Starting Points: proselytization

Apr 4, 2010

Global Voices Online » Morocco: Are Christians at Risk?

In early March, observers watched as around 20 long-time Christian orphanage workers were expelled from the country they called home. The incident, and others which followed it, have brought to light the debate surrounding Christianity in the Kingdom.

While the official Moroccan line is that 98.7-99 per cent of the population is Muslim (the remainder being approximately 1% Christian and 0.2% Jewish), that statistic includes ethnic Europeans residing in Morocco. Proselytizing is illegal, as is conversion away from Islam. Still, foreign Christians are allowed to practice freely, and a number of churches, mostly from the era of French colonization, remain. In contrast, the country's tiny Jewish population is almost entirely native, and is also allowed free practice of their faith.

Despite guarantees of freedom, it would appear that the government is taking a stronger approach of late to proselytism, both real and perceived. The Moroccan Dispatches shares a recent incident in which an Egyptian Catholic priest was expelled from the country:

Evangelicals have operated for years in Morocco, with their main purpose being the conversion of Muslims. Catholics have operated for longer, but purposefully have not engaged in proselytizing. So it came as a surprise that a Catholic priest was also detained and then exported during last week's crackdown.

The blogger shares a message he received from the church in Casablanca:

On Sunday the 7th of March, five minutes before mass began; the police in the city of Larache entered our friary and arrested one of our confrères, Rami Zaki, a young Egyptian friar still in initial formation who was spending a year with us. He was ordered to go with the police, had no possibility to collect anything, and was given no explanation for his arrest…

…When Rami was put on the plane, his passport was taken from him and given to the pilot who later surrendered it with Rami to the police in Cairo. He was detained by the police in Cairo for another seven hours for interrogation before he was permitted to telephone his community of friars. From Sunday, the morning of his arrest, to Tuesday afternoon, when he was released – a total of more than 50 hours – Rami was deprived by the police in Morocco and Egypt of any of his human rights.

In another post, the blogger demonstrates that the public has joined in the crackdowns, citing a recent incident in which a cross was removed from its site of many years:

Where a cross once hung in Meknés

This is the place where a cross used to hang in Meknes' medina. The Catholics who teach Moroccans languages and career skills in this building do not engage in proselytism but have caught up in the anti-Christian sentiment following the recent expulsions of Christians. Last week, the cross was knocked down and beaten into pieces.
On a positive note, Moroccans who have benefited from their services have volunteered to reconstruct the cross.

In a more recent post, the same blogger assesses a TelQuel article on the situation, and says of it:

In the main article, it points out that most Moroccans convert to Christianity more as a result of Arabic media and not from foreign missionaries. This jives with my experience: a number of Moroccans I know have had long conversations with Christian missionaries about religion and none have converted. Some defended Islam while smoking hashish just to piss off the Christians, it that gives you an idea of how many Moroccans understand their Islamic identity. This observation about foreign missionaries, of course, undermines the rationale behind the recent expulsions of many foreigners.

To conclude, the blogger notes the recent media crackdowns and laments:

Other media critical of the government have been shut down recently. And the same could happen to Tel Quel. But as long as they are still around, there will be at least some debate and critical thinking about current events.

Mar 12, 2010

A Christian Overture to Muslims Has Its Critics

Image via Wikipedia

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

January was an ugly month in Malaysia. At least 10 churches were firebombed or vandalized, as was a Sikh temple. Severed boars’ heads — particularly offensive to Muslims, who are not supposed to eat pork — were found on the grounds of two mosques. The cause of this inter-religious strife was a court battle over whether non-Muslims may use the Arabic word “Allah” to refer to God.

The reports from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, described events that we imagine could never happen in the United States, where the First Amendment is supposed to guard against such conflict. But we have fights over religious language, too, even if the violence rarely rises above name-calling.

On Feb. 3, Ergun Caner, the president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., focused attention on a Southern Baptist controversy when he called Jerry Rankin, the president of the denomination’s International Mission Board, a liar. Dr. Caner has since apologized for his language, but he still maintains that the “Camel Method,” a strategy Dr. Rankin endorses for preaching Christianity to Muslims, is deceitful.

Instead of talking about the Jesus of the New Testament, missionaries using the Camel Method point Muslims to the Koran, where in the third chapter, or sura, an infant named Isa — Arabic for Jesus — is born. Missionaries have found that by starting with the Koran’s Jesus story, they can make inroads with Muslims who reject the Bible out of hand. But according to Dr. Caner, whose attack on Dr. Rankin came in a weekly Southern Baptist podcast, the idea that the Koran can contain the seeds of Christian faith is “an absolute, fundamental deception.”

David Garrison, a missionary who edited a book on the Camel Method by Kevin Greeson, the method’s developer, defends the use of the Koran as a path to Jesus. “You aren’t criticizing Muhammad or any other prophets,” Dr. Garrison said, “just raising Jesus up.”

He explained that after reading the sura in which Maryam, or Mary, gives birth to Isa, a missionary might ask a Muslim, “Do you know of any other prophets born of a virgin?”

And, Dr. Garrison continued: “It says in that passage that Isa would be able to cleanse the leper, even raise the dead. At that point in the conversation with Muslims, we say, ‘Isn’t it interesting that Isa had this tremendous power that God gave to him? Even death was under his power.’

“Then you ask the question, ‘Is there any other prophet that had this kind of power?’ And in Islam, there isn’t.”

“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.

While Dr. Rankin, who said that he had received Dr. Caner’s letter of apology, would not offer a specific number of souls won to Christ, he said there was anecdotal evidence that the Camel Method was an important innovation in reaching the Muslim world.

“We have just heard amazing reports all over South Asia, India, Pakistan, North Africa, where people have found a receptivity to the Gospel,” he said.

Christians have long known that there is a Jesus in the Koran, but missionaries have only sporadically made use of that story.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, who teaches Islamic theology at the University of Notre Dame, said that Christians in eighth-century Baghdad defended their faith by pointing to passages in the Koran. “But that was never with an eye toward converting Muslims,” Dr. Reynolds said. “Such a thing would have been unthinkable. It was only a way of gaining legitimacy in intellectual conversations.”

In recent years, however, missiologists — scholars of mission work — have begun urging “insider” evangelism and “contextualization”: placing the Gospel in an indigenous context, to reach those from alien cultures.

“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”

The danger, critics of the Camel Method say, is twofold: exploitation of Muslim culture and infidelity to the Christian message. According to Dr. Caner, missionaries who say the Koran can be a “bridge” to Christianity risk obscuring real differences between the two traditions.

For example, the missionary board recommends that in some cases missionaries use “Allah” to refer to God. As Dr. Garrison explains it, “there is only one God, the God who created the heavens and earth,” so talking about the Christian God as “Allah” is not misleading. But Allah is also the specific god of the Koran, who says things the New Testament God would not. And the Isa of the Koran, while based on the Jesus of the New Testament, is quite different.

“You can ask any Muslim,” said Dr. Caner, a Turkish-American from a Muslim family who became a Christian in high school. “ ‘Do you think that the Allah of the Koran had a son?’ The most important sura in the entire Koran, sura 112, the pre-eminent chapter of the Koran, says explicitly, ‘Allah does not beget, nor is he begotten.’ ”

The missionaries’ use of “Allah” to refer to the Christian God thus strikes Dr. Caner as an error both semantic and theological. In good Baptist missionary fashion, he contextualizes his argument with a culturally relevant, if antiquated, example: the song “My Sweet Lord,” by George Harrison.

“There’s the word ‘Lord,’ ” Dr. Caner said. “Do you go, ‘Oh look, he’s a worshipper of God?’ ‘Lord’ is an English term, but is he talking about the same Lord” — the ones Christians worship?”

“Of course not,” Dr. Caner said, since at the time Mr. Harrison wrote the song, he was interested in Hare Krishna theology.

“Is it fair to use the George Harrison song and say he’s talking about the same god?” Dr. Caner asked. “My answer is no.”