This year I have entered the world of teaching. From a
connection at church I learned of an opportunity to teach at a local homeschool
co-op in Raleigh, and began teaching Global Geography in September. Yesterday
we covered a broad survey of African history, culminating in the sweep of
Islamic forces through Christian North Africa. The coming of Islam in 639 under
military commander Ibn Al-Asi led to the slaughter of thousands of Christians
and the preeminence of Islam in Northern Africa today.
With this background, perhaps you will understand my
fascination with this morning’s headlines regarding a hostage crisis in
Algeria. Supposedly in retaliation for French government support of the Mali
government in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks (by another Islamic group),
Algerian Mohktar Belmohktar organized a takeover of an oil facility in the
Sahara desert. He currently has approximately 340 hostages from multiple nations
including the UK, USA, Japan, and Algerian nationals (per the BBC). Islamic terrorism
has become almost a mainstay of the last two generations, and I want to offer a
way to understand this phenomenon.
1979 witnessed the takeover of Iran by radical Islam. In 2001,
a trans-national terrorist group launched a successful attack on US soil, a
feat unperformed since the Japanese bombing on Pearl Harbor. Today in 2013 a
spin-off of Al-Queda has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks in
Mali and a different group has gained control of the oil facility in Algeria.
The United States government has been engaged in a war on terror, and those
terrorists have frequently belonged to a radical strand of Islamic faith. Like
all who write on Islam, permit me to distinguish radical Muslims from moderates. This distinction lies in how
Muslims interpret the demands of jihad.
Literally translated, the words means “struggle.” But struggle against what?
Moderate Muslims would understand Jihad
as a perennial struggle against personal unrighteousness, and the path to
victory lies in following the demands of the Koran. Radical Muslims, however, interpret jihad as a struggle against the unrighteousness of the world,
against the infidel. Just as the Muslims of the 7th century
practiced a “Convert or die!” strategy of warfare, so modern jihadists seek to
convert the world to the true faith through acts of violence testifying to the
truth of their convictions.
What are we to make of these jihadists who sincerely believe
that their actions are right and good? First, we must understand the draw of
such groups. Cultural philosopher Richard Weaver wrote that all cultures are
formed around a “tyrannizing image.” Rather than the negative implications of tyranny,
with this phrase Weaver sought to invoke the idea of a centrifugal force which
draws all things towards itself. He contended in Visions of Order that all cultures are ways of people relating to
each other being draw together by such an image. For the Christian, the tyrannizing
image is that of the cross. All Christians are bound together in a culture by
the centrality of the cross. Remove the death and resurrection of Christ and
you have removed the central controlling truth of the Christian faith. Radical
Muslims are not motivated by money, power, or geopolitical control (though
these ideas may exist on the periphery). The central dominating image of Islam is
found in their creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet!”
If this idea is true, then all other faiths must yield before it and it is the
duty of believers to spread the truth. This first step towards understanding
Islamic terrorism, therefore, lies in recognizing them as true believers with a
powerful tyrannizing image.
Where then does that leave us as American Christians? Understanding
radical Islam as centered on an absolute truth which condemns all other truths
gives us both something to admire and something to mourn. There is something
within the human soul which cries out for faith, for certainty, for that which
cannot be questioned. Muslims answer this cry with faith in Islam. We can
admire the certainty, and recognize the flow from belief to action. If they do
possess the truth, then all other claims are lies and people world-wide have
been dreadfully deceived.
However, while we can appreciate the sincerity of Islamic radicals,
we must mourn the lie which they have believed. Countless Disney movies and
other artifacts of American culture over the past decade have proclaimed the
idea “Just believe in something!” The idea of faith, just faith with no
specified object, is a frequent trope of many Christmas movies. In radical Islam
we see men who have found a faith to believe in and which they carry to its
logical end. Yet they are wrong. We cannot
ignore the fact that the faith they have believed in is the wrong answer to
life’s questions. They have missed the reality of God’s true and final work in
the person of Jesus Christ, of His special revelation in the Bible, and his ongoing
redemption of the world through the church.
For non-Christians
reading this, I would urge you to consider the different fruits born by the
logical extension of both faiths. Christianity contains a missionary impulse
which has given rise to the modern medical movement (with Christians carrying
out the mandate of Christ to care for the sick), the imperative to care for the
poor, and the modern education system. The educated extremists of the Christian
faith have been monastics, bishops, pastors, and missionaries. In contrast, the
radical Islam in both Iran (Kahmaini) and Saudi Arabia (the royal family), has
produced cultures marked by oppressive legalism, restrictions on human nature,
repression of women, and continued adherence to one of the strictest legal
codes of the Ancient Near East (beheadings, torture, and stoning to name three
current examples from Saudi Arabia). The extremists of Islam have dedicated to
spreading the Islamic faith not by persuasion but through violence and threat
of death. Rather than an ethos of redeeming the world, Islam results in the
enslavement of mankind to a demonic system which claims to be the true hope of
men.
How then ought we to respond to events like the bombings in
Mali or the taking of hostages in Algeria? First, we ought to pray for God to deliver
the captives. Secondly, we should pray for the salvation of the captors. They
are men most sincerely deceived. Finally, we must understand that these are not
men operating from superficial motivations but that these actions flow from
deep convictions of the soul.
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