Understanding Islam

Allah or Jesus? This was the question posed in an e-mail I received a couple of weeks ago, apparently forwarded several times over, originating I know not where. It described an event (which allegedly happened in London) at which a Muslim imam had claimed that it was the solemn duty of all Muslims to kill all non-Muslims everywhere. A bit of research exposed the story as a hoax – but I don’t know how many people had read the e-mail without doing the research, and are using it as proof that Muslims are a dangerous threat to all of us.

I received another forwarded e-mail a few months ago – this one claiming that under pressure from Muslims, all mention of the Jewish holocaust was to be removed from the National Curriculum. This also turned out to be a hoax. 

We clearly live in a time when fear of Islam is rife. There are apparently some good reasons to be wary, when one sees some of the terrible acts which have been perpetrated in our country and elsewhere in the name of Islam. But when anonymous individuals deliberately circulate false rumours in order to besmirch the name of a major world religion and all its adherents, then we seem to have reached a level of hysteria which at least demands some proper investigation. 

It was with thoughts like this in mind that my wife and I attended a ten-week course given at St Nicholas Parish Centre, Shepperton, this spring, by Dr Chris Hewer, Fellow in Christian-Muslim Relations at St Ethelburga’s Centre in London. Dr Hewer is a Christian who has the rare distinction of having spent many years studying both Christianity and Islam; his knowledge of both faiths is remarkable, and he turned out to be the best possible man to introduce Islam to a bunch of suburban British church-goers. 

I actually grew up in Indonesia, the country with the largest Islamic population in the world. And I spent part of that time in Central Java, where some 96% of the population is Muslim. Javanese Islam at that time was a very relaxed, tolerant way of life. Members of minority religions were welcomed and respected. Indeed, the director of the music conservatory at which I studied was himself a Christian. Muslims played music and sang, and told stories from the ancient Hindu epics through dance and puppetry. The town in which I lived, Surakarta, was a magnet for a variety of spiritual groups, from Buddhists to Theosophists to Baptists – a sort of Southeast Asian East Grinstead. And when, three-quarters through my stay there, I chose to become a Christian, my Muslim neighbours did not bat an eyelid; indeed, they were, if anything, pleased that at last I believed in God. 

Times have changed since then. Now young Javanese women wear the hijab – unheard of twenty years ago. One of my professors, a dancer, and one of the most celebrated choreographers in Indonesia, now has to fight to get his students to remove their veils in his class. And Surakarta has become the headquarters of unsavoury fundamentalist Islamic groups, including the one which sent the bombers to Bali. 

Why has there been such a change amongst Muslims – seemingly not just in Java but all around the world? Should we, Christians in Britain, fear Islam itself, or merely the abuse of Islam by a few fringe lunatics? Or, as with most things in life, is the truth somewhere in the middle, and far more complex? 

Dr Hewer’s course was lengthy, detailed, and endlessly fascinating. I won’t claim that he settled the above questions once and for all, but he did paint a picture of Islam as complex, multi-faceted, and resistant to glib generalisations. His first few talks concentrated on the idealised generalities of Islam: the Muslim understanding of the world, the nature of God, the revelation to Mohammed, the Qur’an, and the principles of Muslim thought and practice. This led some attendees to criticise him for seeing Islam through “rose-tinted glasses”. This may well be the case, but it is clearly the right place to start when talking about someone else’s religion. As a Christian, I would rather explain my faith to a non-believer starting from God’s love for us than from our failure to respond properly to that love. We must start from the ideals, for it is the ideals which inspire faith. Everything else is simply the working-out of (or the failure to work out) the implications of those ideals. 

As the course progressed, more complexities began to surface, especially the sheer variety of Islamic interpretation, ranging from the warmly mystical to the uncompromisingly fundamentalist. Dr Hewer made little secret of his distaste for the latter, but made it clear that it was hardly representative of Islam as a whole – and that, without the constant injection of Saudi petrodollars, it might be making little headway. The implication of all this was that, whatever some Muslims might say, those things which worry Christian and secular Britons about Islam, e.g. terrorism, repression of women etc., are not an inevitable consequence of Islam any more than the Crusades or the Inquisition are the inevitable consequence of a loving God who died on the cross for our sins. 

This variety was made ever clearer at our half-term visit to Kingston Mosque, which Dr Hewer arranged. Rashid Laher, chairman of the mosque, went to great pains to emphasise the “normalness” of Muslims, and spoke with disarming honesty about the many challenges the mosque had to meet in dealing with its multi-faceted congregation. Many of his comments would not have seemed out of place coming from the lips of a Christian parish priest: how to balance his ambitions for the mosque with the intransigence of some of its members; how to reconcile the different backgrounds and worship styles of the various members; how to tame the spiritual arrogance of the university students who thought they knew it all. Others we met at the mosque were less diplomatic in their style. One man challenged us as Christians to stand up for godly values; his impression, clearly, was that Christians were far too easily taken in by the secularism of modern society. Another, a convert to Islam (from Christianity, he said) described how his life, which had once been an unholy mess, had come back to the straight and narrow since becoming a Muslim; his testimony was both heartening, for the difference God had made to his life, and shaming, for the warped impression he had clearly gained of Christianity during his youth. 

There is clearly much misunderstanding on both sides of the Christian-Muslim divide. Dr Hewer’s plea, to Christian and Muslim alike, was that, whatever we say, we should endeavour to disagree on those things about which we genuinely have cause to disagree, and should not disagree on the basis of misunderstandings, rumours and falsehoods. It is probably safe to say that most Christians are not massively bothered by points of potential theological disagreement with Islam. The Catholic Church is happy to recognise that Muslims “together with us adore the one, merciful God” (Catechism 841); she “considers all goodness found in [other] religions as ‘a preparation for the Gospel, and given by Him who enlightens all men’” (843). However, there are many in our society, both Christian and secular, who are clearly alarmed at what appears to be the number of atrocities committed in the name if Islam. Courses like Dr Hewer’s should hopefully help non-Muslims to weigh such reports carefully, to check their veracity, to judge whether they represent authentic Islam or are the aberrations of fringe lunatics, and also to seek out the balancing example of civilised and peace-loving Muslims. 

Muslims are perhaps more bothered by Christian theology than the other way round. Our triune God sounds a lot to them like polytheism, and our belief in Jesus as God incarnate is to Muslims nothing more than deranged idolatry. In the face of this, Dr Hewer was clear, it is our responsibility as Christians to explain ourselves better. If our own grasp of theology is not up to explaining the Trinity to non-Christians, then we cannot blame them for thinking our beliefs to be nonsense. In this way, Dr Hewer’s course was not just an education in Islam, but a plea for education in Christianity. We need to catechise ourselves better about our faith, not just so as to answer back Muslims, but in order that we be better Christians. 

One thing from Dr Hewer’s course struck me deeply about Islam: Muslims have no concept of salvation as we know it. Muslims believe that in every age, and to every people, prophets have been sent and have been given a full revelation about the nature of God and about how to live a godly life, both as individuals and as a society. The revelation to Mohammed, in the Qur’an, is but the latest and the last such revelation. It is, according to Islam, fully within the capability of every human being to live a godly life, if only he listen to and remember the words of God. Not for the Muslim, then, the Pauline cri de coeur “Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not… Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?” (Rom 7:18ff) As a Christian, and a sinner, I feel privileged and blessed to know the answer to that question. 

Dr Chris Hewer offers courses on Islam, under the auspices of St Ethelburga’s Centre. He is running 10-week courses in Southwark, Wimbledon, South Hampstead and Bethnal Green from 30 September onwards. He can also run the 10-week course or one-day workshops in your community free of charge. The ideal number for a course is 12-25 and the ten sessions usually include an accompanied visit to a mosque. Courses can be delivered during the day (especially attractive for retired people or people with small children at school) or in the evenings. They last for two hours each session with a break midway for tea and coffee. The hosts gather together the people, provide the meeting place and tea/coffee for the break. Contact chris@stethelburgas.org for more details or if you would like to organise a course in your area.