Category: Other Religions

A reader writes:

The Malaysian federal court has rejected professed Catholic Lina Joy’s appeal to change her stated religion from ‘Muslim’ to ‘Christian’ on her identity card. If she still persist to change her religion, she will need to apply for apostasy with the Syariah court, which the Syariah law forbids.

MORE INFORMATION

Please help to make available this news to your readers as this would help the world to know more about the suppression of religious freedom in Malaysia. It would be a great help to Lina herself.

I’d be happy to let people know about it and to ask for prayers for her and all in Malaysia and elsewhere in the Muslim world who wish to become Christian. The unsettling thing is that Malaysia is among the more progressive countries in the Muslim world when it comes to this issue.

EXCERPT:

In practice, sharia courts do not allow Muslims to formally renounce Islam, preferring to send apostates to counseling and, ultimately, fining or jailing them if they do not desist.

They often end up in legal limbo, unable to register their new religious affiliations or legally marry non-Muslims. Many keep silent about their choice or emigrate.

Lina Joy, 43, was born Azlina Jailani and was brought up as a Muslim, but at the age of 26 decided to become a Christian. She wants to marry her Christian boyfriend, a cook, but she cannot do so while her identity card declares her to me Muslim.

In 1999, the registration department allowed her to change the name in her identity card to Lina Joy but the entry for her religion remained "Islam."

Malaysia, like neighboring Indonesia, practices a moderate brand of Islam, but Muslims account for only a bare majority of Malaysia’s population and are very sensitive to any perceived threats to Islam’s special status as the official religion.

Malaysia has been under Islamic influence since the 15th century, but big waves of Chinese and Indian immigrants over the last 150 years has dramatically changed its racial and religious make-up. Now, about 40 percent of Malaysians are non-Muslim.

The last few years we’ve heard a lot of total nonsense about American democracy becoming a theocracy.

NO, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DEMOCRACY BECOMES A THEOCRACY.

HOW SCARY IS THIS?

A reader writes:

The thought comes from one of your commenters, and I
think it’s worthy of a blog entry (because I’m trying
to work it out myself).
Is the Christian God the same god as the Muslim Allah?
I think most orthodox Catholics will answer yes, but
that generates the question, what does that mean?

The immediately obvious discrepancy is that Muslims
deny the Trinity. But other characteristics fail as
well. Muslims would shudder at the description of God
as “Father.”

So if suffient characteristics of their description of
God diverges suffiently from our description of God,
do we have different gods?

I wrote a philosophical paper on this question a few years ago that I meant to submit as a journal article, but I’m afraid that I haven’t gotten around to it. At this point, I’m not even sure what hard drive it’s on, so I’ll have to do some digging around.

In the meantime, lemme see how well I can come up with a quick encapsulation of the overall argument.

For purposes of simplicity, let us consider the question of prayer, with the understanding that what is said about this topic can be applied in a general way to other forms of relating to the divine, such as offering praise, adoration, etc.

Prayer can be defined in various ways (lifting the heart and mind to God, petitioning God for some good, etc.), but let’s use an understanding of prayer that anyone can understand: Prayer is talking to God.

So the question becomes: When Muslims talk to Allah, are they talking to God?

We need not be detained by the fact that the word “Allah” is not the normal English word for God. It is the normal Arabic word for God, and it is used by Arabic-speaking Christians as a designator for the true God all the time.

We also need not be detained by alleged origins of the term in pre- and proto-Muslim history. Where a term comes from does not determine its meaning. How it is used determines its meaning (otherwise the word “nice” would mean “ignorant” since it comes from the Latin word nescius) and so, regardless of where the word came from, how Muslims use this word today is key to determining whether they pray to the same God we do.

How important it is to recognize present use is illustrated by the fact that Arabic-speaking Christians also use “Allah” as a descriptor of the true God. When they so use it, they have in mind a Trinitarian Being, the Second Person of whom became incarnate as Jesus Christ. That’s what Arabic-speaking Christians mean by “Allah.”

Arabic-speaking Muslims (and other Muslims) obviously mean something different, and the question is whether their usage of the term is different enough that it would prevent prayers they address to Allah from being prayers addressed to God.

What characteristics does a Muslim typically envision Allah as having? I would advance the following list as some of the most important characteristics:

1) Is an uncreated being
2) Is the creator of the universe
3) Appeared to Abraham
4) Is just
5) Is merciful
6) Will raise the dead
7) Is not a Trinity
8) Is not incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth

Characteristics 1-6 are ones that Christians agree with Muslims about. It is characteristics 7 and 8 that are the key points of disagreement. Are they sufficient to keep God from receiving Muslim prayers directed to him?

Before answering that question, take note of this fact: A non-Christian Jewish person would say exactly the same list of characteristics applies to the God to whom they direct their prayers.

Christian tradition and the Bible itself acknowledge that Jewish individuals do worship and pray to God, even if they do not understand that he is a Trinity or that he is incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. If you’re going to say that belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation are essential for worshipping or talking to God then you’re going to have a huge problem with Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.

And yet the person’s understanding of God is different than the one that the Church proclaims.

I think that light on this question can be shed by recognizing that it is quite possible for us to talk to someone even if there are things that we don’t know about them or even if we have false beliefs about them.

To illustrate this point, let’s take the case of someone with a secret identity: Bruce Wayne.

Suppose that I am a paperboy who delivers copies of The Daily Planet in the neighborhood where stately Wayne Manor is located, so one of my customers is millionnaire playboy Bruce Wayne, who always comes out to get his paper promptly, being as interested in local and world affairs as he is. One day as I’m pitching The Daily Planet in the neighborhood, I see him out on his lawn, and I say, “Howdy, Bruce!” He waves back and says, “Hi, Jimmy!”

I had this (brief) conversation with him even though I–as a normal Gothamite (transplanted from Texas)–am totally unaware of the fact that he is secretly Batman. There thus can be things about a person that I do not know and do not believe about him, yet it doesn’t stop me from having a conversation with him.

This is analogous to the situation of the Jewish people in the Old Testament, who prayed to God even though the doctrine of the Trinity had not yet been revealed.

But it’s not analogous to the situation of someone after the revelation of the Trinity who has considered and rejected the doctrine, so let’s go back to the thought experiment.

Suppose that one day as I am pitching copies of The Daily Planet and I notice an article on page one by Lois Lane that is headlined BATMAN IS REALLY BRUCE WAYNE!

Now, I’ve read all of Lois’s previous attempts to prove that Superman is really Clark Kent, and every single time she’s run a story like that, it’s been disproved. So I long ago concluded that Lois Lane is an unreliable source on the subject of superhero identities.

When I see her latest such story, I just laugh and shrug it off, and when I pitch the paper to Mr. Wayne, I call out “Hey, there’s a story on page one that you should really get a kick out of! Haw-Haw!” and Bruce smiles and says, “I know. I already read it on the Internet and had a good laugh. By the way, the Internet is driving dead-tree newspapers out of business, so you should start looking for a new job. May I suggest apologetics?”

Bruce and I were able to have this conversation even though I had already entertained and rejected the claim that he is Batman.

So if I can talk to someone about whom I have false beliefs, what would prevent a person from talking to God even though he has false beliefs about God?

Let me go back to the thought experiment one more time to unearth an insight that should be of help.

The next day I’m tossing papers and I see Mr. Wayne on the lawn and there is a TV reporter there interviewing him. I toss him his paper and shout, “Hey, Mr. Wayne! Thanks for that tip about apologetics! I put in my application with a group in California!” and he calls back, “Good for you, son!”

Unbeknownst to me, the person I talked to this time was not actually Bruce Wayne. In reality, it was Chameleon Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, who used his shape-shifting power to impersonate Bruce Wayne so that he coud be interviewed by a reporter while the real Bruce Wayne was being interviewed on TV with Commissioner Gordon at the same time across town, setting up “proof” that Batman and Bruce Wayne are two different people and thus once again denying Lois Lane the prize of outing a superhero.

In this case I believed that I was talking to Bruce Wayne, but in fact I was not. I was actually talking with Chameleon Boy.

In this case I had a massive number of false beliefs about the person I was talking to. I believed that he was (a) a human being, who was (b) a resident of Gotham and (c) a native of the 20th century and (d) from the planet Earth, and (e) a millionnaire and (f) a middle-aged man and (g) someone who possesses no superpowers.

In reality, I was talking to (a) an alien being, who will be (b) a resident of Metropolis and is (c) a native of the 30th century and (d) from the planet Durla, and (e) has no special wealth and (f) is a teenager and (g) possesses the power to change shape.

How could I get so much wrong about the person I was talking to and yet be talking to him? What was it that allowed my words to be addressed to him even though almost every belief I had about him was wrong?

It would seem that there is some set of minimal core criteria that allow me to talk to a person even though almost everything I believe about him is wrong. What might this be?

In the case of an ordinary conversation, I would suggest that the fundamental criterion of who we are talking to is something we aren’t always fully conscious of.

Suppose that on the third day I had a partner with me in the car, helping me roll papers, and after I finished speaking to Chameleon Boy, he turned to me and said, “Who were you just talking to?” I reply: “Bruce Wayne,” and my partner says, “Who’s that?” Annoyed, I point and say, “That guy over there.”

“That guy over there” is the real descriptor of who I was talking to. I believed that this person was Bruce Wayne (which was false) and that he was not Batman (which was true), but in reality I was talking to a particular person “over there.” As long as there was someone “over there” (i.e., as long as I wasn’t hallucinating) then that is the person I was talking to, even if I was mistaken about the person’s identity and everything else about him.

Notice thus that we have two different kinds of characteristics that apply to the person I was talking to. The primary criterion is that he was “that guy over there,” while everything else about him (the idea that he was Bruce Wayne, that he was not Batman, that he was a human, that he was a millionnaire playboy) were secondary criteria.

This is the way conversations work when we are talking to someone in person: The person we are talking to is the one who satisfies the primary criterion we have in mind–usually “that person over there”–even if none of the secondary criteria we have in mind apply to that person.

Upon discovering that none of the secondary criteria apply, we may say “Oh! I wasn’t talking to you!” but we refer in this case to who we intended to talk to, not who we were talking to. If I discover that the person I have been talking to is not who I thought he was, that doesn’t change the fact that I was talking to him.

So we’ve got a handle on how conversations work in person, but what about conversations with people who aren’t physically present and we can’t think of as “that person over there”?

In this case, it seems to me, we have to decide which criteria we are going to treat as primary and which as secondary.

Suppose that I am a person who is unsure whether Christianity is true. I believe that God exists and that he created the world, but I am not sure whether he is a Trinity or whether he incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth. So I pray, “God, please guide me so that I realize the truth about you and whether I should become a Christian.”

In this case, the primary criterion of who I am addressing would presumably be “Creator of the Universe” or something like that, and thus the Creator of the Universe would understand that I was addressing him, even though I am uncertain about other things concerning him.

Suppose, though, that I was a person who really hated Christians and was unwilling to address their God, even if he exists. In this case the criteria I am applying to the person I am addressing might be something like “the Creator of the Universe as long as he isn’t the Christian God.”

In this case my prayer would be addressed to no one because, in fact, the Creator of the Universe is in fact the Christian God. Up in heaven, God would say, “Sorry, but if you’re really determined not to talk to the Christian God then you’re not talking to me. You’re talking to the void.”

Now suppose that I believe that the Creator of the Universe isn’t the Christian God, but I’m willing to talk to him if he is. In this case my primary criterion is “Creator of the Universe” but “is not the Christian God” is a secondary criterion. As long as this is the case, I’m still going to be talking to God. Up in heaven, God will say, “Okay, you’re wrong about me not being the Christian God, but you’re still willing to talk to me even if I am, and so your prayers are addressed to a real Being.”

If we’re going to ask about the prayers of Muslims in particular and whether they are addressed to God, I would say that it depends on the Muslim in question. Some Muslims may be so anti-Christian that they would be unwilling to talk to God–to Allah–if it turned out that he was the God of the Christians. Those Muslims would not be talking to God because there is no being that corresponds to the description “the true God who is not the God of the Christians.” They would be talking to the void.

But the vast majority of Muslims don’t seem to be in that condition. They may not believe that God is a Trinity or that he incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, but they are still directing their prayers to something like “Creator of the Universe” or “God who appeared to Abraham” or “the one true God” or something like that.

This is what enables the Catechism to state that Muslims “acknowledge the Creator” and that “together with us
they adore the one, merciful God” (CCC 841).

Whew!

Okay, that ended up being longer than I meant it to, but I hope it sketches some of the philosophical basis for how a person can genuinely talk to someone (including God) about whom one has false beliefs.

That’s something we need to happen because, no matter who we are, at some point in our lives all of us have entertained false beliefs about God–even from misunderstanding perfectly orthodox catechesis in childhood–and we still need God to answer our prayers in those times and to guide us toward a correct understanding of him.

THEY WERE FAKING.

Or so it appears.

EXCERPTS:

Pauline revealed to Pajamas Media that the six imams were doing things far more suspicious than praying – an Arabic-speaking passenger heard them repeatedly invoke “bin Laden,” and “terrorism,” a gate attendant told the captain that she did not want to fly with them, and that bomb-sniffing dogs were brought aboard. Other Muslim passengers were left undisturbed and later joined in a round of applause for the U.S. Airways crew. “It wasn’t that they were Muslim. It was all of the suspicious things they did,” Pauline said.

Another passenger, not the note writer, was an Arabic speaker sitting near two of the imams in the plane’s tail. That passenger pulled a flight attendant aside, and in a whisper, translated what the men were saying. They were invoking “bin Laden” and condemning America for “killing Saddam,” according to police reports.

Meanwhile an imam seated in first class asked for a seat-belt extension, even though according to both an on-duty flight attendant and another deadheading flight attendant, he looked too thin to need one. Hours later, when the passengers were being evacuated, the seat-belt extension was found on the floor near the imam’s seat, police reports confirm. The U.S. Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader said she did not dispute the report, but said the airline’s internal investigation cannot yet account for the seat-belt extension request or its subsequent use.

A seat-belt extension can easily be used as a weapon, by wrapping the open-end of the belt around your fist and swinging the heavy metal buckle.

Still, it seemed like just another annoying development, typical when flying the friendly skies. Days after the incident, the imam would claim that the steward helped him attach the device. Pauline said he is lying. Hours later, when the police was being evacuated, the steward asked Pauline to hand him the seat-belt extension, which the imam did not attach, but placed on the floor. “I know he is lying,” Pauline said, “I had it [seat belt extension] in my hand.”

Other factors were also considered: All six imams had boarded together, with the first-class passengers – even though only one of them had a first-class ticket. Three had one-way tickets. Between the six men, only one had checked a bag.

And, Pauline said, they spread out just like the 9-11 hijackers. Two sat in first, two in the middle, and two back in the economy section. Pauline’s account is confirmed by the police report. The airline spokeswoman added that some seemed to be sitting in seats not assigned to them.

One thing that no one seemed to consider at the time, perhaps due to lack of familiarity with Islamic practice, is that the men prayed both at the gate and on the plane. Observant Muslims pray only once at sundown, not twice.

“It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to get kicked off the flight,” Pauline said.

Y’know, I really find my sympathy significantly limited when it comes to

THIS STORY.

The facts, so far as I can discern them, appear to be these:

Six imams returning from an imam conference got on a plane headed to Phoenix and then–prior to takeoff–three of them stood up and started reciting standard evening Muslim prayers in Arabic. The other passengers, however, didn’t speak Arabic or understand the significance of the prayers and got nervous. One of them then passed a note to the flight crew, following which the imams were asked by the captain and airport security to leave the plane so that they could be re-screened. At this point the imams refused to deplane. Following this the police were called and the men were removed from the plane and questioned for several hours. Everyone else was also deplaned and re-screened, and the flight took off three hours late.

Now the imams are crying victimization and blaming the incident on western "ignorance of Islam."

The imams have my sympathy for being in a situation in which it is difficult to fulfill their ordinary religious duties and wanting to do so anyway, but my sympathy ends there.

The fact is that you cannot act on a flight in America like you would on a flight in Saudi Arabia. America is not a Muslim-majority country, and the attacks on it by fanatics of your religion using commandeered airplanes are seared into American memory. You therefore cannot stand up on an airplane in America and start ritualized prayers in Arabic–a language the locals don’t understand–and then refuse the orders of the captain and security to get off the plane and be re-screened–and then go around crying about victimization and blaming Americans for the situation.

The fact is that the Americans on the flight were needlessly alarmed and then forced to wait three additional hours before takeoff due to your arrogant, resentful, high-handed behavior and refusal to make even minimal attempts to adjust to the local culture.

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do" goes the old saying. You cannot expect the people of a country with a different cultural background to understand everything about your culture and accomodate all of it. You must make reasonable adjustments to the culture around you. The thing to do would have been to close your eyes and say your prayers silently in your heads, so as not to needlessly provoke and alarm people who had an entirely human reaction to the situation.

If I were in Saudi Arabia and made open displays of my Catholicism–behavior that would be entirely normal here in America–I would get a much, much worse reaction than what you guys got on the plane–and Saudi Arabia hasn’t even been attacked by Americans. On the contrary, it’s been defended by them.

You guys got off lucky by comparison. You created an entirely predictable situation by your unacceptably rigid and pig-headed behavior, and you have no grounds on which to act like crybabies afterwards.

You have my sympathy for being in a situation that doesn’t allow you to fulfill your religious duties in the way you ordinarily would, and you have my respect for wanting to fulfill them anyway, but that’s it. You handled the situation atrociously.

You created the situation. You needlessly scared and delayed numerous people. You get no sympathy for that.

You shouldn’t get it from your fellow Muslims, either, because your disgraceful public performance only serves to make Islam look bad and reinforce western perceptions of it.

UPDATE: The NYT is reporting that there may be more to what the imams were doing than just evening prayers:

Detailed accounts of the incident varied. Witnesses, including a number of passengers and US Airways employees, said they heard some of the men making anti-American remarks and chanting “Allah,” first as they boarded the plane and then when led off, Mr. Hogan said.

Others said the men behaved strangely once on board, with some asking for seat belt extensions, the police report said. “I did not see they actually needed them,” one flight attendant wrote in a statement given to the police. “They were not overweight.”

Dr. Shahin disagreed, saying the extensions were necessary for their “big bodies.”

In another statement, a gate agent said some of the imams had been praying in Arabic in the gate area. “I was suspicious by the way they were praying very loud,” the agent said.

CHT: Powerline. More.

I’m wondering if the imams didn’t deliberately provoke the situation so that they could play the victim card afterwards.

Orson Scott Card has a really interesting and worthwhile article in which he writes:

[A]s a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government
threatens many values that I hold to be important to America’s role as
a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be
gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party
seems hellbent on losing it — and in the most damaging possible way —
I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its
hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again
to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its
own temporary partisan advantages.

Objectively speaking, the current war and terrorism are not the weightiest issues in determining how one casts one’s vote. Neither one of them kills remotely as many people as abortion does, and thus they should not be–as Card terms them–"the only issue this election day." But they are still issues of massive importance that deserve to be treated with the utmost seriousness and should weigh heavily on voters.

Card’s analysis of the present situation–while lengthy–is carefully reasoned, insightful, and definitely worth reading in its entirety.

GET THE STORY.

John Allen recently intervewed His Awesomeness Avery Cardinal Dulles on the subject of Islam and, in particular, Christian efforts from the Middle Ages onward to interact with his.

The cardinal displayed his customary perspicacity and frankness, and I thought the extracts of the interview that Allen printed were, though brief, well worth reading. I was particularly struck by this exchange:

Isn’t there a . . . problem, in that some of the Muslims who do show up at dialogue meetings aren’t representative of mainstream Islam?

Yes, that can be a problem. I remember back in 1968, there was a Christian/Muslim meeting at Woodstock that I attended. [Note: From 1966 to 1973, Dulles served as a consultor to the Papal Secretariat for Dialogue with Non-Believers]. One of the Muslims had obviously read a lot of Kant, and the whole thing struck me as a little phony. He had studied in the West, and clearly didn’t represent the Muslim tradition in a normative way. That happens fairly often in these sessions. It’s going to take time for real dialogue to develop — there’s an internal process that has to happen.

To return to Pope Benedict, would it be helpful if he put himself in contact more thoroughly with Islam as a living religion, meeting with representative Muslim leaders?

Certainly, it would be helpful, and it’s definitely worth trying. I’m sure he would love to do that. I believe the thinking around the Vatican these days is that the dialogue with Islam should start with things like ecology, poverty, these sorts of common human problems, before we get to more sensitive theological questions. This is part of Benedict’s emphasis on reason. His approach seems to be, let’s go as far as reason can take us before we get to these other issues.

GET THE STORY.