ISNA’s Ninth Inter-Religious Unity Banquet:  Pros and Cons

by Dr. Robert D. Crane


Pros

      Probably the most important of the many satellite events not formally part of the 43rd Annual Convention of the Islamic Society of North America, which was held on September 1-3 in the city of hotels surrounding O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, was the Ninth Annual Inter-religious Unity Banquet.  This has been held annually by ISNA and the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago (CIOGC), which is a federation of more than fifty mosques, full-time Islamic schools, Muslim educational centers, community service organizations, civil rights groups, and professional associations, representing together almost half a million Muslims in Chicago.

  Most of the dinner guests were Christians and Jews representing the leaders of their communities.  Although Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., had not recovered sufficiently from an operation to attend, the heads of all his departments were there, as were the heads of various Protestant and Jewish “denominations,” who gathered in what they called the interfaith community’s hour of greatest need.

  The most prominent literature encountered by each guest as he or she sat down at the table was a call to unite in condemning the possession of weapons of mass destruction by any country or group.  Quite clearly, everyone there supported this initiative, WWW.MCI-NWD.ORG, regardless of how likely they thought that such an initiative could bear fruit in the world of hi-jacked religions.  Although the most prominent ayatollahs in Iran have issued fatwas condemning the very possession of nuclear weapons as a grave violation of Islamic law, this issue was avoided during the entire dinner program.  Probably this was a pro, rather than contra, because even religious leaders have to be politically correct in order effectively to communicate their broader messages.

  The three main speakers at the dinner were all profound and moving, especially the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Brad Hirschfield, who is Vice-President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.  He based his impassioned talk on the reason he refused to post a photo of an injured Jewish child on Beliefnet.  The well-known photo of the Muslim child, who was a victim of Israeli bombing last month in Lebanon, he said, had a universal message, which is that every child has been created in the image of God.

  The Christian speaker, the Reverend Gregory Steele Livingston, was full of bombast, but his classic African-American evangelical oratory did not begin to match the profundity of the Jewish rabbi, at least not for his sophisticated audience.  He did, however, brilliantly sum up the purpose of the dinner, which was to focus attention on addressing the needs of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and the disenfranchised in Chicago, with a low-key, politically correct reference to the rest of the world.

  The Respondent, was Dr. Ingrid Mattson, who is Professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary, one of the world’s three leading interfaith centers of higher education.  She has long been a Vice-President of ISNA, the first woman to hold a leadership position in it, and recently was elected President.  She was perhaps the most profound of the three, but her quiet style differed markedly from that of the two great preachers who proceeded her.  All three, as experienced communicators, spoke extemporaneously, but perhaps her message can be transcribed and published for those who could not attend this $200-a-plate dinner.

  The most significant aspect of this dinner was its focus on a positive message to address the need for charity in addressing the marginalized in America.  This differed markedly from much of the main ISNA Convention, where the emphasis was on defending Muslims from unjust attacks.

Cons

  The major weakness of the inter-faith dinner was its failure to distinguish charity from justice so that both can become equal goals of the interfaith movement.  This failure was notable in a gathering where the attendees were not there as individuals but as representatives of organizations.

  The task of charity is obligatory for individual persons.  Charity is fard ‘ain (an individual responsibility), whereas justice is a community responsibility (fard kifaya) of individuals working together in solidarity to perfect society’s institutions.  Charity is the highest calling because it is the jihad al akbar (the greatest jihad), but organized action to promote justice is also necessary as the jihad al saghrir (the lesser jihad).  Both of these require the third jihad (the only one mentioned in the Qur’an), the jihad al kabir, the great jihad, which is the intellectual jihad, including efforts to change entire paradigms of thought.

  When good people are trapped in bad institutions of society, their efforts to promote justice are very limited.  As long as all the institutions of society are geared to further concentrating wealth, the poor and marginalized will always remain just that.  In Islamic law, both zakat and sadaqa are designed to meet the needs of those who slip between the cracks in a just economic system, not to compensate for the imperfections of unjust institutions.  To use a poor analogy, failure to address these institutional deficiencies will mean that charity will always remain as a tit on the hog, without any power to change hogdom except by providing a little milk to be ensure that hogdom will continue to perpetuate itself and even prosper.

  The major problem facing Muslims in America is their focus on themselves, which this dinner program and several parts of ISNA’s main convention have begun to address.  Merely saying that Islam is the way is worse than useless, because it pretends to address real problems but does not..  The focus should be on the country where one lives, that is on America not on Islam per se.  Otherwise Muslims are irrelevant at best and at worst are a real threat as outsiders.  Most Muslim think-tanks have been little more than jokes, primarily because no-one will pay any attention to them unless they look at all problems from the perspective of what is best not for Muslims but for America.  For example, instead of attacking American foreign policy it would be more constructive to help Americans improve it in the best interest of America not of Muslims.

  This is not to say that Muslims are not growing in sophistication.  In 1985, twenty-one years ago, I gave a keynote speech at the 22nd ISNA Annual Convention (actually the fourth of the new ISNA, but the 22nd of the MSA).  I was asked to talk on a strategy for America.  Everyone expected that I would talk on how to oppose American foreign policy.  When I spoke only on how to help America understand and implement the guidance of our Founders, I lost 99% of my audience.  The very concept that classical American thought and classical Islamic thought are nearly identical was simply incomprehensible to them.  The 43rd ISNA Convention demonstrated that the concept is now slightly more comprehensible, but what to do about it or build upon this insight still is not.  Most Muslims still look at America as a monolithic monster that can be opposed but never changed.

  This short note in response to Sheila Musaji’s request that I comment on the interfaith banquet is not the place to explain what Islam and America have in common nor how to change the un-Islamic institutions that constrict the freedom of all people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, to promote justice. 

  For example, there are clearly developed ways to overcome the bankrupt paradigms of socialism and capitalism with solutions based equally on classical American and classical Islamic thought, which avoid the top down redistributist paradigm of socialism, where both economic power and political sovereignty originate at the top.  There are thoroughly Islamic ways to bring out the best of free-market, private, and broadened capital ownership accessible to every individual person, where all sovereignty originates under the ultimate Sovereignty of God.

  President Reagan called for a “Second American Revolution” to correct the drift of America far off its original course.  Although he was perhaps too obsessed with the threat posed by global Communism, he understood that no-one can be bombed into freedom and democracy, especially when the call itself becomes a front for concentrating all human power in a single ideological cabal, and when this cabal itself is threatening to become the 21st century’s great false god.

  The Islamic civilization at its best provides the necessary model, at least in theory if not often in practice.  Americans need to learn from this in order to apply this universal model in contemporary conditions.  Ibn Taymiya provided the political vision in his teaching that the Caliphate or khilafa was not political but rather consisted in a consensus among the wise men of Islam and necessarily of every other religion (of course we would have to expand this to wise men and women).  For this he was imprisoned for the remainder of his life. 

  The economic model was provided through the centuries of development by the best minds of Islam in the maqasid al shari’ah, and especially of its component, haqq al mal.  This honors the universal human right to individual, private ownership in the means of production, which is possible to implement nowadays in our capital intensive society only through pure credit in an interest-free system of money and banking designed to leverage future wealth not the accumulated wealth of the past.

  Muslims lost their way six hundred years ago, and America is just now marching down the same path to destruction.  Only through true pluralism, which consists in Muslims, Christians, and Jews learning from each other, can justice have any meaning so that the leaders of interfaith can develop both the theoretical and practical elements of a true Islamo-Christian-Jewish paradigm as a model for a common future.