A new book for Catholic children raises some interesting questions about Catholic/Muslim beliefs, and also about Catholic education. Pauline Books has just published My Muslim Friend — a book which it hopes will give Catholic children, their parents, and their teachers "a new understanding and appreciation of Islam…."
An exercise in multicultural evenhandedness, the 48-page book does a good job of explaining the basics of the Catholic faith, and also of presenting basic Muslim beliefs and practices in the context of a friendship between two girls.
But there are problems. Although My Muslim Friend does deal with differences between Islam and Christianity — for example, Muslims don't believe in the Trinity, or in Jesus as the Son of God — most of the differences described are of a more superficial nature. Muslims attend mosques rather than churches, worship on Fridays rather than Sundays, and celebrate different holidays. "We have a lot in common," says the Catholic girl of her Muslim friend, "but we're also very different…we live on different streets. We ride different buses to school. She has brown eyes, and mine are blue…." But almost all children will understand that these are minor differences, and so the stage is set for dismissing Muslim/Catholic differences as of secondary importance.
The real emphasis of My Muslim Friend is on the commonality of the two faiths, and in this respect it is in the mainstream of recent Muslim-Catholic dialogue. In fact the Foreword is written by the Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. He starts the ball rolling by noting that both Catholics and Muslims have their own networks of schools, and that "both systems emphasis faith as a sound basis for a truly human life."
The reader soon finds that commonalities trump differences by a wide margin in My Muslim Friend. Mary goes to church, Aisha goes to Mosque; Mary has her rosary beads, Aisha has her prayer beads. Mary believes in one God, so does Aisha; Mary's church reveres the Virgin Mary, Aisha's faith has great reverence for Mary, as well. And so on. Catholics believe in Jesus as the Son of God, Muslims honor Jesus as one of God's greatest prophets. Similarities are even drawn between the pilgrimage to Mecca and a visit to Lourdes. In both cases, we are told, pilgrims often take holy water back home with them.
A child reading this book will come away with the impression that the things we have in common are more important than the things that separate us. No doubt this is what the author intends. She has constructed her story in such a way that the only fitting conclusion for the reader to draw is, "Why can't we all just get along?" — or some variant thereof.
Given the high-tension times we live in, it's tempting to gloss over the differences between Catholics and Muslims; but if, in fact, there are substantial differences, too much emphasis on the similarities can be both misleading and confusing.
Take the notion that Jesus is greatly esteemed in Islam. Well, yes and no. Yes, Jesus is a great prophet in Islam, but no, he's not quite the same Jesus that Catholics have in mind. In fact, the Jesus of the Koran bears almost no resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospels. Muhammad appears to have had only a scant knowledge of Christianity, and a worse knowledge of chronology. Thus, Mary the mother of Jesus is described as the sister of Moses and Aaron, a circumstance that would place the birth of Jesus somewhere around the year 1000 BC.
In addition, what Muhammad did know about Christianity seems to have come mainly from apocryphal sources — in fact, some of the sources Dan Brown draws on for The Da Vinci Code. Thus, the Koran holds that someone else was crucified in the place of Jesus — an idea that seems to have been borrowed from some of the Gnostic writings, and pops up also in several recent neo-Gnostic conspiracy books about the life of Christ.
Moreover, though Muslims stress that Jesus was not divine, in the Koran he seems scarcely human. He appears mainly in the role of one of Allah's official spokesmen. But "appears" is really too strong a word. This Jesus doesn't attend weddings, or go fishing with His disciples, or gather little children about Him. The Koran mentions that He heals lepers and cripples, but He is not shown doing so and, indeed, He has practically no human interactions. He is more like a disembodied voice than a person, and what little He has to say is formulaic and highly repetitive.
In short, the Jesus of the Koran appears to be an entirely different person from the Jesus of the Gospels. There is practically no sense that He lived in any particular historical time or place, or that He ate and drank and slept, or that He could be moved to compassion or anger or tears. To imply that the Jesus of the Gospels figures very importantly in Islam is highly misleading. It's like saying that the Republic of North Korea and the Republic of Ireland have a lot in common because they both share the word "republic."
Equally misleading, from an orthodox Catholic point of view, is the implication that Muhammad received a valid revelation on a par with that given to the Apostles. My Muslim Friend starts off on the right foot by stating that Muhammad "believed" that the voice he heard came from the Angel Gabriel, and that his followers "came to believe" that Allah was calling Muhammad to be a prophet. But this qualified assertion soon slides into the unqualified mode. Thus, "God's messages to Muhammad became the Qur'an," and "Aisha prays five times, as Allah instructed Muhammad to do." Of course, the author of My Muslim Friend doesn't come out and say that Muhammad's revelation was a valid one, but neither does she do anything to counter the possibility that many children might arrive at that conclusion. This is one of the problems inherent in the multicultural approach. Multicultural education (which is as prevalent in Catholic schools as it is the public variety) primes children to believe that there are many truths and traditions. The ethic of non-judgmentalism prohibits even a Catholic text from questioning the validity of another religion's revelation. This approach is fine for creating an atmosphere of good feelings, but it doesn't do much to sharpen a youngster's ability to make distinctions.
Even the most basic ecumenical supposition — that Muslims, Christians and Jews "all worship the one true God" — is problematic. My Muslim Friend works on this assumption, and so do the many "Abrahamic Faith" dialogues held throughout the world. But if Allah is, in large part, a creation of Muhammad, in what sense is he "the one true God?" In many respects the Allah of the Koran resembles a Nietzschean superman: his will is his chief attribute; and like Nietzsche's superman he is free to exercise it anyway he wishes — even in an arbitrary fashion. Allah is not bound by the category of reason, since this would, Muslims believe, put limits on the freedom of his will. This point was really at the heart of Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg. The pope was trying to establish the point that God is a reasonable God who does nothing contrary to reason. He went on to suggest that God, being reasonable, could not endorse the spread of religion by violence, because a forced conversion is a contradiction in terms. If Muslims could agree to the idea of a rational God, there might be hope of some constructive dialogue. In this sense, the pope has departed from the "Abrahamic Faith" framework of dialogue which assumes more commonality than may be warranted by the facts.
The notion that Muslims and Christians share much in common is a stretch. It's misleading on many counts, but the main one is that it makes Catholics think they understand Islam when they really don't. It's similar to the Russians-are-people-just-like-us-so-their-ideology-can't-be-that-bad mentality which passed for deep thinking during the Cold War days. Yes, the Russian people were like us in many ways, but as even the Russians now admit, communist ideology was deadly.
Too much emphasis on commonality is misleading in another sense, as well. It makes it difficult to believe that the Church is really serious about its own beliefs. After all, if Mary is nice, and Aisha is nice, and the people at Aisha's mosque are equally as nice as the people at Mary's church, and if their religions have so much in common, then what's the difference? Such an approach suggests to students that doctrine doesn't really matter. Naturally, the author doesn't say this, but children can draw their own inferences. If there are many roads to heaven, then maybe it's not that important which one you take. The Note for Catholic teachers which concludes the book only adds to the confusion. It suggests a number of activities, including a day of fasting at Ramadan, so that "Christian students will have an opportunity to share in the Islamic experience."
When taken to heart, multiculturalism renders a culture and — by extension — a religion, incapable of defending or even understanding its own interests. If students gain the impression that there's no substantial difference between Christianity and Islam, they might well conclude that it's better to align themselves with the faith that's confident and on the rise. Here and there, one hears reports of North American Christians converting to Islam. Expect that to increase. In Latin America, Islam is one of the fastest-growing faiths; and in Europe, Islam is winning converts at a rapidly increasing rate. As the geo-political winds keep blowing in the direction of Islam, Christians will come under increasing pressure to make the switch. Books such as My Muslim Friend will make it that much easier for them to make the necessary adjustments and accommodations.
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