2nd Sunday of Epiphany: Responding to Paris
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins today. Given the events
of the last ten days in France, I think that this week would benefit most
from being a ‘week of prayer for interfaith sensitivity and intercultural
understanding for Christians’ – thus it would be a week not so much of
looking across at each other but looking outwards, together, onto the
complex world of how faith and ‘the faiths’ can be part of the solution in
the world as opposed to being part of the problem. And I am thinking, in
particular, of how we can respond positively (as people of Christian
faith) to the horrifying episodes of killing that took place in Paris ten
days ago: because whilst the religious elements of what happened need
careful and thoughtful unpicking, and there is a case for playing down
the religious dimensions, nonetheless, manifestly, religion was in the
mix – one atrocity was said to be being carried out to avenge the
prophet, the other was targeted directly at Jews and ‘Western values’,
which are so often associated with Christianity, were being attacked –
therefore, how those of us in religious communities construct the
situation or understand what took place, and how we choose to respond
to it, seem to me to matter quite a lot.
A great deal has been said and done since Wednesday the 7th:
denunciations, statements, TV discussions, newspaper articles,
interviews, the international gathering of solidarity of three million people
in Paris, and acts of solidarity elsewhere. And we should not forget also
that there are people in deep grief, others in shock and others in fear.
And there are many questions that emerge. And I want to touch on just
one of these. In a piece in the Church Times on Friday, one of the tutors
at Queens and a local priest in Sparkhill, Richard Sudworth, raised the
question of how people have reacted to Paris apropos the role played
by religion. On the one hand he identifies those who despair of the
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religions and their adherents, branding us all and ‘faith’ itself, as so
much part of the problem. It would be much better to keep faith out of
the public sphere altogether, they say. And we can see their point. The
religions stick like glue to the conflicts of the world. Ironically this may
well be a view that many at Charlie Hebdo might subscribe to. I don’t
pretend to understand fully the French take on secularism, but it is much
more militant than in the UK.... On the other hand, as regards the role of
religion, there are those across the faiths who say that what took place
in Paris, which has had so many parallels elsewhere, has nothing to do
with faith. Don’t look at Northern Ireland and see Christianity, they say,
or look at the Peshawar Army School and see Islam. And of course they
are right. In the many sad instances where the politics of marginalisation
or inequality has fomented violent extremism, and where a religious
identification has been either used or placed upon people, then ‘no’ it
cannot be said that what has been carried out has its roots in the faith
with which it is being associated.
This raises the matter, of course, of the way in which Muslims have
chosen to distance themselves very publically from the actions of the
cult extremists in Paris. For example, a delegation of Muslim leaders
went to the offices of Charlie Hebdo the day after the shootings and
described the gunmen openly as “criminals, barbarians and satans”,
and significantly, “not Muslims”. Here in the UK we know of the letter
sent by Muslim leaders appealing for calm over the publication of the
English version of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo. Here in
Birmingham, a leader of a mosque in Small Heath spoke for millions ten
days ago when he said that he was sick of his faith being manipulated
and tarnished by people spuriously claiming an Islamic identity... So one
of the salient lessons coming out of the narrative of extremist violence is
that each faith or community, as it looks out upon other faiths and their
exponents, has to learn to separate out the trustworthy, honest and
eirenic expressions of faith, over against those where faith has been
hijacked for one reason or another, and in this case in order for dirty
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battles to be fought under a religious umbrella. In an article last
weekend in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland wrote that the “challenge
is to frustrate the killers’ desire to fuse themselves with Islam”, and that
“non-Muslims need to take great care that nothing they do treats the
Muslim majority and the jihadist cult as one group.”
One thing that demonstrates the fragility of this issue, however, and
illustrates how vulnerable many Muslims feel in the wake of what has
happened, is the fact that there has been an amount of ‘finger-wagging’,
as Freedland calls it, to say that Muslims should be seen much more to
come out and condemn what’s gone on – behind which is the tacit
assumption that people are being held to support what’s been done
unless there is express denial. This is at best distasteful and at worst
sows a gnawing mistrust. It also indicates a failure to have separated
out the cult jihadists from the rest. And it is little wonder that ordinary
Muslims, who abhor what has happened just as much as the rest of us,
are nervous. Interestingly, the question of the burden on different
groups to take up a position has been articulated differently by different
people. Whereas, for example, Freedland as a non-Muslim is saying
that non-Muslims should be giving attention not to what Muslims should
say, but rather to what we should say or do, so the Muslim commentator
Tariq Ramadan wrote in another article in the Guardian, that from his
perspective, as a Muslim scholar and theologian, he felt it was very
important for him to be coming out and making it very clear that the
attackers should not be allowed to claim an Islamic rationale, especially
theologically, and so taint the faith they claim to act for. “They are
criminals exploiting Islam”, he wrote, and was very keen to lay down
strong boundaries defining what is truly and reliably Islamic.
As he infers, from a Muslim perspective, the matter of the defining of
Islam is a very big one indeed. Another contributor to the Church Times
this week, Alastair Macdonald Radcliffe who is Director general of the
World Dialogue Network, wrote about a very important international
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gathering of Muslim scholars that took place in Amman in Jordan in
2005. At this meeting, all eight schools of Islamic Jurisprudence were
represented, and a joint statement was produced called the ‘Amman
Message’ defining such key issues as ‘who is a Muslim’ and ‘how
religious rulings i.e. fatwahs are agreed upon’. And he notes just how
important this kind of work is for the worldwide Muslim community,
especially when the extremists are setting out not only to set Muslims
against westerners, but also to divide Muslims from each other and
define Islam in their own distorted terms. The articulation of what is the
‘true faith’ is a very pressing issue.
Going back to where we began and the role of religion, it is little
surprise, then, that the opposition Richard Sudworth refers to of ‘religion
is lethal’ (so leave it out) versus religion is not the issue (no religion
thinks or acts like this) he deems unsatisfactory. In his opinion, and I
think he’s absolutely right, religion can neither be left out of the story,
nor can it be wholly exonerated. Rather, the real issue, he says, is about
good religion over bad religion. And one task we have, therefore, is to
work hard on achieving real insight, each for themselves, as to what in
our narratives and practices constitutes bad religion – bad for us and
bad for others. And in his closing remarks Richard reminds his Christian
audience that it was we in Europe who brought on and perpetrated the
horrors of the Shoah, the Holocaust, because it was we who allowed
Anti-Semitism to foment and we who refused to let go of the notion of
the Jews being guilty of deicide and who could therefore be justifiably
punished – and so the unthinkable was able to proceed....
notwithstanding the fact that few Christians would want to say that their
faith had anything to do with the Holocaust – and that’s the point...
It is salutary, then, to take stock that the second atrocity was indeed an
attack on Jews. And Freedland’s article points out that the extremist
jihadists appear, in his own words, to have “anointed the Jews as the
ultimate symbol of the west”, thus creating a hateful rationale for making
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them a target for their cynical vengeance. His article is subtitled, ‘First
they came for the cartoonists, then they came for the Jews’. And he
demonstrates just how important it is for the religions to root out their old
enmities and distorted perspectives.
At best it may be possible, that through this very painful incident in
Paris, a slightly more secure understanding is being reached across the
faiths, especially across the Christian-Muslim axis, that recognises who
is standing on which side of the line – the line being the divide between
honest, legitimate faith and the non-faith, crazed ideology of the
extremists. This has to be a good outcome if it is true.... Casual
conversations may reveal that this is too bold a statement, but as
religious people inhabiting a multi-religious world, we are, I do believe,
called upon to do what work is necessary to forge peace between the
religions. In this week of prayer for Christian Unity it would be possible
for us to seek safety in numbers as a route to shoring up ‘fortress
Christianity’, and to disregard the rest. This would be a great shame. In
fact in our setting of Birmingham this option just isn’t open to us: not if
we want to be one city. The alternative is that we can allow our solidarity
this week as Christians to equip us to pursue the vulnerable path of
peace-making and increased understanding. Amen.
Reverend Julian Francis
January 18th 2015
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