Christians can learn
from fundamentalist
Muslim mistakes

In the first months after Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Muslim communities were largely locked down in shock and fear about being blamed for the terrorist attacks.

Many Muslims around the country have commented upon the support and encouragement they received from outside their Muslim communities, including statements by President Bush.

The standard version is that Islam is not the enemy, but that Islamist extremists have hijacked at least the religious rhetoric and the language of the Quran in the service of their terrorist activities. We have been treated to dueling quotes from the Quran: peace from one side, jihad and fatwa from another.

In the past year, a new phenomenon is emerging: Books, articles, Web sites and public statements are saying that a "reformation" is needed in Islam. Not only that, but Western Muslims in societies with religious freedom and free speech are acknowledging the special position they are in.

The history of interpretation of the Quran is not monolithic. It has differed from era to era and area to area. In recent centuries, along with Western colonialism and hegemony (read: oil), the interpretation has largely become more and more literal and repressive.

The Christian West has a biblical quotation for it: "The letter kills but the spirit gives life." As we in the West respond to all of this, it is seductively easy to become self-righteous. As most Muslims see their religious heritage as one of peace, so we in the Christian West see our religious heritage as founded in and on the Prince of Peace.

But the truth is that we are haunted by the same demon. Our religious conservatives have also insisted upon a literal interpretation of our sacred literature, beginning interestingly enough at about the same time. But even in more liberal, standard brand denominations, we priests and pastors have generally not shared with our congregations the biblical scholarship and exegesis that we learned in theological school.

Witness the surprising popularity (and profits) of the books from the Jesus Seminars! Our own people were hungry for solid meat and historical context, for serious biblical scholarship and solid theology grounded in something more than third-grade Sunday school lessons.

We have helped create, or contributed to, the atmosphere of literalism in interpreting both our own sacred literature and that of Islam. It is we who have tended to treat religion as a set of ideological propositions to be "believed in," rather than a quality of human and interpersonal relationships to be nurtured.

If our Bible is to be read as literally as we seem to assume that their Quran is, then we must re-examine the Book of Joshua and finally learn the lesson of the last half of the Book of Jonah. Read in proof-text fashion, our Bible can be read as the heritage of a violent and bloodthirsty God.

Do most of us read it that way? Of course not! Most of us peruse its pages for the wisdom and insight to feed healthy, sustaining community.

And so do most Muslims peruse the pages of the Quran!

We are in no position to tell Islam how to recover, or discover, post-colonial understanding of its own sacred literature. That they must do for themselves. But maybe it is time that we look at how we use, and sometimes misuse, our own biblical heritage to support our current prejudices.

Perhaps together we might inaugurate a new "Reformation" that frees us from the tyrannies our respective religious pasts and our collective conflicted present. We both have our fundamentalists who are distorting the heritage of our religious geniuses to create conflict where there might be community.