They’ve Got No Game

by Dexter Van Zile (January 2013)

In these countries, churches have been bombed and set on fire, homes ransacked, children terrorized. Men are dragged through the streets and killed. Women are abducted, raped and forcibly converted to Islam. This violence is perpetrated by people who claim to be acting on behalf of a loving, compassionate, merciful and just god.

recent events in Egypt, the largest Arab country in the world and home to the intellectual center of Sunni Islam, Al Azhar University in Cairo, things are likely to get worse, not better in the coming years.

Whether the pursuit of this supremacy is an essential aspect of the Muslim faith is an open question, but many Muslims think it is. So do their victims.

The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular</a>; and others are trying to galvanize other reform-minded Muslims, but they have a long way to go. Many of these would be reformers, such as Irshad Manji, live in the West and risk their lives when they offer their message of modernity to audiences in Muslim-majority countries.

The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press, Paul Berman writes, “Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class” and that the “Muslim free thinking” wing of the European intelligentsia has survived “only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions.” He adds, “Fear—mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology—has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.”

Another troubling reality is that Christian intellectuals, theologians and leaders in the Middle East, Europe and North America have done very little to confront Muslim hostility toward non-Muslims in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Aside from promoting the value of martyrdom and touting the importance of the Christian presence in the Middle East, they simply have no game on either a theological, intellectual or practical level.

No game at all.

Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Fortress Press, 1984) that deals with the impact the Hebrew Scriptures on the status of women. The Koran and the Hadiths are chock full of passages that legitimize the mistreatment of women and non-Muslims. There are many passages that promote the notion of male supremacy and contempt for women.

The teaching of contempt: Christian roots of anti-Semitism.

And they have not applied the principles of liberation theology to the plight of Christians living under Muslim rule as they have to the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the status of African Americans in the United States.

A similar failure has been evident on a practical level as well. Christian leaders simply do not know how to respond to the departure of dictators who historically kept Christians relatively safe from their Islamist persecutors in places like Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

“We don’t have solutions. We don’t know what to do,” said Rev. Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Custos or Roman Catholic official in charge of the Church’s property in the Holy Land.

Ecumenical Theological Research Fraternity in Israel that took place in Israel in November.

During his talk, Pizzabella said that the one clear message the Church is giving to Christians in the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring is that the church prefers that they stay. Immigration, he admits is an option for many Christians, but outright opposition to the Islamists is not.

Nevertheless, the goal for the Christians who do stay in the region should not merely be protection, but dignity, Pizzabella said.

Slow motion martyrdom, in other words.

The conclusion is inescapable: Christians who live in Muslim-majority countries in Middle East lack the power and influence necessary to advocate effectively for their safety and well-being. Effective advocacy on the behalf of religious and ethnic minorities in Muslim-majority countries throughout the world has to come from outside these countries. Christians in the West must speak up on their behalf.

And as they obsess over the sins and of the societies to which they belong, they sinfully abandon Christians contending with Islamist violence throughout the world. If it was wrong for Christians to have done the things they did too non-Christians, it is wrong for Muslims to do what they are doing to non-Muslims.

In order to be effective advocates for Christians and other minorities enduring oppression in the Middle East and elsewhere, they need to get over themselves, their historical guilt and come to grips with the theological roots of Islamist violence and hostility toward non-Muslims, just as they have struggled to come to grips with the theological roots of Christian antisemitism.

Miroslav Volf, have done, maybe it’s time to highlight them.

This is a hugely frightening and risky subject to address, but it is one of the most important theological issues Christians face in the 21^st Century. Jesus Christ and Mohammed offered up two fundamentally different responses to the human condition.

The Holocaust presented a crisis to the Christian faith, demanding its adherents to ask with shame and guilt what type of god they had been worshipping all along. Did Christians worship the one true God or a god that hated Jews and sanctioned their destruction?

When Islamists engage in acts of violence against non-Muslims, they make a straightforward and reasonable claim that they are following an example set for them by Mohammed. Consequently, non-Muslims (and Muslims) need to ask Islamists exactly what type of god they worship. Given what is happening to Christians under Muslim rule throughout the world, it is time to ask if it is logical for Islamists to oppress non-Muslims in the name of the compassionate and merciful god they claim to worship. Do they worship God who is compassionate and merciful, or do they worship a god who hates non-Muslims and sanctions their destruction?

Christians are not the only people who will benefit from this discussion. Muslims will benefit also, for they too are suffering under the lash of Islamism. Just ask the women, if you care to listen.

Secondly, it is time for Christian seminaries in the West to start teaching their students about the lived reality experienced by non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries throughout the world. It is also time for Christian seminaries to teach their students about the connection between Islamic doctrine regarding non-Muslim and the lives of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. Christian seminaries have laudably educated future clergy about the connection between Christian theology regarding the Jews and the Holocaust. It is time to have a similar discussion for the benefit of our fellow Christians living under Muslim rule. This discussion should take place at church assemblies as well.

On a practical level, Christians in the West need to start holding leaders in Muslim-majority countries to account for the mistreatment of religious and ethnic minorities in their midst, just as Western intellectuals held the Soviet Union to account its human rights abuses in Eastern Europe with the founding of the Helsinki Watch Group.

The secular human rights community, as it is currently comprised, has failed miserably on this score. Instead of addressing the catastrophic impact Islamism has had on human dignity wherever it has gained a foothold, the human rights community has promoted a pornographic obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is fueled by the same notions of Muslim supremacy that have destroyed the lives of non-Muslims (and women) throughout the world.

The leaders of countries where religious and ethnic minorities are oppressed need to be shamed and held to account just as the Soviets were in the 1970s and 80s. Shaming the leaders of these countries will help bring an end to the slow-motion martyrdom endured by Christians in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia.

Lastly, we need to abandon any notion that Muslims are the underdog on the world stage. It is the Christians and other non-Muslims suffering under the lash of Islamist oppression who are the underdogs that need our advocacy.

Dexter Van Zile is Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). His opinions are his own.

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