Tag Archives: ISIS

Donald Trump is Wrong about the Founding of ISIS

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the White HouseMost people had forgotten all about it, but Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump recently revived a comment he had made in January, stating that President Obama was the founder of ISIS. “President Obama. He’s the founder of ISIS,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Florida on August 10. Apparently he did not want anyone to mistake his point, for he immediately added: “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS.” Then he added: “I would say that the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”

Asked about his comment in interviews the next day, Trump did not back down. To conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who seemed to be fishing around with Trump to try to find a way to soften Trump’s language, Trump said, “No. I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. I don’t care. He was the founder.” It seems a ridiculous waste of time to have to state the obvious: President Obama did not found ISIS (see below). But Trump’s handle on foreign policy lends itself to the ridiculous.

Now I hold no brief for the CIA, but you really should read this New York Times op-ed by Mike Morell, the acting director and deputy director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013. No matter what you think of the CIA, it’s clear that one thing they do well is to identify vulnerabilities in people and exploit them. With that in mind, keep in mind that for months Trump has been singing various praises of Russian President Vladimir Putin (see this link also).
In his op-ed., Morell explains why.

He reminds us that Putin was a career intelligence officer, skilled at identifying people’s vulnerabilities and exploiting them. Noting Trump’s “obvious need for self-aggrandizement,” Morel writes that “[t]his is exactly what [Putin] did in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.”

Egyptian lamp and jug (Matt Create)In his op-ed, Morrell also argues persuasively why Trump is not only unqualified to be President but that he has already posed a threat to U.S. national security. A few days later, Morell was on the Charlie Rose television show for a major interview, in which he explained in great detail why he wrote the op-ed. You owe it to yourself to listen closely to that interview.

But to return to Trump’s ignorance about the founding of ISIS… I wrote a series of articles for this blog two years ago that traced a large and important branch of the roots of ISIS back through al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to the militant vision of Sayyid Qutb, a radicalized Egyptian intellectual in 1950’s Egypt. Never heard of Sayyid Qutb? Apparently neither has Donald Trump.

So, having suggested that you take time to read the above links and listen to Mike Morell on Charlie Rose, now I’m going to give you some more homework. For a crash course on what Trump doesn’t know about the religious-political roots of ISIS, set aside time to read this series of articles. It will take you about an hour, but it will be time well spent.

Here’s the first one in the series. They are all linked, so you can read through them at your own pace, or skip through them to find those that interest you. And lets talk about this along the way. The Comments area for those articles is open. I hope this helps you. If it does, do forward this post to your friends. This issue is too important to let an outrageous falsehood hang in the air unaddressed, as if it were true.

©2016 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Adam_Inglis (top) and Matt Create (lower) from Creative Commons.

For other posts about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, see these, beginning with this one: To Boldly Go: anti-Trump Republicans Speak Up [Jun 11]; A Christian View of Not Voting for Donald Trump of Hillary Clinton [Aug 25]; Is Donald Trump Merely Lending His Name to “America”? [Sept 16]; Predicting Presidential Debates [Sept 23]; Who Lost the First Presidential Debate? [Sept 26].

A note from Charles: If you want more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow this blog for a while to see if you like it. Just click here and find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address, and then click “Follow.” You will receive a very short email notice when I publish a new post. Thank you.

Invitation to Summer Reading

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summer reading wisdomNOTE: While I’m blogging less frequently this summer in order to finish some writing projects that are screaming at me from the wings, I want to invite you to read, or perhaps revisit, some key past posts. I’ve picked several (see the list below) that seem to have become increasingly relevant over the past year. But of course you can simply pick topics from the Categories list in the sidebar.

And while I’m at it, I want to express a sincere “Thank you” to all of you who are following this blog, as well as to those of you who stop by here occasionally to check out a post. I have tried to make this an open and safe (and nonpartisan and commercial free!) space for sharing, commenting on, and spreading wisdom-based ideas and practices that are vital for our times but, sadly, ignored by the media. You are helping to “get the word out” – by raising awareness that our deepening reliance on wisdom enables us to work cooperatively and peaceably together in areas of private or public activity – where diversity is normative, where cooperation is essential, and where human flourishing is desired, but where adversarial relations or lesser tensions first have to be defused and resolved.

As Ringo once sang, “You know it don’t come easy.” But sharing about wisdom with you and hearing from you is its own reward. So maybe I could do a little friendly arm-twisting. Since this blog is still catching on, and experimental as well, consider taking a minute to turn friends and colleagues on to the blog via email and social media. And if you have suggestions for improving the blog it, I’m all ears. Thank you.

Here is my personal list of posts you may want to earmark for your summer reading or rereading, topics that seem to have become increasingly relevant to our times. The comment areas are open on all of the posts, so feel free to join in:

What You Now Need to Know about ISIS – This link will take you to a short post that will save you a lot of time. It’s a brief summary that lists places on this blog to jump to that may scratch your itches about why ISIS is like it is. These issues are ignored by the media, such as its historical and relational roots in 1960’s Egypt and its religious “submit or die” ideology.

Series on Iran – You will become well versed about historical and political causes of the deeply troubled relations between Iran and the U.S. And not just about the nuclear deal.

The Wisdom of the Desert  – This three-part series looks theologically, and a bit humorously, at the fascinating biblical story of Moses and Jethro in order to discover the vital role that wisdom played in the difficult formation of a just and peaceable society for the million-plus wanderers (Israelites, Egyptians, and others) of the Exodus generation. Discover the relevance of wisdom, justice, and peace for today’s pluralist societies.

Symphonic Justice – Some wonderfully creative thoughts from James Skillen about the the potential for more peaceable international relations.

Jesus As a Teacher of Wisdom in Ancient Palestine – The last shall be first. A series of seven posts. I have linked you to the third one in the series here.

Enjoy your summer.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Image by KimManleyOrt (permission via Creative Commons)

Shalom: Conversation with Dr. Walter Brueggemann

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The Farthest Mosque JerusalemIn 1976, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, then a rising star in biblical interpretation, published Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom. That was also the year when, quite unexpectedly, I became a Christian. I don’t know if there was any divine synchronicity in the air between those two events that year, and it would be decades before I would be underlining sentences and scribbling margin notes in that book, but when I did I was surprised to see how much of the book’s reflections on shalom had been worked into my bloodstream by the Holy Spirit since 1976. Perhaps this is because a praxis that takes the vision of shalom seriously is not bound to any one time, place, or people, and Living Toward a Vision brings out that timelessness. Today, perhaps especially today, I think readers will find the book’s deeply biblical treatment of shalom – in the contexts of exodus, exile, rescue, return, and restoration – prophetically challenging to personal, national, and international peace agendas. The following conversation with Dr. Brueggemann about such matter and shalom took place by phone on March 19, 2015.

Charles Strohmer: You’ve been thinking about shalom for a long time. Do you have a working definition of shalom? (I won’t hold you to it!)

Walter Brueggemann: Well [laughing], I would say that it’s about the flourishing wholeness of creation into the purposes of God. Something like that.

CS: And what do you see as a vision for shalom, for Christians to participate in and work for today?

WB: I think it means peace and justice – peaceable life together among the nations and tribes and religious traditions, and economic justice so that everybody has enough resources to live a life of safety and dignity.

CS: So shalom is not just for some future time but something to actualize in the hear and now.

WB: Yes.

CS: Shalom, of course, is about peace. But in America, “peace” has come to mean things like “personal peace and affluence,” which was how Francis Schaeffer described a particular American idol. Living Toward a Vision interprets the text of Scripture to show that the Hebrew word “shalom” gives us a very different understanding of peace. Shalom is about social, economic, and political well-being, or flourishing. Sometimes I wish the English translators had left that word alone, not translated it as “peace.”

WB: That’s right, yeah. Although there are a lot of people now who just use the word shalom. But we need to do that more.

CS: In the book, you reference Ezekiel 34:25, to discuss what the prophet calls the covenant of shalom. And about that covenant, you write that “persons are bound not only to God but to one another in a caring, sharing community.” So shalom is very relational, isn’t it? It gets us involved in moving others along into places of well-being.

WB: Yes, that exactly right.

CS: So you write that our job is to put substance into the claims of shalom. It’s got to be done very concretely. Your text for that is the Exodus narrative.

WB: I think it’s useful to think of Pharaoh’s regime as being anti-shalom. In Egypt there was abuse, violence, and sharp social stratification. After the Exodus, I think that the covenant at Mount Sinai is an attempt to order social relationships in a shalom-like way, in contrast to the way social relations worked under Pharaoh. If you take Pharaoh’s narrative as the backdrop, then you can see that the covenant at Mount Sinai was aimed at creating communitarian well-being and protecting all the neighbors. And that’s carried more concretely into the book of Deuteronomy, with all of its economic regulations, which were designed so that the big ones could not eat the little ones.

Heart for Lebanan helping refugees (Heasrt for Lebanon)CS: To many people, this communitarian shalom would mean that we’ve first got to get everyone on the same page with us, before reaching out. But I think you’re talking about shalom even for the outsider, the foreigner.

WB: That’s right. And I think that both in the ancient world and in our contemporary society you can see that you really have to regulate and restrain the most powerful actors in order to protect the vulnerable. That’s what much of the law in the Old Testament aimed to do. You can see this today with the attempt to pass regulations that will restrain the big banks who are essentially predatory. At a practical level, I think that kind of regulation is indispensable for arriving at anything like social shalom.

CS: A shalom way of reasoning, then, would not be a fan of the noxious social and political polemics that now seem entrenched as the organizing principle of our country, and which keep getting worse, incessantly dividing us. A house divided…

WB: That is exactly right, because the single components of shalom are always neighbors. So it’s always about neighbors and the neighborhood. Obviously, the way our society is organized now is against neighborliness, and it’s busy destroying neighborhoods. So shalom is a very subversive idea, when you think about the ordinary practices that we think we ought to do.

CS: Besides its relationality, I also see a relativity to shalom in this world. You don’t use that word in your book, but I think I see your argument supporting it. What I mean, for instance, is that the economic well-being of many of us in America might seem like heaven on earth to people in another country. So our gifts of shalom to them move them along to places of well-being that they might consider as shalom for them. So it seems there’s spectrum to shalom.

WB: I think that’s right. Shalom is a very dynamic notion. It’s always under way, always in process. So we never finalize it. We take incremental steps along the way to try to create safer space for the flourishing of more people.

CS: We really need to get our heads out of the clouds, don’t we? I think of the letter that Jeremiah sent to the Jews in exile in captivity in Babylonia. He has the audacity to tell them to work for the shalom of that place!

WB: Because he had figured out that if there was not a larger, stable kind of social order, that the Jews in Babylon were always going to be vulnerable. You can’t have a private shalom to address. You have to address large, sustained questions.

CS: That letter must have been a huge shock to them, because it would have meant working for a very different-looking kind of shalom than they were accustomed to back home, in Israel.

WB: Yes. It was a context for which they were not prepared.

CS: Have we Americans lost the shock of what that means for us today?

WB: I think that’s right. But you’ve got to remember that Jeremiah was a big renegade in his own society. We do have voices like that now, who are insisting that we have to think and act that way, even though the dominant value system wants to silence people like that.

Living Toward A VisionCS: In the book, you use the words “coerced” and “coercion” as the antithesis to the freedom that God intends for human beings. The cruelest forms of coercion today are being perpetrated by those I call the “submit-or-idea ideologues,” such as the ISIS militants. Any thoughts on ISIS as a coercive power?

WB: Well, I don’t have any direct information, just want I read about them. But I think ISIS is a totally violent movement committed to disturbing tradition and norms. It is the antithesis of shalom. And how we can even have a conversation about shalom in that circumstance is exceedingly difficult to imagine.

CS: Too right. Yet even though working for big-picture shalom does not seem possible in the chaos of Iraq and Syria, we may be able to work in small ways to be gifts of shalom to the countless displaced individuals and families who have fled ISIS for refuge in makeshift shelters and camps. For instance, some friends and I have been raising awareness of and support for initiatives such as The Cradle of Christianity Fund and Heart for Lebanon, which are getting all sorts of immediate and longer-term aid to the most marginalized of these families, which number in the tens of thousands.

WB: What you’re suggesting to me is the mantra: Think globally, act locally. That is, you have to have a huge picture of shalom, but when you go to address it, it requires concrete, immediate, local actions.

CS: And this often means creating an imagination for Christians to be free to practice this kind of obedience.

WB: Yes. I’ve been spending energy thinking about Palestinian rights. I think that is a case in point. The threat is not as immediate as ISIS, but we will never have peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians have some guaranteed rights. And in that particular case, the shalom responsibility is to try to influence American policy, because the state of Israel could not get by with what it’s doing if it did not have the U.S. behind it. I think that needs to be rethought, certainly now in terms of the statements made recently by Netanyahu, which were violently war-mongering statements.

CS: Have you landed on strategies for shifting policy?

WB: I think it requires a political voice and political actions, and being out in front and loud and noticeable about Palestinian rights. The media monopoly that Israel has makes it very difficult for us to get any perspective from the Palestinian side. We have got to let people know, in every way we can, that this is an important issue, that different actions need to be taken or we will never have shalom in that part of the world.

CS: I think that one of our American Christian problems is that we know a lot about Israel but not about the plight of the Palestinians. We need a revelation of that. But many people don’t want an imagination for the Palestinian narrative. How might that be changed?

WB: I think the access point is probably concrete narratives about specific persons who have suffered or been done in by military power that is brutalizing. By telling stories of individuals we’ve got to make the point that these are real human lives that are at stake. We can’t reduce everything to an ideology about the security of Israel. These are real people. I think the only way you get real people out front is by specific narratives about people whose names we know. These narratives are never reported in our press.

CS: Too right. And there are many such stories. These days, it seems like ending the cycle of violence is going to take something even greater even than the wisdom of Solomon. So I know I speak for many people when I say Thank you for you’re ongoing contributions to this.

WB: Well we all have to do what we can. I think that the level of anxiety is so high everywhere that it’s so hard to think rationally about these things.

CS: Right. And even some who want to think more wisely about this seem to be locked into an irrational fear and they’ll hit you with the “But what if?” question.

WB: Sure. Worst case scenario.

CS: And when you say to them, “Okay, so you now know about the goals of the submit-or-die ideologues, what are you going to do about it?”, they have no answer.

WB: Exactly.

CS: Because if you follow that logic to the end and act on it, you’ll be picking up a gun.

WB: That’s right. That’s where it leads.

CS: And here’s where we come full circle back to the way of shalom.

WB: Yes. Shalom calls us to do something radically different. And I’m really glad that you’re staying at these hard issues. It’s hard, slow work isn’t it? And it’s so urgent.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Click here to see a series of short posts on “shalom and wisdom.”

Top image by Mohammad Usaid Abbasi (permission via Creative Commons). Middle image courtesy Heart for Lebanon.

A personal note from Charles Strohmer: If you want more of the perspectives that wagingwisdom.com seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Simply click here wagingwisdom.com, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address just above that button, and then click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice whenever I publish a new article. And, hey, if you really like it, tell some friends! Thank you.

The ISIS horror show: what you now need to know

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higher learningSpeaking recently at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama called ISIS a “brutal, vicious death cult.” As the atrocities and inhumanity of the ISIS horror show spread and worsen, as air strikes continue, and as more combat troops are inserted, even people who have remained largely uninformed now know that they need at least some understanding of ISIS that goes beyond CNN or Fox News. So I thought it would be useful to gather in one place, for easy access, a number of short but informative articles on this.

Last year, over the space of two or three months on this blog, I posted several threads of well researched background articles that readers found helpful for learning what ISIS is on about. These non-sensationalistic but necessary pieces delve well beyond typical news coverage, talk radio punditry, political newspeak, and the religious hyper-ventilating that leaves far too many important questions untouched. Interested? If so, I have listed the first post of each of those threads here, just below, in the order that they were published, beginning with the first post. (At the end of each of those posts is a link taking you to the next piece in that thread.)

We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity. You can probably get through the complete fabric in an hour or two and take away a good “reader’s digest” version of where ISIS/ISIL is coming from and what its religious, political, and social goals are. This will also help you see what leaders of more than sixty nations understand about ISIS/ISIL and why they recently gathered in Washington for an unprecedented three-day summit on countering ISIS.

This is the only place on the Web, at least that I know of, where you can avail yourself of a detailed collection like this in one place. It may not scratch all of your itches, but you will come away pretty well informed.

Here is the list of threads, in order, beginning with the first one. But they have been written in such a way that you could jump in anywhere. I don’t have all the answers (no one does), but such as I have I give to you. If you find this list useful, send it to a friend or two.

1) RELIGION AND THE POST-9/11 BIG PICTURE part 1 of 2

2) THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 1 of 4

3) WHERE ISIS STANDS: US VS. EVERYONE ELSE part 1 of 2

4) ISIS & THE RISE AND FALL OF ISLAM part 1 of 3

5) ISIS & AL QAEDA: THE ROLE OF JIHAD part 1 of 2

6) ISIS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ISLAM part 1 of 2

7) ISIS & JIHAD: INEVITABLE WAR

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Image by Brian Donovan (permission via Creative Commons)

Islam and Christianity: A Conversation with James Skillen

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The Farthest Mosque JerusalemA leading social and political thinker and practitioner, James Skillen is the author and editor of many books and journal articles, and he is president emeritus of the Center for Public Justice. His new book, The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction, has been aptly cited as “a call to political repentance.” Having known Jim for a long time, I have greatly benefited from his biblical grounding and generosity of spirit on a staggering array of topics. Since retiring from CPJ, he is sharing his wisdom by writing, speaking, and mentoring more than ever. This conversation took place at the Terminal Brewhouse in Chattanooga and afterward via email.

Charles Strohmer: Jim, let’s begin with what you see as some core differences between a Christian and a Muslim view of religion and politics in the context of the spread of Islam and Christianity.

James Skillen: Islam is basically a religion of law and its scholars are scholars of the law, and there is no imperial authority. The chief authority is God, who has directed his word through the Prophet. And the Qur’an, in Arabic, is not debatable. It’s the law. Of course Islam has become very complex because you’ve now got all sorts of different schools of interpretation. But what gives it its identity as a whole is the Qur’an.

Where I think it makes the most sense to understand Islam politically is in its view of history, that the whole world should become the dar al-Islam (the abode of the people of God in obedience to Allah). The indisputable idea is that God is creator and sovereign over all, so the dar al-Islam has to unfold, but not necessarily by force, although the early Islamic conquests in the Arabian peninsula and across north Africa and into Spain were seen as satisfying this progress of the dar al-Islam. And this created the idea of the umma, the unified community of Muslims.

CS: Where do militant groups today, such as ISIS/ISIL and al Qaeda, fit in? They are seeking to spread the dar al-Islam through force and violence.

JS: For some Muslims, the big crisis since the end of World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman empire is the shrinkage of Islam. I just heard it again today on the radio: Why isn’t the umma increasing like it should, where is the progress of the dar al-Islam? So there has arisen a radical fringe element that believes you can take up arms to advance the spread of the dar al-Islam, and people like Osama bin Laden and the leader of ISIS [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi] have found legitimacy for that militancy in the Qur’an, whether against non-Muslims or even against Muslims, such as those who support democracy and other things of the West.

So there’s this crisis in Islam in which, on the one had, you have those who, like ISIS, want to see rise of a new caliphate that rules the dar al-Islam through sharia law, and on the other hand you have those who have accepted much about the West.

CS: This doesn’t sound unlike the Christian hope for Christianity to spread around the world, for everything to come under the lordship of Christ.

JS: I would say it is very parallel to a Christian view of the kingdom of God that will someday be fulfilled. It can’t be stopped. The gates of hell will not prevail against God’s progress of this. But the Christian community is not called to conquer all nations but to preach the gospel. Christianity itself cannot be brought by force. With Islam, the nations need to come under rule and everybody needs to submit.

I think the parallel that ought to exist in Christianity is to say, and you see this in Isaiah and other biblical prophets, that to come to church regularly but not to live a life of holiness and justice, that’s mocking God. I mean, you can’t have the God who is the sovereign of all just as a Sunday activity. So to bring all things under the lordship of Christ has to be understood as each thing in its God-ordained sphere of activity. So the radical difference from the radical Muslim and the radical Christian, I would say, is that Christians do not see force as their means for bringing in God’s kingdom. God will do that in his own good time.

Wheat and Tares iconCS: Someone once said to me something like: Christianity is a kind of voluntary society and arose as such, but Islam arose as political religion. Would you say that’s an accurate way to describe a radical difference between the two faiths?

JS: I think Christianity is as much a political religion as Islam, but the view of the political is different. In Christianity, Christ is confessed as king and lord of all. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. But the political task of Christians is one of following Christ as disciples, and Christ did not call them to try to clean up this world of all the weeds that fell into the field of good plants (Matthew 13). God will decide when that should be done. In the meantime we are to live as those seeking justice and loving our neighbors in the world that God is upholding in Christ with the same rain and sunshine falling on the just and unjust alike. The Muslim view of human responsibility under God’s law on earth is very different.

CS: This idea about bringing all things under Christ’s lordship within their God-ordained spheres – many university students and graduates are struggling with this. You often call this “sphere sovereignty,” which is quite different than the Islamic view of sovereignty.

JS: I think Abraham Kuyper’s phrase about “sphere sovereignty” places too great an emphasis on the kind of authority the “sovereign” should have. This is understandable in his context, but his main point was that only God is truly sovereign. And he delegates that sovereignty in differentiated measure to the different arenas of human responsibility. No single human authority, whether church or state, can subsume all human responsibilities under its ultimate sovereignty.

The better way for us to think about this today, I think, is for us to emphasize different kinds of responsibility God has given us, most of which exist by the very nature of what God created us to be: friends, spouses, parents and children, gardeners and farmers and shepherds, priests and governors, and so on. What is required is that we learn how to serve God in every sphere of responsibility in accord with what is required of that responsibility.

In our sin we go crooked, backwards, destructively, violently with our responsibilities, such as by dishonoring our friends, rejecting our parent’s responsibility, destroying the earth, and killing each other. In the new life of Christ into which we have been called, the whole of our identity as human beings – the image of God – is called to repentance and to the renewal of all creational responsibilities. And since these responsibilities are diverse, it is a mistake (historically demonstrated) to ask governments to rule families, or to treat a farm like an engineering corporation, or to expect church leaders to tell us how to vote or how to run a business or how to do chemistry.

Jesus healing the blind manCS: What about the secular / sacred split that afflicts Christianity? It has been severely attacked by Muslim intellectuals such as the Egyptian political activist, the late Sayyid Qutb, who taught that the secular / sacred dichotomy is at the root of the world’s ills. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Osama bin Laden before him, and other radicalized Muslim leaders, are absolutely opposed to the split. And the caliphate that al-Baghdadi is trying to create through ISIS/ISIL seeks to rid the world of it.

JS: Christians should not be accepting any sacred / secular dualism, which in a sense goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic church established a distinction between the religious and the secular. The “secular” didn’t mean “not related to God.” It meant related to God via the Catholic church, the sacraments. Then after Christendom fell apart and the church could no longer command politically with moral authority, the secularists said: Thank goodness we’re getting rid of God and the priests and the hierarchy. We don’t need priests for the things of this world. And so they have what’s before them: a secular world.

All that remains is for that to be radicalized by saying: There is nothing else that exists but this world. There is nothing transcendent that can lead to faith in the radical secularity of this world, in which humans are totally in charge and the idea of God is dispensed with. In Islam generally and in radical Islam as well, there is no recognition of such a secular reality. There is only what God created and God himself, who calls us to rule everything under God. So ISIS would say: We’re not going to get anywhere just by blowing people up. We need a political entity not only to replace the Ottoman empire but to do better than that by establishing a domain, a territory, in which all who live there submit to shari’a in submission to Allah, who will bless this effort and pretty soon the whole world will be submitted to Allah. And the idea of the “secular” will disappear.

What the Christian would say is that there is no secular if what you mean by it is something separated from God and is on its own. Instead, every vocation should be seen as one of the aspects of human dedication to God, in which you love God with all you heart and your neighbor as yourself. And within that framework we would not accept any duality of life. You can and should accept distinctions, such as between churches and states or schools and families, and between this age and the coming age, but this age is not a secular age as compared to the coming age as sacred. It’s all part of God’s one creation.

CS: So where do we go from here? What do you see as a gospel-shaped-wisdom response to Christian – Muslim relations and to U.S. policy toward Muslim majority countries in the Middle East? The problems can seem so overwhelming that one may be forgiven for throwing his or her hands up in despair.

JS: There is no easy answer, because what is really required of Christians is that we show we agree with Muslims in rejecting any acceptance of the “radical secular.” Christians need to show what this means by living it out in every arena of their responsibility as disciples of Christ. In many cases this requires more than churches and Christian publishing companies, more than Christian colleges and some evangelistic organizations on university campuses. It will mean Christians finding appropriate ways to organize themselves in their responsibilities as attorneys, doctors, engineers, bankers, broadcasters, and much more. We have to learn how to quit treating any part of our lives as “secular” and not part of our Christian walk.

At the same time we need to gain a deep understanding of what Muslims believe and how they live in many different countries and settings. And then we must learn to engage them wherever possible in friendship and conversation – where we work, where we study, and where we vote and pay taxes. And in all of that we need to be bold to contend with them about our disagreements as to what the Bible teaches and as to why we ought to live to obey God.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

For interested readers, this site will help you start discovering the wealth of Jim’s wisdom, much of which is being made available on the Web.

Images by Mohammad Usaid Abbasi, Ted, and Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

ISIS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ISLAM part 2 of 2

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Continued from the previous post.

justice statueOn one level in his writings Sayyid Qutb is reacting to what he sees as the West’s moral decadence. No doubt many Christians, and others as well, who see the West as morally decadent would sympathize both with that assessment and with a political program that seeks to redress it. A Christian way of redress, however, would not square with Qutb’s program in his book Social Justice in Islam.

We can’t take time here to go into a Christian program for social justice, but to those who are interested I highly recommend the decades-long work in public policy of the Center for Public Justice, which, like Qutb, opposes the idea of a sacred/secular dichotomy that would confine religions to a private sphere, but, unlike Qutb, opposes the public establishment of any religion.

Further, although Qutb would agree with CPJ that “Religions are ways of life and not merely ways of worship,” he would contest a central CPJ tenet, that we can “do justice to diverse religions and points of view while keeping the public square open to people of all faiths and points of view. This is the challenge that the Center believes can best be met from a Christian-democratic starting point.” See this article on the CPJ site. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am a visiting research fellow with CPJ.) And for a Christian idea of social justice, see this piece of wisdom from James Skillen, about what he calls symphonic justice.

Qutb’s theory of social justice, discussed here, creates a religious-political soil for propagating radical Islamist programs, such the Taliban’s in Afghanistan (1996-2001) and the one that ISIS (the Islamic state) is implementing in parts of Iraq and Syria. And Qutb is not the only go-to Sunni Islamist ideologue. Hasan al-Banna, discussed here, is another.

Other prominent figures include the Palestinian Qutbist Abdullah Azzam, an influential representative of the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s and 1970s, who later became Osama bin Laden’s ideological mentor. In his book Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Gilles Kepel writes that bin Laden was one of Azzam’s university students in Saudi Arabia and the two later became partnership leaders in Afghanistan as they fought the Soviets.

Another key figure is the Pakistani intellectual Mawlana Mawdudi (sometimes “Maududi”). Kepel writes that “Mawdudi and Qutb thought along similar lines and exercised influence among Sunni Muslims.” Further, when bin Laden lived and traveled in Pakistan among the jihadi-salafists around Peshawar in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he would have been with followers of Mawdudi, whose extremist writings, in which “religion was turned into an ideology of political struggle,” were well established throughout the region.

It should also be noted that many fighters have apparently joined groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS not so much for ideological reasons but because of deep resentments they hold toward America and European nations. As well, many devout Muslims around the world are opposed to Qutb’s views and regard them as a distortion of Islam.

What I have been focusing on in this series of posts, however, is the extremist religious roots of Qutb’s worldview and the direct or indirect debt that militant Sunni groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda owe to Qutb’s religious-political writings. I don’t mean that you would find his books calling for suicide bombings, beheadings, and similar other horrors. But it’s clear that “the religion Islam vs. the world” is an organizing principle of his worldview, that its overall ideology lends itself to the starting of military jihads, and that jihadist organizations such as ISIS and al Qaeda can be understood withing Qutb’s worldview.

The most troubling aspect of all of this, it seems to me, is that Qutb’s religious-political ideology supports a view of jihad as inevitable war. This will be the topic of the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Image by Vvillamon (permission via Creative Commons)

ISIS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ISLAM part 1 of 2

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sword of justice statueAs we have seen in recent posts, for Sayyid Qutb the core problem of the world’s many and diverse societies is their secular / scared dichotomy, or the hideous schizophrenia. He sees this as a deep spiritual disorder within the trajectory of human history. It has prevented all societies, with rare and short-lived exceptions, from implementing God’s rule over all of life. The solution, as Qutb writes in Islam: The Religion of the Future, is to implement “the religion of God,” by which he means “the Islamic way of life.” “Only then will the hideous schizophrenia come to an end…. The religion of Islam is the Savior.”

As we saw here, Qutb wrote prolifically in 1940s-1960s Egypt and called for a new breed of Muslim leadership – a purified, or cleansed, vanguard movement – that would implement the religion of God. In a major work titled Social Justice in Islam (SJI), first published in 1949, Qutb expounded the “features and properties” of what his view of the Islamic way of life would look like in a society. The book, which expounds his theory of social justice and the public policies of that theory, is much too densely detailed to discuss in a short blog post, so all I want to do here is summarize its basic idea.

Qutb writes that his theory of social justice is based on “the general lines of Islamic theory on the subject of the universe, life, and mankind,” and that the authoritative source for this is “the Qur’an and the Traditions,” which provide a “general scheme” that must be grasped before one can begin to implement social justice (of the kind that Qutb promotes). Early in the book he lays out this general scheme, which I summarize here in six points:

1.    Allah (God) is, a priori, an absolute unity.
2.    “The Active Will” of Allah, from which “all creation” is “issuing,” or “emanating,” and is sustained and ordered, implies an “all-embracing unity” in nature and in the world of man.
3.    The Creator gives “direct care and constant attention” to nature and the world of man, and because of that all “aspects [of life] are interconnected [politics, economics, faith, history, conduct, work, jurisprudence, etc.] so that one cannot possibly be separated from another.”
4.    Mankind, however, had “lived through long ages without arriving at any comprehensive theory” by which to unite himself and the aspects of life to the essential unity, having developed and followed human creeds that militate against life’s “fundamental solidarity.”
5.    This produced a perennial struggle in which individuals and societies have differentiated between “spiritual and material powers” and either “denied one of these in order to strengthen the other, or … admitted the existence of both in a state of opposition and antagonism”; thus “the struggle between the two types of power continued, with men continually uncertain and perplexed and without any definite assurance as to the true solution.”
6.    Then “came Islam, bringing with it a new, comprehensive, and coherent theory in which there was neither this tension nor this opposition, neither hostility nor antagonism. Islam gave a unity to all powers and abilities, it integrated all desires and inclinations and leanings, it gave a coherence to men’s efforts. In all these Islam saw one embracing unity which took in the universe, the soul, and all human life. Its aim was to unite earth and Heaven into one world; to join the present world and the world to come in one faith; to link spirit and body in one humanity; to correlate worship and work in one life. It sought to bring all these into one path – the path which leads to Allah.”

Legislating justice. Having set out this theoretical backdrop, which Qutb invariably calls “this universal theory, or “Islamic philosophy,” or simply “the Islamic concept,” he then states three principles that “are the foundations on which Islam establishes justice”:

1.    “Absolute freedom of conscience” [he means conscience in submission to Allah alone].
2.    “The complete equality of all men” [women are equal to men not in a liberal Western sense but in a qualified sense he develops called “difference in responsibility”].
3.    “The firm mutual responsibility of society” [everyone, but everyone, is responsible for the welfare, or lack of it, of a community].

In the remainder of the book, beginning with chapter three, Qutb articulates his policies for legislating social justice in Islam. These policies are not possible without the public establishment of Islam in a society. And he ties the policies to long discussions about political theory and economic theory in Islam, while throughout the book interpreting many dozens of surahs in ways that he believes lend support to his views.

SJI covers many areas of legislating justice, including specific public policies for human rights, taxation, banking, debt, inheritance, charity, hunger prevention, theft, murder, property ownership, and courtroom testimony. And some of his policy prescriptions intrude into areas of overt moral conduct – places where Western jurisprudence dares not go publicly – such as adultery, fornication, mocking, flogging, drinking alcohol, hoarding, frivolous spending, overindulgence, and wastefulness.

Continued in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer