Christian Love can Heal Rifts Caused by this Reckless War
The Universe
(April 27, 2003)
While the battle Iraq continues and the propaganda war tries to win the mind and hearts of the world opinion, peacemakers have to win the reconciliation between Christianity and Islam.
It will be a long and hard task for religious leaders and believers of both religions. Many Muslims were shocked and angered President Gorge W. Bush called his war on terrorism a ‘crusade’. Nothing could be more abhorrent to the believers of Islam who remember all too well the bloody legacy of the crusades.
Across the Arab world there are fundamentalist clerics and radicals who seize upon this remark and rage against the invasion of Iraq as new war against Islam and they call for a Jihad or Holy War in retaliation. There is no doubt that many years of efforts to bring Christians and Muslims closer has been seriously damaged.
But it’s not a total disaster. In the past decade Christian churches in the UK and around the world have reached out to their Muslim brothers and sisters, stressing the common strands of their faith, such as the shared Father of faith, Abraham and the mutually shared moral values of the family and marriage and the dignity for life.
We share an abhorrence of abortion and the humanitarian services, and above all a rejection of a purely secular materialistic world without God.
Here in the Philippines, there has been conflict with the colonizing Christians ever since the Spanish conquest.
In present times the more fundamentalist groups equate Christians with an predatory group bent on taking their ancestral Muslim lands.
But this is far from the true picture. Christian and Moderate Muslims have lived in peace for many years. Columban missionaries have had an active ministry of interfaith dialogue for many years in Mindanao and Fr. Michael Rufus Hally opened his school and parish to hundreds if Muslim refugees fleeing the Philippine Army.
I believe he died because of this closeness to the Muslim people and that left him vulnerable to men of violence.
The war on Iraq was portrayed as being a war against weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein – not against Islam. But for may Muslims it is the same thing.
What has caused an even greater rift are the images of dead and wounded babies and burning building. These are the leading stories in the Arab press as a result anger across the Arab world is mounting. There is fear too at the terrible might of the US firepower and it's desire for world domination. The coalition forces are directed by two men who openly adhere to the practice of Christianity. But it is a sort of patriotic fundamentalism, similar to the fundamentalism of the terrorists that oppose the global might of America.
The perception that Christian fundamentalism equates Muslims with terrorists is another wedge that drives Muslims and true Christians apart. Muslims cannot always distinguish between the mainstream churches and the fundamentalists.
There is hope that the moderate Muslims can understand that the majority of mainstream churches have stood with them, and the rifts caused by the reckless run to war can be healed.
