Christian Study Centre Silver Jubilee Nov. 22-27, 1993
"Development of Christian Theology in The Context of Islam"

SETTING THE AGENDA:
CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF ISLAM
Dr Charles Amjad-Ali
Director
Christian Study Centre, Pakistan

Organizing a seminar of this stature is in itself an overwhelming experience. One never knows who may or may not be able to come, what kind of travel difficulties and other constraints one faces in coming to Pakistan. That you are here is a highly encouraging sign for us at the Centre as well as for the Christian community in Pakistan, but more particularly for the efforts at Christian-Muslim dialogue in a country which defines itself as ideologically Islamic. So let me once again welcome you to this seminar which I sincerely believe can be an important milestone towards the fulfillment of the quest which lies behind the theme of this seminar.

Even more overwhelming however is the task of setting the agenda for a seminar of this level of such with colleagues stature and commitment present here this morning. But since I was the one to propose this seminar the task de facto fell on my shoulder and I did not have the courage to enforce this taskon any of my friends. Being quite handicapped over the last three or so weeks, due to an operation, I have not been able to give this paper the kind of time I had intended. I therefore hope that you bear with me as I try to layout my vision of the task of Developing a Christian Theology in the Context of Islam, its historical roots and contemporary challenges.

Developing Christian theology in the context of Islam means, inevitably, addressing the concept of dialogue. Indeed, as will become clear, dialogue can never be something we do after we have written our theology, rather it is an intrinsic part of theology itself. There are, of course, as many definitions of dialogue as there are practitioners, but the emergence of the awareness of the need for dialogical processes has an interesting history, that for our purposes can be discussed under four types.

1.  In its very earliest manifestation the concern for the study of other religions (which is an important element of (Dialogue) began as a way of acquiring knowledge in order to belittle the other religions. The knowledge acquired was used in debates to prove the worthlessness of the other religions when compared to Christianity. A great deal of the early work on Islam to come out of the sub-Continent was of this nature.

2.  The second manifestation is a gentler version of the first. Here dialogue was used as a cloak for opportunities for conversion. In some cases dialogue is still understood and practiced this way, especially in the more evangelical wings of the church.

3.  Other activities, which are now included as part of the dialogical process, were mere attempts to understand other religions in order to truly indigenize the gospel. In such cases other religions were treated as prepatoria evangelica and were given the same (or similar) status to that accorded to the Jewish scriptures. This basis of dialogue (and theology) worked very well with religions which were historically prior to Christianity but the situation in the case of Islam, which is historically post-Christian, was more difficult to maintain. This form of dialogue has been most important in India. Some of the protagonists in Tambaram 1938 held this position over against the Barthian/Kramerian position of the difference between "faith" and "religion." This position in its various manifestations has been part of critical Asian theological scene for over fifty years, although the articulation has changed substantially. The main problem with it is that it involves an uncritical acceptance of context for the sake of critical theological discourse.

4.Then came various approaches which all made an appeal to common ideational transcendence. A genuine metaphysical concern for such things as "same god by different name," "common humanity and common human goal," etc. This approach, which was based on the philosophical premises of modernity, created dialogue so that people with very different religious commitment and representing genuine plurality could focus on some content less and historical commonality, which would provide understanding. This form of dialogue carried within it a genuine paradox. On the one hand, the fact that dialogue was at all necessary was the acknowledgment of plurality and the existence of the "different other," and on the other hand, by pushing for some contentless transcendent commonality, the very thing which made the other different was negated. Here all that which constitutes the history and reality of the other was seen as an impediment and prejudice which should be overcome with an appeal to transcendent commonality which everyone shared unimpeded by the "prejudices"
of historical and biographical locatedness.

However, the kind of dialogue that I think we need to develop, and indeed that our encounter with Islam forces us to develop, is somewhat different from all these. Briefly, I understand dialogue as a process of discourse in which the communities involved go through their own respective to come to some common understanding of certain social and political problems. In the achievement of this common understanding the very through which one proceeded into the dialogue in the first place itself undergoes changes. If this definition of dialogue is accepted then the opposite of dialogue is not monologue but metalogue, which means achieving a transcendent reason through escaping or overcoming the prejudices of one's own logos Because of the Enlightenment heritage of our theology, when we have entered into dialogue with people of other faiths we have ended up with metalogical position, i.e. either looking for easy commonalities or looking for a way beyond the particularities of the dialogical partners. In both cases the logos of dialogical partners which constitutes their particularity and identity is negated. Thus we end up also negating the centrality of their particular logos as that which provides meaning and significance for a people, including Christians, in our dialogue.

In dialogue we are faced with the fact that our own logos, and all its intra-community implications of taking certain things for granted, has restricted hermeneutical possibility. A community's self-understanding has a de facto restriction and does not allow the prejudices and traditions, by which a community lives, to be challenged and questioned. The emergence of the other on the horizon, with his/her own horizon or world, or the emergence of the one who attempts to communicate, challenge or ask questions, starts the dialogical process (understood in our way). This changes the very nature of questioning itself within the given community. The emergence of the other challenges prejudices (not that it overcomes them as such) by showing the restrictive qualities of existing prejudices. It changes also the character of the questioning, which is normally generated from within the exclusive domain and structures of a given community. After a dialogical event one can no longer continue to exist as if one's horizon were unchanged, or the other did not exist, or the other had no claim on one's world, or there were no mutuality in their existence. The only way one can continue to maintain such a stance is on the basis of an absolute surety of one's own total knowledge and the belief that the other, and his/her ) horizon, possesses little or no value. At this point either total dogmatism or total prejudice has taken over, displacing any potential for questioning. Historically, of all the religions it is Islam that has most thrust itself on the consciousness of Christianity as "the other". Unfortunately we have usually responded to this other in negative terms.

It is very clear that we need a new theological discourse for a new relationship and one which is no longer based on an internal discussion within the West itself but rather on a relationship between our idea of what it means to be Christian, and an existence which has a fundamental plurality of values which are located in multiple religious systems. In this context we must however make sure that we do not sacrifice those elements which are native to Christianity. At the same time we must safeguard that we do not become so provincial that the universal implication of creation and salvation is lost in a polemical and an evangelical zeal. The quest for a Christianizing mission among Muslim is well known for its ultimate failure in spite of the romantic statements defining it as brilliant initial efforts of people like Zwemer, Henry Martyn, Muir, Sweetman, MacDonald, etc. Attempts at operating in the shadow or in the wake of these earlier efforts, has in recent years raised the question of how we as Christians can envisage a relationship to people of other faiths and specially to Islam, its past history and future direction against which there is a strong and growing hostility in the West.

The struggle in developing a theology in the context of Islam is jeopardized by two very important and very difficult problems. On the one hand we have the difficulty of overcoming the political and social legacy of Western Christianity and its close association with the colonial and expanding Western hegemony; on the other hand we have the related problem of overcoming the theological and epistomological legacy of Western Christianity.

First is the close association of Christian mission with the Western imperial power over the last five hundred years and especially since the emblematic date of 1884 - the year of Berlin Conference, which parcelled Africa out among the so called "advanced powers". The largely uncritical approach to the colonial expansion by the Western Churches and Western missionary structures has left us very vulnerable to the critique of collusion. Related to this is the fact that the local Christians in the Muslim world who have been products of the missionary enterprise, were neither allowed nor attempted themselves to develop any ecclesial or theological independence. This has left a lacuna which is hard to bridge.

The second problem related to the first is the adoption of a theological epistemology of the Western theologians who were largely concerned with the issue of facing the emerging challenge of the Enlightenment epistemology and the secular political order to which they were engaged either in a polemical mode or in an apologetic one. The questions which the Western theologians faced were largely within a religiously homogenous environment and with a particular kind of evolution within this homogenous religious environment. The debate with Enlightenment, secularism, atheism, liberal and utilitarian political theories, capitalist, socialist and communist economic approaches were all within the same sphere. Since this theological epistemology has been the determinative basis for all theology, the religiously pluralistic context of the theological enterprise which was a part of the foundational basis of Christianity was lost. On the other hand, when the missionary enterprise struggled against these debates it almost invariably adopted the more conservative articulator of this theology as their theological foundation. Even when they studied other religions it was either for a better equipping of the missionary, or for knowing the enemy better for more efficient mission, or for showing the weaknesses of other religions and the superiority of Christianity.

I know there were critical voices which kept emerging but they were silenced as were the critical voices of the local Christians who attempted to incarnate Christianity in their own context. All such attempts by the local Christians suffered the stigma of syncretism and all such attempts by the Western Christians was accused of lacking a concern for the mission and saving of souls. Under these circumstances there was an absence of doing theology in the context of other faiths. This changed in the West after what is generally known as the Second World War when a large number of emigrants were allowed to come to the West as the human fodder necessary for the rebuilding of the war ravaged Europe. For the first couple of decades these emigrants did not demand a recognition in their new homes but by sixties they began to demand not only a recognition of their identity but their religion was an essential part of this quest for identity. The churches which were themselves no longer a part of the public sphere took up these challenges and have done on the whole a very noble task, some of our more fundamentalist Christian and their racist attitude notwithstanding.

Thus both these theological challenges have more or less a political dimension. But this is the exactly the dimension that theology in the West has usually shunned. And when the Latin American Liberation Theologians have adopted a political character in their theology they have lacked the dialogical approach and the recognition of a religiously pluralistic context, and instead have operated largely within the symbol of Christendom. In order to develop a theology in the context of Islam, therefore, our theological approach will have to be both political, critical, dialogical and conscious constantly of the religious pluralism. We must attempt what Michel Foucault has so profoundly stated that, "to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult."

In order to understand the contemporary challenges to the Christian-Muslim relationships we must try look where the problems have their roots and foundations. We must do what Nietzsche called the genealogical task of locating the parentage of this problem. It is however very difficult to articulate here all the issues in one go I shall therefore try to indicate some of the salient features of the contemporary challenge.

Most of us know that what is today popularly called "Islamic fundamentalism", and which is seen by some as the most serious challenge today, is more often a demand to recover and refound some notion of an Islamic state. That this is largely a very confused issue is what causes the vain fluttering between the certainty of some presumed past and the democratic quality of participatory and rights oriented politics. Since the certainty is not as easy to come by as some would like to claim and the democratic quality on the basis of their particular interpretation of the past is not possible, they are left in a profound quandary. Actually, Islamic polity seems to me to be in search of a subject matter. Lacking this there is a tendency to arm twisting coercion, and to foment some kind of violent, anarchic jihad at a more extreme level. Though this is how Islam is portrayed more regularly in the West, this same attitude is present in all religious bodies today whom we are fond of calling " fundamentalist" for the lack of better term because of sheer laziness as well as because of the power of Western media. This is equally true of Christianity and its various manifestations in anti-abortionist, anti-women, etc. attitudes, in Judaism especially the settler communities of Israel etc. and in the Hinduism of BJP.

In order to understand this phenomena, we have to look at the contemporary struggle by the religious communities to capture at least a part of the public space, that is to move from their externally determined private sphere to a more public presence. This, I believe, is one of the central theological task confronting both the Christians and Muslims in the contemporary world. Within the development of secularism in the West, religion was privatized for the proper functioning of the state. In Islam, in contrast, right from its very inception and later development over the next 800 years, religion was to form the ground norm for the polity and for the umma an ideological rather than geographical state. While the idea of Muslim nationhood along this line was established in Islamic political discourse from its very beginning the identities of its citizens along ethnic, linguistic or other similar bonds were not subsumed but were seen as a sign of God's mastery and creativity (Qur'an 30:22). And this creativity was in order that people may be identifiable into tribes and nations and in this way identify themselves to one another. Compare this to the traditional Jewish and Christian hermeneutics of the Biblical account of the story of the "Tower of Babel" (Genesis 11). So while the emergence of secular, liberal bourgeois politics in the West demanded social homogeneity and multi-party system within the state, Islam asked for homogeneity in following Islamic law while they could maintain heterogeneity along cultural and social life.

Almost all the major theories in the West might have argued the necessity of this homogeneity as a prerequiste for state formation. Islam kept claiming the homogeneity on the basis of Islam itself. Since Islamic political theory developed during the heyday of the existence of such an Islamic state with multi-cultural, social, national, and tribal affiliations, they have had difficulties with " modern" concept of nation states for their emphasis has always been on state-nations, i.e. a single Muslim state encompassing the entire umma with many nations in it. In this context the limitation of geographically characterized state as compared to ideologically characterized state  nonsense. The geographical character only emerges as a demarcation of the ideological state's boundaries, i.e. the Muslim state (dar-ul-Islam-abode of Islam) and the non-Muslim states ( dar-ul-harb - abode of war or struggle).

The problem with this anachronistic theological position is the sheer fact of the existence of a number of Muslim nation states rather than the past ideal referent ( or the eschatalogical utopia) of state-nations. So one of the greatest difficulties Islamic theorist face is how to deal among the Muslim states themselves as this falls outside the pale of its doctrinal structures. This in a sense is an even bigger theological challenge than how to deal with non-Muslim states. This is not a new problem but one which Muslim scholars tend to overlook or shy away from because the complexity it carries.

The disintegration of the Muslim concept of state-nations can be seen to begin with the assassination of Uthman, the third pious caliph who died in 656. It was somewhat restored under the Ummayid rule (661-750 A.D., i.e. 89 years) but this in itself has remained a major bone of contention within Islam.� � But since the Ummayid period the fragmentation of this concept of state-nations has continued unchecked. After the comprehensive Ummayid rule of 89 years, the Islamic state-nations was divided into three caliphate with their respective spheres of influence, the Abbasids in Baghdad, the Fatimids in Egypt and Syria and the Ummayids in Spain. There was even further internal fragmentation within these caliphates. After the middle of the ninth century, the Abbasid caliphate lost its central authority to the provincial governors and generals within their already limited corner or part of the umma (the state-nations) who had revolted and established themselves as independent amirs and sultans. While these independent principalities did acknowledge the caliph as the spiritual head of the Muslim community (the Umma), they denied his political authority over the umma. So the caliphate had undergone a separation of religion and politics with politics localized (the nation-states) and religion still left at a catholic level based only on a symbolic state-nation either as a utopian or eschatalogical hope, or on the ground of some in illo tempore. Finally, in 945 A.D. a prince, Muizz al-Dawla Ahmad (the establisher of the Buwayhid dynastic control of the central caliphate), actually marched to Baghdad and put an end to the independence of the Caliph. There was a caliph but he was not independent but subjected first to Buwayhids and then from 1055 to the Turkish Seljuks. This subjugated caliphate finally came to an end with the sacking of Baghdad and the killing of the Caliph in 1258 by the Mongols under Halaku Khan.

So from 750 to 945 (some 195 years) there was an independent caliph but with his power as political sovereign in the provinces already challenged. Then from 945 to 1258 (some 313 years) he was a vassal with religious symbolic power under the hands of provincial princely dynastic power of Buwayhids from 945 to 1055 (some 110 years) and then under Seljuks from 1055 to 1258 (some 203 years). During this period the caliph was the spiritual head of the community umma (and in our terminology state-nations) but the political power was in the hands of amirs and sultans who needed the caliph for their power beyond just the provincial structures they actually represented. With the support of the Caliph the state-nations could be controlled even though both the Buwayhids and the Seljuks represented just the nation-states from the provincial boundaries of the Abbasid caliphate. Here was the use of caliph's religious stature for political power which had its legitimation challenged.

The Muslim jurists had to deal with both the multiplicity of the source of authority and the personal moral proclivity of the various caliphs, sultans and amirs, who may have performed the ritual of a head of the state such as leading in prayers and to enforce Islamic injunctions and prohibition, but lacked in most cases the standards required from them (except Umar bin Abdul Aziz who ruled briefly between 711-720). The simplest formula followed by some faced with this dilema was to invoke the law of necessity.

In dealing with this dilemma Islam underwent some of the issue which surfaced during the Reformation in Christianity. In Islam the problem was vis-a-vis both the rule princes over against the emperor and that of the Pope (to use Christian category to define this feature of the Reformation in Islam, for in the case of Islam both these powers laid in the hands of caliph-imam). On the other hand, the possibility of revolt, anarchy, chaos, etc. was equally before their eyes, similar to the issue faced by Luther vis-a-vis the peasants. So some jurists came up with the Calvinist answer of focusing on the third use of the law as well as the right of dethroning the king if he fails to meet covenant of justice some 600 years before Calvin, and some came up with the Hobbesian answer of a Leviathan some 700 years before Hobbes.

The ulemma were satisfied that even if religion and politics were separate church and the state (understood in a particular Islamic way) would continue to be linked. This was a different conclusion from the one Reformation achieved in Christianity. We can even say that to some measure the ulemma endorsed the secularization of the politics in return for a pact of mutual assistance between the state and the ulemmas. The ulemma would leave the d etermination of how Islamic or un-Islamic would be the professional conduct of the head of the state, that is leave it to his private Muslim conscience. In return, the head of the state would enable the ulemma, as jurist and judges, to ensure that Muslims at large honored the required observances, practices, and prohibition of the faith. So like the Latin Mass and ritual and Latin as Lingua ecclesia acted for the catholicity of the church, so the legal (justice) structures of Islam along with Arabic as lingual franca acted as the catholicity for the umma. Thus wherever a Muslim went, he experienced more or less the same law operating with little variation because of the different schools of fiqh. In this way the more the central caliphate of Muslim state-nations disintegrated the more the ulemma acquired the role of central upholder, preserver and enforcer of Islamic law as the bedrock of Muslim unity. But this unity while acquiring a higher status than that of the central and uniting state-nations under a single caliph failed to acquire the political unity but remained religious in a largely secularized context. This difficulty plagues Islam even today and causes a major theological dilemma. If we are to develop a vibrant Christian theology in the context of Islam we have to deal with this dilemma as one of the central issues. But we as Christians are equally confused on the issue of Christian catholicity and multiple nation-states, and the larger issue of the public role of faith, and unlike Islam we have more or less abdicated this debate totally.

NOTES

1.  See Hans�Georg Gadamer's fundamental critique of the enlightenment: "the fundamental prejudice of the enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself," Truth and Method, New York: Crossroad, 1975, pp. 239-240; and 325-341, esp. 330-331).

2.  Michel Foucault, " Practicing Criticism," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D Kritzman, trans. by Alan Sheridan, et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), p.155.

3.  Between 622 and 661 A.D. (i.e. after the hijra - migration - of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina and only for 39 years) the Prophet first and after his death, the four rightly guided and pious caliphs (Khulfa-e-Rashdeen) headed all three branches of the government (executive, legislative and judiciary) on the basis of their religious standing. If we take away the rule of the Prophet in Medina from 622 to 632 A.D. (i.e. only ten year), then we have only a period of 29 years for the rightly guided and pious caliphs. But the fact that the last three of these four caliphs (viz. Umar, Uthman and Ali) were murdered by Muslims themselves and only the first (viz. Abu Bakr) died a natural death, goes to show that even here the power was challenged by those within the earliest umma. There is also a claim in some Muslim traditions that the Prophet himself was poisoned. The continuing debates on the priority of one caliph over the other and the process of succession (or usurpation as some still see it) was challenged from the beginning leading to very early schism between the Shia and Sunni factions and still within the first 39 years to a further division in the Kharajites.

4.  This event has been given a special name: Fitna or mischief which has invoked in the past and continues to do even now very hot passions between the Sunnis and the Shias.

5.  It is not surprising that since the  p p T Ummayid rule in 661 no Muslim state has qualified as being truly Muslim. This  p p T is universally accepted by all Muslim scholars and Muslims in general. That is  p p T to say that with the end of the period from the death of Prophet in 632 till 661 (29 years) there were the rightly guided and pious caliphs and since then there has been no real Muslim rules as such. Though at times one hears various justifications for the comparatively better quality of different caliphates depending on ones denominational affiliation e.g. the Sunnis for the Ummayids and the Shia for the Fatimids. In spite of this the use of Islamic Sharia which is a product of the post 661 A.D. period is still the most articulate demand of the conservative Muslims in contemporary Muslim states.

6.  That is some 313 years after the hijra of the prophet to the Medina and the establishment of the city-state which acted as the foundation of Islamic political thought. This may be seen as the final destruction of the Islamic centralized caliphate and its subjugation in the hands of whoever became politically and militarily powerful. It is ironical that it took almost the same period for Christianity to move from its existence on the periphery of the Roman Empire to become the religion of the empire after the conversion of Constantine.