Should God be de-radicalised? MDI Debate: Wednesday 30th Sept 2009

I’ll be moderating this MDI debate:

My opening statement:

Hello, good evening and welcome to the Muslim Debate Initiative’s public event, ‘Should God be de-radicalised?’.

My name is Paul Williams. Our title this evening reflects modern anxieties about the level of religious involvement in the political spheres of life. The term ‘radical’ is being increasingly used by secular authorities to describe those of a religious persuasion who dare to desire a link between their theological beliefs and an epistemological basis for governing human societies. The debate today is not literally whether God should be deradicalised, rather it is about how far religion is and should be involved in man’s social life.

The question of whether God (whether or not you believe in him) should be de-radicalised, is a moot point, considering that it is the human perspective of how far God should penetrate the affairs of man. This question forms the basis of contemporary discourse that activist secularism and political theism seeks to influence. In essence, today’s debate focuses on the key question – should society keep religion separate from state?

This event is hosted by Muslim Debate Initiative (MDI), an intellectual, political, and theological initiative, formed by experienced Muslim researchers, debaters and speakers, aimed at encouraging inter-community debate, discussion and dialogue. MDI believes that only through frank and open discussion and debate can deeper understanding be gained, relations between different communities be improved, and hopefully, the breaking down of prejudice and false conceptions. It is with this in mind, that we invite our honoured guests to come and present to you today’s event entitled ‘Should God be de-radicalised?’

The Speakers

Abdullah al Andalusi
Abdullah is a former Christian who embraced Islam at a young age, and has studied Islam in depth since he was 18. He also has an academic background in Computer Science. Abdullah has had a long experience in working for Islamic revival and the establishment of Islamic shariah in the Muslim world.

His activities involve speaking at community centres, universities, colleges and appearances on various TV programmes. He is experienced in debates with Atheists, Secularists and Christians, and has be involved in public and radio debates with Atheists and Christians.

Bob Churchill

Bob studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick and Queens University, Canada. He worked in communications and marketing, then systems development, before joining the British Humanist Association in January 2008 as the Membership and Web Manager. He now liaises with local humanist groups, manages membership communications, and has been responsible for the BHA’s online presence during the “Atheist Bus Campaign”. He has represented the BHA on radio and television and has discussed philosophy, religion, values and Humanism in public debates and “interfaith” forums.

Venue and Time:

Date: 30th September 2009

Time: 6:15pm

Venue: Abrar House, 45 Crawford Place, London, (Nearest station: Edgware Road [tube])

Disgrace: A New Report Details Religious Abuse at Guantanamo

Michael Peppard, professor of theology at Fordham University, writes:

Last winter, I wrote for these pages about reports of religious abuse at Guantánamo (“The Secret Weapon,” December 5, 2008). Among the abuses that had been reported were desecration of the Qur’an, prevention and mockery of prayer, and sexual assaults intended to undermine piety. I argued that the victims of religious abuse considered it worse than anything else they had endured at Guantánamo, though allegations of this kind of abuse have been mainly ignored by the American media.

Some readers responded to the stories of abuse in my article by insisting that terrorists are trained to lie. I couldn’t prove they were wrong. If you had asked me when I wrote the article which of the abuse claims I thought was most likely to have been fabricated by detainees, I would have said it was the stories of forced prostration before a makeshift shrine to a false god. It seemed too outrageous. What could contradict America’s commitment to religious freedom more than coerced apostasy?

But there it was in the recent Senate report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Listed among the many techniques designed to increase a detainee’s stress level during interrogation was “forcing him to pray to an idol shrine.” Other forms of religious abuse were also acknowledged by the report: the prevention of prayer, grotesque methods of sexual harassment, and the forced shaving of the beard and head, which was intended not only to violate Islamic norms but also to emasculate the detainees, one of whom was even made to wear a burqa.

Until recently, we could only speculate about the origins of such techniques. But the widely held suspicion that many interrogation methods at Guantánamo had been reverse-engineered from the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) military training program has now been confirmed. Those who instructed Guantánamo’s interrogators used training slides that recommended “religious disgrace” as a method to “defeat resistance.” Elsewhere the Senate report refers to the religious beliefs and practices of the detainees as “taboos” and “superstitions,” language that suggests an attitude of contempt for Islam.

Acts of religious humiliation remain legal at Guantánamo. In Rasul v. Rumsfeld, four British nationals brought a civil suit against ten U.S. government officials. The four claimed they had been illegally detained and mistreated at Guantánamo. Their case was based in part on allegations of religious abuse, which were upheld in the District Court. In January 2008, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided against them. The Supreme Court later ordered the case to be reviewed by the Court of Appeals, which again ruled against the plaintiffs in April 2009. But the issue of religion at Guantánamo had gained another airing. The Appeals Court’s majority opinion again insisted that the plaintiffs were not among the persons protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which their lawyers had cited in their case. But the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 also prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” and who would pretend that religious abuse does not fall into this category? Judge Janice Rogers Brown, in a concurring opinion based on different reasoning, encouraged Congress to revise RFRA for a new era, in which “prolonged military detentions of alleged enemy combatants” are now “part of our consciousness.” If Congress had considered a Guantánamo-like situation when the law was being drafted, she argued, “it likely would have prohibited, subject to appropriate exceptions, unnecessarily degrading acts of religious humiliation.”

One word was surprisingly hard to find in the Senate report: Qur’an. Why? After all, desecration of the Qur’an is by far the most widely alleged form of religious abuse among former detainees. But in the report the Qur’an is mentioned only as a “comfort item” that may be removed from a detainee’s cell to weaken his resolve. Apparently, we are to believe that several carefully planned violations of the tenets of Islam were encouraged at Guantánamo, but that desecration of the Qur’an-the ubiquitous symbol of Islam in every cell-was not allowed.

But then, it’s hard to tell, since many portions of the report are blacked out, including lines in sections about religious abuse. Maybe references to the desecration of the Qur’an were judged too incendiary for the general public. The government knows that if such desecration were officially acknowledged, this would be the lead story in newspapers all over the Muslim world. The harm that would come from such a disclosure might outweigh the good of transparency.

Consider the case of Muntathar Al-Zaydi, the Iraqi journalist now famous as the “shoe thrower.” What was it that stoked his rage? When the London Times asked his family why he turned against the United States, his brother mentioned a May 2008 incident: a Marine in Fallujah had used the Qur’an for target practice. It was an iconic event that tarnished the image of the U.S. military in the region and threatened the security of Baghdad. “He talked incessantly about the subject,” said Al-Zaydi’s brother.

Nothing threatens America’s national security more than the perception that we are at war with Islam. We are not. But to change that false perception we must first change a disgraceful policy.

from Commonweal

New Translation of Qur’an

Penguin Classics have just published a new translation of the Qur’an by the scholar Tarif Khalidi. The Times Literary Supplement hailed it as ‘A landmark in the history of English translations of the Quran’.

Tarif Khalidi is Sir Thomas Adam’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University (the oldest chair of Arabic in the English-speaking world), and also Director of the Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the same university.

In his Introduction he says the following about the history of the Qur’anic text. I have put some significant statements in bold.

‘So far as one can determine its general contours, early Muslim scholarship on the Qur’an emanated from circles close to the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632) and involved, in its beginnings, the collection and preservation of revelation. For the first twenty or so years of its existence, copies of the Qur’an, in whole or in part, were in possession of venerable collectors dispersed by the Muslim conquests in the diverse regions of the new empire. Because of this dispersal and subsequent political and ideological alignments we possess several contrasting, sometimes conflicting, accounts of the Qur’an’s earliest history. Eventually a dominant narrative emerged which held that a committee appointed by the third caliph ‘Uthman (r. 644-56) assembled one definitive copy of the text, disseminated it in the major urban centres of the new empire and ordered all other copies destroyed.

This master narrative holds that the caliph’s edict caused a great deal of distress to possessors of private or family copies of the pre-’Uthmanic text was indeed one of the causes of the rebellion which ended in the caliph’s murder in 656. Nevertheless, Muslim scholarship has preserved examples, in the form of lists, of the variant readings of these early texts. In almost all cases, however, such readings concern very minor variations in grammar or dialect and add nothing of substance to the ‘Uthmanic text, the one that is in our hands today. This narrative has not gone unchallenged in both Muslim and non-Muslim circles, but it has withstood the test of time and of recent and dramatic epigraphic and textual discoveries. The result is that Islam has possessed a definitive sacred text from a very early point in its history. There are simply no ‘apocrypha’ where the Qur’an is concerned. We can therefore be confident that what we possess today is in all essential respects the Qur’an that Muslim narrative tells us was circulated by caliphal fiat somewhere around the year 650. Numerous historical problems remain, but these need not concern a reader who wishes to encounter the text directly, with minimal contextual demands.’

(ppxii-xiii)

A Beautiful House

Abu Hurayrah said that the Messenger of God said, “The relationship between me and the prophets who came before me is as the analogy of a man who built a beautiful house, but in which the space of one brick was left incomplete. The onlookers go around it, admiring the beauty of its construction, with the exception of the place of that brick. Now I have filled up the place of that brick: in me the building is completed, and in me the messengers are completed.” (Bukhari & Muslim)

Abu Hurayrah said that the Messenger of God said, “You will not enter Paradise until you attain to faith, and you will not attain to faith until you love one another. Shall I tell you of a thing to do that will make you love one another? Spread peace among yourselves.” (Muslim)

Mind the Gap! Some recent reflections on Christology

I have just received through the post (thank you Amazon!) a book I’ve been trying to get my hands on for ages: Christology and the New Testament: Jesus and his Earliest Followers by Christopher Tuckett. In case you didn’t know, Tuckett is Professor of New Testament Studies in the University of Oxford and author of several books including Reading the New Testament: Methods of Interpretation, Luke and Q and the History of Early Christianity.

I went straight to the final chapter entitled ‘Jesus’ Self-Understanding’ (pp 202-226). I was eager to find out how he assessed the evidence. Here are some of his conclusions (italics in the original):

Son of God

Did Jesus think of himself as in any sense Son of God? For many this is perhaps the most important question of all to ask about Jesus’ self-understanding, showing some clear continuity between Jesus and later Christian claims. We should be alert to the possibility – even probability – that, even if Jesus did think of himself as in some sense a/the son/Son of God, this may not have meant anything remotely similar to what later Christians meant in using that phrase of Jesus.

Sonship seems here to imply a relationship of trust and confidence, reflected too in some of the Q sayings about God as the ‘father’ of the disciples. It probably does not indicate any idea of ontological being, at least at the level of Jesus. Language of divine sonship, as we have seen was thoroughly at home in a Jewish context, indicating perhaps a special relationship to God characterised by obedience and trust on the side of the human being, and by special choice or favour on the side of God. Jesus’ God-talk seems to fit perfectly well into this mould. But it does not suggest that the one referred to as the ’son’ of God is in any sense a ‘divine’ being.

Jesus very probably saw himself as a son of God. As such he claimed a special personal relationship with God and a closeness to God. As such too he claimed the right to enable others to share in that relationship. But the latter should warn us against seeing Jesus’ sonship as ‘unique’ in the sense that later Christians claimed Jesus’ divine sonship as unique and qualitatively different from that of other human beings. If anything Jesus’ own ideas of his divine sonship work in precisely the opposite direction: to unite others to enable them to share in the relationship to God which he claimed to enjoy himself.

We have looked at a number of facets of the Jesus tradition to try to recover something of Jesus’ own self-understanding. One must say that, at the end of the discussion, the conclusions may be more than a little imprecise. So much of Jesus’ ministry is not directly concerned with his own person: it is focused on God and on the needs of other people. We thus have to deduce possible facets of Jesus’ self understanding from what is implied quite as much as from what is said explicitly. That there is an ‘implicit Christology’, in the sense of a ’special position/role’ occupied by Jesus and implied in his actions, seems undeniable. Trying to gain greater precision is much harder. In some sense Jesus seems to have regarded himself as a prophet with a mission that would arouse hostility and violence against himself. He was willing to accept that violence, convinced that he would be ultimately vindicated by God, and may have used the imagery of the vision of Daniel 7 to express this (albeit perhaps a little cryptically). He may have had some idea of ‘messiahship’ as not totally against his own beliefs about his role, though it would seem that many aspects often associated with messiahship were probably not part of a programme which he would accept as his own. In all this he claimed a close personal relationship with God, expressed through an idea of sonship, but which others would share with him.

All this probably distances Jesus’ own self-understanding by some way from later claims about Jesus to be the unique Son of God, meaning by that a fully divine member of an eternal Trinity. There may be also something of a gap between Jesus’ self-understanding and the views of his earlier followers (who may not quite have reached the stage of Chalcedonian orthodoxy immediately!). Does such a gap matter? It is that question which we address very briefly in the Postscript.

To Christians: Why Attack the Prophet of Islam, Have you read the Bible?

When a ’scholar’ begins to look a little silly…

On Mon 31/08/09 I sent the following email to ‘Servetus the Evangelical’ the author of The Restitution of Jesus Christ (see my post below)

Hi there

I agree with your general position on Christology and therefore welcome your contribution to the ongoing debate about the historical Jesus.

I have a question:

You say, ‘When the contest ends, I will e-mail all visitors who guessed me correctly, telling them they won….I plan to reveal my identity on September 29, 2011′

If we correctly guess your identity before the deadline why won’t you own up and reveal yourself? It is certainly possible that many people could correctly guess your identify and its seems somewhat artificial to keep up your anonymity in the meantime for up to 3 years: ‘The contest will end in three years…’

A final thought: I do hope you are reasonably well known in the evangelical world or there will be folk who will feel they have been taken for a ride…

best wishes

Paul

I received the following reply:

Servetus the Evangelical does not comment on questions about his identity.

Servetus the Evangelical
Author of The Restitution of Jesus Christ

This odd and somewhat defensive reply and the ‘guess my identity’ game make him look ridiculous…