The topic that I’m talking about is a very interesting topic because it comes from a book that I wrote a number of years ago. Actually my wife and I came up with the idea after the Gulf War of 1991. Then I was concerned, that as a result of the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War, that Islam would be seen as the next global threat and little did I know that with 9/11 that in fact that would become the situation in many ways.

The other night I was speaking in Washington at a club, the Cosmos Club, which is also a club that I happen to belong to, and we had a panel of three people. Things were going really well and it was a packed audience. The question and answer period went well. And then someone got up, ostensibly to ask a question but basically it was an attack. And he began the attack by saying “Well you wrote this book called the Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality and then you changed your mind when you wrote a book called Unholy War, how do you explain that?” And I remember saying to him, “I think you might want to buy another copy of my book because the thesis of the Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality at the end of the day was, Islam is not a threat. Muslim Extremists are a threat. Just as Christianity is not a threat but Christian’s who blow up people in Northern Ireland or blow up abortion clinics are a threat. Judaism is not a threat, but Jew’s who assassinate Prime Minister Rabin or Jew’s like Baruch Goldstein, who walked into a Muslim Mosque and killed some 20 plus people and injured probably a 100, they’re a threat.”

Yet post 9/11 that has become a problem. President Bush quite rightly, early on and consistently, has distinguished between the religion of Islam and what extremists do. However people close to President Bush and people in Congress have often not done that. Preachers like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham have not made that distinction. Franklin Graham continued to say, despite the fact the Grahams are close to the Bush family, despite the fact that Franklin Graham gave the invocation at President Bush’s swearing in for his first term, “Islam is evil. The God of Islam is not our God”. Falwell said, the Prophet was a pedophile, or as a talk show host said to me once “Well how can you trust a religion where its prophet also led an army and was a warrior?”

I thought well that’s very interesting. I wonder how you read the Old Testament, what do we do with Joshua and David? How do you think the Canaanites felt when Joshua came in? I mean it’s a very curious. Now of course Christians always have their answer. Because we know that in Christianity, Christianity is a religion of Peace, Jesus said turn the other cheek. The problem is that when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire then Augustine had to come along and develop a just war theory, to begin to talk about how we could go to war and how Christians today can be people who proudly serve in the military and develop Weapons of Mass Destruction. So we have a very interesting kind of situation.

I remember being in a dialogue years ago, a Muslim, Christian, Jewish dialogue, where I was asked to be the Muslim. I thought I was going to be asked to be the Christian with some perspective but they couldn’t find a Muslim other than one who was a doctor or computer engineer, that is they couldn’t find one who was an expert on Islam. This is about 25 years ago in the Boston area. I was dialoguing with a Catholic Priest, who himself knew something about the Muslim world. In fact he and some colleagues had done a book on Medieval Writings of Christians, Jews and Muslims. But he kept talking about the fact that Islam had this notion of Holy War and you know I kept thinking well maybe I’m reading a different Old Testament but it seems to me that there’s a notion of Holy War there but I didn’t even go there. I just said “Well what do we do about the crusades and the inquisition?” And I thought his answer was extraordinarily perceptive. He said, “In the inquisition, we just tried them. So we tried them, we found them guilty but we’re not guilty because the state executed them.” It’s a very interesting kind of phrase.

So today I want to talk about this theme and I want to try and put it in some kind of historical perspective for you because I do think we are at a critical time in our history and as history has a way of operating, it is very unpredictable. At the end of the 20^th Century, I was giving lectures on how the 21st Century might well be the Century of Islam. What I meant by that, was that Islam was emerging in the West as the second or third largest religion. When I got into the field in the late 60’s, early 70’s, Muslims were invisible in Europe and America. There were no Islamic Centers and Mosques, there might have been Muslim’s here but they were relatively invisible. Those that were here tried to blend in and so people thought that Islam was a religion over there, in 56 countries but not here. In 30-35 years Islam is now the second or third largest religion in the West. And I’d begun to see Muslim communities taking off in America, really becoming very much a part of this system, as professionals, as neighbors etc. And then along came 9/11.

Shortly after 9/11 I had a meeting of my advisory board which consists of people from all over the world and the person who’s the Co-chair said “You know John, your center has achieved exponentially more than we could have ever hoped for”, but then he paused and said, “9/11 has put us 20 years behind.” I think he’s right. At the time I thought 10 years. If I were to give you an optimistic scenario it would be that it will take a generation, to turn things around, both in terms of the Muslim world as well as the United States, and even Europe. It’ll take probably 10 years to turn around anti-Americanism in Europe, Japan and China. I don’t know about China, I don’t think we are going to turn that one around. But the situation I think is very serious, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel, but that tunnel is quite long.

When I got into the field in the early 70’s, there were these poor folks who were in the field of studying Islam and were retiring. I thought it must be terrible for them that there’s no peace in Palestine and the situation looks like it’s getting worse. I was convinced, however, that in my lifetime it was a no-brainer, that the situation would get better, and particularly after the Iranian Revolution. Sure we felt threatened, but as a result there was more interest in covering of Islam. We introduced it in the curriculum of our schools; we had more publications, more media coverage. But the fact is, along with good has come also the downside.

So I just want to raise a couple of things for us to think about. I think one of the first things is to realize that many of us have been trained to think about a Judeo-Christian tradition. That very notion is post World War II. It is post World War II because certainly most people didn’t think of a Judeo-Christian tradition historically. Christians didn’t think of it because they were busy persecuting or killing, Jews. Jews certainly didn’t think of it because they were busy being persecuted or killed or being discriminated against. But post World War II, at the fallout from the holocaust etc, we developed a notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition. But Islam wasn’t part of that equation.

Islam was always grouped with the Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. And indeed when I was first asked to take a course in Islam in graduate school I had no intention of studying Islam. I wondered why, why would I do it? Why would I study another exotic religion? I had studied Christianity; I had studied Hinduism and Buddhism. Why do Islam? And part of what fascinated me when I studied Islam was to realize that Islam was a monotheistic tradition. That there was a direct relationship between Islam and Jews and Christians, that Muslims like Jews and Christians accept revelation and prophets, accept Moses and Jesus. One of my Muslim colleagues sent his twin sons to Georgetown; their names were “Musa” and “Issa”, Moses and Jesus. Mary is mentioned more in the Qur’an than she is in the New Testament. Muslims, like Jews and Christians see themselves as children of Abraham. So why are they not there? Why have we not seen them that way?

Well, in an interesting way, if you look at the rise of Islam, you have a very fascinating phenomenon. When Christianity came along it said seriously (and I’ll do it in a not so serious tone) to the Jews, “It’s really great. God revealed himself and his will to you, gave you a revelation and a covenant. But guess what, we represent the new covenant. We represent the fulfillment, so your Hebrew Bible is the Old Testament (which is a pejorative term if you think about it, if you’re a Jew). We have the New Testament”. That’s known as super-secessionism. Christianity superseded Judaism.

Well when Islam came along, in effect what Islam was saying is an extension of that argument. “Guess what, God’s revelation came to the Jews, then to the Christians but for a variety of reasons that revelation became distorted and so God in his mercy revealed his scripture yet one final and complete time in the Qur’an and to one final prophet, the prophet Muhammad.” Well, on the one hand, you could say, that’s a challenge, theologically. And it was. But it also was a political challenge. Now, theologically it was a challenge taken very seriously by Christians because Christianity believed that it had the final revelation and a universal mission to spread the Word and convert all to Christianity. Indeed many Christians believe that if these people weren’t converted, they weren’t going to go to heaven. So you had a theological challenge but at the same time remember Christianity, we always talk about Christianity as you know, “separation of church and state”, “render to God, the things that are God’s and to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” In fact, however, there was a very close relationship between church and state. Why would we talk about the Holy Roman Empire? Why would we talk about Christian Emperors? There might be some vying between the Pope and the Emperor but often it was more about who had more power than really who is the better Christian.

So, when Islam came along Islam was not just a religion, for when Muslim rulers spread the rule of Islam they spread empire. Then Islam was both a theological challenge and a political challenge to Christianity. And in many ways over history we’ve seen that challenge going back and forth, working its way through the crusades and the inquisition, the “Ottoman” threat, European colonialism which was not just about crown but also about cross. And one can continue right down to the current situation. But something else happened. Because for an America that did not know anything about Islam, it suddenly encountered Islam, or at least most Americans did with the Iranian Revolution. When the Iranian Revolution occurred, Tom Brokoff on the Today Show stopped the show in the morning to say “Let me tell you something about Islam. Islam is the second largest of the world’s religions. It has a prophet named Muhammad and a sacred scripture called the Qur’an.” Then he went back to his story.

Now think about this. This is America. We pride ourselves on being one of the best educated, most sophisticated countries in the World. We can debate that depending on our political persuasion but I won’t get into that. But there is a God, so we can only hope. But in any case, there was Tom Brokoff giving the most basic concepts. I mean many of us would say “Gee if we were traveling in the world and we went to a country where there was a good education system like Japan, we’d expect that the Japanese would have heard the word Bible and Jesus. That you wouldn’t need somebody to say “There’s a Bible for Christians, that’s their sacred scripture”

So there was no context within which to understand Islam. So what became the context? Americans held hostage. And so when Ted Koppel had his show, it wasn’t just Americans held hostage, if you remember, it was America held hostage; Every night. And who was holding them hostage? Well every day you saw Muslims, people who represented a faith that very few people knew anything about. So our first engagement of Muslims is people who are out there shouting “Death to America”. As I say to many of my Muslim friends and my Iranian friends “Americans aren’t stupid, if someone says, ‘Death to America’, they believe they mean it.”

Of course when you are dealing with the media, the sense is this must be what they are all like. Analogously I liken that to if you haven’t met a particular ethnic group and then you meet one or two people from that ethnic group. The danger is you are going to generalize about everybody else based on the one or two people from that ethnic group. And that’s what happens for many Americans, given the realities of the media, a media that’s concerned with explosive headline events. What the vast majority of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world do is not covered regularly in the media. What a significant minority, but a small minority of very deadly folk, do that is going to be what one sees everyday. I don’t know of a comparable example. I tried to make it up and say things like “Well if there were 50 Northern Irelands instead of 56 Muslim countries, people would be saying, what it is about those Protestants and Catholics?” Or, perhaps, the sustained coverage of pedophilia in the Catholic Church is another example. Maybe put that in a context where people know nothing about Catholicism and the conclusion would be, “My God, those Catholics, I mean, they are all like that!” How could you send your kid to a seminary? You know, everyone must have this kind of horror story. Well let’s fast forward then, what has actually happened since the Iranian Revolution? We have the Iranian Revolution; we have Saddam Hussein calling for a Holy War in the 1991 War; we have the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and then we have 9/11. As a result, some wind up saying that Islam is the next global threat, rather than Muslim extremism is a global threat.

Some wind up saying that Islam is not only a political threat, it’s a civilization threat and it’s a demographic threat. It’s very interesting, you know I’ve written a lot of books and I’m at a good university and I get a lot of attention. But I am the dumbest of the three boys in my family and I’ve never been great at looking at dictionaries even though I always dump on my students for not doing it. And when everyone kept talking about a demographic threat I hadn’t gone onto the word demographic so I didn’t know what they meant. And then I suddenly realized what they were saying is they are not only threatening us out there in the Middle East and the Muslim World, they are threatening us in Europe and America because suddenly they are on the scene and what are we going to do? As Pat Buchanan said in an article that he wrote years ago, “While their religious cohorts are threatening us in Iran and Lebanon, Muslim doctors in Germany from Turkey, are performing abortions on indigenous Germans, who are of course Christian in background or secular, who are limiting their families. And those doctors are not only performing the abortions to keep the families of these people small, but they are making money so that those doctors can have 7 or 8 children. They have larger families than we have-hence the demographic threat.

Others would say things like, “It’s a political threat that’s existed for fourteen centuries, it’s fourteen centuries of Jihad” With no sense that the conflict intention was started by both sides. But also blocking out the fact, that in many parts of the world, there have been co-existence between Muslims and Christians, particularly among traders and businessmen who are more concerned with trading and business than about religion. Or blocking out Andalusia, Spain and what is today modern day Portugal, where you had in the Muslim world, Christians, Jews and Muslims living side by side. Now that situation gets ratcheted up after 9/11. Because after 9/11 we say, “Why do they hate us?” So what have we first done? Created an ‘us’ and ‘them’. Well who are the ‘they’, are they the Muslim extremists who flew the planes? Or, are the ‘they’, Muslims, all Muslims? Those fires get stoked by the militant Christian right. When I say militant Christian right, I distinguish that from main stream Christian right. Preachers, some of those whom I cited before, who have prominence and who give sound bites and are therefore quickly taken up by the media. The vast majority of your mainstream Christian leaders are never on television. But you get a sound bite from a Pat Robertson because obviously if Robertson says “Let’s assassinate the President of Venezuela” they are going to put that on the news.

You know, it’s just the reality. To give you a comparable example, how many of you know, raise your hand, W. Deen Muhammad? How many know who W. Deen Muhammad is? Ok, well I guess all the knowledgeable people all sit pretty much in this row. Ok, W. Deen Muhammad is the leader of the largest group of African-American Muslims. On the other hand, how many of you know who Louis Farrakhan is? Raise your hand. There we are. That’s the product of the media. Louis Farrakhan is a leader of a much smaller group of American Muslims, but what does Louis Farrakhan have? He’s photogenic and he gives you sounds bites and he says the kinds of things that the media like to report. When somebody says “Jews, Christians and Muslims are children of Abraham”, do you really think the media is going to cover that? Somebody else says, “Jews are a major problem, we have to do something about that. And white people, they are a major problem.” That speech is going to be quoted.

This is part of the problem we have dealt with post 9/11. How do we begin to distinguish between mainstream Islam and extremists? Is there an Islamic threat or a Muslim extremist’s threat? Even more important after 9/11, we have had a problem. When we said, “Why did this happen?” What did we find both democrats and republicans often saying? Former Clinton people as well as Bush people. “But they just hate us.” I love to say, “So and so is stupid, that is a stupid argument”. My wife always says to me in reply, “Stupid doesn’t communicate anything” and I always say, “Yes, it does and it makes me feel good”. I say it and I feel like I’ve said something meaningful and I feel good. You know, if I give a kind of esoteric response, I feel it’s just a head-trip. Part of the reality is, if you just say, “They hate us” that kind of answered the question easily, when we are trying to understand why they do it. Or we say (and this is the really great one), “We are liberal, secular, democratic, love apple pie people”, I mean you name it, all the plusses and “They are…” and then we don’t even fill in the rest; they are all the opposite.

Now the ‘they’. Who are the ‘they’? Well, let’s see, if ‘they’ are all that way, then it means that most Muslims wake up in the morning and say “Thank God I live under an authoritarian regime and I’m not in a democracy. I don’t have to make any choices, it makes my life easy. I may have to worry that’s someone’s going to arrest me but by and large, I don’t have to make any decisions” And of course ‘they’ totally resent our capitalism, rather than maybe they resent some part, our conspicuous consumption, which affects their part of the world. Or as one Presbyterian who works for the American government said, “They resent a capitalism, and maybe we should, of excess rather than success” But instead we act as if people wake up and say, “I hate capitalism, I don’t want to make money, making money is terrible” This makes no sense to prophet Muhammad who was a very prosperous businessman. Most of the early leaders of Islam were prosperous businessmen. Your religious leaders, in Islam, the Ulama often come from families that intermarry or come from business families. You go to major Mosques, what is right next door to the Mosque? The Bazaar. It’s like going to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and finding Bloomingdales next door. I mean it’s a slight exaggeration (but I like Bloomingdales so, it’s a little more interesting than some of the Bazaar’s I’ve been to).

So then we had that kind of answer. But when people said, “Let’s talk about the root causes of terrorism.” That we don’t want to touch, that we don’t want to look at. What are the root causes of terrorism? You know, are the root causes those that lead to alienation, marginalization and radicalization? Are there grievances that people can appeal to, particularly to attract young people? Are there grievances that also are held by mainstream Muslims? Who are not haters of America, but like many people in Europe and Japan and China, are anti-American. Look at the polls. Do they have a problem with our foreign policy? Having a problem with our foreign policy, doesn’t mean they hate America because many of them have studied here and have homes here.

It’s rather that they think that we are hypocrites, that we have a set of principles and values, that are good for us but we somehow don’t feel are good for them i.e. the promotion of democracy. After the Cold War, we promoted it in every place in the World, except the Middle East. We talk about human rights but we support authoritarian regimes all over the Muslim world that violate human rights all the time. But many didn’t want to look at that. Without that explanation we can’t understand that genesis. Without that explanation we can’t understand why after 9/11 there was so much sympathy around the world initially, both in the Muslim and non-Muslim world. And yet within a short time after it, all the statistics and the polls saw anti-Americanism go up exponentially. Why? Because we were seen as unilateral, arrogant and neocolonial. And indeed you hear people talk that way. Somehow we have a mission to change the world, not we have a mission to work with others to change the world. We are going to define what that new world looks like and then we will invite our allies to join us and if they choose not to, then we will go to war or we will introduce this measure or that measure.

So where are we today and what are the challenges? It’s seems to me the challenges are multiple. On the one hand, many in the Muslim world and in Muslim communities have to grapple with the realization that there is a strong extremist strand. Lots of mainstream Muslims don’t experience that strand. Many in Muslim countries do but if they live in Europe and America, they don’t. And therefore they get on with their lives; they don’t feel the need to be concerned about that, just as many Christians in America and many Jews don’t spend their waking hours worrying about Christian and Jewish extremists. And indeed if somebody asked them, they’d say “I don’t think about it, I don’t care. These people really aren’t Christians or Jews. They are just a small margin.” Many of my Israeli friends, particularly those who are very secular orientated will say, “The religious right is insignificant in Israel. You know, there might be an assassination every now and then.” Why, because, the religious right people are not the people they hang out with. They are not the people that they care about.

Well many Muslims now realize that the extremist fringe has to be addressed because a) it’s a danger in the Muslim world and b) it’s now a danger in Europe and America. It’s a danger to them as fellow Americans and fellow Europeans. It’s also a danger because the fallout from that can affect their civil liberties. Because Muslims who came here to escape being arrested in the middle of the night in Iraq or some other country and have lived here for 20 or 25 years, now realize they can be arrested similarly under the Patriot Act on secret evidence. That they could be held indefinitely, some for 2, 3, 4 years, and not be allowed a lawyer or if they get a lawyer, have a lawyer who’s not allowed to see evidence and not be brought to trial. So Muslims have to grapple with the issues of extremism and the issues of reform, and indeed many of them are. How about Muslim countries? Well the vast majority of Muslim countries are authoritarian. So when you say to yourself, “Why are these people so extremist?” This is now getting to the healing part of my talk.

Part of the problem we have is we will say things like “Is there something about Arab culture or Islam? Because there are all these authoritarian regimes and there’s this extremism. But the answer is kind of a no-brainer. Why is there extremism? Because there are authoritarian, repressive regimes. A lot of people when they deal with an authoritarian repressive regime, buckle under. They just learn to live, keep their head down, want to raise their family, have a job. Other people are in opposition. Well the danger when a regime uses violence is that after a while people become radicalized and use violence. But still there is the question: why are they so authoritarian? Think about this. What does the history of Christianity and Judaism show us? That Christians and Jews were democrats? Divine right kingdoms? Divine right kingdoms until the modern era. Feudalism? But modern democracy developed in the West but then how did it develop? The Reformation and the Enlightenment.

I always love it when people say “Muslim’s need Reformation”. Sometimes I talk about that but when I kiddingly talk to Muslim audiences, I say “What they are advocating is genocide because the Reformation also meant religious wars.” We Catholics know what the Protestants did to us. Ah ha, my Protestant friends know what they think the Catholics did to them, noticed how I changed the wording? No. But I mean the reality of it is we talk about the Reformation and the Enlightenment like it was this smooth period. Instead of the fact that it wasn’t just about religious dialogue and people sort of Lutherans and Catholics putting their feet up and having a kind of theological dialogue. People went to war and killed each other. Then we had the development of the modern nation state, the French Revolution and then the Post French Revolution, the American Revolution and then an even bloodier civil war. But when you look at the Muslim world what do you see? A movement from divine right kingdoms to European colonialism.

So after ten or twelve centuries, you are dominated by an outside power. An outside power, that’s not going to promote democracy. Then they leave and who comes in? Kings, military and ex-military. So for the last 40 or 50 years how many governments of the Muslim world are democratically elected? And what are many of these governments like, even when they have a parliament or a political party system; they are authoritarian regimes that dismiss the parliament. They are one party government. Now if you have that kind of regime, you then have a culture of authoritarianism as well as a culture of violence. And so what is the end result going to be? If you are raised in a culture of democracy, you might respond democratically. So you, depending on your politics, you see somebody elected, your first reaction isn’t “The military should take over” or “We have to do something about him or her”.

So Muslim governments have to be pressured to move along a democratic path. I would tend to say they have to be kicked along that path for some of them because of post 9/11. What do many of these governments say? “We are fighting terrorists, so don’t tell us about human rights” And what they do is blur the distinction between extremists in their society and any and all opposition. Look at Uzbekistan. Look at Egypt in recent years. They blur that distinction and say to America, “Now see 9/11 shows you what we are dealing with all the time, so give us your aid. Give us your military aid, give us…but don’t tell us how to use it, don’t tell us who against we are going to use it” And what about America and Europe and those of us who are Christians and Jews and Muslims? In America and Europe we need to prove that we are the liberal pluralistic societies we say we are. You know, we’ll say, “How liberal and pluralistic can Muslims be?” Which is kind of interesting too. The first kid on the block is always likely to then look down on the rest of the kids on the block.

If you look at Judaism, you have Conservative Jews, you have ultra Orthodox Jews, you have Reformed Jews, and you have Reconstructionist Jews. What does that tell us? That Jews facing modernity chose different paths. Some still choosing to be more conservative than others.

So, if you look at Christianity? One of my professors is an Egyptian Muslim. He was invited by the American Academy of Religions (this is 20 years ago) to give his reflections, having taught in America for a year. They asked him “What do you think of Christianity?” He said, “Do you know, I’ve studied Christianity for years. What I can’t figure out is you all used to kind of believe that there was a Trinity and Jesus played a certain role and the church functioned in a certain way and then the Reformation came along. And now you have all these groups. They all call themselves Christians. Some believe in the Trinity, some don’t. Some in believe in Jesus, in a high Christology and some have a low Christology. Some believe that you pray to God and God changes things and others people say just think good thoughts.” Some of the people in the audience got upset but he was identifying a reality. The process of change and reform takes a long time and it shakes out in a lot of different ways. So for Christians to say things like, “I don’t know about Islam, they have major problems with women and gender and they’ll never change. And they have a problem with democracy.” I keep thinking, “Gosh, you know, I don’t remember the history of Christianity being all that democratic. I don’t seem to remember the history of Christianity being all that great with regard to women. I’m still not sure today. I watch some churches that are back sliding. You’ve got some Protestant churches that have actually reversed their positions on women. But if we don’t get out in the media and say, “These people are becoming extremists and this is just the first step. If they treat their women like this, what’s the next step?” Are we going to have problems with regard to not just whether or not women can work in the work place but we are going to have problems with violence against women? Because we know, we don’t have a problem in America with violence against women!

You know, I taught a course in which we read an article in Egypt where all of a sudden you were winding up with cases of violence against women and how this is becoming a big write up in the newspapers. And one of my students said, “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” I said because we don’t have that problem here? And another kid kept shaking his head. I said, “What’s the problem?” He said, “You keep talking about the issue of women and race.” He said, “Your generation solved that problem. We don’t have that problem in America anymore. We don’t have problems with race and discrimination. We don’t have problems with regard to gender!”

So one of the things that we have to deal with, first of all as a government is: How do we have a war about global terrorism that does not look like a war against Islam and the Muslim world?

On 9/12, not 9/11, a Muslim friend of mine in the Arab world said, “It’s terrible what Osama Bin Laden did. Your country will want to go after him. But we wonder whether this is the beginning or the end.” And I said, “What do you mean?” and she said, “Will this become an excuse for redrawing the map of the Middle East and the Muslim world?” Well many Muslims look at a war which expanded to Afghanistan, a war which then develops new frontiers. A war which talked about axis of evil countries, in which all the countries are Muslim except for North Korea. North Korea was the number one country in terms of being a nuclear threat and yet we said we could deal with that diplomatically but the Muslim countries we would deal with possibly militarily and certainly we decided to do that with Iraq. As if Iraq, even when we thought they had Weapons of Mass Destruction, were a greater threat from a nuclear point of view than North Korea. And of course we never discovered any. Then we said the real reason before we went into the war was democracy. But then many of my Muslim friends wonder, is democracy something that you are really going to help develop and stimulate or is democracy really a new weapon? A new way to justify invading a country? Or a new way to change a regime that you don’t like? Or a new way to simply pressure an ally to do things that, that ally might not want to do?

But what are we as Christians and Jews and people of faith, faced with? We are faced, it seems to me, with an additional obligation. We have an obligation as citizens and we have an obligation as believers, those of us that are believers. But they dovetail in many ways because the reality of it is post 9/11 from the point of view from security and from the point of view of economics, everybody needs to be concerned. If there are attacks, the economy goes bad, that affects jobs etc. But what about us believers? We live in a world of greater globalization but that greater globalization means not only contacts among people in different countries, greater globalization means that unlike 30 or 35 years ago, you can travel across America and be outside of cities or towns not just in cities and see a Hindu Temple, see an Islamic Center or a Mosque. I’ve been to Mississippi. I thought they only had one Islamic Center. I couldn’t believe they even had one. I discovered they had them here, here and here…

So we live in a world in which we are more and more challenged to realize that we need to figure out, how are we going to work together, how are we going to live together? We live in a world, where those of us who are Christians and sometimes meaning well, but actually like some of my Muslim friends, having a pretty chauvinistic and patronizing attitude, really think that we’ve got it and they don’t. You see, a lot of people of faith, say “My religion believes in compassion.” But often what they really mean, the dirty little secret is, “My religion believes in community but community is my community of faith. And compassion is for my community.” You see, a guy like Falwell or Robertson when they are condemning Islam, they’ll say “Our God is a God of compassion” etc. But then you see the amount of hate which comes out of their mouth not just viz-a-viz Muslims but about people of other faiths. And not just even people of other faiths but other Christians. Think about those Christian preachers who say, “I don’t care how good a Christian you are. If you are not born again, you are not going to be saved.”

So a lot of my Christian friends and a lot of my Muslim friends subscribe to what I call the “The Hyatt Regency approach to salvation” Hyatt Regencys have glass elevators so the way I know I am going up is I see you going down. That’s number one. They need to see that, you see. The second thing that’s implicit in that, and they don’t realize it, they are going to get to heaven; heaven’s going to be this enormous ballroom. But the stunner is going to be that a) it’s enormous and not a small place that just the elite got in to and

b) they are going to walk in and see it crowded and they are going to want to say to God, “You let all these people in? I worked so hard, I made all these sacrifices and you let him in? I mean I know he’s ok but I can tell you stories about him, a back slider. You let her in?” That kind of righteous mentality. How many Christian and Muslim preachers wind up judging in a way in which you think isn’t righteousness God’s, isn’t God the one who judges somebody’s soul? And yet they feel to judge people of other faiths and of their own faith. Well, you know, that’s the kind of thing we can talk about, we can laugh about but at the end of the day, in today’s world, it’s scary. Because it can be the justification for going to war, it can become the justification for talking about the other and demonizing the other. It can become the justification for falling into the rhetoric of Osama Bin Laden. If I’m right, you are wrong. If I’m oppressed, you are the oppressor. If I am fighting for good, you are evil.

Have you ever counted the number of times the President uses the word evil? It’s absolutely fascinating. It’s absolutely amazing if you actually do a quantitative count, of that word evil. It’s very dangerous. I’m sure he doesn’t mean it but it’s very dangerous…you know you create a black and white world. And then it becomes a world which says, “Look if we are fighting evil, then the end justifies the means.” So what happened with the war in Iraq, most mainstream Christian leaders, despite what many of us might think as Christians, the most mainstream Christian leaders were against the invasion of Iraq in terms of violating just war theory. Ok, well what did others wind up saying? Global terrorism means new regulations of laws; just war is out of date, pre-emptive strikes are in. Without thinking about the fact that what you are really saying with a pre-emptive strike is that it’s ok if I do it, not if you do it.” Just like with nuclear power, “It’s ok if I have nuclear power because I’m responsible. But not you. India can have nuclear power but not the Pakistanis. Israelis can have nuclear power but not the Arabs etc.” It’s very interesting.

So it seems to me, that we as believers have to begin to emphasize more and more, and to appropriate, certainly those of us that are Jews and Christians, the reality that there is a Judaeo-Islamic-Christian tradition. Those members of these faiths are children of Abraham. That they have distinctive differences but they do have a shared heritage, they worship one true God, they accept prophets and revelation, again they may have different perspectives on this. They believe in ethical accountability and responsibility. They believe in a judgment day and they believe in reward and punishment. These values are important.

The final thing I would say is, don’t talk theology. Don’t talk theology when you engage the other. The first thing you do when you engage the other is, you engage the other as neighbor, as somebody in the work place and then you determine, the way we all do when we deal with people, whether we like them or not. And then if we do, then we can talk about religion. If you start with theology, the first thing you are going to want to deal with is, “You know your faith seems curious to me because you believe X”, “Explain the trinity to me.” or “Your faith believes Y, why would God allow himself to be crucified?” Or when it comes to Islam, “You’ve got this belief and it seems strange to me?” So now you get dragged away by the theology, you get dragged away by the differences and we are not dealing with first coming to respect each other and to kind of say after a while “Well gee, if they are very like me, in terms of being concerned about values, family values, about what’s going on in the schools, in the neighborhood, about being honest etc. Then gee if I also know they are religious, then it must be that there is something that comes out of their religious tradition.”

And so I leave you with this thought. That post 9/11 we all have an obligation, whether we like it or not, to be involved. When I first got into studying Islam, audiences never came, nobody was interested and people didn’t see a relevance to what you did. Now they do. And I can argue both on pragmatic grounds but also on theological grounds: the time is short. If things get worse in the next few years we will wind up with an irreparable clash. And there will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many on both sides will come to see conflicts which have concrete, political and economic bases for them which then get legitimated in the name of religion in order to mobilize people, in order to inspire people etc. If that happens, we all lose.