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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Comment on this article Love Thy Neighbor When Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 suggesting that Islam condones violence, Western media homed in on the angry responses and fevered demonstrations by some Muslims. One year later, when 138 prominent Muslim clerics and scholars issued a letter asking for a dialogue between Muslims and Christians—partly in response to the Pope’s address and the ensuing uproar—they got scant attention. The press and many religious Americans have long considered interfaith discussions to be public-relations ploys or feel-good gabfests. But the October 2007 letter, “A Common Word between Us and You,” brought together leaders from around the world and across Islam's often-fractious sects, many with millions of followers, and it countered those who assert that moderate Muslims are silent about violence. At the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture, director Miroslav Volf and others immediately understood that the letter was a breakthrough invitation that had to be seized. Within days, the Divinity School published a response on the center’s website. In November, that response, “Loving God and Neighbor Together,” ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times. It was eventually signed by 500 Christian leaders and scholars from 37 countries, including well-known evangelicals like Rick Warren and Jim Wallis. Yale’s quick embrace of dialogue with Muslim leaders led to a week-long conference at the Yale Law School this past July of about 140 religious leaders, mostly Christians and Muslims. The conference was the first in a series of events over the coming year that will take place at Cambridge University, the Vatican, and Georgetown University, and in Jordan. Participants called this conference—entitled “A Common Word: Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed”—a “first date.” They hope for a long courtship that will bring Muslims and Christians to a better understanding of one another, as a generation of interfaith work between Jews and Christians has done. But as first dates go, it was uncharacteristically hard-nosed. Muftis and ministers delved into theological differences, each group pointing out that the other often misunderstands tenets and priorities of its faith. At workshops, talks, and meals, and next to one another on the treadmill, they tackled thorny issues, such as Christian missionary work in Muslim lands and the treatment of Christians in majority-Muslim states. “A lot of interfaith meetings are effete academics talking about things that don’t really mean anything,” says Caner Dagli, assistant professor of religious studies at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts and one of the Muslim participants. “Now, you have real authorities signing documents. These people have political power, not directly, but because they have constituencies.” Now that the conference is over, the task before the participants, besides continuing and broadening the discussion, is to tell their followers that it is possible to talk with the other side—that the other side may, in fact, share a great deal with one’s own side. But after years of animosity, many of those followers may not want to hear the message. Reminders of the urgency of peacemaking between Muslims and Christians were everywhere. Security was high, as police shut down part of Wall Street and circled the Law School with dogs. Just as the public part of the conference began, on July 29, news reports came out of a death threat from al-Qaeda against King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for hosting an interfaith meeting recently in Madrid. “How do you respond to al-Qaeda? My response is coming to Yale to participate in this,” says Shaykh Habib Ali Z. A. al-Jifri, a widely popular Muslim speaker. Habib Ali al-Jifri is general director of the Tabah Foundation, in Abu Dhabi, which researches Islam and contemporary issues. The many other Muslims who chose to participate included Ayatollah Seyyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, head of Islamic Studies at the Academy of Sciences of Iran; Sultan Muhammad Sa'ad Ababakar, the leader of Nigeria’s Muslims; Shaykh Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Shaykh Tayseer Rajab al-Tamimi, the chief Islamic Justice of Palestine. While mainline Protestants and Catholics routinely show up at interfaith events, the Yale conference differed in its substantial contingent of evangelicals, a community generally more skeptical of Islam. Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, attended the meeting. So did Geoff Tunnicliffe, international director of the World Evangelical Alliance; Rev. Robert Schuller, host of the Hour of Power television ministry; and David Neff, executive editor of Christianity Today. The world, participants said, is growing more religious, not less, and more dangerous. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan, chair of the board of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought (and a sponsor of the 2007 Common Word letter, as well as a principal of the Yale conference), named several factors that have stoked profound tensions between Christians and Muslims—terrorism, U.S. foreign policy (especially the war in Iraq), the status of Jerusalem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, religious fundamentalism, and missionary work. “As a person of faith, it’s hard to avoid a sense of regret about all the ground we’ve lost in a few short years in our quest for interfaith tolerance and understanding,” said Senator John Kerry '66 in a speech at the conference. “We’ve barely broken the seal on the twenty-first century, but already it’s been marked not just by burning buildings and occupying armies and riots and roiling images of bloodshed and humiliation, but also by an even more widespread and dangerous worry—by a question you hear whispered and spoken quietly: what if we can’t live together?” Domestic and foreign polls of Muslims and Christians in recent years reveal a high level of suspicion between them, yet also an unwillingness among majorities of both faiths to concede that conflict is inevitable. A BBC poll published in 2007 found that a majority of Muslims and non-Muslims in 27 countries believe that “common ground can be found.” American evangelicals, however, are more likely than other Christians to have an unfavorable opinion of Islam. In a 2007 study by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, about half of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics said they had favorable views of Muslims. Only a quarter of white evangelicals did. “What’s going on at the grassroots is that conservative evangelicals have a specific set of worries about this process,” says Rev. Joseph Cumming, a conference organizer and the director of the Reconciliation Program at the Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture. “They want to know, are we going to sweep under the carpet certain core Christian doctrines—such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and the cross—and the persecution of Christians in Muslim majority countries? They ask, were we right to apologize for the Crusades in our response to 'A Common Word' when Muslims have done bad things, too?” He adds: “At the conference, we talked a lot about doctrine, but that doesn’t mean we came to a complete meeting of the minds.” The participants did readily come together on the importance in both faiths—and in Judaism too—of loving God and one’s neighbor. Some differences were apparent. Grand Mufti Ceric, of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that some people might be “arrogant” and not deserving of love; Habib Ali al-Jifri, in his speech, said that because God chose and created your neighbors, they are worthy of your love. Muslims gained a clearer understanding of the Trinity and original sin; Christians, of the love Muslims have for the prophet Muhammad, for the prophets who preceded him (including Jesus), and for the Koran. Muslims said they were pleased that Christians were starting to talk about a “Judeo-Islamo-Christian” tradition with common roots. “Dialogue doesn’t mean closing off theology to one another but understanding each other for a better life,” says Ayatollah Damad. “The problems that cause conflict between these groups aren’t theological. It is political matters.” The theological and political are sometimes knotted together. Take the case of Christian missionary work in Muslim countries. Evangelicals see it as a freedom-of-religion issue: people have a right to evangelize and they have a right to choose their faith. Muslims, contend the evangelicals, believe in converting others to Islam. Muslim participants replied that spreading their faith isn’t as central to most modern-day Muslims as it is to most evangelicals. They agreed that no one should be compelled to follow a particular religion. But they said that in the minds of most Muslims, Western evangelizing is inextricably tied to the colonial past. Moreover, tense relations now between the West, especially the United States, and many Muslim countries make evangelizing dangerous for its practitioners and damaging to the reconciliation efforts of Muslim moderates. “In some of the side conversations” during the conference, “there is a misunderstanding of the Muslim perspective on missionary work,” Habib Ali al-Jifri says. “People are under the impression that any restriction has to do with not wanting people to change their religion. But the reality is actually quite different. The principle of Islam is an invitation to open discussion. But our region is inflamed and people are angry, and because of the colonial experience, they feel everything that comes to them from the West is connected to this.” Like some other Muslim participants, he believes that perhaps missionary work should be suspended until “the region has moved out of the precarious situation it is in now.” Evangelicals said they did not agree with Muslims on the issue. “I think this is one of the biggest challenges we face,” Tunnicliffe e-mailed. “Since both Islam and Christianity are missionary religions, conflict seems almost inevitable. Our concern is that Christian, and specifically evangelical, missionary work is linked” in people’s minds “to structures of Western power. It is critical that we delink the perception. In reality, much Christian mission work is rooted [in] the church of the global South.” Many participants will meet again at the conferences to follow, but they vary widely in how much they intend to take back to their followers. Many leaders have to tread lightly with constituents deeply suspicious of the other side, or risk backlash. For their part, Prince Ghazi and Habib Ali al-Jifri are funding a documentary about the Common Word initiative that they hope to show around the Middle East. The World Evangelical Alliance posted several articles on its website about the conference, and Tunnicliffe said his group plans to participate in the upcoming talks. Anderson, however, says he has “no specific plans to communicate the content of the conference to the NAE, although I’m glad to talk about it.” He says the upcoming meetings are “not on my schedule.” Schuller, of Hour of Power, had exhorted participants to have “big dreams” for spreading what they had learned. When a Muslim participant asked about his own intentions, he sidestepped the question. Participants came up with a set of concrete steps that Yale, the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute, and others plan for the coming months. A joint working group will develop ideas brought up at the conference and publish two books, one about the conference and another a study guide. The Muslim and Christian leaders who attended are trying to establish one week a year when Christian and Muslim clergy preach about what is good in the other's faith. Yale and the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute plan a website “whereby Christians will recommend books on Christianity and Muslims will recommend books on Islam that are appropriate for different ages and address a range of topics,” according to a statement issued at the conference. And “many of these Christian and Muslim leaders have invited each other to come speak at their institutions,” Cumming adds. “That kind of thing could have a huge impact, and it’s not even part of what we planned.” Beyond the confines of the Yale conference, the odds against interfaith work are great. The Barnabas Fund, a British-based Christian group that did not attend, later criticized the very use of the words “Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic heritage” at the conference, because it was “a step towards affirming that Muhammad is a prophet.” And if participants had picked up the New York Times the day after the conference, they would have seen a story about an increase in religiously tinged attacks against Egypt’s Christians. “Things won’t change now, not today: I’m investing in this for our children,” said Ceric of Bosnia and Herzogovina. “But that isn’t an argument for me not to do anything. The chances of violence will only increase if I don’t do something to stop it.” Regarding the report of the recent meeting of religious leaders at Yale. Yes, the world’s religions do agree on the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The question is, of course, who does one consider one’s neighbor? Only fellow Christians, fellow Jews, fellow Hindus or fellow Muslims? Only fellow Americans, fellow Arabs, fellow Chinese or fellow Africans? Isn’t today’s world too interconnected to retain such a limited view of who one’s neighbor is? Isn’t it time to extend the concept to its ultimate limits, namely, to everyone living on this little planet? What a difference it would make were we to do so.
Did Yale bow to anti-Semitisim? While the blurb at the beginning of the article mentioned that “ayatollahs, evangelicals, shaykhs, and rabbis meet at Yale,” I didn’t notice any Jewish leaders named as attending or participating, or being quoted. Did Yale bow to the anti-Semitism of the other participants by not inviting Jews? If so, shame on it.
Muslims may not change their religion In her article about the recent interfaith conference at Yale, Neela Banerjee wrote that Muslim participants “agreed that no one should be compelled to follow a particular religion.” If so, that would be a radical change in Islamic theology, because Muslims are not free to leave Islam. Muhammad said “if a Muslim discards his religion, kill him” (Bukhari 4:52:260), and to this day the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence consider it apostasy—a crime punishable in some cases by death—for Muslims to leave Islam. In July 2007, the top cleric in Egypt reiterated this tenet of Islamic law, telling the Washington Post that “Islam prohibits a Muslim from changing his religion and [this] apostasy is a crime, which must be punished.” Similarly, in September 2009 the Islamic Republic of Iran codified into civil lawwhat it has always asserted in Islamic law: the death penalty for Muslims who leave Islam. Islam’s denial of the freedom to change religions—unique among major monotheistic faiths—is why the conference participants were able to agree in writingonly that human beings have the right to preservation of religion (whatever that means) and not freedom of religion. It’s also why the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference have refused to sign the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which grants freedom to choose one’s religion) and instead have signed a Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (which does not explicitly grant this freedom). It’s also why Christian evangelicals are prohibited from proselytizing in most Islamic countries. The supposed tie between Christian proselytizing and “the colonial past” has nothing to do with it.
Where was the Jewish perspective? In the interests of Urim v'Tumim—or Lux et Veritas—I wish to inquire why, as reported in the alumni magazine, the Divinity School’s “Conference on Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed: Implications for Christians and Muslims” failed to include Jews in that perspective and, indeed, the Jewish source for loving God and neighbor in all but one of its symposia? Only on the video reporting that appeared on the Internet was there evidence that a rabbi had been one of the invitees. Can it be that Yale has allowed the animus toward Jews presently manifested throughout the Muslim world (as formerly in a theologically anti-Semitic Christianity), to determine the conference’s scope and participation? The captions of your photos of the invitees failed to mention any rabbis, despite the headline for the article to this effect. Nor did your conference photos of the Arabic and English script appearing behind the invitees reveal any idea that Ahibb Al-Jandak—or “Love your Neighbor”—had its origin in the Biblical Hebrew commandment V'Ahavta l'Reicha Kamocha—or “You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.” Ironically, this was the “Common Word” theme of the conference.
Unanswered questions Your article was of considerable interest to me, since I have tried to note the flow of responses to the general letter issued late last year by Muslim leaders and scholars from around the globe. Not mentioned in the article were the responses by Pope Benedict XVI and many other religious leaders from the United States and abroad and no mention was made of why only the generally called “evangelicals” (with the possible exception of Robert Schuller) were in attendance. Was the meeting intentionally set up as a meeting of Muslim leaders and so-called right-wing Christian leaders? Did the planners intentionally limit the range of Christian views of Islam?
Trying to just get along, ca. 1991 It was good to see in big letters the question chosen to describe an interfaith conference at the Law School this past summer—but the source of those words wasn’t identified. We all remember, back in 1991, the scene caught on amateur camera: a black man flat on his stomach on the roadside, being beaten and kicked by a bunch of the LAPD’s finest, while many more of their buddies looked on without much interest, chatting. Six months later, bearing no grudge, the victim, Rodney King, was on camera again asking his fellow citizens, “Can we all just get along?” A dreamer.
Look to Sufism In the article nothing was said about Sufism, or whether any contemporary and prominent Middle Eastern, South, and/or Southeast Asian Sufis had been invited. I consider this a deplorable lack that should be remedied when planning for the next conferences. Sufi practice is wholly against fighting and warring, and in favor of peacemaking. The Christian West has for at least a couple of centuries found the doctrines and practices of Sufism more accessible than much of what’s found in Muslim orthodoxy, while, as I suspect, many contemporary evangelicals have no idea of the values in Sufism. As inspiration for fuller mutual understanding between Christian and Islamic worlds, the history and traditions of the Sufis of Turkey, Iran, South Asia, and Indonesia have great riches to offer in bridging the 'gaps' this conference has begun to address. As the great Sufi Jalaluddin Rumi said: I will meet you there.
Conference participants are “evading responsibility” Participants in this summer’s interfaith dialogue sound eager to find scapegoats for what are euphemistically called “profound tensions between Christians and Muslims.” One of the principals blames those tensions on “U.S. foreign policy (especially the war in Iraq).” How convenient. Nothing is said about what actual Muslims have done to actual Christians in our time. Consider the month-long Palestinian siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 (before the war in Iraq). Bethlehem was already under Palestinian rule, and heavily-armed gunmen stormed into the church and took it over. Palestinians used priests and nuns as human shields. They refused to allow evacuation of the dead and wounded. They used the church as a latrine, and Christian bibles as toilet paper. The siege ended, and the church escaped severe damage, only through the extraordinary efforts of the Israeli army. Multi-culti gatherings devoted to “getting along” aren’t merely ineffective. They are built upon evading responsibility for one’s actions, and they proceed by blaming others who are not in attendance. Incidentally, your article is subtitled, “Ayatollahs, evangelicals, shaykhs, and rabbis meet at Yale.” But not a single rabbi is named, mentioned, quoted, or pictured anywhere.
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