Sacred Misinterpretation

Reaching across the Christian-Muslim Divide

Martin Accad

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802874146
• eBook ISBN: 9781467456319
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Promotes gracious interfaith dialogue on sensitive theological issues

Theological issues are crucial to how Christians and Muslims understand and perceive each other. In Sacred Misinterpretation Martin Accad guides readers through key theological questions that fuel conflict and misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians. A sure-footed guide, he weaves personal stories together with deep discussion of theological beliefs.

Accad identifies trends, recognizes historical realities, and brings to light significant points of contention that often lead to break-down in Christian-Muslim dialogue. He also outlines positive and creative trends that could lead to a more hopeful future. Fairly and seriously presenting both Muslim theology and a Muslim interpretation of Christian theology, Sacred Misinterpretation is an essential guide for fostering dialogue and understanding among readers from both faiths.

1Introduction

“What was it like growing up as a Christian in Lebanon, with so many Muslims around you?” “How did you handle the pressures of being a minority in a Muslim-majority context?” These are questions that I have been asked many times while traveling in Europe and North America. The first time I was asked this as a teenager, I was taken by surprise. My family had lived for three generations in Hamra, a Muslim-majority neighborhood of Beirut. I was born and raised there and went to a school where most of my classmates were Muslim. When my parents decided to move to the Christian-majority side, due to the relocation of my father’s workplace and the constant dangers of kidnappings and sniping, my most striking memory as a thirteen-year-old was the way that my new Christian friends spoke of Muslims, as though they were a different species. Yet as children, my siblings and I often kept the fast of Ramadan in solidarity with our Muslim friends, and once my brother and I asked my parents for permission to go to the mosque with them. I never experienced Muslims or Islam as a threat. They were simply neighbors and friends who worshiped God with a variant on the theme that I was growing up with.

These days, when people ask me about what it was like to be a persecuted Christian, growing up in Lebanon’s civil war, I reply with a smile that most of the bombs that fell near me were Christian bombs and that the only snipers we feared were Christian snipers, whose gunsights had a cross dangling from them. The war in Lebanon was a civil war. You feared the fire and violence of the other side, whichever side you lived on rather than belonged to.

Christians were kidnapped and killed by Muslim militias because their identity card said “Christian,” and Muslims were kidnapped and killed by Christian militias because their identity card said “Muslim.” The violent jihadi group, ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), has killed more Muslims than Christians and Yazidis, and they have destroyed more Muslim shrines than Christian ones. If they had ever made it to Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, there is little doubt that their iconoclastic mindset would have had them destroy the Kaaba, which Muslims have venerated for fourteen hundred years as having been set up originally by Abraham and his son Ishmael. The ISIS attacks on Christians and Yazidis get more attention because these are smaller groups than the majority Sunnī population. But the latter also suffered tremendously at their hand.

How do we make sense of all the conflicts around the world that, for the majority these days, have taken on a religious color? One group of people is up in arms against Islam, perceiving it as the root cause of the violence. Another group finds itself continuously on the defensive, having to argue constantly that the violent groups perpetuating these horrors have nothing to do with Islam. And Islam is certainly not the only religion in the dock. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both Judaism and Christianity stand accused as well. The expansionist policies of Israel are seen by some largely as the result of narrow and fanatical interpretations of biblical promises to the Jewish people. In addition to this, many evangelical Christians, particularly in the United States, have championed an ideology for over a hundred years referred to as “Christian Zionism.” This ideology is viewed by many as the primary driver of US foreign policy in the Middle East for the past few decades.

Are the conflicts religious, then? Are violent groups inspired by religious texts? Or are the conflicts neither sectarian nor religious in essence, but is religious identity, as some argue, simply “being manipulated and instrumentalised by sectarian entrepreneurs and shrewd political actors”?¹ Any simple yes or no answer to this question should be viewed with suspicion. But if there is no straightforward answer to such a complex question, there can nevertheless be some guiding principles for our thinking, deriving from historically informed observation. Here are a few that come to mind: most conflicts, historically, started not for religious reasons, but rather as a result of clashing visions on economics, culture, language, land boundaries, power, and control. Often conflicts take on a religious dimension, and once they do they become far more difficult to resolve.² Religious texts and beliefs are easy to use by various parties of a conflict in order to defend their ideology, as all meaning derives from a particular interpretation, which is subject to specific contextual factors that change with time and location. Once religion becomes party to a conflict, the resulting intercommunal damage will be deeply rooted and will likely take a long time to heal. Given this intricate relationship between religion and conflict, no religious group can abdicate its responsibility toward it. It is unhelpful to claim that religion has nothing to do with a conflict simply because it was not the root cause of it; if any party at any point claims that it is acting in the name of any religion, then religion has something to do with this conflict.

People of faith have a great responsibility to counter violent ideologies of those who claim to derive them from the Scriptures and traditions of the same religion to which they adhere. The claims of some Muslims, Christians, Jews, or members of any religion that violent people acting in the name of their religion are simply imposters, and that it is therefore not their problem to address, are suspicious. By doing so, they adopt the same tendency as violent extremists who essentialize religion, who claim that they hold the only correct interpretation of their texts, and who anathematize all others. In light of the preceding reflection, I argue that people of faith bear a crucial responsibility in the face of conflict. For the most part, they should not be held responsible for the violence of some who claim to belong to their group, but they do bear responsibility to fight and debunk these ideologies. Given that they share many scriptural resources with their violent counterparts, they are also the ones best positioned to develop initiatives of change that can be effective in transforming conflict situations.

Christian-Muslim Interaction

A Muslim friend of mine, a cleric, once pointed out how artificial our practice of Christian-Muslim dialogue is. Our usual idea of interfaith dialogue is an officially organized session where one or more representatives of each religion present their own perspective on a topic before an audience that is generally made up of adherents of each of the religions being spoken for. Instead, he suggested, let us bring our students together and organize a joint outing or picnic. Let our students interact and get to know one another at the human level. The concept was so simple, so relational and human, that I had never thought of it. I was, after all, an Oxford-bred intellectual, an Arab evangelical raised and molded as a transplant of American evangelicalism in the Arab world. I realized that the communal aspect of my faith was weak and that the biblical imperative that God’s mission (missio dei) was first and foremost about relationship was not always at the forefront of my thinking and practice. Our world has come into its very existence, and we know God as Creator, because of God’s initial thrust to create for the sake of relationship. Redemptive history, as reflected in the Bible, is the enactment of God’s ongoing initiative to restore humanity and creation to himself by his grace, even as the whole of creation continues to be inclined to move away from him through the exercise of its God-given free will. The ultimate and supreme expression of God’s passion for relationship is found in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom God reaches the pinnacle of relationship-restoration at the cross.

Why is it, then, that as Christians and Muslims in our world today, we so often interact with one another through the cold pages of books and through disengaged dialogue panels? At its worst, our engagement takes place through the cowardly pseudonymous pages of websites, or even by seeking each other’s annihilation through armed conflict and suppression.

The Context of My Writing

In December 2010, a Tunisian merchant set himself ablaze in protest against police injustice, leading to mass protests that had a domino effect in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. The ensuing mass movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa would eventually topple the dictatorial regimes of these countries in 2011, in what the media came to call the “Arab Spring,” in reference to the movements that brought down Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Events would begin to take a tragic turn with the rise of protests in Syria in March 2011. So long as the uprisings took place in largely uniform Sunnī countries (Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya) and had to do primarily with economics and harsh government policies, they unfolded and led to the downfall of the existing regimes. In Morocco and Jordan, on the other hand, sporadic uprisings were swiftly met with reform initiatives by their monarchs, who were thus able to quell popular anger and save themselves from the fate of the preceding models. No doubt the Syrian debacle that was unfolding in parallel also contributed in convincing Moroccans and Jordanians that reforms were better alternatives to all-out chaos. The uprisings in Yemen and Bahrain took a different trajectory, due to the more diverse Shīʿī/Sunnī populations. As a result of the intervention of strong external powers with interests in these two countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, things took a different twist. These interventions contributed to prolonged conflicts with still no clear outcome in Yemen.

But it is in Syria that the so-called Arab Spring received its final blow. Syria and Lebanon often seem to be the exception to the rule in the Arab world. It is there that the twists of history are the most dramatic, and there that expectations and predictions of political analysts tend to be disappointed. In March 2011, peaceful demonstrations began to emerge in Syria, near the border with Jordan. At Eastertime, my family and I planned our usual road trip to Jordan across Syria, to spend the holidays with my wife’s family in Amman. But by April (Easter Sunday fell on the 24th), as more serious turmoil was beginning to brew in Syria, we had the well-advised instinct of traveling by taxi rather than with our own car. As we crossed the border into Syria on our journey back, during the last week of April, our taxi had to stop on the side of the road in order to join a caravan of cars going through small villages to avoid the main roads, where armed groups were beginning to take control. My wartime instinct led me to order the taxi around, and we ended up catching a flight back from Amman to Beirut that year. But as we lingered at the Syrian border, it was clear that popular fear was on the rise, fueled by slogans and propaganda. One border official warned that demonstrators were shouting: “Christians to deportation and Alawites to their graves!” These slogans were likely sparked by government propaganda, but their effect was immediate. The Syrian conflict from then on would turn sectarian, fratricidal, and intractable.

So long as conflicts are sparked by economics and policies of governance, solutions tend to come relatively quickly. But history teaches us that when conflicts turn religious and sectarian, they swiftly break into all-out civil war and can take decades before reaching a resolution. Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine are dramatic examples. The rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, particularly since the summer of 2014, is a saga that will not be recounted here. Suffice it to say that these regional developments once more revealed the Sunnī-Shīʿī fault lines that have existed since the seventh century in the Muslim world. Christians and other non-Muslim groups once again had to pay a heavy price for this history, begging for new approaches where Christians will be urged to play a more active role of peacemakers, rather than remaining in the position of passive victims.

What Does Theology Have to Do with Conflict and War?

There is little question that religion, if it is rarely the root cause of a conflict, will nevertheless protract it when it becomes a significant dimension of it—which it often does. As Miroslav Volf argues, “sacred things need not be involved for people to fight and go to war. An insult, injury, or act of aggression or treachery may suffice. But when ‘holy’ things are at stake, conflicts are exacerbated.”³ Why has the world been so slow to recognize, then, the importance of religious dialogue and theology in the resolution of global conflicts?

There is growing recognition globally that religion as a core component of conflict can no longer be ignored. And if it is so, then solutions also need to come from that sector. This is an affirmation that religious actors have a significant role to play in the resolution of conflict now and in years to come. Volf argues that “multipronged approaches are necessary, and engagement with religious convictions and practices.” His book Allah: A Christian Response is written with that purpose, while recognizing that it is “essential but insufficient in and of itself.” Given that extremism on one side of a conflict triggers extremism on the other, he argues that “combating highly negative—and, importantly, inaccurate and prejudiced—Christian views of Muslims is a significant contribution to combating Muslim extremism.”⁴ The use of theological discourse to resolve differences is a common practice among groups with differing views within a single religion. But the idea that religious discourse can also contribute significantly in working toward peaceful relations between populations with rival ideologies is a relatively recent notion. It is also a primary motivation and belief of the present book.

In his book When Religion Becomes Lethal Charles Kimball observes that “throughout history, religion and politics have always been intertwined and interdependent,” but he affirms in the same breath that “today the volatile mix of the two is more lethal than ever.”⁵ This reality requires that in the twenty-first century, people of faith draw from their respective traditions inspiration and resources to resolve some of today’s most protracted conflicts. Or as Kimball puts it, “Realistic steps forward simply must include ways of understanding and appropriating elements of religion into viable political life and structures in the 21st century.”⁶

For people of faith, theology matters supremely in our understanding of reality, of self, and of the other. Our understanding of the character of God is fundamental to our ethics, and our ethics drive our relationships. Our understanding of the way that God interacts with humanity affects our understanding of revelation, and our understanding of divine revelation is fundamental to our doctrine of Scripture. The notions we hold about revelation also affect our understanding of prophethood and hence as well the space that we allow for other faiths within the boundaries of our own.

One premise of the present book, therefore, is that our theologies have been fundamental to our understanding of one another, and our murky relational history seems to indicate that our mutual perceptions have been largely negative. The conflicts that currently mire our world have taken on a decisive religious coloring, and so have a great majority of conflicts throughout history. Given the present shape of things, it matters little whether the roots of these conflicts were originally religious or not. If we want to face the present and its realities, we ought to realize that the burden of history lies largely on people of faith. This book seeks to take stock of this burden by launching into an exploration of theology as a foundation for dialogue. I express my premise, and indeed my motivation for writing, as follows: your view of Islam affects your attitude to Muslims; your attitude, in turn, influences your approach to Christian-Muslim interaction, and that approach affects the ultimate outcome of your presence as a witness among Muslims.

How, then, do we develop a view and an understanding of Islam that fosters in us the right attitude and approach, in order for our relationships to be constructive and fruitful? In the context of reflecting over this question I developed the SEKAP Spectrum of Christian-Muslim Interaction (figure 1).⁷ The spectrum emerged in my attempt to identify a diversity of positions and attitudes between the two extremes of s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Gabriel Said Reynolds
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Hermeneutics and Dialogue
• 3. God in Christian-Muslim Dialogue
• 4. Who Jesus Is Not according to Muslims
• 5. Who Jesus Is according to Muslims
• 6. Muslim Strategies in Approaching the Bible
• 7. Taḥrīf and the Corruption of Scripture
• 8. Islam’s Muhammado-Centric Reading of the Bible
• 9. Muhammad as Paraclete
• 10. Beyond Conflict
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References and Other Ancient Sources