c. 1999 Religion News Service
ST. PAUL, Minn. _ Muslim extremists and Islam’s treatment of women. No matter how hard Georgetown University professor Yvonne Y. Haddad tries to humanize American Muslims, her non-Muslim audiences seem fixated on those two issues.
Following a recent talk at the modernistic Chapel of the Incarnation on the campus of Luther Seminary here, the first question faced by Haddad raised those very issues. It was asked in a self-assured voice that left little doubt of the speaker’s belief that Islam came up short on both accounts.”That’s how most Americans think when it comes to Muslims,”said Haddad, a Syrian-born Christian and leading academic expert on American Muslims.”It’s all about stereotypes. That’s all they have to go on.” As the American Muslim community continues to grow at a steady clip _ current estimates generally range between 3 million and 6 million _ the nation’s Christian churches have belatedly recognized the need to go beyond stereotypes and provide their members with a fuller understanding of Islam and the lives of ordinary Muslims.
Some churches are acting out of a pluralistic impulse to reach out to Muslims as important newcomers to the nation’s changing religious scene. The hope is that better understanding will lead to better relations and avoidance of the sort of cultural clashes that have accompanied the convergence of Islam and Christianity elsewhere in the world.
For others, the desire is to develop more effective strategies for evangelizing Muslims, who demographers say may soon replace Jews as America’s largest non-Christian religious community.”We want to evangelize. No bones about it,”said R. Phillip Roberts, a Southern Baptist North American Mission Board official whose denomination is stepping up its production of materials explaining Islam to its 15.7-million members.
By and large, however, churches in both categories have been slow to take up the Muslim challenge.
The Rev. Burt Breiner, interfaith relations co-director for the National Council of Churches, said a lack of resources and expertise have in part been responsible for the slow reaction to a community whose rapid growth has been no secret for the better part of two decades.”The need came at a bad time,”said Breiner, whose organization includes 35 major American Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican denominations.”Many of the mainline groups have been losing members, which has forced tighter budgets. There’s just been nothing left to fund a new program.” An equal _ if not greater _ stumbling block has been what Breiner termed”the tension among Christians and between churches over dialogue vs. evangelization.””Some are concerned that dialogue sells short the gospel,”he said.”The concern is, should we be preaching the gospel rather than learning about Islam?” Ironically, said Charles Amjad-Ali, a Pakistani Muslim convert to Roman Catholicism and Luther Seminary professor, conservative churches that favor evangelization over dialogue are often better equipped to understand Muslims because they share similar approaches toward religious faith.”Just like Islam, the conservative churches take a literalist approach to their scripture. The problem is both have no ability to see God outside of their own reality, preventing genuine understanding,”Amjad-Ali said.
What interaction has taken place between American Muslims and Christians has largely involved dialogue between more liberal national leaders from both faiths. Isolated local dialogues have also sprouted.
Los Angeles has long been a leader in local dialogue. Yet Salam Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council there, said”nothing is happening on a consistent basis with individual churches. It’s just here or there. It’s insufficient and neglected.” Nationally, many of the most influential denominations that espouse dialogue have done little more than issue a few brochures about Islam for their members and lend support to NCC leadership talks. In some cases, efforts to understand Islam have meant more contact with foreign than American Muslims.”Even a brochure is more than most churches are doing,”said Jane Smith, a United Church of Christ representative to the NCC interfaith commission and a professor at Connecticut’s Hartford Seminary, which has pioneered Muslim-Christian dialogue.
In an attempt to broaden its efforts, the U.S. Roman Catholic Church for the first time last year included Islam in its triennial summer institute for diocesan interreligious relations officers.
The church also has organized East Coast and Midwest regional Catholic-Muslim dialogue groups for married couples who discuss family issues with an eye toward identifying common concerns. A West Coast group is also in the works.”The goal is to produce contacts that are productive and can produce materials for use in both communities,”said John Borelli, interreligious relations director for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.”But it’s a slow process.” A handful of Christian colleges and seminaries around the nation also have instituted programs to give students greater exposure to Islam.
One such school is Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., a nondenominational evangelical institution that includes Islam in elective courses on world religions and offers students a chance to observe Friday prayer services at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles.
George Alexander, a Biola professor who directs the Islamic studies, said his approach is”building friendships that will lead to interfaith dialogue.”At the same time, he said the”ultimate aim”of the Biola students involved in the effort is generally to be missionaries to Muslim nations or the American Muslim community.
St. Paul’s Luther Seminary, which is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, offers one of the nation’s few church-related master’s level Islamic studies programs. Recently, some 50 students, Lutherans and non-Lutherans, gathered at the seminary for a five-day introductory conference on Islam.
The conference was organized by the school’s 5-year-old Islamic Studies Program. Haddad, co-editor of”Muslims on the Americanization Path?”(Scholars Press), was the featured presenter.
Both Christian academics and Twin Cities Muslim leaders addressed the students, who ranged from undergraduate comparative religion majors to second-career seminarians studying to become pastors. Others on hand were missionaries sent by several Christian schools and denominations prior to their working in Muslim nations or among American Muslims.
Some students said their concern was understanding Muslims. Others said their desire was to convert them to Christianity. Michelle Morocco, a student at Lutheran-affiliated Thiel College in Greenville, Pa., was sent by her school and denomination, the small evangelical-Pentecostal Christian Church of North America (General Council), so she could later share with them what she learned about Islam. “We used to be able to say that Islam was far away and didn’t concern us directly,”program director Mark N. Swanson said.”This conference is a recognition that the situation has changed. Islam has been the capital `O’ other, something strange and even threatening in the popular media.”Now it’s the neighbor down the street, or even a member of the family. The churches have a great need to educate their people to this. There’s a lot of catching up to do.” The nation’s historically black churches have been particularly slow in reacting to the growth of Islam, despite the faith’s fastest growth in the United States coming among African-Americans. According to estimates, a third or more of all American Muslims are African-American converts to the faith _ many coming from the historically black churches.
Imam E. Abdulmalik Muhammad, national spokesman for the Muslim American Society, the nation’s largest African-American Muslim group, said the only time he is invited to black churches is to discuss social problems impacting the larger black community.”White churches are more open to dialogue with Muslims than are black churches,”he said.”The black churches are still afraid of us.” Marsha Snulligan-Haney, a professor at Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of six historically black church seminaries, agreed.”This is an issue the African-American churches has not wanted to face. It means facing up to their own failures and has the potential to be very divisive,”said Snulligan-Haney, who is part of an NCC attempt to organize a black church-Muslim dialogue tentatively set for early next year.
For their part, Muslims are often suspicious of Christian efforts to dialogue, fearing it’s a mask for evangelization.”That’s part of the legacy of Western colonialization that Muslims carry with them,”said Haddad.”Besides, sometimes that’s what is it. For a lot of people, dialogue is a way to undermine the other.” One way to lessen that concern among Muslims, said Al-Marayati, is to begin by talking about shared concerns.”You can always get a book to learn about basic Islam. Talking about shared concerns, about life as it is on a daily basis, makes people real to each other,”he said.
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