April 12, 2006]

Christians, Muslims on alarming path

(Dallas Morning News, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) LONDON _ In the past three months, Muslims around the world have rampaged against cartoons in a Danish newspaper deemed to be mocking Islam, and an Afghan faced the death sentence for converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, two popular Christian preachers in the U.S. stoked the flames by labeling Islam as an evil or violent religion.

The list of provocations from both sides appears to have grown by the day since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, and fears are mounting that the world's Christians and Muslims could be heading toward an irreparable split.

Religious leaders on both sides acknowledge that the trend toward extremism is worrying but insist that a clash of civilizations is neither imminent nor inevitable. They do warn, however, that those advocating moderation and dialogue need to raise the volume internationally or risk being drowned out by the fanatics.

"Somebody has to start the process. Somebody has to take the lead," said Sheik

Ibrahim Mogra, a leading member of the British Council of Muslims, who meets regularly with Christian leaders, including the archbishop of Canterbury, in an effort to keep the two communities communicating.

It's time to "turn up the volume," he said. "The silent majority has been quiet for far too long."

British Muslims and Christians initiated efforts to improve communication well before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but religious leaders said the task gained a new sense of urgency after the bomb attacks last summer on London's transportation network by a group of Muslim extremists.

At a local level, communication remains strong and cordial between Christians and Muslims, the sheik said, but such a dialogue is severely lacking at the international level, where it is most needed.

Not everyone is optimistic about the prospects.

"I'm not trying to be inflammatory against the Muslim people at all. I just sense that there is such a diverse difference of theological understanding and difference between their beliefs and our beliefs," said Ed Ethridge, director of missions of the conservative North Texas Baptist Association.

"There probably will always be those on each end of the spectrum, where you have your radical fundamentalism, that will create a continued rift between the two sides," he said.

Polls suggest a trend toward isolationism and away from dialogue. A survey last summer by the Washington-based Pew Research Center found that majorities across Christian-dominated Europe, Russia and North America believe Muslims in their countries do not want to assimilate.

The poll also confirmed that people in countries dominated by one of the religions tend to view the other faith unfavorably. Both sides perceive each other as being prone to violence.

John Voll, associate director of the Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding at Georgetown University, said the rapid expansion of television and the Internet have sharply affected Muslim-Christian relations and increased the potential for misunderstandings.

"What we have is the ability of people in, say, rural Afghanistan to know about the publication of cartoons about the prophet Muhammad in a minor publication in a small country in northwestern Europe," Voll said. A few decades ago, the Danish cartoon incident probably would have passed unnoticed.

"People have not quite gotten used to the full implications of that kind of immediacy," he said. But for extremists, it has become a vital tool for provocation. "It means that anybody who hates people of another distinctive religion is going to be able to find a vast inventory of all those reasons why they hate those other people."

While Arabic satellite networks have outraged Christians by repeatedly airing diatribes by Muslim extremists who advocate holy war against the West, Christian broadcasters have rankled Muslims with harsh characterizations of Islam.

Last month, evangelist Pat Robertson criticized Muslims rampaging over the cartoon, saying, "It just shows the kind of people we're dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it's motivated by demonic power. It's satanic, and it's time we recognize what we're dealing with."

He added that "the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is world domination."

Another evangelist, Franklin Graham, said during a U.S. television interview last month that his views of Islam have not changed after having described it as "a very evil and wicked religion."

Shortly afterward, news broke about a capital-punishment trial in Afghanistan of a Muslim who converted to Christianity. Under heavy pressure from Western governments, an Afghan judge eventually dismissed the case after declaring the defendant mentally unfit to stand trial.

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Christians in the Dallas area, as elsewhere in the United States, reacted with outrage.

"I was disappointed," said Ethridge of the North Texas Baptist Association. The trial "expresses a judicial, judgmental, hostile attitude toward Christianity" that ran contrary to the democratic values Afghanistan claimed to have adopted, he said.

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Each side has launched Web sites attacking the behavior of the other. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, regularly publishes complaints about religious discrimination against Muslims but also denounces religiously motivated terrorism.

That has spawned a Web site called Anti-CAIR, which asserts that CAIR has close links to groups on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations. The accusations have prompted lawsuits and countersuits.

Other Web sites run by devout Christian organizations take an even harsher stand toward Islam, while a wide range of Arabic sites urge Muslims to join the war against Christians as well as Jews.

"The fundamentalists on both sides of the religious divide . . . view each other with a good deal of hostility," said Gillian Collins, secretary of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of Great Britain, which is affiliated with the American, British and Canadian peace activists who were kidnapped in November in Iraq. The American was killed, but the British and Canadians were released last week after 117 days in captivity.

"We have our own explicit beliefs, but that's not quite the same thing as branding someone else's faith as evil," she said. "Sometimes it's easier to be an extremist if you don't want to take the time to think."

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Ethridge said extremism is not the only factor contributing to the growing gap. "Their goal is to convert any people they meet to Muhammad and the Muslim religion. That's their whole modus operandi, just like for us as Christians," he said.

"They believe that they're right, and we believe that we're right," he added. "I don't `believe' I'm right _ I already know I am. And that's what makes the big gap between us."

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