When There is No Common Ground
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in ReligionRichard Cohen of The Washington Post has an excellent essay on Abdul Rahman, the Afghani Christian convert who was nearly executed as punishment for converting away from Islam. Cohen says:
The murder of a person for his religious belief ought to be inconceivable. It is something we in the West stopped accepting hundreds of years ago…the right of the government to take a life on account of religion has not even been argued in the longest time. We are way beyond that.
Then, after pointing out that there was no worldwide Muslim condemnation of the planned execution, Cohen concludes that the silence must be because a lot of Muslims agreed with the punishment. To this, Cohen says:
The groupthink of the Muslim world is frightening. I know there are exceptions — many exceptions. But still it seems that a man could be killed for his religious beliefs and no one would say anything in protest. It is also frightening to confront how differently we in the West think about such matters and why the word “culture” is not always a mask for bigotry, but an honest statement of how things are. It is sometimes a bridge too far — the leap that cannot be made. I can embrace an Afghan for his children, his work, even his piety — all he shares with much of humanity. But when he insists that a convert must die, I am stunned into disbelief: Is this my fellow man?
There are many cultural rifts between the West and the Muslim world. Some can be closed or at least bridged. But in cases like Abdul Rahman, we in the West cannot find common ground. Killing a man for converting to a new religion is wholly unacceptable. There is no compromise. They are wrong. We are right.
Yet there is nothing we can do that will radically change the deplorable aspects of many Muslim cultures. Those changes will have to come from within Islam and from within the nations of the Middle East. All we can do is focus on finding common ground where there is common ground to be found, while making sure our own sense of right and wrong are not compromised in vain attempts to build bridges where no bridges can be built.
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March 28th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
These moments have come along periodically since the biggest of them all — 9/11/01. They make those of us in the West generally, in America in particular, in the vocally politically concerned minority specifically, sit up and say, “woah” (or “yow,” or “insert exclamation of surprise of your choice”).
We bicker with one another, each side insists that the other is in league with/as bad as the people we claim to be at war with. We slip into moral relativism in a myriad ways.
Then comes the woah moment — a woman aid worker beheaded. A burst of murderous fury over a cartoon. Now this. And we realize … what? For the moment we recognize that the differences within us — West/America/debaters — are comparatively minor and we essentially believe in the same things and follow the same code of ethics and morality.
And, by contrast, we realize there are vast numbers of people living and choosing to live with a very different set of ethics and morality.
But then we fall to bickering again and quickly we forget. And maybe I’ve overstated the thing we — temporarily — all see and recognize. Maybe it’s no more than the shock of the “woah.”
March 28th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Of course, “You’re wrong, we’re right” is what you say just before you have to decide if you’re willing to use violence to enforce your point of view. The other side is, and the citizens of the US probably aren’t. Not for religious freedom in societies that probably don’t want it, anyway.
That’s my opinion, anyway (I’m ambivalent, since I could be one of the people doing the killing (hopefully) should my fellow citizens surprise me in this).
March 28th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
This could be an over-simplification, but in my view the Muslim movement across the world can be boiled down to this. It is a “gang” mentality. Many have kept silent out of fear and it is up to them to take their religion into the twenty-first century.
In the same way that gangs set the bar for acceptable behavior …. If you are a member of the Crips and you throw your colors down and take up the colors of the Bloods …Crips will do their best to kill you.
If you are Mafioso and you leave the life, they will do their best to kill you.
Maybe instead of war we should go after Muslim terrorists with RICO laws.
March 29th, 2006 at 10:44 am
About 500 years ago Christianity was in a not too different situation. Burn the heretics and all that. We outgrew it back then, thanks in part to Martin Luther and company. Hopefully, Islam can do likewise.