Apart from the letter sent by the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog to the Muslims of the world last August 3 to mark the end of Ramadan this year (the actual feast was on August 16), nothing much has been reported on furthering the Christian-Muslim dialog, after the initial impetus of the Common Word response to the challenge laid down by Benedict XVI in Regensburg. The worldwide climate has no doubt been affected by the fact that the prematurely and optimistically named 'Arab spring' has turned into a grim winter for Western observers of Islamic affairs and, especially, for the Christians living in the countries that have had a resurgence of fundamentalist Islamic nationalism. The Muslims of Milan - a feisty community that once saw fit to perform their Friday prayers in Milan's Cathedral Square - seem to demonstrate the Muslim 'otherness'...
Islam and its fear of dialog:
Why Muslims find it hard
to relate to non-Muslims
by VITTORIO MESSORI
Translated from
August 21, 2012
But how can this be? They invited the mayor of Milan to come, and they griped because due to a prior commitment, he sent an associate to represent him.
Then when the latter handed them a letter from the Archbishop of the diocese - Cardinal Angelo Scola, whose letter was considerately written in Arabic - the person who organized the meeting simply put it into his pocket, said a few perfunctory word of thanks, but did not bother to open the letter, nor even to mention Cardinal Scola in his opening remarks.
[Cardinal Scola, of course, since he was patriarch of Venice, has headed the movement Oasis - with its own Arabic monthly magazine - which is very active in promoting dialog with Muslims in the Middle East. I must check out if there is an overview report of what Oasis has managed to do so far.]
What was the 'logic' in the above which happened at the Arena di Milano among 10,000 Muslims who gathered for the end of Ramadan last Sunday?
Well, at least, in the Muslim perspective, the logic was explained by the Grand Imam who led the meeting: "We intended to greet only the civilian public institutions representing the city, and that includes we who live and work here. This is a Muslim religious occasion and we obviously did not plan for representatives of other religions to speak... It would be like us wanting to greet the Catholics in the Cathedral of Milan as they prepare to celebrate Christmas Mass".
Those who do not know enough about Islam are often scandalized by not taking into account that
[even if they do not have one common worldwide leader, as Catholics do], Islam is a 'bloc' - an impenetrable unity that distinguishes, without the possibility of relationship, between their 'us' and the rest of the world that is not 'us'
.[The worldwide community of Islam calls itself the ummah.]
Of course, there is a distinction between the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are Sunni and the Shiite minority (about 10-15% worldwide), but this does not exclude their substantial unity of belief.
Beyond that, Islam just does not have anything like the plurality of Christianity today, with its many confessions, within which there are also diverse charisms and diverse tasks: from the fervent Christian to the occasional practitioner, from the strict traditionalist to the 'adult' secular Catholic.
In Islam, you either believe what everyone else does - and believe it without hesitation, being ready for martyrdom if you should dare renounce or question any of i - or be expelled from the community which does not accept any deviation from doctrine nor any lukewarmness in religious practice.
[And leftist Catholics say the Church is despotic! If it were, they, the dissenters, would not be around at all.]
The 'bloc' is so compact that it has come to impose on Muslims the religious duty to exclude, by violence if need be, anyone who does not do his part as required, or seeks to 'sneak' into the
ummah. For instance, a non-Muslim who seeks to join the pilgrims to Mecca and is found out can expect no mercy.
Even a non-Muslim intruder into a mosque during the Friday prayers would be dealt with harshly. The entire world is divided into the 'land of believers' and the 'land of unbelievers', and it is the duty of every believer to reduce the latter territory.
For over a thousand years, social compactness and firmness on basic doctrine (reduced to five juridical precepts, the so-called 'pillars of the faith' that one must follow - the Muslim creed, daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca) have been the strength of this religion, but they now threaten to be its weakness.
In the late 19th century, the French author of 'A Life of Jesus', Ernst Renan, who spoke Arabic, who had lived in the Middle East, who had read and studied every Muslim text, had no doubt: "Islam can only exist as a 'the only religion' - not as a religion of state, but as the State itself. When the West manages to force it to change into a free, individual, and spiritual religion that is lived family by family and not in great clans or in the assembly of the mosque, Islam will perish".
[I personally retain from having read Renan in my teens a statement he made that I have never forgotten, "Somehow Islam soils everything it touches". It may be seen as extreme cynicism, but in the context of history and our own contemporary experience, it seems to be generally true, and God bless those who have been exceptions to the rule!, such as the thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age that flourished in Moorish Spain and not in the Middle East.]
Obviously, we cannot ignore the predictions of the 'experts' but we can never forget, either, that history is unpredictable par excellence. But there is no doubt that Islam is called on today to meet the challenge made by Renan more than a century ago.
The current massive Muslim migration to Western countries is risky for Islam, above all, and nothing is more fallacious than to mistake a certain Muslim aggressiveness as a proof of Islam's strength and masculine vigor!
Indeed, it is fear above all, perhaps, that explains why the people forged in the Koran tend to resort to fundamentalism, to intransigence, and in some cases, to terrorism.
It is uneasiness that explains why charges of 'modernism' or 'Westernization' have forced entire political castes into exile from the Middle East and Arab North Africa after hard-and-fast Muslims come to power.
So, even the discourtesy (or more kindly, the mistake or gaffe) committed at the Arena di Milano last Sunday, must be framed within this concern to preserve the compactness of the 'bloc' at all costs, which must live in a society that is its exact opposite and which even defines itself as 'liquid'.
As if to tell others: "Here we are as 'us' - we don't want to hear other voices. All we want is for the politicians to confirm that we can stay in this city and calmly strengthen the unity of our faith and customs. As for dialog, what need do we have for it, since we have the ultimate revelation, the conclusive one, for which Moses and Jesus were merely precursors and announcers of Mohammed, the last unsurpassable prophet?"
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/08/2012 22:42]