Christ Lutheran Church -- conyngham, pa

By Kent Jackson

Sunday, February 18, 2011

The towers of the World Trade Center collapsed a decade ago, but the central question about the attack remains.

Why?

To learn more about what happened that terrible day, the adult Sunday school class at Christ Lutheran Church spent the past five months studying Islam.

By going carefully through the book, Islam: What Non-Believers Should Know by John Kaltner, we looked at attitudes Christians and Muslims hold toward one another, about similarities between the faiths, the roles of women in Islamic society and religion in government.

Many of the class members thought at the start of the study that a silent majority of Muslims condemned the attacks of 9/11 and other attacks such as suicide bombings, which have been undertaken, funded and supported intellectually by a minority of Muslims.

Kaltner, a professor of religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, points out that Islam opposes suicide. The prohibition comes not in the Qur’an but the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed passed down through traditions that Muslims obey. One statement from the hadith says “He who commits suicide by throttling himself shall throttle himself in hellfire forever.”

Islam also condemns offensive wars and the killing of women and children. Kaltner points to a line from the Qur’an that could be taken out of context to prove otherwise: “Kill them where you find them and expel them from where they expelled you.” Those words are preceded by a call to stay “within the limits” and followed shortly after by the line “But if they desist, surely Allah is merciful and forgiving” that argue for Muslims to stop fighting when their attackers stand down.

The term jihad does not mean holy war, writes Kaltner, who gives two definitions. The greater jihad refers to a Muslim’s inner struggle to follow the way of Allah. I equate that roughly to Paul’s call to Christians to work out your salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12.) Kaltner said the greater jihad has nothing to do with violence.

The lesser jihad refers to a call to spread Islam, which required violence at some points in history, including when Muslim communities were under attack. Osama bin Laden, who did not train as a scholar in Islamic law, stretched the little jihad into a call for killing Americans wherever possible based on the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, and support for Israel.

If the attacks violate tenants of Islam, why didn’t Muslims rise as one to condemn them?

The answer is that Islam doesn’t have a central authority, other than Allah. No pope or cleric speaks for the body of believers, called the ummah.

Rather, all are equal within the ummah and there is a tradition of reaching decision by consensus.

The tradition might indicate that Muslims might adopt democratic governments as they throw off rulers like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, although much of the Islamic world now lives under undemocratic rule.

Does democracy extend to women in Islam? Our class discussed that question with interest. The Qur’an sets the sexes on an equal basis in lines such as “whoever does good works, whether male and female, and is a believer, will enter heaven.” Another passage however says more women witnesses than men are necessary to verify a legal transaction.

For every regime like the Taliban that oppresses women, others allow broad rights to women. Some women choose to wear headscarves or burkas as a sign of their faith, rather than coercion, Kaltner points out when describing the diversity of practices within the Islamic world. While Americans might consider Islam a religion of the Middle East, only one in five Muslims is Arabic. Indonesia has the greatest numbers of Muslims, followed by India and Pakistan.

As with the rights of women, variation exists in other aspects of Islam. The split between Shiites and Sunnis is about succession of the imam to rule the caliphate centuries ago. To me, the split parallels the division between Catholics and Protestants in Christianity. As Christians await the return of Christ in the last days, Shiites expect the hidden imam to return when the world ends.

Like Catholic monks, Sufi Muslims downplay material wealth. Sufis seek a closer connection to Allah through mysticism.

Muslims have historically showed tolerance to Christians and Jews – whom they refer to as people of the book – when they are living within their borders.

Our class divided, however, on whether Christians worship the same God as Muslims. Among American Muslims, 77 percent said they worship the God of Christians and Jews, according to a survey taken by the Council on America-Islamic Relations.

Now that the class has finished studying Kaltner’s book, we are learning about the fruits of the Holy Spirit, principally love, joy and peace as described in Galatians 5 and elsewhere in the Bible.

But we plan to watch a film on Islam when it arrives in the mail.

I still am interested in hearing from others inside and outside of our congregation about prospects for harmony between Christians and Moslims.