Piety, Politics, and Power

Lutherans Encountering Islam in the Middle East

David D. Grafton

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781606081303
  9781498252140
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877187
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

From the time of Martin Luther's writing of "On War Against the Turk" in 1529 to American Lutheran military chaplains serving in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Lutheranism has had a symbiotic relationship with Islam in the Middle East, framed across cultural and religious borders. There have been those who have crossed these "borders" to engage in mission and dialogue. In Piety, Politics, and Power, David Grafton examines the origins of the American Lutheran missionary movement in the Middle East, with a focus on its encounter with Muslims and the varied Lutheran theological responses toward Islam. The narrative is placed within historical contexts to provide an overarching background of Middle Eastern history and Christian-Muslim Relations. The survey covers Lutheran missionary communities in Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jerusalem and the West Bank, including the work of the Lutherans working for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionaries, the Anglican Church Missionary Society, the Lutheran Orient Mission, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Whether enthusiastic Pietists seeking the conversion of Muslims and Jews; cautious theologians in dialogue with Islam, Judaism, or Oriental Orthodoxy; or social activists working on behalf of refugees in Egypt and the West Bank, Grafton argues that these Christian missionaries were all enmeshed in the politics of the communities in which they lived, and either contributed to or suffered from the realities of Middle Eastern and international politics. Given the current reality of "Pax Americana" in the Middle East, the author asks the driving question about the role of American Lutheran missions and Lutheran-Middle Eastern Muslim dialogue in the age of American power in the Middle East.

1

Introduction

Americans have always had a unique relationship with the Middle East. From the early days of the new colonies the New Promised Land of North America was seen as the incarnation of the ancient Eastern Promised Land. With newly arrived immigrant communities in the New World, settlements sprang up throughout the wilderness recalling their ancient biblical heritage: Mt. Zion, Hebron, Bethlehem, etc. This was a new Promised Land for a new Promised People. But as the communities in the wilderness flourished and thrived socially and economically, and looked westward, many Americans pined for their spiritual roots in the biblical East. Evangelical preachers began looking back over their shoulders toward the true lands of the Bible. It was only a matter of time before the idea sprung forth that if the New Zion could be conquered through the hard work and zeal of a new chosen nation, certainly the true lands of biblical heritage could be reclaimed just the same.

Encouraged by the developments of the Evangelical Great Awakening in Britain, Americans began to imagine new spiritual quests. While the European powers sought commercial exploits and the new American republic carved out its own niche within the web of international relationships, American Evangelical Christians began to take seriously the opportunities of a new land and its riches, by sending out is best and brightest to carry an American Enlightenment to the East. From Mount Ararat in the North to Mount Sinai in the South, American Evangelicals drove eastward into the Middle East to reclaim their biblical heritage for Christ. And yet, although Americans did have a unique perspective of the Holy Lands quite different from their European cousins, their views of the Middle East and its people rested upon very long tradition of past images.

From antiquity Western written accounts and artistic portrayals provided a wide variety of images of the lands of the Middle East, which has come to be known as the “Orient.” From these records the “Orient” has always carried a sense of fascination of the mysterious unknown: its people, their customs, and their religions. No area of this mysterious land was more intriguing than “Arabia.” The ancient Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE described “Arabia” as an exotic place filled with spices and aromas, and populated by great snakes. By the first century BCE the Roman Empire came into closer contact with the people of the Middle East primarily for commercial purposes. Records and images of Arabs became more frequent. The Roman historian Strabo in the first century CE painted a picture of the people of Arabia as uncultured desert nomads who engaged in the trade of exotic spices.1 The Aramean peoples of the Near East had also known of the Arabs as traders. An eighth century BCE. Assyrian record of Sargon II states that he received from “Samsi, queen of Arabia,” a tribute of “gold, products of the mountain, precious stones, ivory, seed of the maple, all kinds of herbs, horses, and camels.”2 These descriptions found their ways into the sacred writings of both Jews and Christians, reflecting the ancient records of the desert nomads who provided the civilized world with luxury items of “gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (see 1 Kgs 10:15; Isa 60:6–7; Jer 25:24; Ezek 27:21–24; Matt 2:1–11 [Ps 72: 10–11]).3 In the seventh century, however, a series of events occurred that would dramatically alter Western views of the Orient. A group of people from the Arabian Peninsula, the place of the great “snakes” and spices, burst forth from the arid lands on the edge of the Byzantine Empire, overrunning everything in their path. Within only a hundred years the Arabs were at the gates of France, only to be turned back by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. The Arabs, these ancient Bedouin traders, were now known by a new identity, being led by their prophet Muhammad, known pejoratively as “Mohamet” in Western medieval literature. Middle Eastern Christians who had previously lived under both an alien Chalcedonian Christian Roman Empire and a Zoroastrian Persian Empire were now forced to live under the Arab Muslims. These “Oriental” Christians described their new overlords in a variety of manners, some positive while others negative. Some were impressed by their religious tolerance, as opposed to Byzantine “oppression” against non-Chalcedonian heretics—the Armenians, Chaldeans, Copts, and Syrians. Others were offended by the Arabs’ lack of culture and their cruelty. Regardless of these initial reactions, however, the Christians of the Middle East had the opportunity to develop first hand experiences of the “believers” [mu‘aminīn], as they would call themselves—Muslims, as we have come to know them.

However, across the Dardanelles in Constantinople and further west in Rome, European Christians developed their own perceptions of Muslims from afar. The political borders of empires at war prohibited honest first-hand spiritual encounters, what Jean-Marie Gaudeul calls a dialogue “from across the Borders.”4 Information about Muslims was often limited to what was expressed through political propaganda and the bravado of kingly pronouncements, or what information could be smuggled across enemy lines. Thus, most of the images and information of this “Other” was second or third hand. There were some attempts throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries by Latin missionaries, the Dominicans especially, to come to some sort of accurate intellectual understanding of Muslims and their religion. These Christian missionaries traveled across the Mediterranean to live in the Muslim world and began a serious attempt at learning its language, cultures, and religion. However, their writings were usually guided by the tenor of the times, the tragic military and economic confrontations between Eastern and Western communities during the Crusades. During this medieval period the term “Saracen,” the Latinized Greek word meaning “tent-dweller,” came to signify not only the “primitive” cultural background of the Arabs but their new religion as well, Islam. The famous eleventh century medieval Song of Roland recalled the gallant fight of Charles Martel’s army against the invading “Saracen” hordes across the Pyrenees. The song became a classic reference for European views of Muslims. The “Saracen” became the new barbarian. Whereas ancient Rome had previously faced the barbarian hordes of the Huns and the Goths, now the new Holy Roman Empire was facing the challenge of these “Saracens.” European literature quickly associated the word “Saracen” with all followers of the religion of Islam, regardless of the ethnic background. While the Moors of Spain were ethnically different than the Arabs of the Levant or the Turks of Eastern Anatolia, they were all called by the derogatory term “Saracen.”5 By 1453 the Ottoman Turks, another ethnic community that had converted to Islam, managed to conquer much of the Muslim Middle East and expanded their empire up to the very gates of the ancient Byzantine capital of Constantinople. In an earth-shattering event, the Turks scaled the ramparts of the capital of Eastern Christendom, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and conquered the last holdout of the Byzantine Empire. Eventually they would turn the cathedral church of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. The fall of Constantinople was burned into Western memory through song, poetry, and painting, lamenting this catastrophic date. But the threat did not end there. By the seventeenth century the Turks were at the gates of Vienna, the center of Renaissance European culture. The image of the “Arab” or the “Saracen” was replaced by that of the “Terrible Turk.” Faced with a Muslim threat, which was seemingly turning the European world upside down, Christians began to interpret the Muslim threat within the framework of biblical apocalyptic imagery provided by the twelfth century mystic Joachim of Fiore. One could be consoled that the rampaging Turks were merely a sign of the end times predicted by Christ in the little Apocalypse of Mark. These apocalyptic images were quite common as Martin Luther began his career as a young monk. As we will see in the first chapter of this book, for Luther the “Terrible Turk” served as a cultural reference point, which emerged from the international politics of the day. The frightening public image of the Turk contributed to his own biblical and theological hermeneutic, and helped to further the cause of Lutheranism. Luther, like other apocalypticists, saw the Turk as only one manifestation of the end time, not its cause.

Jumping forward nearly half a millennium, American images of Islam have followed a similar vein as the Medieval European tradition of the cultural denigration of Muslims. As a result of the 1973 October War between Egypt, Syria, and Israel, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) enacted an oil embargo on the allies of Israel. The embargo created an energy crisis in the United States as the price of a barrel of oil skyrocketed. As Americans felt the impact of having their daily activities restricted due to the reduction in the availability of gasoline, negative images of the Arab Bedouins appeared in American media. Cartoons, advertisements, and lyrics in pop culture appeared, decrying the dagger totting, greedy oil sheikh riding a camel in the desert.6 The greedy sheikh was quickly replaced by the “mad Ayatollah” after the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, in which Iranian students in Tehran held 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. During the Lebanese Civil War throughout the 1980s, Americans were bombarded with pictures of Western hostages as radical Muslim groups utilized the media to instill fear for political purposes. Most recently, the tragedy of 9/11 has been followed by horrible and gruesome images on the Internet of radical Muslims beheading innocent victims. According to one of the leading North American Christian Dispensationalist authors, these actions “perfectly d[escribe] the nature and genetic characteristics of Ishmael and his descendents, the Arabs.”7 Like the apocalypticists before him, this author interprets the actions of “the Arabs” as ushering in the End. These are the images of Islam and the Middle East to which Americans are currently subjected.

Western culture, both in its European and North American forms, has for the most part developed images of Muslims “from across the Borders.”8 By this I mean that these images have developed from afar, across not only political boundaries, but also cultural, geographic, and religious boundaries. Images of the “Other” have developed from within the safe confines of our own geographic and cultural safe havens. And thus, these images have easily been based upon imagination and caricatures. Naturally, this goes both ways. Middle Eastern Muslims have developed their own images of the West from within the boundaries of their own prejudicial religious and cultural borders as well.9 The sudden and dramatic realization of the presence of American Muslim communities within the “homeland” after 9/11 has prompted a great deal of curiosity, interest, fear, and anxiety about the presence of the enemy in our midst, even though “the enemy” has been residing with us since the early days of the Republic!

Throughout history, however, there have been records of those who have crossed the boundaries to view first hand the culture and religion of the “Other.” Throughout the medieval period the Dominicans and Franciscans traveled to the lands of Islam. Venetian merchants carried on significant ongoing trade and conversation with their Muslim counterparts in Middle Eastern cities and ports. By the seventeenth century curious European travelers began to publish records of their personal journeys to “the Orient,” referring to its people in a variety of ways.10

The Western missionary movement that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, resting on Continental Pietism and reveling in the throes of the British Great Awakening, began a new encounter with Muslims in the Middle East. These missionaries brought with them many images from their own culture of a backward and deplorable Muslim Orient. As the missionaries settled down in the Middle East or in the Asian subcontinent and came into daily contact with Muslims, they began to develop a wide variety in their own first hand views and images of Islam. Interestingly enough, they found not only what they believed to be a Muslim community in need of being raised from the pits of spiritual despair, but Jewish and Oriental Orthodox communities caught in a deplorable state of “petrification” as well. In 1812, one of the earliest Protestant reports by the American Board of Commissioners of For...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Luther and “the Turk”
• Chapter 3: The Lutheran Pietists in the Middle East
• Chapter 4: National Missions in the Holy Land
• Chapter 5: Early American Lutheran Views of Islam and Mission in Persia
• Chapter 6: The American Lutheran “Conversation” with Islam
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Appendix: American Lutheran Personnel in the Middle East (1950–2003)
• Bibliography
• Credits