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 Thinking Clearly about Islam
American Christians should bear in mind a long history of religious conflict.

By Francis X. Maier

Twenty years ago this past summer, I met a priest in northern Ghana. He told me a story. It has remained with me ever since.

The priest was a White Father missionary and vicar general of the Tamale Archdiocese. Ghana has a large Christian population, and as a Church leader he was well known and respected in the district. Driving back alone from the countryside one afternoon, his car blew a tire. He careened off the road and crashed into a ditch. The accident smashed several of his ribs, bloodied his face, and broke one of his arms.

Northern Ghana also has a significant Muslim population. At the time, Muslims had a monopoly on the makeshift trucks that provided public transportation. More than a dozen Muslim truck drivers saw the injured priest and passed him by. He finally pulled himself from the wreckage, limped to the road, and forced a truck to stop. The driver, a Muslim, made him stand in the back of the truck, despite his injuries; he bounced his way into Tamale City and collapsed.

I asked the priest why the Muslim drivers had ignored him. “Because in their eyes, I’m an infidel,” he shrugged. “I just didn’t count.”

A history of conflict
I heard similar stories at mission stations all across northern Ghana, where the Christianized and animist peoples of the south collide with the Islamized north. Most of the missionaries were Dutch White Fathers. Most were skeptical of European Church structures and authority. Many spoke the language of an Africanized liberation theology. But one thing they shared unanimously: a fierce private criticism of Islam, born of direct experience.

“Islam comes into a village,” said one priest, “and it smothers everything else. Progress, change, social development: forget it. Arab money buys the elders, and everything freezes in place. For the women, it’s very bad.”

Of course, maybe the religious frictions in Ghana 20 years ago were an exception. Maybe things are different now. Maybe Islam really is the religion of peace that its current American spokesmen claim it to be. But the record of bitter Muslim-Christian sectarian bloodshed in Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere suggests otherwise.

In fact, the record shows that again and again, in predominantly Muslim societies Christians face everything from economic, political, and religious discrimination to intimidation, kidnapping, forced conversion, and murder. Exceptions obviously exist, and circumstances vary, but the Qu’ranic norm of marginalizing Christians always reasserts itself.

And this is not new. It has been going on for centuries. Most of North Africa and the Middle East once had a flourishing Christian civilization. Muslim armed invasion submerged and erased it. By the time of the First Crusade, the (Christian) Byzantine Empire had already been fighting Muslim expansion, on and off, for 400 years.

Still more
Turkey, a NATO ally and a superficially secular Muslim state, has systematically strangled its ancient Greek and Armenian Christian minorities to the brink of extinction. Barely 2,000 Greek Orthodox souls remain in the jurisdiction of Constantinople’s (now Istanbul’s) Ecumenical Patriarchate, one of the most venerable Sees in Christian history.

At the same time, Turkish authorities are gradually erasing Armenian Christian churches and artifacts from the countryside in what amounts to a kind of cultural genocide. (Turkish policies resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of resident Armenian Christians in the early years of the 20th century—a fact which continues to block Turkey’s full acceptance into the European Community.)

In Upper Egypt, in January 2000, Muslim extremists murdered 21 Coptic Christians with impunity. In Algeria in 1996, Muslim militants cut the throats of seven unarmed and harmless Catholic monks. In Sudan today, a radical Muslim regime carries out a war of slavery and genocide against the Christian and animist peoples of the south, resulting in perhaps two million deaths so far. In Saudi Arabia, all Christian symbols and public worship are forbidden. In Pakistan, another of America’s allies, repressive “blasphemy” laws and Muslim extremists began persecuting the Christian minority long before Islamic terrorists shot up a Catholic church in late October, killing at least 16. And in Indonesia, yet another “friendly” regime (and the world’s most populous Muslim country), Islamic militants have attacked and beaten Christians and torched churches for years. And their violence continues.

History’s lessons
What is the purpose of mentioning these details?

In his book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch pointed out that Americans don’t like the past because we don’t want to be obligated or troubled by it—a theory which may account for Americans’ traditionally poor grasp of history. In thinking clearly about Islam, however, we ignore the lessons of history at our own peril.

Islamic culture has obviously contributed much beauty and greatness to the human experience. In the Christian view, Muslims, Jews, and Christians—and all human beings—are equally children of God, with the same rights and the same inherent dignity. Muslim Americans have the same right to personal security and freedom from fear the rest of us seek.

But we do need to remember that Islam does not really mean “peace.” Its correct translation is the subject of scholarly disagreement, but over the centuries it has most commonly been understood to mean submission—submission to the will of Allah. The fraternity, rights, and respect governing relations among Muslims are not extended to unbelievers. Those outside Islam, those who do not submit to Allah, are never fully trusted, and, throughout history, they have been subject to forced conversion, humiliation, or destruction.

The great French writer, social critic, and theologian, Jacques Ellul observed a decade ago that “there is so much talk nowadays of the tolerance and fundamental pacifism of Islam that it is necessary to recall its nature, which is fundamentally warlike.” He went on to note that in the Muslim view, “the world is still divided between the world of Islam and the world of war. And inside the umma [the lands dominated by Islam], the only possible existence for the infidel is dhimmitude—a status of inferiority and humiliation.

Of course, Islam in America may take a different path—a path of integration and diversity in culture, pluralism in its politics and mutual interfaith support. If it can happen anywhere, it will happen here. We should do everything we can to encourage that in a spirit of good will. Honest interfaith dialogue must play a part in that effort.

In the meantime, the Gospel obligates those of us who are Christian to love and to forgive. It does not obligate us to be naďve.

Francis X. Maier, former editor of the National Catholic Register, writes from Colorado.

Back to Catholic World Report January 2002 Table of Contents