So right-wing “Christians” are claiming that if American Muslims pray near the site of the World Trade Center Massacre radical Muslims around the world will cry “Victory over America.”
I’m astonished at the sheer stupidity of people who call themselves “Christian” who think there is a monolithic Islam, that all Muslims march in lockstop–secretly or openly– with some Muslim pope or central authority somewhere. They should know better than anyone that text-based religion can never be monolithic. Rival interpretations are inevitable. Do Lutherans or Baptists follow the orders of the pope? Do Pentecostals follow the dictates of the Baptists? The idea is laughable. The distance between, say Wahabi Islam and Imam Rauf in New York, a Sufi Muslim, is far greater than the distance between most Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church.
The forms of Islam shaped by the American experience have less and less in common with the forms of Islam found elsewhere, say in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
What surprises me about these fundamentalist right-wing “Christians” is how utterly unreflective of their own experience they are. Like Muslims and Jews, Christians are a “religion of the book.” We all three live by two realities: 1. experience of a monotheistic sacred presence, and 2. a tradition of interpretation of a sacred text, through which we claim to understand and explain the experience of that sacred presence. No one claims to be more tethered to the text than these fundamentalist Christians and yet no one is engaged on a regular basis in disputation on the meaning of that text with people who disagree with them in interpretation. Even small differences of interpretation of a single Hebrew word can cause them to split from their church and find or found a new one.
Islam is radically de-centralized. The Islam of Java is far from that of Teheran, which is far from that of Riyadh. And Sufi Islam is far from all three. The idea that the NY mosque would take marching orders from ANYONE outside their own de-centralized mystical movement is a sad joke. Would the Blood-Washed Baptists claim “Victory!” to hear that the Episcopalians were building a church in Saudi Arabia? The idea is laughable. They’d just say, “It figures. The Episcopalians aren’t Christian, anyway. They’ll be in hell along with the Muslims and Jews.” The idea that Osama bin Laden would be pleased that the Sufis are worshiping in New York with the support of the American law and people is a form of breathtaking ignorance.
I so wish “Christians” didn’t display their ignorance so openly. It shames the rest of us, who don’t, ourselves, follow lockstep with the hate-mongering of Newt Gingrich and Fox News.
