Has the Vatican Joined the Crusade Against Islam?

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Apr 7, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Has the Vatican Joined the Crusade Against Islam?

Distinguishing Between the Outer [Dhahira] and the Inner [Batina]

Qur’an 5:48 To thee We sent the Scripture in truth, confirming the scripture that came before it, and guarding it in safety: so judge between them by what Allah hath revealed, and follow not their vain desires, diverging from the Truth that hath come to thee. To each among you have we prescribed a law and an open way. If Allah had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (His plan is) to test you in what He hath given you: so strive as in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is to Allah. it is He that will show you the truth of the matters in which ye dispute.


  The head of interfaith relations representing the United Muslims of America, Iftekhar Hai, joined a delegation in March, 2006, from California to witness Pope Benedict XVI’s elevation of the Catholic archbishop from this region to the Cardinalate and to the most important office in the Vatican, other than that of Pope, namely to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from which Benedict XVI rose to become the Supreme Pontiff. 

    In his monthly column for the San Mateo County Times in April, Iftekhar expresses concerns that the new Pope shows signs of abandoning Pope John Paul II’s openness to Islam.  His interpretation of what he learned is unnecessarily pessimistic about the future of interfaith relations.  We should not expect Christianity to be something that it is not, nor to become discouraged about interfaith cooperation when it does not conform to our expectations about what it should be.

  The three points about the Vatican’s positions on world affairs that most concern Iftekhar are: 1) the official policy to Christianize India, or at least “to think about it”; 2) the official policy to oppose the acceptance of Turkey into the European Union; and 3) the continued reference to Istanbul as Constantinople, even though the residents of this city changed the name to Istanbul centuries ago. 

  None of these three positions is incompatible with continued cooperation between Christians and Muslims on the real issues of conscience, such as: 1) economic justice, especially the wealth gap and the need for institutional reform to remove the barriers to broadening private ownership of wealth that are inherent in the present system of money and credit;  2) global political justice, especially the related problem of support by triumphalist Christianity and secular fundamentalism for the resort to war in order to impose political hegemony by a single world power as part of its strategy to maintain the global status quo with all of its injustices; 3) political and cultural self-determination, especially the problem of ethnic and religious oppression by regional empires in places like Southwest Asia (Palestine), Central Asia (Kashmir and Chechnya), East Asia (Uighur in China and the Moros in the Phillipines), and even the Americas (many examples, including the Native American nations in the United States), and 4) many other global challenges, especially freedom of religion, gender justice, ecological justice, and pandemic disease.

  The first problem that concerns Iktekhar is the stated objective to convert his native India to Christianity.  This mission is two thousand years old and is not a problem.  The drive to convert both persons and peoples of other faiths is an inherent part of Christianity, based on the orthodox belief that only by accepting the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as one’s personal means to salvation can anyone enter heaven.  Compassion for other human beings would demand that they be converted.  Given this supremely exclusivist approach to religion in orthodox Christianity, Pope Benedict XVI could not oppose those who call for the Christianization of the world. 

  Many Christians, and probably most, who embrace Islam do so because Islam is not exclusivist in this way, though they soon find that most Muslims are.  In Islam it is none of our business who believes what.  We are to teach what we believe is the truth and we have no responsibility beyond that.  Allah gives the necessary baraka to accept Islam to whomever He wills.  Allah states clearly in the Qur’an that it is His will that people should worship him in diverse ways as legitimate paths to sanctity.  This is self-evident to most people in the world, but not to Christians, except for those few who follow their own human nature in opposition to the dogmas of the Church.  We should not expect the Holy Father to reject the central tenets of organized Christianity.

  The second perceived problem, namely, rejection of Turkey’s bid to become officially part of Europe, is strictly a political problem.  We must accept the fact that the Papacy is a political institution.  This politicalization of religion has no counterpart in the religion of Islam, other than the absurd concept of an “Islamic state” espoused by Syed Qutb and other extremists who have perverted Qur’anic teachings from time to time (most of the time) for untold centuries (fourteen to be exact). 

  The various countries of Europe are trying to forge a common identity, partly in response to a half century of the American effort to control Europe as a political and economic satellite.  They are trying to create a law-based common framework to overcome the rivalries that produced two world wars, which is why they are so upset about the Neo-Conservatives’ doctrine of unilateral preemption designed to eliminate the rule of law in the world. 

  There must be some limit to European identity, which is why the issue of admitting Eastern European countries has been so contentious.  Russia is a special case, because it is an Asiatic power with a Christian religion.  In my view, it can not and should never be admitted to the European community of nations.  Turkey has even less reason to be admitted, because it is an Asiatic power and culturally belongs to another civilization.  This has nothing to do with cooperation between Christians and Muslims.

  The third perceived problem is mainly semantic.  Constantinople was the center of the Christian world for many centuries while the Patriarch of Rome represented only the barbaric tribes of the West.  I wrote my dissertation on Christian heresy, with emphasis on the split between Rome and Constantinople and on the gradual rise of the Vatican to global supremacy among self-proclaimed Christians.  Most Christians have a very insular and solipsistic view of history, so they will never abandon their historical view of West Asian history, any more than Jews will abandon theirs.  Pope Benedict’s reference to Istanbul as Constantinople does not mean that he wants to reimpose Christian hegemony in the “Middle East” (i.e., the region halfway between Europe and India), though many Christians, Jews, and secular triumphalists in the United States would like to do so.

  We should be careful not to confuse the externals of religion, especially the political externalities, which Muslims in Arabic call the dhahira, with the spiritual essentials, the batina.

  Every religion consists of three aspects, with great diversity within each of them.  These deal with body, mind, and heart, or practice, knowledge, and interiority.  The first deals with the ways of observing what the Muslims call Islam’s five pillars, namely, the statement of a credo, prayer, fasting, charity, and the pilgrimage, all of which are fulfilled through symbols that are unique in each religion but have a common purpose.  The means of observing these through the body are governed through specific legal regulations, known as fiqh in Islam and Cannon Law in Roman Catholicism. 

  The second aspect of every religion is the mind or theoretical knowledge.  In Islam this the domain of iman or faith, which deals with the nature of God, of angels, of resurrection (single as in the so-called immanentist Abrahamic religions or multiple as in the so-called transcendental “Eastern” religions), and accountability both in “this world” and “the next.”  This second aspect of all religion is expressed in philosophy, theology (kalam in Arabic), jurisprudence (in Islam the universal principles of human rights known in the shari’ah as the maqasid, which deal with our horizontal relationships with other human beings but have been substantially dead now in Sunni Islam for six hundred years), and, fourthly, theoretical Sufism, which is the attempt to capture in words what is knowable but is beyond human understanding and explanation. 

  The third aspect, which lies at the center of all world religions, has no name, because every name would restrict and therefore falsify what it is.  Based on the personal revelation or hadith qudsi to the Prophet Muhammad, i.e. not in the Qur’an, but explicit in the New Testament, that every person is created in the image of God, this third aspect of religion deals with our instinctual search for the presence of God, Who is both transcendent or distant and immanent to the extent that each person is merely a reflection of the divine.  This results in the transformation of the person so that, as revealed through another hadith qudsi, God is “one’s hearing through which one hears, one’s sight through which one sees, one’s hand through which one grasps, and one’s foot through which one walks.” 

  The end product of this process of self-actualization is a commitment to justice, as taught through a three-fold path from Hinayana Buddhism by the discipline of separating oneself from physical reality, by Mayayana Buddhism by merging with the ultimate, i.e. nirvana, nothing, or no-thing, and finally by Tantrayana Buddhism, which emphasizes the responsibility then to bring justice to the world.  Some people call this Sufism, but such names may serve only to confuse because there are so many diverse paths, some of them highly unorthodox, within Sufi-like or mystical traditions in every religion.

  The major purpose of interfaith understanding is to distinguish between the particularities essential to the external practice of every religion, which might be conceived to be along the circumference of a circle, and the second level efforts to cooperate in understanding the nature of things through rational discourse, and, finally, the spiritual paths that can lead from these externalities or dharira to the essential oneness in the batina at the center.

  The three problems that surfaced in the visit to the Vatican by Iftekhar Hai at the investiture of Cardinal Levada, are part of the dharirah.  They become real problems only when we think that they are.

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