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Is Islam to be trusted?In my secondary school teaching I have been very privileged to meet many Muslim children and their families who are very appreciative, (much more so than many "nominally" Christian parents), of my efforts to bring the children in my care into contact with the great religious traditions of Mankind. Most Muslims, (like most Christians perhaps perhaps), I have no problem with, but Islam is a different matter. It's not the growing strength of international Islamic radicalism per se that causes me to make this observation but the response of Islam to such developments. The recent terrorist bombings in East Africa have largely been accompanied by a deathly (and deadly) hush in the Islamic world. [It's no use citing the Crusades, the Inquisition and Northern Ireland to me as an Orthodox Christian, (the historical Russian pogroms against the Jews perhaps, I admit) ... these are largely western Christian issues and ones upon which Orthodoxy is just as critical as Muslims or western secularism. Western Christians sacked Constantinople long before the Turks. At least the Sultan didn't try and evict the Patriarch as our "brother" in Rome did 2 centuries earlier!] However, to my main point .... Islam can never really be unequivocally against terror precisely because Muhammad was a warrior-prophet. The Qur'an itself propagates the "jihad" and although pious and godly Muslims rightly interpret this as a fight against evil, theocratic Islam which rules by shariah has always used jihad as a means of subjugation and intimidation. Islam is basically intolerant of pluralism except in so far as it more or less admits the possibility of the People of the Book, (Jews and Christians), retaining their religious identity as a "mini-nation" under Islam's political control, (the millet). Even in so-called secular Turkey, however, it is increasingly difficult for the few remaining Greeks to establish the historical reality of Turkey as a multi-ethnic entity. The archaeological remains of Byzantium are an anachronism to many Turks ... as are the distant offspring of their builders. The West is the "Great-Satan" to many militant Islamists because it is considered to be the breeding ground of decadence and idolatry. Islam is an intensely moralistic monotheistic faith. Many of its ideals some post-Christian westerners secretly admire. The rot has already set in and we perhaps have another few decades before Islam achieves a position of political and religious influence in the West to challenge the pitifully weak Christian culture of our society. So, no, I don't think Islam can be trusted. It has never accommodated a humane ethic largely because its iconoclasm has rendered it faceless. I shudder every time I see an icon in a Greek museum defaced by the hand of a fanatical Muslim. The eyes are always scratched out. Blind to the Saviour how can they be saved? God knows. But, friends, in our desperate western liberal way of trying to be kind and tolerant, let us not be blind to this truth. Muhammad conquered as much by the sword as by the book. Fr Gregory |
