Blog

Authority, Community & Identity article

Muslim-Christian Dialogue in the Gulf


In mid-October 2011, I conducted the following interview with the Rev. Doug Leonard, Director of the Al Amana Center in Oman. Aimed at promoting Muslim-Christian understanding, the Al Amana Center began as an initiative of the Reformed Church in America and now operates under the auspices of the government of Oman. As far as is known, the Al Amana Center is the only Christian-initiated interfaith center in the world that formally partners with an Islamic government. 

What exactly is the Al Amana Center?

The Al Amana Center is an academic institute for Muslim-Christian Relations in the Sultanate of Oman. It offers intensive semester-long and two-week academic programs whose purpose is to facilitate mutual learning between Christians and Muslims.  We also publish academic articles about Muslim-Christian relations, and invite visiting scholars to speak and research in Oman.  The initiative started originally by the Reformed Church in America and is now ecumenical with participation from the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, various Orthodox denominations, and mainline Protestant denominations. As far as we know, the Al Amana Center is the only Christian-initiated interfaith center that is partnering with an Islamic government.  Everything we do is in partnership with His Excellency, Sheikh Abdullah bin Mohammed al Salimi, who is the Minister of Awqaf and Religious Affairs.

How did this initiative come about?

The Center was formed in the late 1980s and is built upon the legacy of a relationship between the Reformed church in America and the Sultanate. The Reformed Church came to Oman in 1893 and formed hospitals and schools, for the purpose of providing humanitarian service in the country.  By 1960 the hospital network here had become the largest employer, second only to the Royal Army of Oman. The employees of the hospitals were predominantly Omani. The idea from the beginning was to start a medical college—to train Omanis to be doctors and hospital administrators and to eventually hand over the operation to Oman, which happened in 1973.

Can you say something about the work of the Center?

We partner with the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Oman, and with colleges in the US and Europe to provide experiential interfaith programs designed to aid students in their understanding of Muslim-Christian relations. In addition, we bring American and European seminary students to Oman who are training to be ministers, either Catholic priests, Orthodox priests, Protestant ministers, or Imams.  Our students learn about Islam in the context of an Arab country.

Religious leaders today need to have a global and multi-faith perspective.  This is the world that their congregants are encountering and as leaders they need to be equipped to help them make sense of this diversity and how it informs faith in action.

Oman is the only country where Ibadi Islam is practiced as the official religion. Ibadi doctrine preserves both an austere practice of piety combined with openness to engaging with other schools of thought within Islam and the doctrines of other faiths.  This combination makes Oman an ideal place in which to engage in interfaith learning.

It is amazing to see the transformations that students go through, especially the undergraduate students…. We have a relationship with Cambridge University in the UK, Tübingen University in Germany, Hartford Theological Seminary in the US and Northwestern College in Iowa.  Our undergraduate semester program is designed for small liberal arts Christian colleges in the US.  It is the smaller, liberal arts, Christian colleges that don’t necessarily have access to this kind of pluralism in their own context.

We also work with the Ministry of Religious Affairs to identify religious leaders in Oman whom we send on a tour of the US and the UK to provide an experiential education of religious pluralism.

We contribute articles to various academic journals including The Muslim World, an academic journal of Muslim-Christian relations published by Hartford Seminary. Al-Tasamoh (Tolerance) and Al-Tafahum (Understanding).  These journals showcase religious pluralism in the region. They are published in Arabic and have a wide distribution in the region.

Finally, we bring Christian and Muslim interfaith scholars to Oman to present at the Grand Mosque and at the Institute of Shari’a Studies, an Islamic seminary focusing on Ibadi theology. There are about a thousand students at the institute.  The students are from Oman and many of the surrounding Muslim countries, places like North Africa, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan—mainly students who are interested in studying Ibadi Islam.

Do you have scholars in residence as well?

At the moment we don’t, but we are hoping to develop a program that will bring scholars for extended research and teaching.  Professor David Ford, Director of Cambridge University’s Interfaith Programme came to Oman in 2009 to deliver “A Muscat Manifesto” in the Grand Mosque.  Dr. John Caputo—the famous Catholic theologian came in 2010 and gave a fascinating talk at both the Grand Mosque and at the Institute for Shari’a Studies about the implications of deconstructionism and post-modern philosophy on the field of theology.  Professor Hans Küng of Tübingen University has spoken here.  Last year Dr. John Esposito visited Oman and spoke about the political implications of Muslim-Christian Relations. Each year we assist in bringing a couple of scholars to the region.

We’re also interested in going beyond the theory of interfaith relations to collaborative projects that center around our shared values and put faith into action.  We ask the question, “How can Islam and Christianity respond to some of the challenges of globalization together?  How can we collaborate to solve world problems?” Islam and Christianity are global religions.  They coexist in nearly every country in the world. Half of the world’s population is Muslim and Christian.  If we can figure out how to help religious leaders and people of faith from both groups to collaborate, there’s an enormous wealth of human resource…that could be mobilized to do good things, such as addressing the crisis of AIDS in Africa, crafting intelligent approaches to the problems of global warming, or responding to the world’s need for humane labor laws that govern the migrant work force.   There are all manner of global problems that need our collaboration.

What fueled the government’s interest in starting this Center?

I wasn’t here during its formation, so I don’t know the entire story, but I think there are three things that have led to Oman’s interest in interfaith education.  One, Oman has been a hub of trade and commerce for thousands of years.  Muscat has been a cosmopolitan city for a millennium.   Oman’s trade with the US began in 1790. The first Arab ambassador to the US was an Omani.  The trade with China, India, Africa and Persia date back thousands of years. So Oman has always been a sort of global hub.  The second is that pluralism is built into Ibadi doctrine. Ibadi theology is characterized by both an austere practice of Islam and  a willing to listen to and understand the faith of others.

The famous Ibadi scholar Nur al-Din al-Salimi (d. 1914) said, “You will find us accepting truth from whoever brings it even if he is a hated one.” And likewise, “We refuse the false from whoever brings it even if he is a beloved one” (Isam Al-Rawas, Oman in Early Islamic History, Reading, UK: Ithaca Press 2000, p. 78).  So the willingness to dialogue and seek understanding is built into Ibadi doctrine, which is why the title of the academic journal, Al-Tafahum¸ means “Understanding.”

The Ministry of Religious Affairs also offers conferences on inter-Islamic scholarship. They led a conference on fiqh or jurisprudence last year.  The presenters were top scholars of Shia Islam from Iran here, and top scholars from Saudi Arabia, from Sunni Islam. So Ibadism is interested in relating to all schools of thougth within Islam. The parallel in Christianity is the ecumenical movement. His Eminence Shaykh Ahmad b. Hamad al-Khalili, the Grand Mufti of Oman, said “the Ibadis have never dared to exclude anyone from the millah (community of Muslims)”(His Eminence Shaykh Ahmad b. Hamad al-Khalili, Grand Mufti of the Sultanate of Oman, The Overwhelming Truth: A Discussion of Some Key Concepts in Islamic Theology, Oman: Ministry of Awqaf & Religious Affairs 2002, p. 9.)

You can even see this unifying intent in the architecture of the Grand Mosque in Muscat. You see the arches with the black and white alternating bricks on the arches — a reflection from the Mosque in Cordoba; then there are the floral patterns in the mosaics, which are Persian; and Indian Muslim influence from Mughal art. The Grand Mosque in Muscat, Oman is a visual statement of the Islamic inclusivity that Ibadism seeks to foster.

The third factor contributing to Oman’s interest in inter-faith relations is His Majesty Sultan Qaboos.  His Majesty is committed to interfaith peace and dialogue. The Sultan gave an endowment of 4 million dollars for a chair in the study of the Abrahamic Faiths at Cambridge University two years ago.  What is remarkable about the chair is that it includes Judaism. His Majesty was also involved in the peace process between Jordan and Israel, back in the mid-90s.  His Majesty has great vision for the need and importance of deepening interfaith understanding.

Is there much of a history of Muslim-Christian interaction in the country?

The church as it is currently structured has been here since the early 1900s. But of course, Christianity was here with the …Nestorian Church [in] the mid-fifth century C.E.] . …. [T]here is evidence of Omani bishops being members at synods of the Catholic Church….. There’s also a story about how Islam came to Oman. One [version] of [the story] is that Oman sent a Christian, an Omani, to go and consider this new movement that they had heard about.  This Christian returned to Oman after meeting with Mohammed, converted to Islam, and convinced his tribe that they also need to convert.  So perhaps the Christian community was the first to convert to Islam.

Muslim-Christian interaction has existed for hundreds of years in Oman.  The Portuguese came in 1507 and were conquered in 1651.  The tribes of Oman defeated the Portuguese and expelled them.  Oman was the first nation to gain independence from a European colonizing power. But of course, the Portuguese brought with them crosses on their flags and churches in the forts, so churches became associated with military and colonial power… Then in the 1890s, Christians arrived again in Oman through the Anglican Church.  A missionary named Bishop French, who’s buried here, in Sidab, came to open a church and a missionary station here for the Anglican Church.  That was in 1891, the same year that the first minister of the Reformed Church in America came to set up the hospitals. The good relationship between Oman and American and British Christians developed because Omanis saw that Christians were doing good things for society and the people.  That humanitarian relationship reframed the relationship with Protestant Christianity. Today there are Orthodox churches, Catholic churches, Protestant churches, all sharing the same plot of land and designated areas for Christian worship.  Christians are more ecumenical in the Gulf than just about anywhere else in the world.  It’s a beautiful thing.

Can you tell me about some of the issues that become focal points for dialogue? Do you talk about the impact of modernization and globalization here for instance?

I was asked to contribute an article dealing with the problems of globalization in the last issue of Al-Tasamoh. I wrote about the challenges of the breakdown of community that results from globalization, from mass communication, Internet, and social media.  We are connected technologically, but it’s a superficial connection, and we are experiencing a loss of local community and family systems. One of the points I make in the article is that Islam and Christianity are perfectly set up to provide an ethical correction to that kind of transformation.  Both faiths are global religions that have successfully learned how to be both global and local in their practice of faith and life.  Islam and Christianity have maintained an ethic that simultaneously prioritizes family connections, local community connections through a mosque or a church, and global presence and action.  That is not to say that these two monotheistic faiths have been immune from the emerging modern values of hyper-individualism and consumerism. But both traditions maintain that essential connection of nuclear family, extended family, wider community, as well as global engagement. And both faiths have within their respective traditions very strong critiques of individualist consumer society, and so they can demonstrate an alternative model of human relating for the world.

What do you think about the relationship between church and state here? 

Some people would say that in order to maintain religious pluralism you need a separation of church and state. But that’s not the case here. Ibadi Islam is the official religion, and yet, religious freedom and tolerance is protected in society. Even Hinduism, where a Muslim might say—and maybe incorrectly—that Hindus worship many gods. I don’t think Hindus would say that. Polytheism is the cardinal sin of Islam, the worship of anything other than one God. And yet, foreign workers who are practicing what many Muslims would consider to be a cardinal heresy are given land and money to build new temples in Oman. His Majesty just gave funding and land for a new Hindu temple.  Oman is like England in that there is an official state religion, the Anglican Church, and yet, freedom of religion is protected in society.  So I don’t think a nation needs to have a separation of church and state in order to have a progressive civil society that protects the freedom of religion.

What about the relationship between Islam and democracy: is that a topic of discussion here?

I hear that question often, especially when I give talks in colleges or churches in America. There’s an assumption in America that Islam and democracy are mutually exclusive. But in Ibadi Islam, the imam is elected; tribal elders are elected, and they elect the Imam. Ibadis resisted the idea of a caliphate—a religious authority as the head of the Islamic empire. They instead had regionally elected imams, in North Africa, East Africa, here in Oman—anywhere that Ibadis from Basra set out to establish Ibadism, imams were locally elected. So democracy is an essential part of Ibadi Islam.

I was surprised to learn in the documentary sponsored by the Ministry of Religious Affairs that even Muslims here are forbidden to proselytize.

Right. That ruling comes from a desire to keep peace among the religions in the country.  Oman wants to protect people from those of another religion who might desire to distribute pamphlets or aggressively push others to believe a certain way.  Such approaches are foolish, insensitive, and very upsetting to anyone.  This is the reason that Muslims are also not allowed to proselytize.  Oman wants to maintain harmony among groups.  To a Western mind, that feels controlling, but we need to understand the intent behind the ruling.

But what about conversion?

Our work at Al Amana Centre is in no way about conversion or proselytization.  Hopefully, what people are converted to is a deeper understanding and appreciation for one another’s faith. And there’s no apostasy law here. The goal of our work is certainly not that someone would change his or her religion.

What contribution do you see your Center making, and what do you hope to achieve?

It’s one thing to read about another faith, and it’s another to actually encounter and be in relationship with people of another faith.  We live in polemic times. Experiential and relational interfaith education is what it will take to transform people’s understanding of the other. That is what we provide at Al Amana Centre, programs that seek to foster inter-faith encounters and deepen understanding for both Muslims and Christians. We’re operating on a small scale now; one of my visions is to replicate this work in Oman and provide similar programs for interfaith learning in other parts of the world where Muslims and Christians coexist.  Today, every religious leader needs to have a better understanding of, and appreciation for, other faiths. People of faith look to their religious leaders for guidance and direction, and so they need to be educated to help people in their understanding of the “other.”

Do you have any examples of the impact this dialogue has had?

I have become friends with one of the students at the Institute of Shari’a Studies.  There was no question in his mind when we met that it was bad for him to interact with me as a Christian. He’s not Omani; Omanis generally wouldn’t say that. His Imam had taught him that it makes him an unclean Muslim to associate with anybody who is not Muslim, and that Christianity is corrupt.  It is through our friendship that he now comes and helps to lecture for our students who come from the US and the UK. He now is able to articulate the importance of Muslims learning about Christianity, for the purpose of being at peace with Christians. Someday he’s going to become an Imam in his country, and he’s now going to be a different kind of leader than he would have been without this interaction.  He told me recently that he wants to do his Ph.D. in Muslim-Christian relations.  So the most important contribution that we can make is to foster inter-faith understanding, especially as we become more mobile and inter-cultural and inter-religious in every country.

2 Comments on Muslim-Christian Dialogue in the Gulf Array
Brandon Vaidyanathan
Brandon Vaidyanathan Chair of the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of America. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 2014. He has researched and worked on the cultural dimensions of institutions in South Asia with his work being published in journals such as Business and Society and the Journal of American Academy and Religion.
Global Currents article

The Ennahda Effect?


Tunisia’s Islamist-oriented political party, Ennahda, appears to have won slightly more than 40% of the popular vote in constitutional assembly elections on October 30th, the first elections since protests there ignited the Arab Spring last January. In December 2010 and January 2011, in the first days following popular revolutions in Tunisia and then Egypt, commentators emphasized their non-religious nature and the central role that ideologically neutral, social-media-toting youths played in toppling authoritarian governments. So the impressive, outright electoral victory of a major, religious political party in “secular” Tunisia should give pause for reflection.

Two questions seem particularly important: 1) Why did Ennahda do so well?, and 2) What does their success say about the future of Islamist-oriented parties elsewhere in the region?

Why Did Ennahda Do so Well?

Commentators were not wholly off the mark on Tunisia’s secularism. Survey data indicates that Tunisian society is indeed the most secular in the region. World Gallup Poll results for 2010, for example, report that only 36% of Tunisians report they attend Friday Mosque services every week, compared to 64% of Libyans, 61% of Egyptians and Moroccans, and 55% of Algerians. While 36% is still rather high when compared to Western Europe, and while a much higher proportion of Tunisians (92%) still identifies itself as Muslim, Ennahda’s electoral victory cannot be read as a simple connection of the party to a religious population.

Rather, Ennahda’s success reflects the party’s ability to connect its religious identity and political vision to a wider, less-religious public, including many of the relatively non-ideological youth who participated in the revolution. Thus, in the days since the elections, the party has tried to assure electors of both its economic prowess and its intent to protect Tunisia’s popular political liberties, even while transparently presenting itself as a religiously-oriented party. Throughout the electoral campaign, Ennahda was also able to capitalize on the heavy price it paid for its long history of political opposition to an authoritarian regime.  For more than twenty years, from jail cells and in exile, Ennahda’s leaders have preached the need for elections in Tunisia. The credibility associated with such consistent calls for reform, coupled with its identity as a transparent and clearly religious political party, gave it a strength and coherence that other secular and liberal parties in Tunisia lacked.

What Does Ennahda’s Performance Mean for Islamist-Oriented Parties Elsewhere?

On the one hand, Ennahda’s success is a reminder that Islamist-oriented parties remain a potent source of political mobilization in the region, and heightens expectations of their future political role in all four countries of North Africa. With the exception of Libya, however, Islamist-oriented parties will not enjoy Ennahda’s untested sheen of promise and cannot assume that they will be rewarded with votes simply because of their religious identity or because of their status as an opposition party.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while previously barred from power, has been more associated in the public perception with violence and nepotism than Ennahda in Tunisia. Likewise, in Morocco and Algeria, Islamist-oriented parties have little concrete to show voters after more than ten years of participation as legal opposition parties and currently face widespread voter apathy towards all political parties. Islamist-oriented parties in all these countries, therefore, will have to work hard to mobilize voters and push their electoral fortunes towards those of Ennahda.

As these parties seek to do so, the hope is that Ennahda’s success makes its method and model all the more attractive. If there is to be an “Ennahda Effect,” we would expect Islamist-oriented parties elsewhere to seek to 1) burnish clean records; 2) travel towards secular parties; 3) assure less-religious voters; and, critically, 4) focus on the economic grievances which made political reform possible in the first place.

It is difficult to imagine that the consolidation of democracy in the region could take place at this juncture without the help of Islamist-oriented parties. If other Islamists emulate Ennahda and if Ennahda is capable of securing a solid consensus around its new proposed constitution, one that can win over Tunisia’s secular parties and their constituents, then sustainable democracy in North Africa might not be so far away, and the Arab Spring might really begin to bear tangible fruit.

2 Comments on The Ennahda Effect? Array
Michael Driessen
Michael Driessen is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. He teaches courses on Religion and Politics and co-direct the University’s Interfaith Initiative. His research interests include the nature of public religions in Catholic and Muslim societies and the role of interreligious dialogue in contemporary global politics.
Authority, Community & Identity article

The Qur’an, the Bible, and the urge to violence


Philip Jenkins’ September 2011 piece in this blog, “9/11: Did the Qur’an really make them do it?,” was an eye-opener on the touchy issue of religion and violence. For me it was also a reminder of an anti-Semitic piece of propaganda I found in an Istanbul bookstore years ago.

With the conspiracy-mongering title, Judaism and Freemasonry, this was a crude volume — one that, among other things, claimed to explain “Israeli terrorism” in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was full of photos showing Israeli soldiers attacking Palestinians, and presented huge captions that included verses from the Old Testament and especially the Book of Joshua. If the photograph showed Israelis breaking the bones of a Palestinian youngster — a globally notorious scene from the ‘80s — then the caption featured the biblical verse, “He shall break their bones” (Numbers 24: 8b, KJV). The book’s argument was blunt: The Israelis were torturing a nation because their God made them do it.

The more I learned about the Old Testament and the politics of the Middle East, the more I realized that what the book presented was not analysis but propaganda. It remains true that Israel’s 40-year-long occupation is a pretty brutal one, and that the Old Testament includes some belligerent passages, but the reality was far more complex. I noticed that Jewish religious sources also include many words of wisdom and compassion, and that there are many Jews who are willing to make peace with their Arab neighbors. Indeed, the militants who advocate and even practice violence in the name of Judaism are pretty marginal. Moreover, the source of their hatred is actually not the confrontational passages of the Torah, but the political and social situation that they are in.

In other words, such militants turn angry and violent not because they read their religious texts. Rather, they focus on the harsher parts of those texts because they are already angry and violent for temporal — often political — reasons.

The Sloganization of Scripture

I often recall my experience with that anti-Semitic book and the way it misread the Hebrew Scriptures because I see that more and more people are doing the same thing with the Qur’an. When Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda bomb innocents, or when some fringe imam in a radical mosque preaches hatred toward non-Muslims, greenhorn “Islam experts” find passages in the Qur’an that apparently justify such extremism. And, it turns out, these extremists themselves refer to similar passages in the Qur’an or other Islamic sources. The situation is very similar to the strange agreement between the anti-Semites and the Jewish extremists on the incorrect notion that Judaism justifies carnage.

One common problem in all such misreading of the Scriptures amounts to the “sloganization” of certain texts. This is done by taking a part of the holy text out of its textual and historical context, and turning it into a slogan that “justifies” a mundane political agenda. For example, some Islamic revolutionaries, especially those who were inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, used to find a political message in this verse: “Those who do wrong will come to know by what a great reverse they will be overturned!” (26:227) But in fact the verse speaks about the punishment that God will hand down to unbelievers on judgment day, not about a this-worldly turn of events.

The crucial mistake is to overlook Islam’s scholarly tradition called “tafseer,” which is the study of the meaning of the Qur’an. Tafseer has a basic rule: A single verse or passage can’t be understood in itself. Instead, it has to be evaluated according to the other parts of the Qur’an, the general goals and principles of the holy text, and the way it was implemented by the prophet. Yet most radicals — be they Islamist or anti-Islamist — don’t have the time or the patience to “waste” on tafseer. They prefer to copy and paste the divine words to create powerful slogans for their immediate purposes.

Muslims and Non-Muslims

For an example of sloganization, consider this Qur’anic verse, which is frequently quoted by Muslims who are hostile to other followers of the Abrahamic path:

“O (Muslim) believers! Don’t make friends with the Jews or Christians” (5:51).

But then look at this verse, which puts the one above in context:

“(Muslims!) God does not forbid you from being good to those who have not fought you in religion or driven you from your homes, or from being just towards them. God loves those who are just. God merely forbids you from taking as friends those who have fought you in religion and driven you from your homes and who supported your expulsion. Any who take them as friends are wrongdoers” (60:8-9).

One can also add to the discussion the Qur’anic verse that declares that “all who have faith in God and the Last Day and act rightly,” including “those who are Jews, and the Christians,” will be rewarded by God in the afterlife (2:62). From this premise, it is quite possible to build a Muslim form of ecumenism, in which other monotheistic faiths are seen as sisters, not enemies.

In short, if one looks at the Qur’an with a pre-existing aversion to non-Muslims, one can find verses that will justify and amplify this attitude. But if one looks with a more sober mind, one can see the contexts of those particular verses — and even find arguments for peace and tolerance.

Islam Without Extremes

That’s why, as I argue in my new book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, we have to look not only at the texts of Islam, but also at the contexts of Muslims. The texts are of course not unimportant — contrary to what an absolute sociological reductionist might claim — but they are always interpreted in the light of pre-existing cultures and mindsets. That is why more rigid schools of Islam have generally emerged in more culturally isolated and parochial locales, while more flexible and liberal schools of theology have tended to arise in more cosmopolitan centers of commerce. And that is why the decline of rationality and liberty in late medieval Islam was very much linked with the decline of economic dynamism, and the dawn of a “liberal Islam” is now especially evident in more cosmopolitan Muslim societies.

If one dismisses all such nuances, and looks at an alien faith only to see its deficiencies, one can find plenty of ways to denounce that alien faith and venerate one’s own. But as I learned from my encounter with anti-Semitic literature in that Istanbul bookstore some years ago, that is not the way to understand the world — or change it for the better.

3 Comments on The Qur’an, the Bible, and the urge to violence Array
Mustafa Akyol
Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist and the author of the books The Islamic Jesus (St. Martin's Press, February 2017) and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (W.W. Norton, July 2011).
Authority, Community & Identity article

9/11: Did the Qur’an Really Make Them Do It?


In the past few weeks, I have been asked regularly what lessons we learned from the experience of September 11, and I have despaired of finding much new to say about the terrorist themes because I’ve lived with these issues for so long. I was teaching courses and seminars on terrorism back in the mid-1980s, and in my last offering — in 1996 —our major class project was to assess the likely political and social implications of bringing down the World Trade Center.

On reflection, the greatest lesson I learned from the 9/11 horror concerned religion, and specifically how we in the West viewed the great world faiths. And the lessons are as much about Us as about Them. After 9/11, many commentators went beyond focusing on the particular ideology of the perpetrators to speak in terms of a broad clash of cultures and civilizations. They focused intensely on Islam, trying to determine just what features of that faith led its adherents to violence and bloodshed. Many writers have presented Islam as a stark contrast to Christianity and Judaism, and portrayed a struggle of darkness against light.

The Qur’an, in this view, is something like a terrorist manifesto: the book oozes violence, with so many verses about battles, swords and blood. Fanaticism seems hard-wired into the faith. Are the core texts of Islam so repulsive that they will prevent Muslim societies ever evolving to civilized and democratic communities? Why can’t they learn to be like us?

Reversing the Gaze

What’s so startling about this approach is what it says about how little Christians and Jews seem to know about their own scriptures, and their own history. Absent from such discussions is any sense of the extraordinarily violent and unforgiving passages that litter the Hebrew Bible, which is also the Christian Old Testament.

The Bible is an extraordinarily violent book: many passages quote God as commanding acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and racially-based mass murder. To take just one example of many, when God orders the conquest of Canaan, he supposedly commands his followers to exterminate the native inhabitants: “you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.” One passage in Exodus tells how the Amalekite tribe ambushed the children of Israel migrating through the wilderness. In response, the Bible’s God commands eternal war against that people, to annihilate them and blot out their memory. And God showed no patience for those who resisted commands to slay. According to the first book of Samuel, God orders King Saul to strike at the Amalekite people, killing every man, woman, child, and animal. When Saul fails to annihilate the enemy, he earns a scolding from the prophet Samuel, who himself slaughters and dismembers the Amalekite king. Saul’s sin was failing to be sufficiently thorough in genocide, and his reluctance led to his own destruction.

The striking fact here is not that such passages exist, but that they have been so utterly forgotten by so many devoted Bible-readers. So equally have the actual real world consequences of these texts. When we compare the Qur’an and the Bible, we might be tempted to see a critical difference between the texts. While the Bible reports violence in the distant past, the Qur’an commands violence here and now. The Bible, in this view, records ancient campaigns against forgotten peoples, which are of interest only to archaeologists, while the Qur’an commands “Fight infidels!”, an order valid in any age.

Biblical Texts of Terror: Not Just Ancient History

But such a contrast is false. However later commentators have read it, it is not obvious that the Qur’an was commanding violence without end against unbelievers, as opposed to warfare against specific Arabian tribes or factions in the seventh century CE. On the other hand, many generations of Christian and Jewish readers have found no difficulty in applying the Biblical commands in their own day.

If the Bible aims its harshest words at ancient peoples who no longer exist as identifiable ethnic groups — Amalekites or Canaanites — plenty of later commentators, Christian and Jewish, have had no problem in applying those imprecations to modern races and nations. Protestants have seen Catholics as Amalekites, and killed them accordingly (and vice versa); White Americans used the story against Native peoples; modern-day Hutus in Rwanda used the Amalekite tale to justify killing Tutsis. The last Christian who will seek to exterminate another nation on the pretense of killing Amalekites and Canaanites has not yet been born. In 1994, the Amalekite command sparked one of the worst massacres in the history of modern Israel, when a Jewish terrorist slaughtered dozens of Muslims worshipping in a Hebron mosque.

In comparing the Bible and the Qur’an, I stress that I am discussing the scriptures, rather than the historical experience either of Islam, or of Christianity and Judaism. Islam has a long history of conquest and religious warfare, in which Muslim armies and regimes subjugated or slaughtered members of other faiths: armed military jihad in the name of God is no myth. From the seventh century through the seventeenth, Muslim rulers cited religious justifications for their wars of conquest and imperial expansion, just as Christian Western powers would from the Renaissance onwards.

Only a wide-ranging historian with a truly global vision could comment plausibly as to whether, across the centuries, more aggression and destruction has been undertaken in the name of Islam than of Christianity. I have no idea how you might measure the body count. But in terms of the violent and unacceptable faces of their fundamental scriptures, differences between the faiths are minimal.

Understanding Our Sacred Texts, Understanding Each Other…

I draw two lessons from this. One, of course, is about the relationship of scriptures to real-world behavior. To say that terrorists or extremists can find religious texts to justify their acts (as the 9/11 hijackers did) does not mean that their violence actually grows from those scriptural roots.

Such an assumption itself is based on the crude fundamentalist formulation that everything in a given religion must somehow be authorized in scripture — or, conversely, that the mere existence of a scriptural text means that its doctrines must shape later history. When Christians or Jews point to violent parts of the Qur’an (or the Hadith) and suggest that those elements taint the whole religion, they open themselves to the obvious question: what about their own faiths? If the founding text shapes the whole religion, then Judaism and Christianity deserve the utmost condemnation as religions of savagery. Of course, they are no such thing; nor is Islam.

It’s also instructive to see how so many Bible readers fail to see these violent passages, and what that says about the nature of faith. When I write something about these topics, I can usually rely on receiving an outraged email from someone who quotes a gruesome passage attributed to the Qur’an, and then asks, roughly, “So where does Jesus say anything like this? Where does the New Testament say anything like this?” When I respond by pointing out texts in Joshua or Deuteronomy, I know I’ll get a response on the lines of “Oh, that’s not the Bible, it’s just the Old Testament.” That’s an alarming indication of a Christianity that has gone far astray from its Old Testament roots.

…and Strengthening Faith

It would be easy to cite these gruesome Biblical stories as a foundation for a New Atheist rant, and that’s absolutely not my intent. Paradoxically, what I have been trying to do in recent years, especially in my book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, is to show that Christians need not just to acknowledge the worst and grimmest scriptural texts, but even to use them as a means of strengthening faith and understanding.  Christianity only makes sense as the culmination of the whole Hebrew Bible, including its most unsettling portions.

Jesus was Yeshua, Yesu, whose name echoed Joshua, and it commemorated that great and deeply flawed warrior. In the Greek text, both names appear as Iesous: one Iesous slaughtered Canaanites, another healed the daughter of a Canaanite woman. Also, according to the New Testament, Jesus was immersed in the Hebrew Bible and, specifically, in the book of Deuteronomy, which contains so many stumbling blocks for modern-day believers. Paul was no less fascinated. If you take Deuteronomy out of the New Testament, that later work loses much of its structure and rationale. Christians need to be reading the whole Bible, including those tales of Canaanites and Amalekites, and comprehending them, not pretending they don’t exist.

The more Westerners probe the unacceptable portions of the Quran, the more urgent becomes the need to confront the texts of terror in their own heritage.

25 Comments on 9/11: Did the Qur’an Really Make Them Do It? Array
Philip Jenkins
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University as well asthe Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. His book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses was released by HarperCollins in October 2011. Among his more than twenty previously published titles are The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity (2002), Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 1960s and the Making of Eighties America (2006), The Lost History of Christianity (2008), and Jesus Wars (2010).
Authority, Community & Identity article

Overheard at a Christian Triumphalist Soirée: Channeling the Qur’an’s Critics


I agree with the main themes and arguments advanced by Philip Jenkins, not only in his blog post for Contending Modernities, but also in his interesting and important new book, Laying Down the Sword, which I have reviewed at some length for a forthcoming issue of The National Interest. That said, let me play devil’s advocate here and develop a point of view with which I fundamentally disagree, but which Jenkins does not fully counter in his otherwise compelling rejection of the distorted logic of Islamophobes who describe the Qur’an as a “handbook for terrorists.” What follows is an imagined response to Jenkins, based on eavesdropping on the discourse of (let’s call them) the “cultured despisers” of Islam:

Don’t Islam and Christianity Have Very Different Founders?

“Yes, perhaps it is true that, ever since Christianity first became entangled with empire (Rome, 4th century CE), Bible-toting Christians have taken a back seat to no other religion, perhaps not even to Islam, when it comes to horrific acts of violence — from lynching to genocide — committed in the name of their religion.  But at least millions of other Christians have solid ground in denouncing and resisting these distortions of their faith — Biblical warrants for naming them powerfully as distortions.  For starters, Jesus never killed anyone, or led an army in battle; indeed, he enjoined his followers to “lay down their swords,” and he suffered an unjust death on a cross without resisting. By contrast, Mohammed was, among other things, a warrior, whose military conquests are still celebrated by devout Muslims.

“The deeds and example of the founder of a religion are important (if not always decisive) for how scriptures are read, and how the faith is enacted, by his followers.  That is why Christianity has produced movements of nonviolent resistance against state violence (and on explicitly Christian grounds), and even “peace churches” (i.e., the Quakers, the Mennonites, Church of the Brethren) which endorse pacifism or nonviolence as the orthodox Christian position.  Even the Roman Catholic Church in recent years—mirabile dictum!—is moving toward nonviolence as a counter to just war theory. (Read Pope John Paul II on this question: stunning!)”

Doesn’t Islam Confound Mosque and State?

“The fact of the matter is that Christianity has solved its problem with violence, by and large, because it went through a Reformation, which helped to inaugurate a modern period of church-state separation and religious freedom, thereby helping to disentangle Christianity from its cozy relationship with empires and nation-states. Meanwhile, Islam remains in thrall to the state or regime, and when resistance does occur, it is not motivated by Islamic principles but by secular human rights precepts.”

Don’t Too Few Muslims Read the Qur’an Critically?

“Christians (like Jenkins) have learned to read the Bible critically, weighing different passages differently, according to their conformity with the unmistakable nonviolent example of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Contra Jenkins’ claim, they do not ignore the Old Testament, but they prioritize the prophets and wisdom passages over the bloody passages Jenkins cites. Only a minority of Christian fundamentalists take every passage literally (or claim they do). Meanwhile, it is only a minority of Muslims, and a tiny one at that, who read the Qur’an critically, prioritizing the nonviolent phases of the Prophet’s career over the period of battle—and that tiny minority puts itself at risk by doing so!”

An Invitation…

Back now to my own voice: I (Appleby) have my own rejoinders to these arguments advanced by Islam’s “cultured despisers.” I will be happy to share them in a subsequent blog. Meanwhile, I invite others to weigh in, to formulate their own (cultured) rejoinders to the Christian triumphalist language I have rehearsed above.  The exercise should be edifying for us all.

3 Comments on Overheard at a Christian Triumphalist Soirée: Channeling the Qur’an’s Critics Array
Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Field Notes article

Indian Catholics Responding to Globalization


When I first began researching call center workers in India, I was surprised to come across an article on a British news website about how the Catholic Archbishop of Bangalore had expressed public concern about rapidly mushrooming call centers. While most people outside India assume that call centers and “outsourcing” must be an unqualified boon for the country, the Archbishop fretted about their impact on the lifestyles of Indian youth.

I was already in Bangalore at the time, so I contacted a Jesuit priest in the city I knew from his brief sojourn at my university in Canada to ask whether any initiatives were underway in response to this concern. Fr. John (not his real name) told me he had actually been appointed to a special “task force” by the Archbishop to start addressing this, and they were going to have their first meeting in a few days. I persuaded him to let me be a fly on the wall.

So a few days later I found myself sitting in a large meeting room in a church, sparsely furnished with wooden school desks and chairs. The Archbishop and a number of priests arrived and settled in. The bishop’s idea was for the priests assembled there, who represented twelve different parishes or deaneries, to devise some way to address different aspects of the phenomenon either in terms of regions or tasks. Since they were unclear even about the key issues, they decided to hold a conference or forum that would frame the problems needing to be addressed.

The event, to my surprise, came together within only a couple of months. The Archbishop and his team managed to organize a three-day symposium that brought together participants — Catholics as well as non-Catholics — from all over India, including journalists, psychiatrists, social workers, physicians, managers, and call center employees. At the end of the event they came up with a detailed action plan to address the key issues identified.

I left the country a few days later, having completed my planned research. Three years later — last summer — I returned to Bangalore hoping to follow up on the outcomes of this conference. I tracked down Fr. John to ask him how things had developed since the Archbishop’s big conference that event.

“Nothing” he replied, smiling sheepishly. After the initial fervor and activity, the Church had quickly become preoccupied with other pressing business. Some were dealing with recent outbursts of religious violence in Karnataka state and other parts of India. Others, like himself, were addressing the massive influx of migrants from other parts of India into Bangalore.

In my continued conversations with him as well as with other Church leaders in India I interviewed this past summer, I came to learn of many other challenges that globalization poses in addition to those associated with call centers. The issues arising from call centers, in fact, reflect and are embedded in a host of these larger issues, some of which I will touch on over the next couple of posts for Contending Modernities.

Internal Migration

Every month, thousands of new inhabitants move into the city. The “lure” of Bangalore, particularly for young people, as the Archbishop put it in an interview, was “education, jobs, and lifestyle.” For the lower and lower-middle classes, who constitute the majority among them, the challenges are many and enormous. The cost of housing being astronomical, the best that many can do is to live in “paying guest” accommodations, renting a room or a part of a room in an apartment that a landlord may not care to maintain very well, and on terms that are often unfair to tenants. Employment contracts, similarly, are not always formal agreements, and are thus susceptible to exploitation. Health problems are an additional challenge, exacerbated by loneliness in the case of people who move by themselves to support families a great distance away.

Among college-age students, an additional concern identified by church leaders was cohabitation — or “live-in relationships” as they commonly termed it — which has recently been an issue of Supreme Court debate. The issue, they note, is not simply premarital sex. What often happens is that the couples moves in together, but keeps this arrangement a secret from their parents living in faraway hometowns. These parents in many cases end up arranging separate marriages for them, and the couples rarely have the ability to refuse. In addition to the emotional damage, they noted, honor killings are not rare, particularly in cases of romance between castes or religions.

What made dealing with migration especially challenging, said the Archbishop, was that people were simply “coming and going.” They are “like children without a father.” And he confessed a sense of helplessness. The Church did not have a “systematic plan,” or any good way to “get [people] to come and register so we can try to help them out.”

Taking on the Challenge

Fr. John was one of several priests I met who were trying in their own way to respond to this concern. By day, he was an administrator in one of Bangalore’s Catholic colleges. But in the evenings, he taught “soft skills” in a vocational training program he recently started for low-skilled migrants to Bangalore.

His classes catered mainly to people without a high school education who were looking for service-sector jobs. He focused on such basics as English conversation, how to use a computer, how to prepare a résumé, how to appear confident, and how to shake hands. Many of his students, he said, had picked up jobs in the new Starbucks-style coffee shops that are now found on just about every major city block in Bangalore. Some had found clerical jobs in one of the city’s many IT or BPO companies, sending faxes, making photocopies, and running other errands.

There is something ironic about Fr. John ‘s position. On one hand, he is personally very critical of globalization and capitalism, as were several of the priests I met at the conference four years ago. On the other hand, he feels that critique is not going to employ and feed these migrants. He found many of them in desperate conditions; they moved to the city in the hope of being able to send money to their parents back home, yet now they are unable to cover their rent. And now he wants to help them survive. Fr. John’s goal was to enable them to complete the equivalent of a high school education so that they would be eligible for basic promotions — a matter of necessity in a country in which “credentials are everything,” as one of my call center respondents put it.

While his network of contacts in different ethnic associations assisted him with recruitment, he found retaining students an unexpected challenge. He initially offered classes for free, finding donors to support his project and cover the costs of materials and supplies. But students would not attend regularly; many would disappear after a couple of classes. He later started to charge a nominal fee, which helped a little. Some students at least would come back after losing their jobs, or after a company closed down, attempting to commit to improving their chances. But the combination of long working hours and ever-new job opportunities serve as a constant impediment.

I was surprised by just how much Fr. John’s complaints resonated with that of the secretary of the (secular) union of IT and BPO workers, despite the differences in their constituents’ social class and occupational sector. The union leader told me that very few employees showed any loyalty or consistency in their commitment to the union. For most of them, he said, it is simply an “agony aunt” — a shoulder to cry on when things go sour. But as soon as they find a new job, they disappear. He wished he could help them realize that staying with the organization would improve their prospects in the long run.

But for many of these young migrants, the kind of commitment it takes to either work on a long-term educational goal or remain loyal to a collective association like a union may be a formidable challenge in the face of more immediate pressures to survive in a new, demanding, and expensive city.

In attempting to address this issue as well as others I will discuss in my next post, religious institutions such as the Catholic Church are not merely passive in the face of globalization. Though the efforts may sometimes be fitful and unsustained, as the Archbishop’s conference on call centers illustrates, the Church is trying to play a role in shaping and mediating its consequences for many young Indians in today’s burgeoning Bangalore.

Leave a Comment on Indian Catholics Responding to Globalization Array
Brandon Vaidyanathan
Brandon Vaidyanathan Chair of the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of America. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 2014. He has researched and worked on the cultural dimensions of institutions in South Asia with his work being published in journals such as Business and Society and the Journal of American Academy and Religion.
Field Notes article

Catholics in the Call Center


In 2005, I visited Bangalore for the first time in ten years, and was astonished at the major facelift the city had undergone. The once quiet and easy-going “garden city” was now a thriving metropolis, dotted with an ever-growing number of shopping malls, coffee shops, glass-paneled office towers, KFC and McDonald’s franchises, and Pepsi billboards.

Besides these usual symbols heralding the arrival of globalization, one new development struck me as peculiar. Hailed as the key to India’s future, it was the Business Process Outsourcing or Offshoring industry, commonly referred to as BPO.

The Burgeoning BPO

While I was aware that western corporations had started outsourcing various service processes to India from telephone-based sales to document processing to customer service, I was clueless about how widespread the industry had become. BPO jobs had become all the rage. People—young adults mostly—were flocking to join nocturnal call centers catering to clientele from the US, UK, or Australia. Call Centre Training colleges and companies mushroomed in cities, advertising a viable alternative to the standard middle-class career routes of engineering and medicine.

But the phenomenon had insidious aspects: many of these companies required workers to undergo “accent training” and “culture training” to provide a “seamless experience” for customers, i.e., masking the fact that they were speaking to someone in India. People in the West began expressing security and privacy concerns about Indians handling such confidential information as credit card numbers, not to mention anger about their jobs being shipped overseas. Meanwhile in India, journalists, scholars, and social commentators expressed concerns about new forms of imperialism and identity tensions, and the rise of a new class of young, “westernized,” hedonistic, financially irresponsible quasi-professionals with bleak career prospects outside this fledgling industry.

BPO Culture and the Role of Religion

A couple of years later, when I was looking for a topic for my Master’s thesis, this seemed just the thing to investigate. At this time, a good deal of research had explored the labor process in these companies, but we knew little about the cultural impact on the lives of these employees outside the workplace. How do these new forms of work affect their relationships, habits, lifestyles, conceptions of what is worthwhile and desirable?

In the past couple of years, some excellent studies (e.g., by Patel and Nadeem) have shed light on some of these questions. But the role of religion still remains largely unexamined. My research in Bangalore over the past few years, starting with call centers and now looking at transnational corporations more generally, has come to focus increasingly on how religion both shapes and is shaped by these new forms of capitalism. My most recent and ongoing research focuses predominantly on Catholicism in this environment.

It’s not something I intended to focus on at first, but religion emerged as a pertinent theme early on in my interviews. Many Hindu employees I interviewed made it a point to carry out their daily puja before going to work; some joined popular movements such as Art of Living, founded by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, which they said helped them achieve a balanced lifestyle and deal with anxiety; others mentioned the importance of caste and horoscopes in important life-decisions such as marriage. Some others expressed familiar secularist narratives of casting aside traditional religion as irrelevant to the modern age, but even many of these attended religious ceremonies and celebrate religious festivals—these were crucial elements of their relationships with their families. In fact, Smitha Radhakrishnan’s recent book provides an insightful account of the strong relationship between Hinduism, family, and national identity among Indian IT workers.

Religion was a similarly important factor among my Christian interviewees, Catholics and Protestants alike. Many strove to attend church services and prayer groups regularly, and frequently participated in practices such as daily prayer, Bible-reading, or Catholic devotionals. Others regularly attended church services, but at the same time found traditional Christianity to be too constraining. They called themselves “spiritual but not religious,” and assembled a bricolage of beliefs and practices from traditional Christianity and New Age spirituality, perhaps akin to what David Brooks, called “flexidoxy,” following one of his interviewees.

While the role of religion in the lives of these employees outside the workplace is certainly interesting, I was surprised to learn of some of the ways in which religion becomes present even in the labor process.

Jesus in the Call Center 

A central aspect of work in these offshore call centers is, of course, the communication between the Indian employee and the Western customer. The dominant depiction of this interaction in western popular media—including in the highly rated but recently cancelled NBC show “Outsourced”—is of the angry customer growing increasingly frustrated at the incompetence of the Indian call center rep. Scholarly treatments of the topic, on the other hand, often tend to present another image: the hapless Indian call center rep cowering submissively under the barrage of verbal insults from the abusive western customer.

But these are not the only possible scenarios. Sometimes, for instance, customers try to learn about the Indians with whom they are speaking, what their lives are like; at the same time, these gestures can often be patronizing. One of my respondents, Julie, a 27-year-old Charismatic Catholic who was working in a call center at the time, proudly narrates an incident in which she shattered an American customer’s stereotype of Indians. The man called about his mortgage, figured he was speaking to someone from India, and started to pick on her name: “How do you like your name? I mean, don’t you feel bad about your fake name?” When she replied that Julie was her real name, and that she was a Catholic, the customer was incredulous, and started to interrogate her Christian beliefs. She elaborated:

And I told him, “Listen, I know Jesus personally!” And he was very very surprised. ‘cause their concept of India is cows, buffalos, snakes, terrorists, everything not-nice. And I told him how much of Jesus I know. And he was very very zapped […] And he’s like, “What??”’ [laughs] I said, “Ya, I have a prayer group that meets here every Saturday!” And he was very very zapped! And especially just the privilege I got to introduce Jesus to someone in America who thinks that an Indian has no clue what Jesus is all about!  

Julie was one of the very few people I interviewed who actually liked working in a call center. Most either tolerated it due to financial desperation or put up with it as a necessary stepping stone to a better career elsewhere. But Julie said she loved her job. Even when I re-interviewed her three years later—by this time she had left the corporate world to work in a government-run orphanage because she felt called to work with children—she still insisted that she thoroughly enjoyed her old work environment.

Defending the “Profession”

Yet Julie was saddened that many in her youth group at church did not support her working in a call center. Some told her to her face that it was “not the right profession” and that “God does not want you to be there.” Julie took offense at this: “I was like, [laughs] you know, very pissed off! And these were people who are concerned about me, but hey, it’s not the right way to put it. It’s by the end of the day a profession, and if I’m handling it well, then it’s good!”

Like most other call center workers I met, Julie saw herself as a “professional,” and wanted to defend this line of work as something that churches should consider legitimate and noble. As Noronha and D’Cruz have pointed out, this is an important identity marker for these employees, although it is a contested one—an issue requiring a separate post.

In any case, Julie said she was glad that she did not listen to her youth group and she stayed on at the call center. She insisted that she had not had to compromise her religious beliefs as a result of working in this environment. On the contrary, she credited the experience for developing and strengthening her faith. In the workplace, she often exchanged spiritual quotations and articles with several colleagues and even with customers online. On most days, she returned from her call center job at 6 in the morning, and then was dropped off at church to attend Mass and Eucharistic Adoration before returning home. Despite her differences with her fellow youth group members, she continues to remain a part of the group. Still, she feels strongly that religious groups and institutions should “change their perspective of the call center” and abandon their preconceived notions. Similar to other call center workers I found in church groups, she argued that it was wrong for church leaders to stigmatize people like herself who did not fall into the stereotype of the hedonistic and frivolous call center worker.

For example, even now I had talks with Protestants on the point about incidents about priests, you know, doing things that they are not supposed to do. And I always get back and tell them [… that] there are lot more people doing an amazing job; how about talking about them? I have the same thing to tell the Catholic Church. Yes there are things that are going wrong—these are people who are young, who don’t know how to handle their lives, especially when money has been given to them. But there are other people who are not like that!

It’s hard to assess how well Julie and these “other people” represent Catholics who work in the call center environment. After all, researchers have confirmed the impossibility of gaining access to a representative sample in such an industry in which companies, touting security risks, are mostly unwilling to consent to being studied. Numerous Christian prayer groups have emerged in the call centers in recent years. At the same time, sensationalist accounts in newspapers and the pervasive worries of the older generation about these “youngsters losing their values” give the impression that faith-inspired call-center workers are not in the majority. Nevertheless, Julie’s account, like that of my other respondents, highlights some of the important tensions between new modes of secularity and new religious modernities—including Catholic ones—emerging around the world.

2 Comments on Catholics in the Call Center Array
Brandon Vaidyanathan
Brandon Vaidyanathan Chair of the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of America. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 2014. He has researched and worked on the cultural dimensions of institutions in South Asia with his work being published in journals such as Business and Society and the Journal of American Academy and Religion.
Global Currents article

The Islamic Call for a Free Egypt


When the Arab Spring began earlier this year, first in Tunis and then in Egypt, many in the West felt sympathetic. It was people power, after all, that rallied against longtime dictators, asking for the very democracy that the West cherishes so much.

But What If the “Bad Guys” Take Over?

But other people in the West saw a risk in this historic moment: What if the initially democratic Arab Spring would be a midwife to a series of Islamist dictatorships? The deposed dictators of Tunis and Egypt were unmistakably authoritarian, but they were also secular, while their opponents included religiously motivated parties like the Muslim Brotherhood. So, what if these Islamists took advantage of democracy to establish their own dictatorships? What if these “bad guys,” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reportedly put it in a recent meeting in Washington, emerged triumphant instead of the “good guys”?

I am very familiar with this democracy-is-dangerous-for-Muslims argument, for it has been used in Turkey, my country, for decades. The Kemalists, the ideological followers of Turkey’s secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, found the imagined legitimacy of their authoritarianism in their secularism. In other words, a bit like the medieval “divine rights of kings,” we were subjected to the undivine rights of Kemalists, deriving from their supposed access to “science and reason.”

The people who buy this argument often make two crucial assumptions. The first one is that secular people and their parties, by definition, must be more liberal. But there is hardly any empirical evidence to believe so. (Just look at Turkey, and see how the Kemalists have behaved badly with regards to free speech or minority rights, as I explained here.)

The second, and perhaps more credible, assumption is that a political view inspired by religion, and particularly Islam, must be authoritarian. There are, of course, various examples to support that view, but there are examples to the contrary as well.

The Pro-Democratic Grand Imam?

One of the latter came recently from none other than Ahmed al-Tayyeb, The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in Cairo, one of the top centers of Islamic learning in the world. In a news conference that made its way to global headlines, the grand imam called for “the establishment of a modern, democratic, constitutional state” in Egypt, based upon the separation of powers and guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens. He also urged “the protection of places of worship for the followers of the three monotheistic religions” and considered “incitement of confessional discord and racist speech as crimes against the nation.”

In the same declaration, Imam al-Tayyeb also said that the principles of sharia, or Islamic law, should remain “the essential source of legislation,” while Christians and Jews should have their own tribunals. (Perhaps like the “millet system” of the Ottoman Empire, in which various religious communities were subject to their own laws.)

I am sure that the advocacy of Islamic law here will ring many alarm bells. But it should be noted that Islamic law is already a part of legislation in Egypt. Moreover, there is no problem in deriving laws from a tradition (whether that be Islamic, Roman or “Common”), as long as the tradition is reformed to cope with modern human rights standards. So, Al-Azhar will perhaps need to revisit some problematic aspect of classical Islamic law — such as the bans on apostasy or blasphemy — for Egypt really to become a “modern, democratic, constitutional state” with shariah as its “essential source of legislation.”

Beyond the False Choice between Secularism and Islamism

Such a synthesis between democracy and Islam is not only possible. It is also the most promising path for the future of the Muslim world. To see why, the Westerners and the Muslim secularists who are obsessed about keeping the Islamic pious out of the game should understand that this very exclusion has led to more radical forms of political Islam.

In other words, the modern Middle East has been haunted by two fiercely opposing yet similarly illiberal trends: secular authoritarianism versus Islamist authoritarianism. Epitomized by dichotomies such as the Shah versus Khomeini, or Nasser (and Mubarak) versus the Muslim Brotherhood, these two extremes have created a vicious cycle, which blurred the evolution of democracy, in which natural aspirations of the Middle Eastern peoples, including those of the Islamic pious, could have been answered.

The key question is whether this vicious cycle can be broken, and whether Muslim nations can find their own way to freedom. Voices from the Arab Spring, such as that of Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb, and recent success stories such as Turkey, in which a party with Muslim values (the incumbent Justice and Development Party) fosters economic progress and democratic reform, are examples which claim “yes!” We just need more of them.

1 Comment on The Islamic Call for a Free Egypt Array
Mustafa Akyol
Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist and the author of the books The Islamic Jesus (St. Martin's Press, February 2017) and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (W.W. Norton, July 2011).
Deadly Violence & Conflict Transformation article

The Future of Catholic Peacebuilding


TIMOTHY SHAH

Among the most pressing of the challenges posed by modernity is violent conflict: bloody struggles between peoples, inside and across borders, over scarce resources as well as a sense of threatened identities. How is it possible to build peace and new, sustainable forms of community in the face of this challenge?

The heads of several of the international Catholic organizations most deeply involved in peacebuilding joined scholars in Rome on June 30 for a conference on “The Future of Peacebuilding: Contributions from Catholic Theology, Ethics, Praxis.” The Contending Modernities blog asked the organizer of the conference as well as a key participant—Gerard Powers and Maryann Cusimano Love, respectively—to share their thoughts on Catholic peacebuilding, based on reflections they presented at the conference.

Held at the Christian Brothers’ Casa La Salle in Rome, the meeting was organized by the Catholic Peacebuilding Network (CPN), based at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and co-sponsored by nine other academic institutes, development agencies, and peace organizations affiliated with the CPN: the Bernardin Center for Theology and Ministry, Catholic Theological Union; Caritas Internationalis; Catholic Relief Services; the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College; the Institute for Policy Research, The Catholic University of America; the Institute for Theology and Peace, Germany; the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego; the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame; the Order of Friars Minor; and Pax Christi International.

With an audience of diplomats, aid workers, peacebuilding practitioners and academics, the conference focused on three questions: What constitutes effective and authentically Catholic peacebuilding? How can Catholic peacebuilding practices inform and be informed by Catholic theology? And what are future challenges for Catholic peacebuilding?

The text of the talks and video of the conference are available at http://cpn.nd.edu/.  For a fuller treatment of these questions, see Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, edited by R. Schreiter, S. Appleby, and G. Powers (Orbis 2010).

1 Comment on The Future of Catholic Peacebuilding Array
Timothy Samuel Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Editor of the Contending Modernities Blog. He is Associate Director and Scholar in Residence of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and Adjunct Research Professor with Notre Dame's Kroc Institute. With Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott, he is co-author of God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics.
Deadly Violence & Conflict Transformation article

Catholic Contributions to Modern Peacebuilding


Some people say that Catholic Social Teaching is the Church’s Best Kept Secret.  If that is true,  Catholic peacebuilding may be Catholic Social Teaching’s Best Kept Secret.  From South Sudan and Central America to Congo and Colombia, the Catholic Church is a powerful force for peace, freedom, justice and reconciliation.  But that impressive and courageous peacebuilding work of the Catholic community is often unknown, unheralded and under-analyzed.

The heads of several of the international Catholic organizations most deeply involved in peacebuilding joined scholars in Rome on June 30 for a conference in Rome on “The Future of Peacebuilding: Contributions from Catholic Theology, Ethics, Praxis.”  The conference was sponsored by the Catholic Peacebuilding Network (CPN), based at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and 9 other academic institutes, development agencies, and peace organizations affiliated with the CPN.

With an audience of diplomats, aid workers, peacebuilding practitioners and academics, the conference focused on several questions.

What Is Catholic about Peacebuilding?

The speakers highighted several cases of Catholic peacebuilding.  In the keynote address, Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, gave a personal reflection on insights he has gained from his peacebuilding work in his native Ghana.  Fr. William Headley, dean of the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, drew lessons from the Church’s peacebuilding in Burundi, especially the engagement of Catholic Relief Services and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with the Church in Burundi.  Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International, provided an overview of Pax Christi’s long-standing support for the multi-faceted peacebuilding work of the Catholic Church in Sudan. In his first public address since being elected secretary general of the Vatican agency Caritas Internationalis, Michel Roy, described the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative in Northern Uganda.  I highlighted the Church’s engagement with armed actors in Colombia.

One could view the Church’s peacebuilding role in these and other conflicts through the standard metrics of social science or conflict resolution theories.  To some extent that is valid, for, as Headley noted, we must humbly acknowledge that many of the “practical resources [Catholics] use for conflict analysis, mediation, trauma healing, [and] reconciliation were developed outside of the Catholic context” by other faith groups, secular NGOs, scholars, and governments.  But there is more to it than that, according to Headley.  “Ethical reflection, theology and spirituality are not project activities, skills or management tools” of secular NGOs.  Reflecting on lessons learned from two decades of peacebuilding work, Claudio Betti, director of Special Operations for the Sant’Egidio Community in Rome, made a similar point: “the Church is not and never will be only part of ‘civil society.’”  Without underestimating the importance of peacebuilding skills and strategies, Cardinal Turkson emphasized the Church’s capacity to address the personal dimension of peacebuilding: “Violence manifests itself through people, so peacebuilding starts with changing the heart…. As Christians we have faith and grace to change hearts.”

What secular approaches to peacebuilding miss is the peacebuilding power of faith; not faith in general, but particular kinds of faith – in this case Catholic.   One can only understand what the Catholic Church is doing in Ghana, Sudan, or Burundi if one understands that its mission and self-understanding is shaped by a specific set of Catholic beliefs, practices and institutions – and the effectiveness of the Church’s peacebuilding is derived in large measure from its Catholic identity.

The point here is not that Catholic peacebuilders should retreat into a parochial ghetto.  Engaging with other religious bodies, civil society groups, and governments in promoting peace is part of what “catholic” peacebuilding means.  But peacebuilding can be narrow and sterile when it is not animated by the Church’s rich tradition of spirituality, theology and ethics.

What Makes Catholic Peacebuilding Effective?

Conference participants highlighted several elements of effective peace building.

First, peacebuilding is effective when it is strategic — that is, when it addresses all factors (military, economic, political, cultural), and all actors, at all levels – and also addresses how these actors, factors, and levels relate to one another.  Roy noted that the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative in Northern Uganda was distinctive because it undertook peacebuilding from the village level to the United Nations and included not just a formal role in the official peace process but also mediation of local conflicts, trauma healing, efforts to reintegrate rebels into their communities, and extensive relief and development programs.

The same was true of the Church’s work in Sudan.  Dennis noted that, as violence flares anew in South Sudan, the “Catholic community is present and fully engaged, using international networks to expose brutality, accompanying communities caught in the violence, making strong public statements in an effort to protect those being harmed, promoting reconciliation, [and] encouraging the development of just political processes and structures.”

Second, this mulit-level, multi-faceted approach to peacebuilding is possible only if peacebuilding is done through Church structures and Catholic institutions – i.e., episcopal conferences, Caritas agencies, Catholic educational institutions, and Catholic lay organizations.  In some ways, it is less complicated and easier to work as an independent NGO with its own programs and accountable only to itself.  But Catholic peacebuilding is successful, not because of a few activists working at the margins of Church life, but when peacebuilding is integral to and animates the life of Catholic institutions.  Moreover, even then, the disparate work of many different kinds of Catholic institutions and other actors must be integrated and coordinated.  That is the insight behind the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, which connects a variety of Catholic peacebuilders in new ways that enable them to respond to needs identified by the Church that cannot easily be met by any one or two institutions alone, or by the same types of institutions.

Third, genuine peacebuilding must be sustained, robust, and long-term; there are no easy or quick solutions to violent conflict, especially conflicts of long-standing duration.  Short-term engagement – e.g., the week-long seminar – can sometimes be helpful, but what is most helpful is an intentional, systematic, long-term process of accompaniment.   Maryann Cusimano Love, associate professor of political science at the Catholic University of America, noted that one difference between the peacebuilding initiatives of political institutions, such as the UN Peacebuilding Commission and new offices at the U.S. State and Defense Departments, is that the government programs have an understanding of peacebuilding that is far less robust and lacks the “moral imagination” and long-term engagement of most Catholic approaches.

How Can Catholic Peacebuilding Inform, and Be Informed By, Theology and Ethics?

Several speakers commented on the need for the further development of a theology of peace that is comparable in scope and sophistication to the Church’s teaching on the use of force.  For example, how would our understanding of peacebuilding change if the Church’s teaching on inter-religious dialogue, Christology, reconciliation, human rights, development and ecclesiology were seen through a peacebuilding lens?  If we reflect on “lived” Catholic peacebuilding, it becomes clear that there are areas where practice might inform theology and vice-versa.

Fr. Robert Schreiter, a professor at the Catholic Theological Union, cited several challenges for the theology and praxis of Catholic peacebuilding:  “shaping policies and practices for ius post bellum”; giving greater attention to social forgiveness; and translating a theology and ethics of peacebuilding into terms intelligible to peacebuilders of other faiths and the secular world, and making it accessible to grassroots communities.  I would add two other examples: the role of the Church in facilitating peace processes, a widespread practice about which there has been little systematic reflection, and approaches to self-determination and secession, about which there is also a dearth of reflection in official Catholic teaching.

Concluding Thoughts

I might be the last person on the planet not to have a Facebook page.  But if I had a Facebook page, I could choose my “interests” – like skiing, skydiving, pinochle…. or peacebuilding!  In the world according to Facebook, peacebuilding is an “interest” – with its own symbol! I suppose that is something to be celebrated.  But in the world according to Catholic social teaching, peacebuilding can never be a mere interest, an optional activity that a few of us might engage in.  No! For Christians, peacebuilding is not an interest but an imperative; it is our vocation.  As Schreiter emphasized, peacebuilding “is more than something the Church can do” because of its global reach and ubiquitous presence in many areas of conflict.  “It is something the Church must do if it is to be faithful to its Lord, … an utter requirement for our participation in God’s reconciling action in the world.”

Finding ways to make peacebuilding more authentically Catholic, more effective, and more theologically grounded is a continuing challenge for Catholic peacebuilders.

1 Comment on Catholic Contributions to Modern Peacebuilding Array
Gerard Powers
Gerard Powers is director of Catholic Peacebuilding Studies at Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He also coordinates the Catholic Peacebuilding Network and is co-editor (with Schreiter & Appleby) of Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics and Praxis (2010).