I
was reading in Today's Zaman (English language daily newspaper in Turkey) about a conference at the University of Maryland focusing on
the moderate, peace-seeking Islamic "Gulen Movement," which has an
estimated four million followers, mostly Muslims. It is seeking to be
recognized as the world's leading Muslim movement.
This article sparked a great conversation with a teacher colleague about Islam. As a faithful Muslim and as a Turk who has lived in Pakistan and is now seeking his green card to teach in U.S., he brought up to me how much he hates terrorism and Bin Laden, who he said is not a real Muslim but a criminal.
I asked him what he could tell me about the Gulen movement. Turns out he is an active part of it. The Gulen movement emphasizes that "education is the ultimate means through which we can deduce the divine will and thus improve the world." Fethullah Gulen (still living) believes in a moderate and inclusive brand of Islam, and seeks to see a renaissance if not a reformation of his religion. There are three root causes of violence -- ignorance, disunity and poverty. Founded in Turkey, the Gulen movement believes in science, interfaith dialog, and multi-party democracy. The movement has been praised by both Jews and Christians.
The Gulen schools serve more than two million students in 90 countries. In Pakistan and Afghanistan the Gulen Movement is trying to identify youths at risk to join terrorist groups and give them free tuition to private schools and a place in the Gulen communities, in hopes of turning their lives around.
The Gulen Movement also helps fund a daily English-language newspaper, Today's Zamen, here in Turkey, which is quite good and is run by real journalists, not simply advocates.
Reading my Turkey Blog, Dr. A.M. Secrest, retired professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina and North Carolina Central University, writes that his perceptions of Muslims are changing. He confesses that he has never known a Muslim before, and like
many Americans, has reacted negatively to media images of Islamic fundamentalists and extremists. But he is "favorably impressed" with Muslim Turks as I describe themin my reports:
Sounds as if we Americans, esp. the younger generation, could learn something from the Turks and the Islamic fold, with a secular, tolerant attitude, about manners, respect, generosity and acceptance...It's amazing to me that your students have never met a Christian before, yet accept you and even applaud you...Just as you have much to learn from them, so you have much to teach them about us...
A tolerant Muslim might have a lot to teach Americans. I'm afraid so many Americans are becoming increasingly irreligious, materialistic, and savage.
Indeed. The respect that young Turkish Muslims show toward their parents, teachers and other elders is far greater than what young Americans demonstrate toward their parents, teachers and elders. The innocence of young Muslims, particularly on sexual matters and relations with the opposite sex, is endearing. They seem to experience so much less confusion and angst than do American teens. Far fewer are lost to drugs, alcohol, illicit sex, and spiritual nihilism, it seems to me. Far fewer kids spend hours a day zoned out on the Internet (home computer use is far less common here). They actually play old-fashioned face-to-face games together, or with their parents. Teachers at the school I teach at do not have to worry about being reprimanded if they touch, hug, spank or shout at children. Their authority is rarely questioned.
Turkish Muslim families appear to be more stable and close-knit than American families. The culture here in Kayseri is utterly wholesome. Divorce, affairs, family dissolution, and step-families are far less common than in America. (Granted, we freedom-loving Americans might find arranged marriages stifling and the highly structured family life, with rigid male-female roles, about as comfortable as a strait jacket.)
Bill Cosby, among others, has lamented the coarsening of American society, which we export daily to Turkey and the rest of the world through cable television and the Internet.
Of all things he'd wish for young people, better television is on the list. Cosby said he wishes kids had access to classic writers and their stories on TV, "so that our youth can find themselves being excited about things other than going straight for the genitalia."
Is there any wonder that the Muslim world resents our pollution of the television airwaves and some of the other "freedoms" we bring to the world stage?
Some bigots are trying to spread a bogus email that Muslims are generally intolerant, antisemitic and deniers of the Holocaust. Ironically these prejudices are often perpetrated by people of Christian heritage who have a far greater history of intolerance of Jews, and who are trying to stir up fears of Muslims. A Greensboro blogger, Brenda Bowers, maintains a completely deluded section of her blog devoted to the "War with Islam," as if she would like to launch a new Christian crusade against the world's one billion Muslims. As a Christian currently living in Turkey with many wonderful, peace-loving Muslims, I find this stuff offensive and just plain ignorant. I sure hope nobody takes it seriously.
Meanwhile, a new exhibit at Georgia State University (in the country of Georgia, not the U.S. state of Georgia) demonstrates that Jews thrived in the Ottoman Empire, while facing prejudice in Christian societies. Quote:
"Why aren't there more Christians in modern-day Turkey, given the widespread evidence of early Christian history here?" I ask on my Turkey blog, and in response receive a brief tutorial on European and Turkish history. Recently on this blog, I commented on a book I picked up called "Islamic Imperialism," noting that historically, Christianity has been far more imperialistic than Islam. Indeed, Muslims in places like Turkey have been far more accepting of Jews, while Christians in Europe, most notoriously Germany, persecuted and sought to annihilate the Jews.
I also pointed out that the modern-day use of the word "crusade" by most Christians is as misinterpreted by non-Christians as the modern-day use of the word "jihad" by most Muslims is misunderstood by non-Muslims. Bruce Johnson illuminates my point, and further explains the similarities between Islam and Christianity:
As a Muslim explained it in a lecture, "jihad" means "struggle" and most typically refers to what we would call personal spiritual struggle to be a better person. The same way that when St. Paul talks about "spiritual combat," he's talking about struggling against the evil in you, not fighting other people. I mention this because some people may not understand that not every Muslim who advocates "jihad" is a fanatic.
As far as religious imperialism goes, Christianity and Islam have something in common which sets them apart from most other religions, a sense of their own character as not only revealed religions, but as revealed religions to which all people are called. Jews also believe that Judaism is a revealed religion, but tend to believe that Gentiles are not obliged to adopt Judaism in order to be spiritually fulfilled.
But the Christian belief that Jesus Christ is in a unique sense the Son of God and Savior of mankind - however an individual Christian nuances his understanding of that - at the very least presents a challenge.
Muslims have similar aspects to their religion. For one thing, it is a tenet of Muslim belief that every single word of the Quran was dictated in Arabic to Muhammed by the Archangel Gabriel as God's word. One thing that sometimes complicates Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims is the dual meaning of the words "Muslim" and "Islam." To us, they are the name of a religion. To Muslims, they are that, but also, literally, Islam means "submission to God," and Muslim means "one who has submitted to God." So if you say, "I'm not a Muslim," it can kind of sound like you're saying you're a rebel against God, since that's what the sentence could literally be taken to mean. Kind of similar, I guess, to saying, "I'm not saved."
Muslims believe that Christians and Jews are "People of the Book" who had their own "prophets," Jesus and Moses (or "Issa" and "Musa"), and that by following their teachings, we follow God. But the further complication is that they also believe that Christianity and Judaism corrupted the teachings of their founders, and that if we followed what they would consider PURE Christianity, our beliefs would pretty much coincide with theirs.
I agree totally with you about wars being inspired by many things other than religion. But we Christians do have that tragic chapter in our history where basically we were killing people for not being Christians. And I think it's historically accurate to say we did a lot more of that than Muslims or Jews did in the same period.
It may help you in your understanding of your Muslim neighbors in Turkey if you can become rather familiar with some of the central points of Islam, like the "five pillars," I believe it is, of their faith. The Wikipedia article on Islam is a good place to start. Some of it I find very admirable - for instance, the emphasis on alms to the poor as a central act of worship, or the belief in the radical equality of all believers.
In anticipation of spending a year in an Islamic country (Turkey), I picked up a book called Islamic Imperialism. It seems to have been written in the aftermath of 9/11 as a fear-mongering book. One could just as easily write a book called Christian Imperialism, and indeed that has been the subject of many books. Yes, I suppose the evangelical and "universalist" mission of Islam and Christianity has become a kind of cultural if not religious imperialism at certain times and certain places in history. But I tend to believe that it is not the religions themselves that compel zealots to invade, occupy, rape, pillage, steal and kill. Culture, history, nationalism and opportunity have far higher correlation with such "war crimes" than religious belief itself.
If Christians at a predominantly Muslim university sought to create a chapter of "Campus Crusade for Christ," (such groups actually exist in Asia, Europe, and Africa), that would probably be about as welcome as a chapter of "Campus Jihad for Mohammed" at a predominantly Christian university. (Those apparently exist, too, according to this web search.)
“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing– they believe in anything" is a quote attributed to G.K Chesterton which he never actually said, as Michael Doherty points out on his blog.
Wall Street Journal: "What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
Watching Rev. Jeremiah Wright's interview with Bill Moyers on PBS (click here to watch the whole interview or read the transcript), it's easy to see what Barack Obama saw in him -- a literary, charismatic man who was ministering to the poor and the oppressed, lifting up a benighted neighborhood and building a dynamic church, growing it from an average attendance of 80 to 8,000. Anybody who wishes to understand and delve deeply into the controversy around Rev. Wright, rather than reject him out of hand based on sound bites -- must watch that interview or read it.
To folks who wonder what Obama saw in Rev. Wright in the first place, the interview was revealing. Obama was attracted to Wright because he was well-educated, well-read, cerebral and inclusive and able to talk about spiritual and theological issues with depth, using words like "hermeneutics," according to Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendall's biography of Obama, quoted in aNew Republic blog. Wright also served as something of a father figure to the essentially fatherless Obama as he sought to solidify his black identity. (Hat tips to Andrewsullivan.com)
Rev. Wright's presentation before the National Press Club, "The African American Religious Experience: Theology and Practice," was thoughtful. And he made the good point that as a result of the controversy surrounding him, perhaps "the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible" to the larger American culture.
Dana Carvey said he based the character of "church lady," created in the 1980s, on a woman from the church he grew up up in who kept tabs on his attendance. But that character, and the characters of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggard and Tammy Faye Bakker, are not as resonant cultural archetypes as they used to be, say, in the 1980s. I wonder if people who grew up in the 80s and 90s find those characters nearly as funny as people who grew up in the fifties, sixties and seventies.
In the North, if you answer the phone on Sunday morning, that's natural, but in the South, if you answer the phone on Sunday morning, you're "staying home from church," Georgia-born comic writer Roy Blount observed. As soon as you moved to town in the South, one of the first questions would be, "Have you found a church home yet?"
That's far less true than it used to be: 12 percent of North Carolinians, for example, now claim no religion at all, according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. And religion in the South is far more diverse than it used to be, according to the study, though people in states like North Carolina are still far more religious than in, say, California.
I remember a time in the small-town South when anybody who wasn't a Protestant was looked upon with suspicion.Thankfully, mostly gone are the days when Jews were asked by bigots or the hopelessly sheltered and naive why their people killed Christ, why they hadn't accepted Him as their Lord and Savior, or if they are "completed Jews." I also remember when Catholics in the small towns of the South were exotic creatures, when they would be asked (even by public school teachers) why they weren't Christians, why they were Papists, why they let a single man -- the Pope -- tell them what to do and control their lives.
I remember as a reporter in the mid-1980s covering the story of a young woman in small-town Oklahoma who sued her church for invasion of privacy and won $150,000 after church leaders told parishioners to shun her because they had seen a man's car parked at her house all Saturday night.
That kind of hostile religious narrow-mindedness has all but disappeared in America. Another Pew study indicates that openness to new religious traditions is quite commonplace in America, and that many people wind up in different denominations and different religious traditions than their parents.
Of course we still have a serious problem in this country with prejudice, bigotry and inordinate fear of Arabs and Muslims. Most Americans say they know little or nothing about the Muslim faith, according to a Pew Forum survey.
As a reporter who covered religion, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to a wide variety of religious practices, and to attend a wide variety of services -- by fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, black and white Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox, even Buddhists and Muslims, and found myself fascinated, identifying something of value in all of them.
I do wonder sometimes, if in all our politically-correct but shallow respect for religious diversity, we have lost something. And maybe we have lost something with the demise of church ladies who took note of when we attended services and when we didn't. At least she cared about our behavior. People don't seem to care or know nearly as much about religion as they used to. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn't strikes me as a book that ought to be taught in high schools.
Religion in schools? That debate, too, seems to have become passe compared to the rage the ban against Christian prayers in public schools generated in the 1960s through the 1980s (See this 1988 essay, "Banning Prayer in Public Schools Has Led to America's Demise," by Gary Bergel.) Almost nobody expects public schools to embrace and promote Christianity anymore because it clearly violates the separation of church and state. Indeed, many evangelicals have dropped the quixotic quest to return prayer to public schools. Evangelicals like Os Guinness now make the case for civility and how our future depends on it.
Recent Comments