To whom shall we give Access to Our Water Holes? - Islam and international relations

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Farid Esack

This is the visualized, if somewhat dramatic, dilemma that all of us experience at some time in our lives and in the process of becoming persons. Most of us make only a weak response to the invitation of encounter with others and, because we feel uncomfortable in our world, expose our nakedness as persons.

Because we refuse to risk a full life of knowledge of the other, we die behind our fears and prejudices. Dragging slow and uncomfortable steps, we nevertheless feel that we are moving. We forget that all motion is not movement, just as I "moved" from alif to Surah Fatihah, a meaningless motion deeper into ignorance of who we and those around us really are.

Survival and the Clan

Survival and the clan are elevated to absolutes in our fear and ignorance. The commitment to the clan and the invariable corollary, demonizing of "the other," acquire a greater value than truth and our beliefs. "The Jews," however bitter the internal debate about who is in and who is out, and "The Muslims," however desperate the effort to deny each other, are labels that become far more important than Judaism and Islam. Some may, of course, argue that there is no Islam without a Muslim or Judaism without a Jew. I can understand how this may be thought of in terms of God-people relationships. I get a bit worried, though, when it inevitably results in God itself becoming a label.

I remember a rather painful encounter with this commitment to the clan at the expense of the truth at the 1986 annual Summer School of the Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations (CSIC) in Birmingham, where I was based for four years. A Muslim and a Christian speaker shared the platform for a seminar on religious minorities. The Muslim speaker dealt with the encounter of Muslims with Christianity in the United Kingdom, while the Christian spoke on Christians' experiences in Pakistan. Having lived there for about eight years, I certainly regard Pakistan as a subject with which I am familiar. The Christian speaker gave a rather gentle and somewhat diluted account of the social oppression experienced by Pakistani Christians. She failed -- or refused -- to talk about the horrendous tales of dehumanization to which Christians are subjected there.

As many of you are probably aware, interfaith dialogue is a rather fragile affair and many feel unable to utter raw truths in these fora. We still feel far more comfortable in our own faith circles, with what Riffat Hassan describes as an "inauthentic dialogue based on abbreviations."

With a few exceptions, the Muslims present took umbrage at the Christian speaker who, in the behind-the-scenes words of the Muslim speaker, "is being regularly planted at seminars like these to discredit Islam." Another Muslim participant asked the Christian speaker "if a Muslim could become the Pope since you are so keen on Christians becoming ministers and mayors in Muslim Pakistan?" At that point I rose and pointed out that the Christian speaker did not suggest that the Pope should become the Imam of Makkah, but only wanted to know why a Christian cannot become a mayor in a Pakistani city in the same way that a Muslim may become -- and, indeed, was at that time -- a mayor in a British city.