As a Christian, I hesitate to criticize other religions. Nothing human is perfect, no culture is perfect, no religion (the root and heart of culture) is perfect. And pointing to others’ flaws has the double downside that it misdirects attention both from one’s own weaknesses and from others’ strengths. But faced with this question, I cannot avoid a few comments on Islam and violence: “A journalism student in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for distributing an internet article that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. Do Islamic beliefs preclude freedom of speech? What about other faiths?”
1.....I preface these remarks with what I said in prefacing my teaching of Islam in the University of Hawaii: "This is a noble religion of high contributions to humanity and with a high potential for contributing to global peace and prosperity." I am pained to have to speak of any downside of any religion. Would that we could speak of the downside each of one's own religion and only of the upside of all the others! But we can honor truth and hope only by admonishing as well as affirming one another.
2.....Violence is a factor in all human traditions, all cultural-religious histories. I confess my own religion's shameful story of it. But the formative Christian literature has a greater suspicion of violence, and less expectation of what good it may achieve, than does the formative Islamic literature. This is largely because of a difference in the roles of our founders: Muhammad, the warrior prophet, led in killing; Jesus, the nonviolent announcer of the full-coming kingdom of God, was killed. For Christians and their societies, the cross of Jesus (the fact of his execution) erects, between the impulse to violence and acts of violence, a barrier of hesitance that is unparalleled in Islam.
3.....Less complex higher animals have cultures, but for two reasons they do not develop civilizations: both their languages and their ability to defer gratification are too primitive. Human beings mature, and create civilizations, only to the extent of their developing both their linguistic and their gratification-deferral potentials.
4.....We can develop language because of the complexity and pliancy of our speech-organism, and we can develop gratification-deferral because our brains offer the amygdala-neocortex route as alternative to the immediate passage from sensory-emotive impulse to neuromuscular action. When we impose thought and decision between our lower-animal direct movement from impulse to action, we are using this God-given alternative route. All of us earthlings will have to make more use of it as we strive toward addressing global problems globally on the basis of religion as well as the other dimensions of human life. (Violence, of course, is only one gratification needing deferral for humanization.)
5.....In the West, there’s a long and lengthening distance between crime and the death penalty. In Islam, that distance is shorter. In the West, blasphemy is no longer a crime. In Islam, blasphemy is an expansive category of capital crimes; and the fear of death (official and unofficial) as the general punishment for "blaspheming” lies like a gray incubus of fear in the Muslim world and beyond. (Apparently, the blasphemy which that young journalist was condemned to death for was not directly insulting Muhammad but suggesting a particular equal right for women in implicit alleged violation of the Qur'an.)
6.....Blasphemy in Islam is a negative-sanctional blanket over what the West calls freedom of speech, including of the press. The contrast with Christianity could not be starker. In orthodox Christianity, Jesus is God (as well as man) and nobody gets killed for blaspheming him or for departing from him into another religion. In orthodox Islam, Muhammad is not God, but everybody is in danger of death for blaspheming him or for departing from him into another religion.
7.....Osama bin Laden, soon after 9/11, said “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet [is] Muhammad.” I would like to think that this understanding of jihad is marginal in Islam, like a shoreside whirlpool in the fast-flowing Niagara River. But it turns out that he was quoting Muhammad’s farewell address, March 632 (Osama adding the last four words). Increasing numbers of Muslims are speaking out against the Islamist overreading of this to promote world-intimidating violence. Against this extremism, Muslims of ecumenical mind are increasingly reaching out to engage non-Muslim religious leaders in conversations toward a more truly human world of peace and prosperity.
8.....Between the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Islamic sharia there can be no reconciliation. For Islam, “war territory” is the whole world except where populations live under sharia. And sharia cannot survive freedom of speech and press. That is why this 20-year-old journalist has been condemned to death.
9.....Contrast these words of faith in the power of truth to win its own battles, unimpeded and unaided by the force of law and the power of the sword. They are from Jefferson’s Second Inaugural Address (1805). “...truth and reason have maintained their own ground against false opinions in league with false facts; the press...needs no...legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasoning and opinions on a full hearing of all parties....[If the press descends to] demoralizing licentiousness, [the cure is not to be sought in coercive suppression, but in] “the censorship of public opinion.” Yes, this is a doctrine of the West, emergent after long, bloody centuries. But every civilization has good gifts to give to the whole human family. This is one which we of the West are imperfectly, sometimes even bunglingly, offering to the world.
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