Distinctly Welcoming

The Lost Art of Identification - incarnation by another name

Talking with a local colleague on Friday, he reminded me that Muslims constantly struggle with extremists, often coming from the outside speaking for their community. These extremists present a distorted, reactionary view of the Muslim faith, appear bolshy and forceful, lacking in compassion, understanding or any engagement with real relationships across different boundaries. For the majority of Muslims, they feel powerless in the face of sectarian groups that supposedly speak on their behalf, using the media's hunger for simplistic caricatures to make their splash. Your average Muslim would rather continue to follow their faith in a manner that fosters goodwill, neighbourliness and peace. It can all be very frustrating and demoralising. How would you feel in this situation?

Well, for many of us, we have an opportunity to sympathise, empathise and identify with the bulk of Muslims in Britain when certain Christian groups pronounce in the public arena to our consternation and bewilderment.

Dialogue or Evangelism with Muslims: a simple trade?

There is a mini fuss kicking off about the place of evangelism amongst Muslims. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has spoken out about the need to have a strategy for evangelism to Muslims and suggested that the church has been far too diffident in that direction. His comments have provoked a fellow bishop to warn that evangelism "contributes nothing to our communities". What do you think?

Stay with me with this thread while I make my point; whatever you do, don't duck out too early for fear of misunderstanding me! Now I'm someone who normally gets a little jittery when Michael Nazir-Ali starts talking about Muslims...but he has got a point. Is the church a little like liberal newspapers that will gladly have a pop at other religions, but never satirise Muslims for fear of a backlash? There's not much integrity and courage there. And what kind of one-dimensional dialogue and community relations are established when a major dimension of our identity (and this is a mutual identity!) is the injunction to proclaim our faith to the other?

For me it is a no-brainer that we need to embrace evangelism and continue to think through our proclamation to all faiths and none. It's also a no-brainer that we should be thinking through strategies for dialogue and good community relations, though. The more pressing questions relate to the issue of what kind of dialogue and what kind of evangelism?

So, I'll applaud Michael Nazir-Ali, but add a vital qualification. If the Bishop of Rochester wants to resource an influx of folk bearing tracts and standing on podiums doing anti-qur'anic polemics into areas like mine (Muslim-majority) then I will agree to disagree. If he's talking about resourcing church communities that can confidently love and serve their Muslim neighbours unconditionally while unashamedly explaining the hope they have in Jesus, then I'm with him 100%. If the Bishop of Hulme's concern to see good community relations is about smoothing church-mosque relations so issues like apostasy in Islam are never broached and doctrinal differences overlooked in favour of focussing on shared beliefs alone, then I'm not interested. But if his vision of dialogue helps churches and Muslims to disagree and still be friends then I'm up for that.

The thing is, we don't need traditional evangelism or traditional dialogue: we need dialogue that includes the sharing of faith and evangelism that is prepared to listen.

Islam in the West on Film

We live in an age when people get a lot of their cultural clues through film rather than literature. With the aims of encouraging curiosity in other faiths and equipping knowledge, I will offer some pointers to resources beyond the traditional textbook theology or guide to religion books that can be ever so daunting and intimidating. Here are 3 films, then, that are, first and foremost, great entertainment, quality productions. But they also provide authentic and perceptive windows onto Islam in the West. So, in no particular order:

East is East is a comedy based in 1970's Manchester and explores the gulf in cultures between the Pakistani-born Muslim dad, his white English wife and their children. The two worlds that so many Muslim young people live in are reflected in both the comic and tragic episodes of this family. I remember talking to a leading interfaith churchman and Muslim imam about this film and they both thought it offensive and a caricature. I mention this as a qualification to the film but feel I need to recommend it because, without exception, I've found that second-generation British Asians find this witty, warm and true to their own experiences (the imam and vicar were of  "a certain age"). It helps lift the lid on the complexity of faith and culture in the  multicultural debate and  each character is treated with genuine sympathy.

Hidden was my favourite film of last year and is very much at the opposite end of the spectrum from East is East. If you enjoy arthouse foreign language films then you'll love this French domestic drama with brilliant performances from Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteul. It's the sort of film with lots of languor; minutes when nothing seems to happen. Beneath the tense threat to the middle class existence of the main characters is a foreign menace that seems to draw from a past sin; an act that has never been acknowledged, confessed, forgiven. It's an incredibly powerful film in which you are never quite sure who is guilty, who bears responsibility. In essence, it's a challenge, with the most tantalisingly open-ended conclusion, to love of neighbour, to honest dealings with the past, and risky embrace of the stranger. In our Orwellian Big Brother age, and with the legacies of colonialism and the fear of terrorism, Hidden is a very eloquent stir to emotion and intellect.

Ae Fond Kiss is the third recommendation. A British arthouse film by the director Ken Loach; it's a love story between a white Catholic girl and a Muslim boy, set in sectarian Glasgow. There's a touch of Romeo and Juliet about this, but once again, it helps to highlight the culture/religion interface and the grappling of communitarian Asian cultures in the individualised West. There's a wonderful scene early on when the sister of the Muslim boy is making a school speech and proudly strips off her  school shirt to reveal a blue Rangers top announcing  that, "I'm a Scottish, Muslim, Rangers-supporting girl in a Catholic school". A lovely encapsulation of the mulitiple identities that are the lot of our lives today.

Go rent and watch! ....next up will be novels.

And the xyz of this sharia furore

A few days later and I can safely say that the British media, in the words of Bob Dylan, "went along for the ride" and failed to offer any objective analysis of Rowan Williams' comments on sharia law. Bishop Tom Wright has written an open letter to his clergy which is a helpful guide to the truer intentions of the Archbishop and Andrew Goddard has published an insightful piece on the Fulcrum website here, (thanks Jon's Journal for finding these).

There seem to me to be two different motors, both forming a pincer movement, driving the reaction to the sharia debate. The first motor is from a secular perspective that would drive out this awkward business of faith from all public spheres such as law, education and business. In the words of Friday's Guardian lead, "what the Archbishop really wants is a tolerance for the role of religion in public affairs that succeeds only in highlighting why it should be excluded." The second motor is exemplified by these comments in the Daily Telegraph: "If the Church of England is to have any point, it is to stand up for the prevalence of English and Chrsitian values."

Now in both wings there are real fears, both sensible and misguided, about sharia law and extremist Islam in Britain. What there has been precious little of in this debate is the altogether fundamental question of what sort of society we want to live in. In Britain, we have moved from a largely Christian-based legal and social system to an increasingly rights-based secular system. We live in a time of transition where so many of the structures and still many of the legal principles carry echoes of a church-shaped past. Much of our present social, cultural and legal thinking is being driven by individual "rights": the supreme power of the individual in her conscience to decide on the reality of the world for herself. Overlaid on this, the multiculturalism project, as distinct from the "laicite" of France where no public acknowledgement of faith is, in theory, permissible, fostered cultural and religious difference without any corresponding social "glue". In essence, everyone is free to do their own thing so long as they don't harm "me", and I get to choose "my way".

The trouble with this is manifold. What if I don't have the resources to choose what I want? Individual rights and freedoms quickly transform into proprietary rights, demands and consumption. What if the choices I see being made harm creation, harm future generations, and by my judgment, harm "them"? What kind of "choice" do I have about the environment and society I live in and is access to this only possible through money if I have no say in shaping the greater good? Is there no prior claim to "duty" to the other, our neighbour?

...These are the big questions underlying the debate, make no mistake. In the church, we need to begin to at least get a handle on the symbols of this discussion because the two responses I outlined earlier are also played out, sadly, by Christinas. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves advocating for what Lesslie Newbigin called a "naked public square": devoid of the language of faith and thus prey to totalitarianism and naked greed. Alternatively, jostling for prime position on a pedastal of privilege, pushing off the awkward squad of other religions that want to make their presence felt undermines our faith and, in the process, neuters the public square from the rigour of genuine challenge.

A dose of reality and humility is called for: "the past is a different country; they do things differently there." Are we going to fall for the traps of cultural supremacy or Christian dualism? .....Or is there another way forward in Christian faithfulness?

The ABC of Sharia Law

Another day, another controversy around the place of faith in Britain. Oh what a sorry mess we are making of this business of public faith! Sharia law is one of those phrases that conjures up immediate negative images, and because of that, is often a rallying point for polarising opinion. If we like to pride ourselves on our religious sensitivity and savvyness when it comes to world affairs, we might be deeply offended by the thought that you could equate "Muslim" with "terrorist". The word sharia, though, is buttoned up for most people: sharia = stonings for adultery, hands chopped off for stealing and instituionalised misogyny.

Rowan Williams, being a very intelligent man, knows that sharia law is far more complex than this. The vast bulk of Islamic laws that are invoked within Muslim communities (yes, present tense because it is a current reality here in Britain), concern family relationships (divorce and separation), and inheritance matters. The trouble is, the media and our beloved political establishment are either not intelligent enough to know this or, and God forbid this be the case, prefer to play to the simplistic public perception (sharia = stonings etc) for short term electoral expediency.

It helps to have a little bit of wider knowledge, including a little bit of historical knowledge. Did you know that the Jewish community have religious courts ruling on familial and inheritance matters that have credence in our legal system? Did you know that under British colonial rule in India, many Muslim regions operated a parallel sharia system to the English legal system?....And let's come closer to home: did you know that the Church of England has its own valid legal structures for enforcing discipline and disposing of property?

What makes Rowan Williams' comments so incendiary then? ...Fear and ignorance.

Ignorance we can do something about very easily and sadly our politicians don't seem to want to do much about that at the moment. What comes out in the press over the next few days will tell us whether our media wish to remain ignorant.

Fear takes more time to deal with, and fear is not to be minimised or scrubbed under the carpet. The very idea of sharia law in Britain doubtless suggests public floggings in northern towns. The very fact that Rowan Williams has broached the issue ought to be welcome because the conversation to be had is, "what aspects of shariah are incompatible with life in Britain today?" You can't have this conversation if you've not recognised that the reality for many Muslims is to want to adhere to Islamic proscriptions in their public dealings. By shutting off the conversation at source, you are effectively saying, "your faith should be entirely private". Is that what we want? I don't want a society where that is the case for my Christian faith and I should apply that freedom to my neighbour as much as myself. The tough call is the mutual challenge of which laws and practises should be denied in the pursuit of the common good. Thus, respect for the vulnerable, fully equal status for women, illegality of corporal punishment would be among my challenges to some Muslims that would want to bring an unadulterated sharia to Britain.

So, all in all, I'll thank the Lord for our Archbishop....and pray that we will seek truth and move from fear to love.

Patrick Sookhdeo and the Barnabas Fund - some reflections

I've been out and about for several days, doing teaching for trainee ordinands in St Albans and Bristol and speaking to some postgrad students in Oxford. It's been very stimulating and I've found a great deal of openness to a constructive engagement with Islam in Britain. At the same time, I'm realising that the mental furniture of so many Christians is decked out with threatening shapes of what Islam is and aspires to be through the publications and articles emanating from the Barnabus Fund. I write this post with genuine hesitation, because Patrick Sookhdeo is a fellow Christian and I want to honour and respect his heart for mission and his concern for the persecuted church; the persecution of which is an uncomfortable reality in so many Muslim countries and even within Muslim communities here in the UK. Patrick speaks with some learning and from the hard realities of being a Muslim convert to the Christian faith. But there is a big "but" coming.....

Only the other day, I received a Barnabas Fund email newsletter offering a critique of the "A Common Word" document that had been sent by a number of international Muslim leaders to Christian leaders as a statement of the basis of dialogue at the end of last year. The tone and Christian theology underlying Patrick's conclusions to this effort at dialogue, very typical of his writings, are what I'd like to unpack. Anyway, deep breath, I'll respond to several specific points in the Barnabas Fund newsletter, "A Common Word: a path to progress?":

1.  Patrick begins by highlighting the tale of Hartford Seminary in the US which, so he  says, was originally a missionary training college with "good Calvinist foundations" and now has a student body that is  35% Muslim and a centre for Islamic chaplaincy training, all because it started on a path of understanding Islam and seeking dialogue between Christians and Muslims. The lesson seems to be that any form of dialogue is a slippery slope to syncretism, compromise and the watering down of truth. I take as my model Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, "full of grace and truth" who "heard us", listened, incarnated amongst us, took on our humanity but also challenged us. Dialogue is the essence of the life that is "God with Us".....and, yes, he's right, it's risky, but it's part of what we should do and be.
2. The Barnabas Fund response does highlight some genuine inadequacies in the "A Common Word" document. There are major omissions (what about Judaism?, what about the doctrine of apostasy? is "love of neighbour a true pillar of Islamic teaching?) but it is not intended to be "the final word": it is a start, a preliminary to some needed and significant discussions. Are we as Christians to be mean-spirited, cynical, arrogantly waiting for "them to get themselves in order" before we engage in relationship? Again, the way of Christ would, surely, say no.
3. Patrick provides a scathing critique of a "Yale Document" response to A Common Word which can be found on the A Common Word site and has been signed by a host of evangelical leaders and theologians. To suggest that some of those signatories are no longer trinitarian because they quote "The New Testament" as opposed to "The Holy Bible" and refer to "the Prophet Muhammad" out of respect to their Muslim audience is more than a little outrageous. The letter does not purport to be a deep and meaningful theological response (read Daniel Madigan's letter if you want to see the best of those) but a statement of intent and goodwill.
4. The practice of "taquiyya" is invoked by Patrick. This is the Arabic principle of dissimulation, of  presenting a false image to those in power in the furtherance of Islam. It is a doctrine that has a basis in Islamic history and is often used by the Barnabas Fund to cloak the efforts of progressive Muslims with a veneer of suspicion and deceit. Whilst recognising the reality that exists within some Muslims, brandishing this term about actually mitigates against the vulnerability that Christians ought to bring to relationships and that Patrick highlights as so different to the Muslim faith. To beat people with doctrinal truths whilst failing to embody them makes us, at best, hypocrites and at worst agents of division.

At the end of the day, the message from Patrick is "here be monsters": back off, don't trust, and until they prove themselves worthy, do not give any ground to Muslims. The Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, writing in the 1930's was posed with the problem of what being a Jew meant in Nazi Germany. To survive, you had two choices: assimilation or emigration in order to set up a new Zion. The first option meant that you were denying everything you stood for as a Jew. The second option meant that you betrayed all that it was to be a Jew because you could not assert and grab what could only be received as a gift from God. As we reflect on our Christian response to Islam in Britain, taking in controversial issues like the planned public calls to prayer in Oxford, covered by Ruth Gledhill, we face a similar tension. How do we present the Christian faith in the public square, without falling into the trap of losing the very sense of what it means to be a follower of Christ?

Patrick concludes his letter with the suggestion that the naivety of western Christians is actually exacerbating the suffering of Christians in Muslim majority lands. Let's hear the voices of the suffering church, campaign, speak out and pray.....But let's also be vulnerable and loving, without fear or favour to our Muslim neighbours. Any other route is just not of Christ.

An Audience with A Grand Mufti

The other evening I attended a local mosque to hear the "Grand Mufti of Bosnia", Dr Mustafa Ceric. The school kid in me was quite pleased to meet a Grand Mufti; it's one of those titles that is as snigger-inducing as it is mysterious. I found out later that a Mufti is someone who has the authority to pronounce a fatwah so I ought to be more careful.

Anyway, this senior Muslim cleric was visiting Birmingham as part of the programme of "Radical Middle Way" events to encourage sincere and committed Muslim faith robustly engaged in the plurality of Britain. Dr Ceric was fascinating: advocating personal piety in prayer and reading of the Qur'an, shari'ah law for governance in Muslim family and financial matters and thirdly, the exercise of reason in a confident encounter with the rest of society.

One neat observation on his part was that "Muslims like each other but have no respect for one other. Non-Muslims don't like each other but respect each other". In essence, he was saying that Muslims need to be credible in a society where you are valued by your learning and your productiveness. It is the combination of Muslim unity coupled with the use of wisdom and rationalism that will make them a force for good in wider Europe, so he says.

It's the kind of stuff that is relevant to the discussions on no-go areas. Here is a Muslim voice, speaking to a conservative, non-academic mosque community, and challenging Muslims that their faith ought to be outward looking and be able to learn from non-Muslims without needing to compromise. The issue is real, but there is hope in voices like Mustafa Ceric for the wider good. As Christians in Britain, and in the world, dare we pray for Muslims, that they may find a way forward; help them in this process so that the church might be a blessing to all? As hordes of teenage Muslims, in their sneakers, baggy trousers and prayer hats filed out in the rain, I wasn't sure how many of them got the references to Weber or even the wider debate to which Ceric's qur'anic references referred to so I remembered that grumpy prophet again: "seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

Young British and Muslim

I've just received my copy of Philip Lewis' new book, "Young, British and Muslim". Philip is a lecturer at Bradford University's Centre for Peace Studies, was a mission partner with CMS in Pakistan and is part-time interfaith adviser for the Diocese of Bradford. This book is a must-have for getting a feel for the the issues facing young Muslims in Britain today and takes its cue from a series of interviews with Muslims including their very honest challenges to community leadership. It's well worth getting hold of and even has a foreward by Channel 4 newscaster Jon Snow and recommendations from notable journalists such as Madeline Bunting. Philip is a world-class scholar of Islam and brings his depth of knowledge to provide a respectful but accessible introduction to the subject. Buy it here. And while on the subject, spare a prayer for Pakistan: for peace, for leadership of integrity and courage and for grace on all sides.

Careful what you say

It's been a tough few weeks for the Islamic community in Britain as the Sudanese teddy bear incident raged and the spectre of freedom to convert from Islam once again has come to the fore. Ruth Gledhill, the Times' correspondent, has been covering these issues and it has been dismaying to me to see the venom that has been generated by us good old Christian folk. As I've said before, we should not duck out of the truth-telling in our engagement with other faiths, speaking out against wrong and injustice. What perturbs me, though, is the tendency to make sweeping judgments about whole groups of people and foreclosing what "the other" can be to us.

I'd like to pose a question to some of those that have posted so liberally about the wrongs of Islam: is it inevitable that a Muslim be violent, cruel and sexist? Now I can answer a quick and categorical "no" to that question. I answer from experience but I also answer from within my own Christian tradition. Not one person in this world is "inevitably" always going to be wrong. There is something about the Christian hope that I hold to that will see the good, see signs of grace in all places and in all people. If Christmas means anything, it's about God surprising us in the most unexpected places. Isn't that what the Parable of the Good Samaritan is all about?

So, as gently as I can, I'd like to suggest that words like "they", "always", "all", "must" in connection  with negative behaviour from Muslims be deleted. The added incentive might be a slightly less gentle reminder to some Christian self-reflection. Here's another question: is it inevitable that Christians be colonial, paternalistic and compromised by power? I answer again from my own experience and from the trajectory of my Christian hope an unequivocal "no". However, my recognition of those traits in myself and in the church ought to drive me to humility as I bring challenges to my neighbours, of whatever faith.

A bishop back in the early 20th Century said, "how can we sing our love song to Jesus without telling dirty stories about the other?". More recently, Vaclav Havel said, "There is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly and tolerantly". In our truth-telling, in our necessarily robust engagement in the public arena, guard us Lord from falling into sin.

If you go down to the woods today......

A big part of my job involves helping churches to understand Islam and Muslims and to engage constructively as good neighbours. It's quite a challenge in the current climate of fear and not helped by some Christian voices that would villify and generalise. Every now and then, though, something comes up on the news that makes my job exceptionally difficult, and the controversy over the teddy bear in the Sudanese classroom is one of those instances. I groan, I wince, I shudder.Good dialogue, good neighbourliness requires that we have some uncomfortable discussions too. A colleague of mine has been suggesting that the current metaphors of host and guest for the Christian engagement with our multifaith arena are inadequate. Basically, guests are always on their best behaviour and will try not to say anything too challenging to their host. After all, they're dependent on the host aren't they? Conversely, a host will have a reputation to keep up and not want to turn the guest out. So what is it to be? He suggests that "co-citizens" might be a more robust metaphor. As co-citizens in this world, let's express our disgust for the reactions of the Education Ministry in Sudan. They're not representative of all Muslims, let's not forget that, but with grace, humility and with a determination to hear critiques that come the other way, let's not duck out of the hard-talk. Oh, and if all we do with and about Muslims is the "hard-talk", it might be time to rewind and start being a guest before we can mature into being co-citizens.