Christian‐Muslim relations in the African context

Abstract

The course of Islam and Christianity in Africa as well as statistical figures suggest a wide variety within, as well as considerable divergence between, both religions in the many African contexts. Though the majority of African Muslims still stick to a ‘traditional African Islam’, we observe a resurgence of Islam reflecting a growing religious awareness, on the one hand, and tendencies towards an ideological re‐interpretation (Islamism), on the other. Trends in resurgent Islam are highlighted by the examples of Islamic internationalism and da'wa, the modernisation of Islamic education, and the proliferation of Islamic political groups all over the continent. Various dimensions of Christian—Muslim relations in Africa today show areas of conflict as well as of cooperation and exchange. Against the background of the economic and social disintegration of many African societies, there is no alternative to inter‐religious dialogue which must be based on an authentic African theological foundation, being rooted in the African heritage shared by Muslim and Christian communities alike.     

Islamic theology and theological engineering in the Nordic setting

The aim of this article is partly one of identifying and problematizing obstacles and realistic possibilities regarding the emergent field of Islamic theology in the context of Nordic universities, with special emphasis on Denmark. For the moment, a full-scale Danish Islamic theology programme designed for Muslims seems an almost herculean task for a variety of reasons, the most important of which will be identified and critically discussed. Currently, a small-scale programme is the most feasible option and, as such, it has recently been launched at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. The article closes with an excursus arguing that not only would Nordic Muslim communities benefit from the establishment of an Islamic theology programme at the university level, Christian university theology today would certainly also benefit if an Islamic theology study-module were to be added to the standard curriculum. In a multi-religious society, sound academic knowledge about Islam and its relationship with Christianity is indeed a desideratum for the contemporary Christian theology student.     

New religious movements in Islamic West Africa

Christianity and Islam have interacted extensively with traditional African faiths to engender innovative religious developments known as 'New Religious Movements in Africa'. Although the majority of these movements have arisen out of the interaction with Christianity, a number of them have been inspired by Islam. The article, following an established paradigm for New Religious Movements, covers 'African-Related Movements' which are neo-primal, i.e. movements where the inner dynamic and basic structure derives from traditional faith to enable them to cope with new situations and the 'Synthetist movements' which reflect a real assimilation of Islamic elements, but are less ethnocentric and more universal in outlook. The former are referred to as 'Africanized neo-Islamic Movements' whereas the latter are called 'Orthodox New Islamic Movements'. Between these two are the 'traditional movements'. Reasons for the different effects of Islam and Christianity on African tradition and a comparison of Islamic and Christian movements are also presented.     

Christian‐Muslim influence in Pondicherry,South India∗

Christian‐Muslim influence on modern Hindu and Hindu‐inspired movements and religious institutions has always been a neglected area of study. In this paper, we try to fill this gap to some extent, by concentrating our interest and study on the Hindu‐inspired Sri Aurobindo Movement of Pondicherry in the Tamil country. In the course of the paper, we show how values of Islamic and Christian‐West origins have made crucial in‐roads into modern Hindu religious thought and practice. We have brought out especially the striking resemblances between the Sri Aurobindo Movement and Islam. Values like egalitarianism, brotherhood and universalism, so alien to Hindu traditions and genius and so familiar to Islam and Christianity seem to have been successfully incorporated as core values by modem variants and interpretations of Hinduism. Though our study concentrates only on Christian‐Muslim influence on the Sri Aurobindo Movement, anybody can see that it has great relevance to many modern Hindu and Hindu‐inspired movements in India.     

MYSTICISM AS MORALITY

Sufism—spiritual practice, intellectual discipline, literary tradition, and social institution—has played an integral role in the moral formation of Muslim society. Its aspiration toward a universal kindness to all creatures beyond the requirements of Islamic law has added a distinctly hypernomian dimension to the moral vision of Islam, as evidenced in a wide range of Sufi literature. The universal perspective of Sufism, fully rooted in Islamic revelation, yields a lived (and not just studied) ethics with the potential to view and embrace all creatures through a single ethical vision, regardless of religious or other affiliation. This side of Islam, both acknowledging and surpassing the outlook of the legal heritage, offers important insight into understanding the nature of Muslim society as both Islamic and meta‐Islamic in religious orientation. Sufism, still significant in today's Islamic world, thus offers important material for locating Islam as part of an international order with principles and standards that resonate deeply with the moral vision of Islam itself.     

The Fascination of Islam

An Orientalist painting reproduced on the cover of the English translation of Rodinson's La fascination de l'Islam prompts some initial reflections about elements of distortion and projection in European perceptions of the Muslim world. The rest of the article charts the growth of the academic study of Islam and makes some suggestions as to how it might develop in the future. The second section surveys the history of Islamic Studies in Western Europe, dealing in turn with Christian scholarship, text-based Orientalism, and the contribution of the political sciences. It highlights the merits of these approaches but also explains why Muslim students find them problematic. The third section considers a traditional Muslim approach to the subject, as described by Ibn Khaldun. Because of its emphasis on the transmission of information on religious authority, this approach would be inappropriate in a modern Western university. Moreover, as a historian, Ibn Khaldun was already aware of its deficiencies. The fourth section opens by stressing that there is an urgent need to bring Western scholarship and traditional Muslim scholarship into constructive dialogue with each other. Despite the enormity of the task, it would be facilitated if Islamicists of all persuasions were prepared to learn from colleagues in Religious Studies and Theology. With this in mind, a number of suggestions are made as to how Islamic Studies stands to be enriched through contact with these two disciplines. Finally, the author states that Religious Studies and Theology also stand to benefit from the relationship. For example, he suggests that the rise of Islam raises important issues for those who are interested in the formative period of Christian doctrine.     

Isma'il Al‐Faruqi on Muslim‐Christian dialogue: An analysis from a Christian perspective

Until his death in 1986, Isma'il al‐Faruqi was an active Muslim participant in the field of Muslim‐Christian dialogue. This article begins by outlining his many contributions to this subject and continues with an analysis of these sources. Al‐Faruqi understood the development of Christianity to be a corruption of the original teaching of Jesus which was instead preserved faithfully by Islam. He believed that Christains have hindered constructive dialogue through their involvement in mission and Orientalism. His primary basis for an academic dialogue was reason, yet this actually led to an affirmation of Islam. He regarded ethics to be the more appropriate area for discussion. The assessment here finds that al‐Faruqi essentially required Christians to abandon their Christian heritage in favour of the principles of a rationalistic Islam. Nevertheless, he may be commended for his commitment to dialogue and his ultimate vision of inter‐religious unity.     

Missions without missionaries: the social dimension of church growth in Muslim Java,Indonesia

We live in a world where religion is not confined to the private sphere and where faith-based acts, from Qur'an burning to terrorist activities, affront not only believers but also non-believers. Indonesia, where moderate Islam has long enjoyed its compatibility with other religions, has recently emerged as a hot spot of Muslim–Christian violence. In order to examine the social face of faith in ‘unfavourable’ circumstances, this article analyses church growth in Muslim Java by addressing the sociological issues related to what makes a church strong. Through an empirical investigation into the Java Christian Church, the article demonstrates that a church manages to establish a firm foothold in a Muslim society by developing the porosity of the religious frontier at the organizational level.     

Major themes in the Arabic political literature of Islamic revivalism, 1970–1985: The Islamic system of government (al‐nizam al‐islami), shūra democracy and the implementation of the Sharica as opposed to secularism (cilmaniyya)

The analysis of the political literature of Islamic revivalism belongs to the pertinent issues of Muslim‐Christian dialogue. This article is an inquiry into the major themes of this literature published in Arabic. The historical context of the writings of political Islam is the failure of the secular nation‐state in the world of Islam to cope with the processes of modernization and development. The political Islamic response to this failure is the revival of the dream of reconstructing the Islamic state along the model of Medina on the eve of the rise of Islam. The analysis of the intellectual reconstruction of the early Islamic state as an expression of divine order, which ought to replace the secular state, reveals that this construction is imbued with projections of modern times into the Islamic past. Thus the alleged Islamic government of nizam islami/Islamic system as a modern issue is an outgrowth of political Islam. In this sense, the notion that Islam is a din wa‐dawla/ divine order of the state cannot be found in classical Islamic sources. Part one of this two‐part article comes to the conclusion that political Islam is a burden for modern Islam and an obstacle to the accommodation of the needs of the Muslim people to the modern age; it is not a promising future prospect in the present situation of crisis.     

Christian‐Muslim relations: Some current themes

The recent writings dealing with Christianity and Islam, written for very different audiences, point to some common current themes in Christian‐Muslim relations. Taking Bill Musk and Ziauddin Sardar as starting points, the article discusses the importance of secularism, mutual mistrust and the efficacy of religious faith to deal with contemporary problems as major concerns which must be addressed in any meaningful dialogue between Christianity and Islam today.     

Challenges and developments: Christian‐Muslim relations in the Middle East

Abstract

After surveying the Christian period in the Middle East, this article outlines the coming of Islam and the process of conversion to Islam, before summarising the situation in Christian‐Muslim relations in 1800 and the new developments that unfolded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main body of the article surveys recent (that is, post‐1950) developments, focusing on challenges such as the impact on local Christian‐Muslim relations of the creation of the state of Israel and the ‘Islamic revival’, the problems of Christian emigration, conversion and inter‐community clashes, and more positive developments such as the concern for more accurate analysis and reporting of Christian‐Muslim issues, the growth of dialogue between the communities through meetings, publications and efforts to educate future generations, and the establishment of Christian churches in regions where they have not existed for many centuries, particularly in the Gulf.     

Islam and Gender in the Thought of a Critical-Progressive Muslim Scholar-Activist: Ziba Mir-Hosseini

This article highlights the scholarly contribution of the Iranian-born Muslim scholar-activist Ziba Mir-Hosseini to the academic field of gender and Islam. In the first part, Mir-Hosseini's thought is positioned within the larger processes of the shifting loci of authority and normativity in contemporary Islamic discourses, particularly with reference to the emergence of what will here be termed critical-progressive Muslim scholar-activists. There follows a brief justification as to why a study of Mir-Hosseini's thought in relation to gender and Islam warrants examination. Mir-Hosseini's personal journey in the field of gender and Islam is then outlined and her major contributions to the field are noted. This is followed by a discussion of the support Mir-Hosseini finds for her ideas in the hermeneutical theories employed by reformist male Muslim scholars, and then an examination of her views on the relationship between Islamic feminism discourses and (neo-)traditional expressions of Islam. Mir-Hosseini's deconstruction of the assumptions governing classical Muslim family law and ethics that have been re-appropriated and legally enforced by some contemporary Muslim majority nation states is presented next, followed by a discussion of her proposals for the reform of Muslim family law and ethics. The final section discusses Mir Hosseini's activism with special reference to her involvement with Musawah, the global movement for equality in Muslim family law based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.     

Mahometans on the Edge of Colonial Empire: Antipodean Experiences

ABSTRACT

The public conceptualization of Muslim immigration and settlement in New Zealand has become synonymous with the comparatively recent influx of Asian and African migrants and refugees over the past two decades. However, a noteworthy minority of Muslim immigrants arrived during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the colonial period. This article surveys the immigration and settlement of Muslims from the 1850s to the 1950s, focusing on the biographies of the most prominent individuals, broadly tracing their arrival and participation in the Anglo-European Christian society they chose to settle in, through to the creation of the Islamic institutions in this country from the 1950s to 1980s. I will conclude with a brief overview of the significance of this pioneer period in view of more recent immigration and the proliferation of Islam in New Zealand, together with some observations upon the interactions of Muslims with a largely Christian society and what that may indicate for the understanding of relations between Muslims and Christians within New Zealand from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Although the first century of Muslim settlement has been largely overlooked, or marginalized, much can be revealed about the broader Muslim experience at this extremity of the (former) British Empire.     

Differences in Paradox between Islam and Christianity: a statistical comparison

Historically Islam has been recognized as a religion that is logical. Christianity has long been recognized as having a number of beliefs or doctrines that could be described as paradoxical. Sixty-nine religious doctrines or beliefs were evaluated for paradoxical content and in terms of whether Islam and Christianity agreed or disagreed with respect to each doctrine or belief. It was hypothesized that disagreement between the two religions would be much more common with respect to paradoxical doctrines or beliefs. Nearly 90% of doctrinal agreement or disagreement could be traced to the paradoxical or non-paradoxical content of the beliefs evaluated. The relationship between agreement and paradox was very significant statistically. Implications for future Christian–Muslim dialogue are discussed.     

INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

Abstract. I explore the contributions of Ibrahim Moosa, a Muslim legal scholar, to a Muslim‐Christian dialogue on religion and science. Moosa begins from the context of Shari'a, Islamic law, and not from the usual issues of the religion‐science dialogue. Beginning as it does from a legal tradition, the approach suggests a perspective on science and religion that is particular to Islam and provides insight into how an authentic dialogue between Muslims and Christians would proceed—and thereby an alternative model for a religion‐science dialogue.     

Syed Ameer Ali: A bridge‐builder?

This paper examines whether there is any truth in the contention that Syed Ameer Ali (to adopt the English formulation of his name that he himself used) was an effective interpreter of Islam between East and West. To that end, it examines his background and early life, his credibility as an interpreter of Islam to the British élite and as a Muslim interpreter of Christianity. It concludes that he was far more at home in Western intellectual assumptions of his day than in Islamic scholarship and was not the effective interpreter he aspired to be. This raises on‐going questions about whether there is any future for Islamic modernism or whether it is too tainted by association with imperialism and other Western phenomena.     

Toward a Christian‐Islamic Ecumenic Encounter

Abstract :  Ted Peters' framework for ecumenic engagement provides elements that will advance such an encounter with Islam. Applying several of Peters' terms to interreligious relationships, Walter Wagner looks at various meetings between Muhammad and Christians contemporary to him. He cites the contacts between Muhammad and the first Muslim communities with Christians (610–632 AD) as both negative and positive paradigms for subsequent relationships. Wagner then points to Surah 1 as the key Quranic text for understanding Islam in relationship to Christianity. Reflecting on past efforts at dialogue and predicting what will be important future issues, Wagner stresses the intense religious nature of Islamic political‐social expectations and projects three factors for future ecumenic encounters between Islam and Christianity.