie: Welcome to the Ethics and Public Policy Center. I’m vice president of the Center as well as director of the Evangelicals Studies Program.

You are here today because you know the importance of the topic of today’s meeting. As you know, this topic has already been covered extensively in the press. Just Tuesday, you may have seen Laurie Goodstein’s piece on the front page of the New York Times, "Seeing Islam as an Evil Faith." I can also say, without going into any detail, that Time magazine is doing a cover story on this topic. David Van Biema is here for that purpose. What you say is on the record.

At the center, we’ve been impressed by a couple of things. First, the comments that have been made publicly on this topic have been unfortunate; they have not helped fruitful dialogue. But, despite those imprudent comments, some of our friends in the press have not gotten it right. Our goal today is to try to bring some clarity to the question at hand. We’ve asked our speaker to talk something about what it means to have theological integrity, cultural sensitivity, and our engagement with this subject in public. Also, with our public rhetoric, we need to learn how to speak about other religions.

As you know from your invitation, Dr. Sanneh is the Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity, and Professor of History at Yale University’s Divinity School, and also a professor of history at Yale. He has been educated on four continents: his PhD is in Islamic Studies from the University of London. He is also chair of Yale’s Council of African Studies. He is the author of numerous books including Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa, Translating the Message: the Missionary Impact on Culture, West African Christianity: the Religious Impact. He’s the editor at large of the Christian Century magazine, and we are delighted he has joined us today.

In their missionary expansion, too, Islam and Christianity share a common vocation, with conversion a commonly recognized response of faith. Thus the vitality of Islam as an historical movement and as personal faith is demonstrated by the fact of its having inspired hundreds of millions of men and women down the centuries and across the world. Western engagement with Islam is taking place on this missionary frontier where, as Muslims see it, commitment to truth cannot be postponed indefinitely. The reason is clear. The world is not an alibi for faith. In the commandment to submit and bear witness to the truth, the canon of faith stipulates joining the name of God to that of Muhammad, His superlative messenger. Such submission also taps the world for immediate religious duty, a world that in the last four or five centuries has been controlled by the West to mundane ends, painful as that is for religious radicals to admit. It is their common global ambition that has complicated relations between Islam and the West.

Muslims recollect in their devotion the successful outcome of the battle of Badr (624 c.e.) as a providential sign of God’s favor on Mecca and on the Prophet (Q 3: 120-124). Today, however, battles no longer resound with similar divine approval. Desert Storm of 1991, for instance, left liberated Kuwait a divided camp concerning the West’s standing in the Muslim world. The War on Terror or Operation Iraqi Freedom, whatever their merits, have similarly ignited growing resentment among Muslims, filling them with anger that infidels now call the tune. Important disagreements still divide Muslims among themselves, as, for example, those that led to the Iraq/Iran war, but none is more fateful than the theological divide between the Muslim world and the West. Muslim pride in the Prophet’s accomplishment has been re-awakened by the power and success of an assertive secular West. Merely for Muslims to exempt the Prophet’s accomplishment, as many are inclined to do, by assigning the blame for their weakness to something other than Islam, seems a halfhearted repair job, because exempting religion there necessitates exempting it also as remedy for weakness. If religion is not responsible for what we have failed to achieve - and no one says it should be - then it cannot be responsible in helping us to overcome our failure. That makes religion moot, though, a scarcely satisfactory outcome.

In mitigation, I turn to a different approach by calling our attention to a volume of essays printed several decades ago in Karachi, Pakistan. The book is called, Islam - Our Choice: Impressions of Prominent Converts to Islam (Karachi: Ashraf Publications, 1961, repr. 1977). The converts in question are Western converts to Islam. In the epilogue the editors pause to take stock of the theme of conversion. They clearly had the West in their sights. But what most struck me was the devout sentiment sincerely expressed for the conversion of the West to Islam. The Mongol invaders, the editors said, descended upon Islam in hordes of destruction and rampage, sweeping the caliphate before them, more than the Crusaders were able to do. Yet the Mongols’ power and their success in overcoming the Muslims availed them for nothing, because in the end they converted to Islam and went on to produce some of the greatest art and architecture Islam has known. Maybe a similar end is in store for the West, the editors speculated, so that the very might of the West that has been used to defy and humiliate Muslims will be expended from a long and costly confrontation with the Muslim world and then the West, too, jaded with materialism and success like the Mongols before them, will convert to Islam, a religion that is better placed to use the great gifts of the West for the glory and service of God.

That sentiment, coming several decades before 9/11, as I said, struck me as unusual. The hope may be delusory - as it certainly is in the eyes of secularists - but the idea that you can take everything away from Muslims, including their towns, cities, countries, and political structures, but, as long as they have Islam, they will triumph, that confidence I found remarkable. Can it contend against the secular West, I wondered? Can Western materialism inspire and sustain clarity of faith and vision, hope and commitment to God, strength to endure trial and tribulation, can it find largeness of heart required to tolerate difference and disagreement, and sense of community necessary to nurture the sacred and the holy that Islam represents? The editors of Islam - Our Choice don’t think so. Or, to put it less starkly, the editors don’t think that materialism has the capacity to bear privation and pressure without crumbling into subjective retreat, and that a spiritual force like Islam knows how to transform materialism by offering it as a gift to God and thus as fruit for ethical use. The West offers no gratitude to God for what God has given it, and so its material power will one day choke it, is the implicit claim. Kufr will flood the void from which shukr has been banished. (See the article by the present writer on shukr and kufr, Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, 2 vols., vol. ii, Leiden: Brill, 2001-2002.)

What confuses Muslims, nevertheless, is how Christians as religious people seem content to maintain churches but to defer to reason of what it means to bear witness to God. Muslims are uncomprehending as to how Christians can come to such a position and still remain religiously serious. How can the edifice of faith maintain itself if it mortgages itself to rational approval? It is much simpler for Muslims to assume Christianity has long abandoned its truth claims than for them to enter into a complicated debate about how Christianity has modernized its theology to accommodate itself to the world. Many theologians, with one part of their mouth, speak lucidly of a transcendent God while, with the other part, urge that religion be made to fit within the bounds of reason alone. Theology, as al-Farabi pointed out, originally meant just that for the Greeks, to make God accountable to reason. Muslims, however, remain unpersuaded of the worth of religion once rational sovereignty takes it over. Muslims scholars think in terms of how we can give pride or place to reason. As udaly? put it, "We should be careful not to use human analogy to prove the divine the greater. Otherwise the greater would be at the service of the later. But anyway, I don’t want to focus on that unless you want to.

In the deep gulf between the Muslim world and the secular West, Muslims have not been reassured even by professed Western interest in the Súfí Muslim tradition, since the West takes the Súfís as conceding the distinction between spirituality and worldly concerns. The West in many ways is in search for a mystical kind of religion. In other words the West recruits the Súfís in the battle to isolate religion and to remove it from public life. Muslims suspect the West of using the Súfí reputation to promote a denial of Islam's claim about the necessary integration of ethics and politics. In the way the West has set up a solid wall of separation between church and state, Súfísm is captured on one side of the wall, and then emptied of its Islamic vitality. Súfísm as religion without creed and sacrament, as spirituality without obligation, appeals to the West’s emancipated ideal. Hence the draw of figures, for instance, like Rúmí and Omar Khayyam in the Muslim tradition, and, in Christianity, of Albert Schweitzer and Dag Hammarskjold, former Secretary General of the United Nations.

The Western penchant for spirituality has allowed raiding other religions for their common subjective residue. In the hands of the accomplished, such as Joseph Campbell and Matthew Fox, say, the forays into spirituality can indeed look like much overdue cutting down of dead wood and an un-caging of the soul. Spirituality, defensible on the theory that man does not live by bread alone, seems like an innocuous way of filling the gap that has opened up in the process of separating church and state, a theme Robert Bellah and his colleagues have expounded in Habits of the Heart. Not infrequently, however, spirituality takes a downturn to become a device for stripping or suspending difference. Popular mysticism often is a strategem of mass distraction, say the religious masters. As the Qur’án declares, God will not be outstripped or be superseded by our stratagems (Q 70: 60). (Al-Hujwiri, an 11th century Súfí himself, recounts an anecdote about a fellow Súfí who declined the company of a renowned saintly figure, not from an inflated sense of his own worth, but from a concern about being distracted from obligations laid down in the canon, including turning up for prayers.) Muslims in the main do not accept that religion as creed is secondary or derivative, and so they have reined in Súfí mystics, however useful mystics may be for getting the West’s attention.

I want now to move to the theme with which I began 20 minutes ago and talk about difference and dialogue.

When Bernard Lewis first propounded the thesis of a "clash of civilization" in an Atlantic Monthly article (Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," Atlantic Monthly, September, 1990, 47-60) he was giving voice to a reality implicit in the order of things. As a lifelong student of Islam and the Muslim world, Lewis was keenly aware that the logic of the secular imperative confronted with the logic of Muslim truth claims makes a clash all too likely, if not necessary.

One response to this dispiriting account of relations is containment, though that cannot be a long-term solution. Spatial separation is impractical as well as undesirable. Although Lewis did not say that, dialogue is the alternative to the civilizational clash he describes, yet for dialogue to work the terms have to be commensurate, so that we can have dialogue for example, not between public reason and subjective truth, but between contrasting views of revelation and the public good. Dialogue cannot go back to medieval theological presuppositions about common ground or to modern ideas of universal values.

Our medieval heritage is not reassuring for us. When Pope Boniface issued the bull, Unam Sanctam in 1302, declaring the church as the only institution with authority to grant salvation he was giving voice to the culmination of what started with Emperor Theodosius’ decrees of 380 and 391, the first requiring all citizens of the empire to become Christians, and the second proscribing all non-Christian religions. The Council of Florence in 1442 and the Roman Catechism of 1566 pushed the process further by condemning nonbelievers and, with the Catechism, by declaring the infallibility of the church. All these actions had in common the idea of territoriality as a sacrament of faith, with the church complementing in the religious sphere what the state had become in the political sphere. Uniformity of rule and doctrine had its validation in state and church autonomy in their respective domains. A common rule of church and state, however, sowed the seeds of future conflict.

Many people continue to feel the need to repudiate Christianity or the Western peculiarities as a prerequisite for affirming diversity and supporting tolerance in the world. On the back of rejecting one culture people are asked to embrace other cultures as a show of equality and pluralism. The provocative idea that criticism of the West will assure an appreciative view of other cultures has predictably produced a backlash with the positive and negative changing hands: repudiating other cultures is for the religious right a condition for affirming Christianity. That explains why dialogue has fallen as a casualty of both the left and the right. The left reduces religion to a matter of common values, to an upbeat opinion that offends no one, while the right restricts religion to chauvinism, infused with rousing jingoism. And so dissidents on the left, for example, accuse the U.S. of promoting a Pax Americana that is an arrogant violation of other cultures, while their counterparts on the right salute the flag as a sign of God’s favor. The left romanticizes other cultures and the right demonizes them, a hint here that the two sides are cross cousins.

"all are to be considered as retaining an equal right to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience. While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace the religion, which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence that has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man (emphasis in original). The Christian religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them."

Religion is not invented by human policy; so it cannot depend for its truth claims on human enforcement. This is a principle of enormous importance for us. Mainly, that the imposition of religion is really as bad as the suppression of religion. For theological reasons, a secular state that suppresses religion is really doing the bidding of the theocratic state that wants to impose religion. And the result, in both cases, is a violation of conscience. And this is the logic that seems to point to the need for separation. It seems to me, this band of liberalism is very hospitable to the farcing of religion as well as to the recognition of the values of a dynamic difference.

So let me finally say, that, the teaching of Jesus about giving to Caesar the things of Caesar and to God the things of God, lies at the very root of the very basis of the values of the liberal democratic society. But, liberal democratic society, as Tocqueville reminds us, is very comfortable making use of the fruits of religion on the ethical/teachable religion, without caring too much for the roots of ethics. It is the responsibility of churches and religious bodies and other organizations to nourish and nurture the roots of religion, even though the fruits of religion, in terms of the public good are available for everyone. It seems to me, then, that usefulness is not a truth claim, just as faith is not just a public convenience. And we need to engage our Muslims friends on the perils of joining church and state, religion and politics, with religious and theological argument. Thank you.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Dr. Sanneh. Now, we’ll open the discussion.

Michael Woodruff: Professor Sanneh, I’d be interested in your views on the notion of reciprocity as that value is carried into a political policy on religious freedom. We look at Saudi Arabia and other countries, and we say they are closed societies due to their theological, political, and religious history and conventions. Yet we in the West take that value of reciprocity, and we project it as a universal value as it reflects our understanding of the human person. We look at their society, and we say they’re not treating women and children in a way that speaks to an ethical obligation. And it reflects on this whole notion of reciprocity. Our women as journalists will go and cover their heads out of respect, because they know that that culture has such a strong value, that’s an accommodation for them. Why must the West accommodate when they go there but their expectations are a double standard? They do not have to accept similar restrictions. In fact, they complain about profiling and everything. It seems to me there’s a huge hypocrisy that we have to deal with within religious communities.

Lamin Sanneh: No, I agree with you. The problem of cultural relativism is that any attempt to show interest in a culture other than your own can be construed as interference. Unwarranted interference. And so, logically, cultural relativism must draw lines of battle between the cultures, and it just shows that we have to get over that.

I think you’re absolutely right. I read in the New York Times several years ago, a little piece. It was tucked away, not even the headline was tall, a very small box, that about four homosexuals had been executed in the public square in Saudi Arabia. That was it. No comment, nothing. It was long before 9/11. For about 15 years, I used to collect all these stories from the papers, and I would select from these a kind of book that I would give to my students to read, because I teach a course on dialogue. The students are also lost. They don’t know what to say or what to think. They would like to believe that we have no business judging others, criticizing other people’s cultures. But on the other hand, that’s not very comfortable for them.

So, human rights, for example, is a wonderful thing, but you want Saudi Arabia to respect human rights for women, gays, and others. Well, that’s not your business. But it’s self-contradictory. We believe that diversity is a very good thing, because that way, we think we can acknowledge difference. On the other hand, we think difference is a very bad thing because it conflicts with what we have in common. So we have that kind of conflict.

Paul Marshall: Thank you very much, Lamin. In your closing remarks, I might not be quoting or summarizing your correctly, cause we’re all sitting here writing, but you said something like, "It would be good if we could persuade Muslims of the benefits to religion and faith, of the separation of church and state," and then you said "religion and politics." I’m concerned about that because, exactly what does that mean? If you just take the phrase "the separation of church and state," since it came into usage about 50 years ago, it is hopelessly confused discussions of this within the US. And then to use that as a means in understanding elsewhere is even worse.

Just one example if I may. With discussions now within Iraq, pressures within sub-Shiite groups for Islamic state, many Americans have said we need things like a separation of mosque and state. It’s important that we don’t have clergy (by which they mean Shiite law professors), ruling the state. For me, that’s not a very important question. I don’t care so much who the officers of the state are. I care what laws the state passes and which ones it enforces. So you could have mosque authorities and everyone else like this entirely excluded from the political structure. But the question is, what sort of Islamic law might be in place in somewhere such as Iraq or Nigeria or elsewhere? So here, the question of the religious influences on the state structure itself comes to the fore.

Now, I don’t think one could argue that our understanding the politics, our understanding the state, or our understandings of law can be separated from our religious beliefs. I know of no society or no culture where that exists. The idea that you would vote or think about politics in a way separate from what you think about the rest of your life wouldn’t work. So I’m just suggesting is that we slightly refine the question as "In what ways." Firstly, to have an equivalent church structure distinct from the state itself is good. But the second question, I think, is more important: In what ways is it legitimate to have religious influences on a state structure? And in what ways is it illegitimate? That’s a more difficult question. But my worry is that, particularly in the West, people don’t open up that question, because a lot of the categories we use disguise it.

Lamin Sanneh: I agree with that, that functional separation is very important, but for religious reasons. For religious reasons. Enforcement is not a sacrament of faith. Or, as one Muslim scholar in Nigeria put it, "The functions of shariah are so horrendous that any awareness of them would deter people from the beginning." That’s a theological argument, by the way. I happen to disagree with him. The theological argument is this: that God is our enemy. God cannot trust human beings. So the only way human beings can be kept in line is that awareness that God would crack the whip. God is not our friend. Now I disagree with that. I would say that’s a horrendous way of looking at divine mercy and divine compassion. And that obedience or obligation is not a function of coercion but a function of a free conscience. That religion worthy of God, you are free to pray to God and worship God.

Os Guinness: I thoroughly agree with you, but I’d like to broaden the discussion and bring in globalization and our own American cultural laws and a discussion of religion and public life, here. Make the argument. What we’re seeing is a direct result of globalization. So, Falwell’s remarks in Lynchburg that cause riots in Pakistan; it’s very much a product of globalization. But seen that way, it’s equally the cultural warring we’ve had here of religion and public life we’ve had here in the last 30 years is now being played out round the world. And the fact is the same people who did not give us a good answer here, are now giving us a very bad answer around the world. But behind that, lies the simple fact that America at the moment doesn’t have a good answer. We’re torn ourselves between tendencies between the sacred public square-religious right-and the naked public square as Neuhaus has put it. And they’re exactly being played out now globally, and the impulse is to universalism and the impulse is toward radical relativism. And the universalism is not only Christian and Muslim; it’s also feminists and some Democrats who want to impose democracy as a universal thing. So we have powerful impulses toward universals in the world-secular and religious-and we’ve got powerful impulses toward relativism, many of them in departments like anthropology and among certain strong liberals. But just as we don’t have in this country any clear civil public square, so we can live with our deep differences, and not just dialogue, but debate them. We need to propose a global equivalent to a civil public square and that is totally lacking.

Now, I personally agree that in the absence of a global civil public square (which hasn’t been articulated yet), we’re likely to move towards a two-tiered universe. And the top tier will be cosmopolitan liberals, mostly secularists. And the bottom tier will be local, non-liberals, most of which will be religious peoples. So actually, I would agree with Muslims, in that much Western religion isn’t serious. And that even terrible radicals like Said Kutuk who talks about what he talks about "the grotesque schizophrenia" of Western understanding of religion-he’s right. Privatized religion is a grotesque expression say of Orthodox Judaism or classical Christian faith. But I believe what we’re talking about is an international understanding of what’s a civil public square, so we can truly, with freedom of conscience, live with profound differences, and some of those differences are absolute.

Gerald McDermott: Sirah 9:5, I believe, says, "Slay the unbeliever wherever you find him." And in the book of Joshua, we read that Joshua is to exterminate all sorts of folks, men, women, and children. Now, Christians and Jews historically, have developed a mechanism to read the book of Joshua in a historical context. So they don’t regard God’s commands to Joshua in regards to the Amalekites, or other "-ites," as normative for believers today. But the vast majority of Muslims have not developed that mechanism to read these different passages when Mohammad was dealing with his enemies, and to read them historically. Instead, the vast majority of Muslims read these normatively.

So, my question has to do with, Dr. Sanneh, with your last statement that we need to engage Muslims in conversations about the perils of joining the church and state with theological arguments. Two questions: one, what do you think is the percentage of worldwide Muslims who do not see lesser jihad-that is, the forcible imposition of Islam upon the rest of the world-as normative today? So what’s the percentage of Muslims today who are sympathetic to militant radical Islam? You know, there’s been a big debate on that since 9/11 about that. Is it the majority of Muslims who are really peaceful and think this is terrible, or is it the reverse? Two, many people have said worldwide Islam is at a crossroads today. It can go one of two directions. The direction of militant, radical Islam that always interprets the Qur’an normatively and not historically, or in the other direction, that recognizes the value of pluralism, for instance. So those are the two questions. Where do you see Islam today in terms of the majority of Muslims, how sympathetic they are to the lesser jihad? And second, which way do you think Islam is going to go?

Lamin Sanneh: If I could answer that, I would become the Pope. But I don’t know, I don’t think anyone does. But Thomas Freidman, in an article a year ago January, entitled, "Run, Osama, Run," reports that he had traveled around the Muslim world, then to Belgium, Germany, and England, and he had spoken to business leaders, political leaders, community leaders, in Pakistan, and everywhere else. And he said, "What’s troubling you?" There are business leaders that are concerned, you know, very rational! But he said, "What’s troubling?" Not one of them was critical of their plan. January 21 or 22, 2002, I believe. This is a fresh "field observation." He said he was shocked to find that discovery. He thought the business people especially would be hardheaded and would not support bin Laden. He couldn’t find one person who would condemn him publicly or privately.

I was in South Africa, myself, at the turn of the millennium, before September 11. But if you remember 1998’s attack on the World Trade Center. I was in South Africa, Cape Town. I was speaking to the King. They all had tremendous admiration for Yousseff who was implicated in the first attack. And I thought, here is a man who thought he was clear in Cape Town, South Africa. So I don’t know.

The other thing about jihad, I think it is fair to say, that in medieval Arabic sources, whenever jihad is used in Arabic, without qualifications, it means "militancy." It’s only when it’s qualified, that it becomes the greater jihad against corruption. So that’s a very new thing.

But let me just say a couple of things. I believe, intellectually, that America has won the debate about church and state, religion and politics, about public and private, intellectually. What we have done with that legacy today is a combative secularism, which we thought was more the French way, the French revolutionary path; the American revolutionary path was something else. In my view, something different. I have no doubt about even the radicals who. If you remember at the beginning of the Declaration of Right, "all men are innately equal." But who realize in nature with other we’re equal. Jefferson did, until the Declaration of Independence changed that. You know, all men are created equal. So this brings in a sort of theocentric understanding of community, equal political community. So to build community in a sense, you have to begin with some theological assumptions or religious assumptions about human community and human personhood. Persons created in the image of God give us an idea to begin the order. So I think America has one battle. But in another way, I think America has one debate, because America is the home to the greatest pluralism ever seen in the advanced industrial world that the world has ever seen. In terms of different religious groups and communities, all flooding in here and establishing their role. It seems to me that the next step is how to do better, to become a discussion for wider sharing abroad. Many of these communities in America go back to their own regional communities in India, Malaysia, Egypt, etc.; and they take back their experiences in America. They’ll come back again, and will keep reinforcing and renewing these challenges of global contact. So America it seems to me is at a crossroads, and has to take responsibility for that.

Michael Cromartie: Let me throw out a provocative question. Might the response to bin Laden in Tom Friedman’s piece, might what Friedman noted in his piece, explain some of the public rhetoric that some evangelicals have had? It wouldn’t excuse it, but it would explain it. Paul Marshall, what do you think about that?

Paul Marshall: This is hard to answer for two reasons. One is we don’t actually have the information; you would have to really do opinion polls. The answers would be 1) Yes, I’m terrorist, or 2) No, I am not a terrorist but I like them. So, the actual information base isn’t there. Two, you are dealing with a continuum. It’s not like, "How many of them are extremists?" and "How many are not extremists?" There is a whole range. So let me just throw in a third factor in terms of judgments that Muslims say about bin Laden or things of this type. It is very widespread in the Muslim world that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were not responsible for September 11. Stories began, I think it was in Jordan, that all the Jews were told not to go to the World Trade Center on that day, and they didn’t. In many places this is expected as the case quite rationally by the people who do it because that is what they read in their newspapers, hear on the radio, on the television, and at the mosque. It is not that such an individual or person extremist, but everything in their life has told them that, No, these people didn’t do this and the Americans have blamed this in order to support the Jews, and things of that type. So, to make a judgment about whether the person who believes this an extremist is de-contextualized.

Those are all of the qualifications and these are wide ranges, but I think twenty to forty percent of Muslims would want something like an Islamic state. A small percent of Muslims would fight to establish that. Maybe 1, 2, or 5 percent. But even with low percentages, you are dealing with a million people.

Ron Sider: I have an easy question. I just want enough wisdom to show us as evangelicals how to deal with Islam. I would like you to comment out of your experience on the big problem that we have. In earlier meetings, some visible evangelicals made some very strong statements, and caused riots in other parts of the world. These statements have certainly been used in all kinds of ways. I think a lot of evangelicals feel that those were misguided statements. But out of your experience, sit back and help us, what do you think would be most truthful and right and helpful-I trust that those are not contradictory-for the evangelical leadership in the United States to do and say at this point of time?

Lamin Sanneh: I like to redraw the boundaries. I am not really sure that it’s helpful to begin with saying, "Well, what should we say that would be helpful or that would not be offensive," because that gets you the whole issue of tactics and strategy, so you become very instrumental in how you approach this.

It seems to me from my own evangelical experience from within Islam. I remember, before I became a Christian, I only read the Koran. And the figure of and the witness to Jesus and the Holy Family was what really grabbed my attention. But Jesus is a figure of controversy in the Koran. There is swirling controversy around him, scattered through the Koran, especially in chapters 4, 5, and 7, and a later chapter called the Marium. What attracted me, then, to Jesus was this kind of controversy, not this kind of innocuous prophet who came, did God’s work, and then went. The controversy being that because of his work as a prophet of God, Jesus was hated. As a young Muslim in boarding school supported by public funds-here was a colonial government supporting Islam! I was entitled to go to the school because I was a descendant of chiefs. Reading the Koran was what controlled much of my life. Jesus became a focus of hatred, not because he did anything wrong, but because he did the work of God.

I wanted to find the link, the connection between the lives that I saw around me, of struggle, children suffering for example. I wanted to find a connection to the divine. So I felt a long conversion to Christianity. The image of God in human beings was particularly telling to me, that the divine enterprise was more connected with the human struggle, moral struggle, and moral suffering. I didn’t feel it was my job to condemn anybody or not to condemn anybody because he didn’t give it to us to say who should be going to heaven or not. That’s God’s business, God’s judgment. But through that, this amazing picture of love dramatized in the life of Jesus, in the faithfulness of Jesus, who in the face of evil and suffering, didn’t flinch or recoil, this really upset my world. This was not the value system I was used to.

Anyway, I feel that there are evangelical strains that can be invoked to really appeal to the conscience of Muslims.

Ron Sider: In a sentence it seems to me you are saying, gently, don’t back off from evangelism and sharing your faith. I think across the board in the United States, American evangelicals agree with that. The disagreement comes with the other part. As we insist on the truth of Christianity and Jesus Christ and clear recognition of fundamental differences, we also live in a global world and we have responsibility as citizens. We have some of our people saying that "Islam is evil," or that "Muhammad is a demonic pedophile," or whatever. How do we get that part right as we continue, I hope, passionately but wisely and in an assertive way with evangelism?

Lamin Sanneh: Why should we trade insults with Muslims? Islam has no shortage of invective. Poems of invective against the U.S. or the occupation.

When I spoke with someone from a church, I told them I wanted to love God. The minister said that I had a wonderful idea, and he directed me to a Catholic church across the road. I went to the Catholic Church, and I spent a year there. They wouldn’t baptize me.

So I went back to the original church and said, "The Catholics wouldn’t baptize me. Will you baptize me?" 

He said, "Did you know our baptism is recognized by the Catholic Church?"

I said, "No I didn’t know that."

"Well, it is."

So for my catechism, I read New Testament form criticism in a liberal Protestant church! I was seventeen or eighteen years old, and I passed through this stuff. Christians are embarrassed with religion, especially the liberal streak. Muslims say to me when I tell them my [conversion] story, sometimes with tears in my eyes, "We wish we were there to help you."

So, I say yes, don’t back off. But, surely the Christian faith requires getting yourself prepared, into shape, really train yourself, prepare yourself.

Michael Cromartie: This is the real issue that is creating the controversy. That as we read these accounts in the press, not only did Franklin Graham make some unwise comments; but he actually might not only share medical supplies and food, but he might share his message. That seems to be the part-not just that he said it was a wicked and evil religion-take that away. He still might do what you just asked him to do and that seems to create like throwing a grenade in the middle of our postmodern situation. If any colleagues of the press would like to speak either on the record or off the record this.

Uwe Siemon-Netto: I would to very much.

Michael Cromartie: Go ahead, Uwe.

Uwe Siemon-Netto: I had tremendous difficulties. Since September 11th I have been looking into, actually, since the Barcelona conference, I have been looking into the issue of conversion and mission. In Barcelona, at a conference for journalists and theologians, I ran into a Lutheran theologian from Cairo who told me that there were in Cairo or around Cairo, at least six Muslim communities, Muslim congregations that were actually secretly Christian. And their imam would sneak into his back door to do catechism in the middle of the night.

Then I heard the same thing from the moderator of one of the Presbyterian churches in Pakistan, which at the time when Afghanistan was still ruled by the Taliban, in the countryside, there were Muslim congregations that were de facto Christians and whose imams were trained at Bible schools along the border.

Then I ran into a pastor friend of mine in Germany, a Lutheran pastor, who is busy baptizing especially Muslim women from Iran. There is a common thread to all these stories, and that is apparitions, which we Lutherans do not really stress that much. But in every one of these cases, there were apparitions of Jesus. Always Jesus.

Then I talked to a missionary-I’ve forgotten his name now, he died recently-who said that were, indeed, there were even in Saudi Arabia secret Christian congregations that were Muslim. I have had a tremendous time having to push this through. I got it published, but it was watered down. I had difficulty getting it through even our on wire service, which is not exactly hostile to this sort of thing.

Which brings me to an interesting question here and that picks up on what Gerry McDermott and Paul Marshall have asked, which is, who is actually there as a partner within Islam to discuss these things? I would like to bring this question on a little further, and not so much as how many in favor of radical Islam or of terrorism, but how many are actually prepared to discuss reforming Islam, and what leverage is there to reform Islam? My contacts in Europe mainly, tell me that maybe one or two percent of Islamic scholars who would be persuaded to discuss this, from the "ish iach" angle that God sends every hundred years or so a reformer who will not refocus the Koran which would be considered a heresy, but would refocus the perspective on the Koran from the angle of the era we are living in.

Michael Cromartie: Before you answer the question about reforming the Koran, I really think we need to stay on this point, which is the question Ron put on the table about evangelism. Everything we read about in the press is that not only have you made inappropriate comments, but that you might actually try to persuade somebody of something. David, was your question related to this?

David Van Biema: Yeah, although it debases the discourse a little bit.

Michael Cromartie: Well, debase it now.

David Van Biema: I’ll put it in terms of the New York Times article since you mentioned that. Laurie Goodstein seem to be suggesting that, far from being an outlying sort of notion, the expressions by Franklin Graham of a couple years ago about Islam being evil and wicked were fairly normative for the evangelical community. You could go beyond, saying that they were supposed to be seeing Islam as equally misleading as say Buddhism or Hinduism, but rather even beyond those two. That was sort of the tenor of her piece.

I have a similar question, Ron, not necessarily to Ron, but when Ron said, regarding Franklin Graham’s statements that some would disagree, I am very interested in the question of whether some would disagree or whether just feel they are impolitic, or not useful to bringing the gospel at this point. Is there a baseline agreement in the evangelical community that Islam is at best misleading, and at worst, something quite a bit worse than that? My assumption has been yes, and my discussion has not lead me to feel differently, but since I am getting the vibe that no, that is not the case. I would like to hear about it. I apologize for opening the question to everybody, and if you want to just go on and talk about what you were talking about….

Michael Cromartie: No, that is all related. Ron, do you have a quick response?

Ron Sider: I think that almost universally evangelicals recognize that there are fundamental conceptual, theoretical, and theological differences between Islam and Christianity, and we don’t intend to pretend that is not the case. We deeply believe that Christian faith is true, and Jesus is the way.

Os Guinness: But Ron, that wasn’t the issue at stake, was it?

Ron Sider: The other issue is to suggest that one, the New York Times, when we are luring by wanting to eagerly share what we believe to be truth. That kind of condemnation of any sort of belief in truth and intention to share it, that is unacceptable. Second, on the other hand, we think it is just. It’s not just impolitic; it is worse, it is too sweeping to say of a whole religion that has mix of good and bad in it, that it is evil. I think are a large number of evangelicals that don’t want to say, both because impolitic and because we think it is wrong to say that kind of sweeping statement. But that is not backing off from the fact that there are fundamental differences. We recognize those and we want to make truth claims.

Os Guinness: Franklin Graham’s remarks were about Muslim actions. Now I would say, as an evangelical, that Richard Coeur de Lion was evil in what he did in Jerusalem as a Christian crusader. And I would equally be able to say as an evangelical that what the Muslim radicals have done in slaughtering nearly two million people in the south of Sudan is absolutely evil. Now that does not mean that Islam is evil.

David Van Biema: When somebody followerd up with him, Franklin Graham said the implication is that there was a systemic difficulties, not there were individual evil people. So, I am not certain and would ask whether you are just making the statement that they are making some evil Muslim or whether you think there is a systemic difficulty or evil or weakness or satanic influence or you name it?

Os Guinness: That would take more of a discussion than you would print in Time magazine.

David Van Biema: Well, I am responding to your response.

Gerald McDermott: There are probably forty million evangelicals so this is a huge community with a vast range of opinion. Secondly, theologically, I would say many evangelicals use the doctrine of common grace. Say, God gives his grace to all human beings, particularly to all religions, or at least many religions. You can go back as far as Jonathan Edwards, a great theologian in the evangelical tradition, a father of theologically evangelical Christians to some degree. He is recognized by many evangelicals as a theological father, so to speak. While he said that religion as a whole is demonic, he never the less recognized that Muslims and the Koran, which he had a copy of as far as we know, had much truth in it. For instance, he says the Koran says that Jesus was the Messiah. Now, of course, the Koran uses the word Messiah differently, but he said, hey, there is truth here.

Paul Marshall: Two things. One is that I would suggest that evangelical attitudes towards Islam are basically part and parcel of American attitudes attitude toward Islam. I get the same attitudes, the usual generalist source is the cab drivers, the guy in the bar, you get people saying comments like, Well, I think we should say it is peaceful, but I think there is really militant streak in here. A lot of these things are not "evangelical" are fairly widespread.

I want to go back to Lamin Sanneh. You mentioned your difficulty of getting catechized and baptized. You didn’t say why. Were they worried that if you did this, you would be killed and the church would be attacked? You bring up the question of apostasy, and there is also surprise that many Muslims would talk to you openly about this. In my own experience, the question of changing their religion away from Islam is a sticking point even for the more liberal Muslims I know.

Some examples, you know this, but for many churches in the Muslim world, especially the Arab-Muslim world, it is a matter of protocol that you will not baptize a Muslim who has become a Christian unless they leave the country first, because their chances of getting killed or imprisoned are very high, and the chance of the church being attacked is very high. I have interviewed Muslim converts in probably a dozen countries who lived their entire life in hiding. So, is this some background with yourself and that you might want to comment on that? But I think this is also important in dealing with the question of evangelism in Muslim countries. But that hasn’t come up. Converts are often killed by members of their family.

Lamin Sanneh: I don’t think the concern was ever for my safety in the church or for my well-being. But it seems to me that whatever the reason for their reluctance, it raises the question as to whether they should be considered a missionary church at all. What's the point of being a missionary church in an overwhelmingly Muslim society [if you won't be a missionary church]? Why are you there?

My view for the reason was that liberal Protestantism--whose great hero was John Keats, the English poet--believed that all religions were moving towards a convergence. He believed that. In that convergence, the distinctions of religion would fall away and what would reamin would be a common denominator in which religion would participate. Conversion makes that awkward.

Os Guinness: This issue is controversial because the Muslim hatred of conversion, which often leads to the death penalty, as Paul said, coincides with the secular aversion of the conversion. And I want to make the very simple point; I’d never heard the secularist idea against conversion in a way that didn’t undermine the liberal commitment to persuasion. Because for so long there is not coercion, only persuasion, which, of course, is at the heart of the message of Jesus. Conversion is the fruit of the highly liberal view of changing people’s hearts and minds. And any atheists who argue against it, whether the Baptists praying for Hindus a couple of years ago or the current thing, they are actually being, not liberal, but illiberal.

….As you treat them. And you should take time to get to know them. So that’s my response to you about what would be good as evangelicals. Be truly evangelical. Love people, embrace them. Before we get to evangelism, we must know them, we must care about them, we must hurt with them, all the things that truly define God’s purposes and God’s intentions.

Joel Belz: I’d like to take this a different direction. I would like to hear some practical comments from some of the relief groups represented here. It seems that a lot of what we’ve been talking about kind of intersects in Baghdad right now. We have a reporter who turned in a story about churches in Baghdad. There was a surprisingly consistent sense among them that they had a greater degree of freedom under Saddam Hussein, and now they’re afraid they won’t be able to keep that once this so-called democracy comes. It’s just with the policy situation with the humanitarian groups coming in, and because you want to be sensitive, to the various religious groups, they are stepping back and working with the churches in Baghdad, I think that’s the sense that I got. And the churches in Baghdad are a little concerned, ironically, that under a US-led or democracy democracy, they may not have the freedom that they had under dictatorship. How can we take something practical away as far as what things to look for, what good sign posts to look for, and what things evangelical groups, reporters, and thinkers can be looking for in Baghdad.

Lamin Sanneh: Yeah, I mean, there are these inter-Christian communities ……….I often start by telling my students, there are Arab Christians who call God Allah, before there were any Muslims. So the question is is Allah the same God as the God of the Christians? Christians worshiped God as Allah long before Mohammad appeared on the scene. So we have to have understanding as related to frankly we are not prior in the way that we think theologically we are. These Christian communities existed in the ancient Middle East for a very very long time. The second thing to say though, is that these communities have also taken on the cultural norms of their setting. So these churches have become what the Quran calls nina ? a little cultural groups that really took up faith as a cultural thing. The Coptics for example in Egypt, through centuries of living you know in solid Islamic melieu have taken on the characteristics of the Muslim community. And so they’re afraid of the West coming in, with their democratic ideas, secular ideas, and shaking things up. These are not unique to the Christian community, it’s true also of the Orthodox church in Russia. I was in Germany shortly after 1991, and I met a professor there from the Russian Orthodox seminary, and you know, he’s an imminent theologian. And he said, ‘you know, for a very long time, we in the Orthodox church used to believe that to be a Russian is to be Orthodox, and to be Orthodox is to be Russian. Territoriality. Now these things are shaken up, and we need resources to help our people to understand that this is just a characterization. So the Christians in the Middle East have a great deal to learn about the nature of Christianity. But we also Western Christians have a great deal to learn about the ancient roots of Christianity.

Next Response (Gi?): I don’t speak from a religious position when I look into Iraq. I speak on my experiences of …………This is just a Muslim perspective. If I am responsible for all operations in Iraq, I would establish a relations with a church in Iraq, not far administering aid to the Iraqi people. I would establish relationships with Iraqi civil institutions, even the Muslim faith communities, I would work with them in administering aid, I would establish a manipilant? Relationship with the church. Why? Christians are identified as loving, fellowship, things that I can help the church in this one reflection or this one journey, I might help them. If people in the church need assistance, I would give assistance, but in terms of reaching out to the ordinary Iraqi people, I would not use the church as the link at this point and time. Why? If I would do that, it would become the product of ……………..Also, one question that I would want to understand, "If Sadam has been brutal against the shiek community in Iraq, but has protected the Iraqi church, what is that? Has the church stood by in silence, while a lot of Iraqi Muslims are being abused. Rather than the population at large, maybe the church has to repent of its one sin. Maybe the church needs to be challenged. And the only way for the church to be challenged is church engaging in internal reflection, and trying to find what is its place? I would go to the Iraqi church and put the Iraqi church in a position of power, by giving that church all the resources, helping them to reach out to other Iraqi Muslims, I would not be helping the Iraqi church, in any kind of a way. That would be my response.

Serge Duss: I will add on that in other Muslim countries, Bosnia and Kosovo, there were very small Christian communities; we did not align ourselves just to the Christian church, because then it becomes us and them. And the purpose of us being there is providing aid to all who need it, and as best we can to contribute to an emerging civil society where people and community will be able to take their own responsibility of helping themselves. We want people to be able to help themselves. And one of the ways we do that is by structuring projects that bring together folks, leaders, from opposing ethnic or religious communities. And serve as the bridge when possible. It takes time, it’s slow as watching the grass grow, but there are results. People see this foreign group is there for purpose of helping all people, not just one. And that’s what helps give us the credibility and builds trust. And without trust first, you can’t have credibility.

Galen Carey: Serge said it’s not only the foreign groups that can show that kind of inter-group sensitivity, even the local groups. I’ve seen a number of places where the evangelical churches have actually distinguished themselves because of the way in which they share with everybody. Not just their own group, but the groups that are fighting each other as well. Also wanted to comment on, I think there’s an important need and opportunity domestically in terms of how Muslim/Americans, especially those from the Middle East, are treated here. And it’s more a policy issue than a personal one, because my sense is that on a personal level, in general, Americans are fairly even-handed about things, but on a policy level, Muslim Americans from the Middle East have been treated quite badly in the post-9/11 period. And the evangelical voice of protest is virtually non-existant. I think it’s seen by most Muslim Americans that the policies of our government reflect the wishes of the Christian community and even more particularly the evangelical community, and in that regard, things like the detentions, the special registragtions for the Pakistanis and others are quite troublesome and have created quite a bit of problem in terms of our own values I think, and yet we don’t hear Christians or evangelicals speaking up about that. I think if we were, and we do have people of evangelical traditions who are in places of responsibility in the government, and the extent to which they are representing policies which are antithetical to this self- sacrificial love which we say we’re all about, then we’re more based on appearance. It does the cause of the gospel no good. And on the contrary, if we’re able to speak up and welcome immigrants, refugees, especially those fleeing the terrorists, and the Muslims countries themselves, who are Muslims, then that’s an important way that we can build these kinds of bridges.

Paul Marshall: But they don’t speak out because they disagree with you, they disagree with you about what’s happening.

Galen Carey: What? What do you mean?

Paul Marshall: Well, you have given a description of sort of wide-spread tensions, a picture of oppression, and things of this kind. And why don’t we speak about that? It’s because more Americans, most evangelicals think they’re wrong. They think your description of the situation is not correct.

Female: Or they don’t disagree with the policies.

Paul Marshall: yes.

Galen Carey: Precisely. There’s a disagreement about the use of the law.

Paul Marshall: Yeah, I would say you have to make a case about the way you see what America’s doing is correct.

Marc Ericson: Well the first thing, our team in Somalia would say about Muslim clans and Mullahs and leaders and the calipha literally risked their lives to save our team. When 9/11 happened, the next day I went down to the Islamic community to a doctor I knew was one of the leaders, told him that story, he said we will do the same for you. If you are in danger, if you need a place to come, if you want someone to look out for you, our whole church will be available to you. We went down and told him that. Not because we were for our foreign policy. We have to disengage from what is happening in terms of our foreign policy. They have to hear that from us. That’s how we preach the gospel.

Paul Marshall: Oh, it may be good for pastors, a subset of Christians to disengage from foreign policy, say particularly in this town, where many Christians and others are deeply engaged in government, and that’s their divine given office, to separate themselves from foreign policy. That could be a church thing, that could be a clergy thing, but it’s not a lay person thing.

Female: But the question is, how do you go about doing that if you are a lay person and one of the things that you talked about is the appeal to this tradition of Christiandom. If we don’t go through and unpack all the things we’ve inherited all the things that shape our thinking about evangelical traditon, then how do you express your divine calling with regard to public policy. You know, submit to this prior way of thinking. Where is the point of departure. Is the point of departure the cross or the gospel, or is the point of departure a cultural framework for thinking about the cross or the gospel, because for instance the evangelical leaders in American are in some ways sort of set primarily because they have voice, and are going to be called upon to speak in the media. When and on what topics you choose to speak is what presents the face of evangelicals collectively.

Male: What I heard Paul was just saying is that you don’t see what just happened as being morally offensive essentially.

Paul Marshall: I have not closely followed detentions or immigration violations and so on. But I could be persuaded either way. The analysis you want right or wrong, is not shared by most Americans. Then you went on to say this was a defect of the church without properly reflecting our values, and maybe there should be some repentance in this. It is not a moral failing of people not doing something if they disagree with you about something that needs to be done. If they feel that the current security policies of the US administration are OK - bad sides, good sides, but generally OK - you’d have to make that case rather than saying because they’re doing bad things the church should repent of not having complained about them.

Male: Well, I’ll go on record saying I think we look back in 10 years, my guess will be evangelicals will look far too much the Amen corner of what’s happened. Without independent perspectives, some of my good friends in the administration have sounded in the last few weeks really like cheerleaders. And I’ve sort of groaned at the emails that have come across my desk. Are they thinking in the light of theology or history or wherever? This is off the subject, cheerleading and all.

Male: The survival of the West has nothing to do with the job of the church.

MC: OK, I’m going to go to Steve McFarland now, he’s been waiting for a long time. I just thought that Paul was going to make an important point to Galen.

Steve McFarland: Professor, Galen and Marc have partially answered this question. What can evangelicals, particularly evangelicals in relief and development agencies, start doing or stop doing. Stop diluting the effectiveness and civility of our discourse. The peripheral issues become obstacles to our centering on our information of the gospels in word and deed. What are some practical ideas? You suggested not to compromise the gospel. What are things that don’t compromise the Great Commission and our truth claims? What can we stop doing so we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot?

Male: I think also some things we should be doing or not doing, but I think we should bear down on one thing which no one can dispute, which is religious. The President of Senegal is Muslim has available to him secular schools, government schools, Muslim schools, that he supports himself, and Christian schools. And he decides, I want to send my kids to the Christian schools. And so he does. And this you can