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April 9, 2007 • VOL. 45, NO. 7 • Oakland, CA
Scholar: Don’t
judge Islam by actions
of terrorists or Christians by Crusades
“It
is a mistake to judge Islam on the basis of terrorists, just as it is
(unfair) to judge Christianity from the Crusades,” an internationally
known Muslim scholar told her audience after delivering a highly complex
lecture at the University of San Francisco.
“To see Islam through the example” of suicide bombers, said
Professor Mona Siddiqui, “is so very negative and so toxic, and
it does Islam a great injustice.”
Atonement Father Elias Mallon, also a well-known scholar on Islam who
provided a formal response to Siddiqui’s presentation, agreed. The
most positive route to dialogue between faiths, he said, “is to
bring the best of ours and the best of yours.”
However, he added, “the temptation is to focus on the worst of mine
and the worst of yours” because the more positive approach can “be
boring”.
The responses followed Siddiqui’s delivery of the 28th Annual Paul
Wattson Lecture at USF on Feb. 26. The event is co-sponsored by the Jesuit-run
university and the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, a religious order
that champions the cause of Christian unity and inter-religious dialogue.
Siddiqui, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Islam at
the University of Glasgow in Scotland, outlined the Muslim concepts of
human dignity largely as definable from the Quran, the sacred book of
Islam.
Like Christianity, she said, Islam views humankind as being assigned stewardship
and dominion of the earth by God. Both religions also point to the creation
of humans in a special way by God as underscoring the dignity of humankind.
However, she said, the faiths differ in their understanding of God. In
Islam, she said, a “tension between knowability and unknowability
remains.”
In broad terms, she said, Christians’ fundamental view of God is
anchored in the Incarnation, God becoming man, while for Muslims, God
remains “completely transcendent, absolute and one, all of which
forms the fundamental core of Islamic monotheism. However near God may
be to man, there is an essential difference between God and man and which
affirms the unknowability of God.”
“Nowhere in the Quran,” she pointed out, “is there any
specific mention of man being created in the image of God.”
The first Muslim woman to be appointed head of the theology and religious
studies department at Glasgow University, Siddiqui also commented on Shariah
or Islamic law.
“Obedience to God is understood on several levels in Islam. Prostration
in ritual prayer is a physical reflection of humility but acts of worship
… are not confined to obeying ritual and observing the law.”
While “worship develops man’s sense of himself and his love
for God,” she said, it “is also about heightened awareness
of the bond he has with those around him. Thus, obedience should not be
equated with servility, rather an enhanced awareness” of humankind’s
place in “God’s eyes” and “the respect and dignity
which must form the basis of relations with fellow beings.”
However, in its simplest definition, she said, “Shariah is not law
as we understand law in the modern world -- a set of imposed rules and
regulations.”
Rather, she said, Shariah sets forth principles for Muslims upon which
civil and social behaviors should be based.
Too often, she said, specific laws or penal codes of some Islamic governments
violate “the inherent teaching of the Quran itself,” which
does not state any punishments.
Many scholars, she said, claim “the non-coercive directive of the
Quran has been eclipsed by the established and still pervasive rules of
the medieval jurists.”
“This issue is further complicated by the fact,” she added,
“the Quran mentions those who follow other religions, notably Jews
and Christians, as people who also enjoy God’s favor.”
Many scholars, she continued, “make the claim the Quran contains
an inherent pluralism, the egalitarian spirit of which has been lost”
in judicial application.
“Religious pluralism for the Shariah,” she said, “is
not simply a matter of accommodating competing claims to religious truth
in the private domain of individual faith. It was and remains inherently
a matter … which a Muslim government must acknowledge and protect
-- the divinely ordained right of each person to determine his or her
spiritual destiny without coercion. The recognition of freedom of conscience
in matters of faith is the cornerstone of the Quranic notion of religious
pluralism, both inter-religious and intra-religious.”
