Jesuits Warn Against Demonishing Islam
After a week of discussions behind closed doors, Jesuits from around the world meeting in Rome will tomorrow elect their new leader, known as the 'Black Pope' because of the robes he wears, in contrast to the white worn by the Pope. To the regret of many, the Jesuits no longer wield the kind of power that earned them this sobriquet, but nevertheless were still warned by Cardinal Rode earlier this week to remember that they were the servants of the Church, and not the other way around. By coincidence, in London this evening, the order's British religious are launching their new online journal, which carries an interesting article calling for tolerance to be shown towards Islam by Australian Jesuit Father Dan Madigan. Read our report on the faith page.
Father Madigan, founder of the Institute for the Study of Religions at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and member of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims, is this year working as International Visiting Fellow in the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown where he is writing a book on Christianity for a Muslim readership.
In his article, reproduced on our faith page, he says there are worse things to worry about than radical Islam: 'The greatest shame of the last century was the killing of millions of Jews by Christians conditioned by their own long tradition of anti-Semitism and seduced by a virulently nationalist and racist new ideology. The last 15 years in Africa have seen millions of Christians slaughtered in horrendous civil wars by their fellow believers. A Catholic missionary is dozens of times more likely to be killed in largely Catholic Latin America than anywhere in the Muslim world. So let us not be misled into thinking either that Muslim-Christian conflict is the world’s greatest conflict, or even that war is the most serious threat to the human future.' He goes on to ask whether the effects of poverty or of our stewardship of the earth are not more serious than Islamic extremism. 'If we wish to talk of love, we will not be able to ignore the cry of the poor,' he writes.
He commends the new initiative in Christian-Muslim dialogue, the Common Word document signed by leading Islamic scholars from around the world.
Someone who might not easily agree with him is Irshad Manji, the openly-gay Muslim reformer who is a senior fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels. Irshad is coming to the UK tomorrow to promote her film, Faith without Fear.
She told me today: 'Islam began as a religion of justice but it has become corrupted into an ideology of fear. It is we Muslims who have done most of the corrupting and therefore only we Muslims can lead the effort to fix it. For those who claim that this is an unIslamic or anti-Islamic message, I remind them as a faithful Muslim that the Koran tells us to take ownership of our problems.'
She receives regular death threats, and will have security protection during her week here. She has been alarmed to note how the number of threats from western Europe now exceeds those from the Islamic world. 'This goes to show the degree to which Islamic radicalisation is being permitted, particularly in western Europe,' she said. 'We are living in an age of self-censorship where so many issues are deemed off-limits. We have to appreciate that diversity is superficial if it is only about religion and race. Muslims have the right and responsibility to ask questions about what is being done in the name of Islam worldwide.'
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