Finding common ground between Muslims and Christians

In the first place agreeing on what the unity of God means is impossible and should not be even attempted, even for those Christians who might wish to affirm that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

The second difficulty concerns the Islamic understanding of terms used in A Common Word, terms which would be understood quite differently by Christians. For example, the meaning of “freedom of religion” for a Muslim means freedom to practice Islam alone. As previously noted, the term “unity of God” constitutes a rejection of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Also problematic is the Islamic use of “devotion” as a synonym for “love”.

The immutability of the Islamic sacred texts represents a third difficulty. These texts contain many alarming things for Christians and persons of other faiths. The classic example is Sura 9.29 which reads, quoting from the Noble Koran translation of Dr Hilali and Dr Khan, published by Maktaba Dar-us-Salam, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, “Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”. The Noble Koran adds a footnote to the effect that the jizya is a tax levied from the non Muslim people (Jews and Christians), who are under the protection of a Muslim government.

Aside from Islamic teaching, the history of Muslim Christian relations clearly tells us that Islam has never been at peace with Christianity. As Bernard Lewis (in The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror), renowned authority on Islamic affairs points out, “the presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule”.

Therefore, getting Muslims to move on issues such as the status of Christians and Jews as second class citizens (dhimmis) in Islamic society and the treatment of apostates (Muslim converts to Christianity) will be extraordinarily difficult.

A fourth difficulty concerns the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya.

Whereas for Christians, lying is considered a sin, the use of taqiyya in Islamic jurisprudence and theology, as a precautionary deception and keeping one's convictions secret from unbelievers, is regarded as a virtue and a religious duty. And “unbelievers” is precisely how Muslims consider the Pope and other Christian leaders.

A major problem, that will frustrate Muslims, concerns the issue of what it is that the Muslims are seeking and this issue is allied to the implied fallacy in A Common Word that Christian leaders can speak for Western nations. This is an understandable confusion for Muslims as Islam is as much a political ideology as a religion in a way that Christianity is not, the Crusades notwithstanding.

This coalescence of religion and political ideology in Islam helps explain why true freedom of religion remains so foreign to it. By issuing this challenge to Christianity, Islam in fact challenges itself to recognise the religious neutrality of the state and therefore religious freedom for all its citizens regardless of their particular religious beliefs.

So, what are Muslims seeking?

One answer has already been suggested - the conversion of the Church’s leaders, beginning with the Pope. This can be no more than a fond hope, even for the most conservative Muslim.

Arguably, the main objective for the Muslim political leaders signing A Common Word must be to gain the assistance of Church leaders in bringing the war on terror, or in Muslim eyes the war on Islam, to a speedy end. In this they will be disappointed. The disappointment will not be with the words and actions of church leaders, who with few exceptions will willingly comply, but rather with the discovery that the church leaders’ voice will count for so little in determining the course of the war on terror.

While it would be foolish in the extreme to expect any significant doctrinal accord between Muslims and Christians, yet on the basis of our common humanity and for the sake of the approximately one in ten Christians facing persecution in the world today, much of it from Muslims, we should by all means possible seek mutual understanding and civility in relationships across the Muslim Christian divide. This, I suggest, would be a profoundly Christian thing to do, even if in effect all that is achieved is a truce for a limited time.