But There Has Been A Revision to the Bible
Year Delivered or Published: None
Author: Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Author's Faith: Christianity
Date Submitted to Inspiration and Issues: April 26, 2007
Topic: Religious Conflict
“So then he came in and asked me why so many Christians don’t like Muslims,” my husband’s colleague says to me. We share a chuckle, at the honest bluntness of the eighty year old questioner, making him audacious during this time of increasing religious tensions. This question comes during our colleague’s first visit to a Qatari home, his first introduction to an extended traditional Muslim family. He, the visiting American, becomes the stand in for the family’s patriarch to understand the foreign mentality. The American visitor tries to explain the Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the means for regulating daily life. The elder resists.
“But there has been a revision to the Bible, even. Do people not know?” he exclaims.
“A revision?” I’m puzzled. After a moment it dawns on me as our narrator says: “The New Testament.”
We share an amused look.
The fact that most Muslims respect Jesus as a spiritual teacher, escapes many outside the Islamic community, as we are constantly prodded with images of jihadists training in desert camps.
“We respect Jesus, why don’t people respect our prophet?” This is another reported query from the night of cultural encounters.
Respect seems to keep coming up as an issue for Muslims and Arabs I talk to everywhere we travel in the Middle East. My husband and I have visited Oman, Jordan, Turkey, and the Maldives during the last eighteen months we’ve lived in Qatar. And in all cases people are warm and friendly, even after hearing our distinctly East coast American accents. They are able to separate individual citizens from the actions of their governments, something racial profiling and anti terrorism has made increasingly difficult in the United States.
There is a tension between the peaceful followers of Islam and those who riot when they see cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed with this turban depicted as a bomb. What is the fine line between faith and righteous indignation spilling over into violence? There is very little secular tradition in Islam, as many Muslim socio-religious countries function as theocracies. In such a tradition, blasphemy occurs on a separate register. But that the indignation of these masses is guided by religious clerics much in the way that the West is ushered into fear during the nightly news, escapes many people.
Islam has become the communist threat of the millennium for many Americans. Muslims are the bogeyman we fear is out to change our way of life. And the stand off between the secular West and the religious East seems to be growing by the millisecond.
What can we do?
I think the key is to be more respectful.
There are people who will debate that Allah means God, the same God as Yaweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There are others who will tell you that Allah is the God of Ishmael and thus everyone believing in Allah and Yaweh are People of the Book, sharing a common tradition. This summation causes virulent debate in evangelical circles where God is certainly not Allah.
Outside of esoteric arguments, there is a truth here that could be the way to save us: all of us, regardless of whether we believe in pluralism, are hemmed together equally by science. Our current DNA can be traced back to a common originator – whether by faith to Adam or Eve of the Garden of Eden, or by empirical evidence to mitochondrial Eve of Mesopotamia – it appears we are irreversibly connected.
As we race towards globalization and the world continues coalescing in bright spots such as the European Union, we are faced with this fundamental fact: we are here. We are here, for now, on one planet, we are rapidly destroying. And if we want our children to have any kind of global inheritance outside the fear, anger, and mistrust we know, we will have to find new answers to the age old question: if religion is so good, why is so much evil committed in its name?
