Speaking of Faith: Hearing Muslim Voices Since 9/11

At Cherokee United Methodist Church, I'm part of a Sunday School class called Tapestry. This morning our lesson was on "Reconciliation." In addition to readings from our text and references to Milton's Paradise Lost and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," I brought in some quotes from a this past week's program of my favorite public radio show, Speaking of Faith (available here only via the show's web site, speakingoffaith.org).

I'll probably write some more about 9/11 tomorrow, but I thought I'd record here the following quotes from recent--or relatively recent--guests on the program:

Mr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: . . . no Muslim is any different from an American or a Swede in the basic human desires and needs. They’re human beings who want to have a family, who want to be able to live at peace and so forth and so on, and gradually things would work themselves out. But the reason you have so much tension is that you have pressure from an outside civilization in practically every domain of life of the Islamic world. And since Islamic civilization is not dead, it reacts.

And so what happens is that a number of misguided people who begin with a love for their faith end up in the hands of the devil, in a sense, of taking recourse to extreme action, doing things which are against Islamic law. For example, killing the innocent is specifically banned in the Qur’an. The Qur’an says to kill one innocent person is like killing the whole of humanity. It’s a hideous act. So to save the sharia, they’re going against the sharia.

Mr. Vincent Cornell: For myself, the Islam that I accepted through the Qur’an and through now over 30 years of study of classical Islamic works throughout Islamic history, is to a large extent not the Islam that I see on TV and being expressed by many people in the Muslim world. The desire for revenge, the desire for glory, the desire for personal heroism, the desire to eliminate all norms of decency and ethical behavior in the cause of a political goal, all of these things that are being expressed by Muslim extremists are specifically mentioned as aspects of pre-Islamic society that Islam came to end and eradicate. And so for Muslims like myself, what makes this particular time so painful is that everything is in a sense reversed. The world is upside down. You know, it’s a 180-degree reversal.

Here's one more idea, picked up, I think, from the journal of the show's host:

U.S. culture tends to define a religion in terms of what its adherents "believe"; this is a very Christian-oriented approach. But Islamic tradition is non-hierarchical and non-doctrinal. It is not primarily a religion of beliefs but of practices, of piety woven into the fabric of daily individual and communal life.