Montreal Gazette
MONTREAL, CANADA, September 23, 2006: As Jews all over the world celebrate their New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and more than one billion Muslims begin to observe Ramadan, a month of fasting – and as the Catholic pope mulls over the furor he has unleashed with his curiously provocative comments on Islam – a group of scholars meeting in Montreal has grappled with difficult questions about the world’s religions and their place in the post 9/11 world. Islam is not the only religion in which there is a tendency toward fundamentalism, argues eminent Islamic scholar S.H. Nasr. Look at Messianic Judaism and evangelical Christianity. “The Middle East is the place where all three meet, and because of that there has been tremendous upheaval,” said Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and author of more than 30 books. The central reason for the rise of this fundamentalism is twofold, he observed – the creation of the state of Israel on land lived in by others, and oil. “It’s about the West wanting the oil of the Middle East, in a land that is holy to all three,” he said, speaking last week at the Congress of World Religions hosted by McGill University. “If Burma had been given to the Jewish people after the Holocaust and oil was discovered in Southeast Asia, there would be no fighting in the Middle East.” Nasr’s position was reinforced by theologian Karen Armstrong, who recently published The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. “All fundamentalist movements are rooted in fear of annihilation,” she said. They are exacerbated by symbolic issues, like the Holocaust and Palestine. “Only after the Holocaust did most Jews support the state of Israel,” explained Gregory Baum, professor emeritus of religion at McGill. “Before that, most wanted to be good citizens.”
One of the panellists at a discussion on Perspectives on the Conflict in the Middle East, Baum argued that in light of the colonial aspirations of Western countries across the Mideast, “it was no wonder that the Arabs saw the creation of Israel as coming down on them.” However we might describe Islamic fundamentalists, considered to be no more than 10 per cent of practicing Muslims and not representative of the aspiration of the vast majority of the Muslim population, there is little question that we apply a double standard, Baum says. “No newspaper in the world would criticize Christ or Judaism, but Muslims and Islam are fair game,” he said. And if this damaging fundamentalism weren’t enough, tainting Islam in the eyes of the West, those who do adhere to a faith with codes of behavior and dress find themselves squaring off against the heavy hand of Western material culture. While Nasr sees the modernist movement as having failed in the West, with progress leading to degradation of the environment, of spirituality and of a strong moral code, he acknowledges its power. “Secularism is an ideology with strong missionary zeal,” he said. “It is absolutist and fundamentalist.” But he argues, “you can’t watch Madonna and respect Islamic and Buddhist dress.” “Modernism also destroyed Kabbalistic thinking – a metaphysical understanding of the commandments and stories in the Torah – in Judaism,” said Armstrong, considered an expert on Islam and fundamentalism. “Now there is designer Kabbalah.”
A vacuum exists, many theologians and human-rights advocates argue, that might pave the way for those who seek peace and an enlightened dialogue. “Do you know of any religion that would endorse murder, terror and violence,” asked Shirin Ebadi, Nobel-prizewinning human-rights advocate, who opened the conference. “Do you know of any religion that would take away rights because of one’s color or beliefs?” Democracy and human rights are common rights of all societies, Ebadi says. “Every creed believes in respect for life, property and the human dignity of others. Every creed believes it’s unacceptable to demean human dignity.” She describes as tyrannical those who would “resort to violence in the name of religious culture.” Enlightened Muslim thinkers do exist and their voices must be heard despite the aggressive position of undemocratic Muslim states and radical Islamic groups. “Muslim intellectuals are trying to let the world know that wrongful acts relate to those people and not to their religion,” she said. “Therefore, wrongful deeds of certain groups should not raise hostility against Islam. The Islamic world is large.”
According to Irfan Omar, an Islamic scholar at Marquette University, a Catholic school in Milwaukee, Wis., there are theological Muslim thinkers who want to redefine the idea of “jihad” – that hot-button word that has come to mean “holy war” – more accurately as “just struggle.” There is religious justification for considering non-violence, like the Sufi tradition in Islam, said Omar, who spoke at a panel on Religion and “Just War.” “This aspect of non-violence appears in every single prayer,” he said. “The inner reality of all religion is the same, in that each religion is sacred,” Nasr said. “I am a Muslim but I do not have a right to tell a Christian to put his cross aside.” What matters, he argues, is that “you understand what it symbolizes. Understanding of another religion will not impoverish my own.”
Dialogue is the way to begin the process toward peace, says Dow Marmur, rabbi emeritus at Holly Blossom temple in Toronto and currently executive director of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, in Jerusalem. “I’m looking for dialogue and I hope we can identify those people in the Muslim world.” Marmur said he remains opposed to the occupation of territories Israel conquered in 1967 and “how it distorts Jewish values.” The use of power doesn’t solve anything, said Marmur, who argues that a desire to dominate destroys both the dominator and dominated. “Religionists have a vital role to play,” he said. “I do believe there should be a direct Jewish-Muslim dialogue,” Nasr said. This has been a narrative of pain, says Armstrong, that has taken on mythical significance. “We know that however holy a land can be, if there is no justice there is no holiness.” We all need a change of heart, Armstrong argues. “The golden rule is: ‘don’t do to others what you don’t want to have done to you.’ Do we want to inflict pain on others?” she asked. The West bears great responsibility to make this happen, Armstrong said. But paving the way for peace means “absolute respect for all the parties involved. Marmur noted: “Prayer before politics may become a viable option.”