Peter Riddell describes a visit he made with 15 students to a suburban mosque in Melbourne. He reflects on the Christian-Muslim dialogue that followed the preliminary address by the Sheikh and his son which presented not only basic information about Islamic belief and practice but also bluntly informed them that the Bible was not the original version; that Jesus was given a single gospel and that Christians now have four gospels plus the Gospel of Barnabas. The Christian-Muslim dialogue invited questions but answers involved absolutely no self-criticism, “a clear tendency to emphasise the allegorical rather than the literal in interpreting the Qur’an” and use this device “to distance themselves from their more troublesome co-religionists who quote text and verse of the Qur’an in support of their campaigns of terror in certain locations.” The dialogue also involve misinformation and revisionist history, with “Saladin presented in idyllic terms” and the utterly false claim being made that “no Jewish remained in Palestine after the time of the Romans, so there were no Jews living in Palestine when the great Jewish immigration began in the 19th century.” One of the speakers complained some people didn’t accept him as a true Australian yet when he was later encouraged to read some books he stated he only read books in Arabic, raising questions concerning his own self-identity.
Riddell, stressing that the context of the dialogue was one of conviviality, points out that “Christians must be as forthright as the Muslims will inevitably be”. As he puts it, “Dialogue only works if Christians, while remaining polite and courteous, speak their minds.” Riddell finishes off his comments with a lengthy citation by a Muslim scholar, C.M. Na’im, who, observing a series of Christian-Muslim dialogues, wrote:
The Christians usually began by denouncing the Crusades, the 18th and 19th century colonial expansions into Islamic lands, and the more recent Cold War policies of the United States against various nationalist movements in the Third World. They readily identified themselves with the West and its history, only to castigate all Western protagonists and proponents, past and present. Their Muslim counterparts began in the same vein. They denounced the Crusades and argued that the same crusading spirit worked equally behind the colonial expansion and the unquestioning American support of Israel against the Palestines… The listeners nodded in agreement. One Muslim speaker mentioned the expulsion of the Moors from Spain as another such moment, and all heads were further lowered in sorrow and shame. Amazingly, no one asked how the Moors arrived in Spain in the first place, or what had brought Muslims to the land of the Testaments. It was as if there had been no imperial expansion of Islam, no Arab conquests of Syria, North Africa, and Spain… the sword was very much present in the story of Islam’s expansion, too. When this acknowledgement is not made, interfaith dialogue soon turns into an incoherent comparison of Islam, a faith without history, and Christianity, a history without faith.
Source: “Reflections on a Christian-Muslim dialogue” in Evangelicals Now (August 2008) 15.
Posted July 27, 2008
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