Catholic views on a Violent ISLAM

Islam and Western Democracies


By + Cardinal George Pell
Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Australia

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\Even more explosively, Luxenberg suggests that the Koran has its basis
in the texts of the Syriac Christian liturgy, and in particular in the
Syriac lectionary, which provides the origin for the Arabic word
"koran". As one scholarly review observes, if Luxenberg is correct
the writers who transcribed the Koran into Arabic from Syriac a century
and a half after Muhammad's death transformed it from a text that was
"more or less harmonious with the New Testament and Syriac Christian
liturgy and literature to one that [was] distinct, of independent
origin"[17]. This too is a large claim.

It is not surprising that much textual analysis is carried out
pseudonymously. Death threats and violence are frequently directed
against Islamic scholars who question the divine origin of the Koran.
The call for critical consideration of the Koran, even simply of its
seventh-century legislative injunctions, is rejected out of hand by
hard-line Muslim leaders. Rejecting calls for the revision of school
textbooks while preaching recently to those making the hajj pilgrimage
to Mount Arafat, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia told pilgrims that
"there is a war against our creed, against our culture under the
pretext of fighting terrorism. We should stand firm and united in
protecting our religion. Islam's enemies want to empty our religion
[of] its content and meaning. But the soldiers of God will be
victorious"[18].

All these factors I have outlined are problems, for non-Muslims
certainly, but first and foremost for Muslims themselves. In grappling
with these problems we have to resist the temptation to reduce a
complex and fluid situation to black and white photos. Much of the
future remains radically unknown to us. It is hard work to keep the
complexity of a particular phenomenon steadily in view and to refuse to
accept easy answers, whether of an optimistic or pessimistic kind.
Above all else we have to remember that like Christianity, Islam is a
living religion, not just a set of theological or legislative
propositions. It animates the lives of an estimated one billion people
in very different political, social and cultural settings, in a wide
range of devotional styles and doctrinal approaches. Human beings have
an invincible genius for variation and innovation.

Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion
and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited. To
stop at this proposition, however, is to neglect the way these facts
are mitigated or exacerbated by the human factor. History has more than
its share of surprises. Australia lives next door to Indonesia, the
country with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world[19].
Indonesia has been a successful democracy, with limitations, since
independence after World War II. Islam in Indonesia has been tempered
significantly both by indigenous animism and by earlier Hinduism and
Buddhism, and also by the influence of sufism. As a consequence, in
most of the country (except in particular Aceh) Islam is syncretistic,
moderate and with a strong mystical leaning. The moderate Islam of
Indonesia is sustained and fostered in particular by organisations like
Nahdatul Ulama, once led by former president Abdurrahman Wahid, which
runs schools across the country, and which with 30-40 million members
is one of the largest Muslim organisations in the world.

The situation in Indonesia is quite different from that in Pakistan,
the country with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. 75
per cent of Pakistani Muslims are Sunni, and most of these adhere to
the relatively more-liberal Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence (for
example, Hanafi jurisprudence does not consider blasphemy should be
punishable by the state). But religious belief in Pakistan is being
radicalised because organisations, very different from Indonesia's
Nahdatul Ulama, have stepped in to fill the void in education created
by years of neglect by military rulers. Pakistan spends only 1.8 per
cent of GDP on education. 71 per cent of government schools are without
electricity, 40 per cent are without water, and 15 per cent are without
a proper building. 42 per cent of the population is literate, and this
proportion is falling. This sort of neglect makes it easy for radical
Islamic groups with funding from foreign countries to gain ground.
There has been a dramatic increase in the number of religious schools
(or madrasas) opening in Pakistan, and it is estimated that they are
now educating perhaps 800,000 students, still a small proportion of the
total, but with a disproportionate impact[20].

These two examples show that there is a whole range of factors, some of
them susceptible to influence or a change in direction, affecting the
prospects for a successful Islamic engagement with democracy. Peace
with respect for human rights are the most desirable end point, but the
development of democracy will not necessarily achieve this or sustain
it. This is an important question for the West as well as for the
Muslim world. Adherence to what George Weigel has called "a thin,
indeed anorexic, idea of procedural democracy"[21] can be fatal here.
It is not enough to assume that giving people the vote will
automatically favour moderation, in the short term at least[22].
Moderation and democracy have been regular partners in Western history,
but have not entered permanent and exclusive matrimony and there is
little reason for this to be better in the Muslim world, as the
election results in Iran last June and the elections in Palestine in
January reminded us. There are many ways in which President Bush's
ambition to export democracy to the Middle East is a risky business. In
its influence on both religion and politics, the culture is crucial.

There are some who resist this conclusion vehemently. In 2002, the
Nobel Prize Economist Amartya Sen took issue with the importance of
culture in understanding the radical Islamic challenge, arguing that
religion is no more important than any other part or aspect of human
endeavour or interest. He also challenged the idea that within culture
religious faith typically plays a decisive part in the development of
individual self-understanding. Against this, Sen argued for a
characteristically secular understanding of the human person,
constituted above all else by sovereign choice. Each of us has many
interests, convictions, connections and affiliations, "but none of
them has a unique and pre-ordained role in defining [the] person".
Rather, "we must insist upon the liberty to see ourselves as we would
choose to see ourselves, deciding on the relative importance that we
would like to attach to our membership in the different groups to which
we belong. The central issue, in sum, is freedom".[23]

This does work for some, perhaps many, people in the rich, developed
and highly urbanised Western world, particularly those without strong
attachments to religion. Doubtless it has ideological appeal to many
more among the elites. But as a basis for engagement with people of
profound religious conviction, most of whom are not fanatics or
fundamentalists, it is radically deficient. Sen's words demonstrate
that the high secularism of our elites is handicapped in comprehending
the challenge that Islam poses.

I suspect one example of the secular incomprehension of religion is the
blithe encouragement of large scale Islamic migration into Western
nations, particularly in Europe. Of course they were invited to meet
the need for labour and in some cases to assuage guilt for a colonial
past.

If religion rarely influences personal behaviour in a significant way
then the religious identity of migrants is irrelevant. I suspect that
some anti-Christians, for example, the Spanish Socialists, might have
seen Muslims as a useful counterweight to Catholicism, another factor
to bring religion into public disrepute. Probably too they had been
very confident that Western advertising forces would be too strong for
such a primitive religious viewpoint, which would melt down like much
of European Christianity. This could prove to be a spectacular
misjudgement.

So the current situation is very different from what the West
confronted in the twentieth century Cold War, when secularists,
especially those who were repentant communists, were well equipped to
generate and sustain resistance to an anti-religious and totalitarian
enemy. In the present challenge it is religious people who are better
equipped, at least initially, to understand the situation with Islam.
Radicalism, whether of religious or non-religious inspiration, has
always had a way of filling emptiness. But if we are going to help the
moderate forces within Islam defeat the extreme variants it has thrown
up, we need to take seriously the personal consequences of religious
faith. We also need to understand the secular sources of emptiness and
despair and how to meet them, so that people will choose life over
death. This is another place where religious people have an edge.
Western secularists regularly have trouble understanding religious
faith in their own societies, and are often at sea when it comes to
addressing the meaninglessness that secularism spawns. An anorexic
vision of democracy and the human person is no match for Islam.

It is easy for us to tell Muslims that they must look to themselves and
find ways of reinterpreting their beliefs and remaking their societies.
Exactly the same thing can and needs to be said to us. If democracy is
a belief in procedures alone then the West is in deep trouble. The most
telling sign that Western democracy suffers a crisis of confidence lies
in the disastrous fall in fertility rates, a fact remarked on by more
and more commentators. In 2000, Europe from Iceland to Russia west of
the Ural Mountains recorded a fertility rate of only 1.37. This means
that fertility is only at 65 per cent of the level needed to keep the
population stable. In 17 European nations that year deaths outnumbered
births. Some regions in Germany, Italy and Spain already have fertility
rates below 1.0.

Faith ensures a future. As an illustration of the literal truth of
this, consider Russia and Yemen. Look also at the different birth rates
in the red and blue states in the last presidential election in the
U.S.A. In 1950 Russia, which suffered one of the most extreme forms of
forced secularisation under the Communists, had about 103 million
people. Despite the devastation of wars and revolution the population
was still young and growing. Yemen, a Muslim country, had only 4.3
million people. By 2000 fertility was in radical decline in Russia, but
because of past momentum the population stood at 145 million. Yemen had
maintained a fertility rate of 7.6 over the previous 50 years and now
had 18.3 million people. Median level United Nations forecasts suggest
that even with fertility rates increasing by 50 per cent in Russia over
the next fifty years, its population will be about 104 million in
2050-a loss of 40 million people. It will also be an elderly
population. The same forecasts suggest that even if Yemen's fertility
rate falls 50 per cent to 3.35, by 2050 it will be about the same size
as Russia - 102 million - and overwhelmingly young[24].

The situation of the United States and Australia is not as dire as
this, although there is no cause for complacency. It is not just a
question of having more children, but of rediscovering reasons to trust
in the future. Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global
warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when
confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of
nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a
steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia,
no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be
benign. In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain
attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a
reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Most of this is a preliminary clearing of the ground for dialogue and
interaction with our Muslim brothers and sisters based on the
conviction that it is always useful to know accurately where you are
before you start to decide what you should be doing.

The war against terrorism is only one aspect of the challenge. Perhaps
more important is the struggle in the Islamic world between moderate
forces and extremists, especially when we set this against the enormous
demographic shifts likely to occur across the world, the relative
changes in population-size of the West, the Islamic and Asian worlds
and the growth of Islam in a childless Europe.

Every great nation and religion has shadows and indeed crimes in their
histories. This is certainly true of Catholicism and all Christian
denominations. We should not airbrush these out of history, but
confront them and then explain our present attitude to them.

These are also legitimate requests for our Islamic partners in
dialogue. Do they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are
abrogated by the verses of the sword? Is the programme of military
expansion (100 years after Muhammad's death Muslim armies reached
Spain and India) to be resumed when possible?

Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would
impose Sharia law? Can we discuss Islamic history and even the
hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran without threats
of violence?

Obviously some of these questions about the future cannot be answered,
but the issues should be discussed. Useful dialogue means that
participants grapple with the truth and in this issue of Islam and the
West the stakes are too high for fundamental misunderstandings.

Both Muslims and Christians are helped by accurately identifying what
are core and enduring doctrines, by identifying what issues can be
discussed together usefully, by identifying those who are genuine
friends, seekers after truth and cooperation and separating them from
those who only appear to be friends.

.

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