Having retired from regular classroom duties in 2001, C. M. Naim is now an emeritus professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A Muslim from India, he has observed and participated in Christian-Muslim dialogues, four of which he described in a 1996 article for the Lutheran journal Word and World.1 He was struck by the eagerness of the Christians to denigrate themselves and their history, exhibiting what might even be described as self-loathing. The Muslims were only too eager to join in this chorus of Christian-defamation, playing upon their counterparts’ overwrought sense of guilt. Ignoring their own violent history, these Muslim parties to dialogue exploited their unfair advantage and thus joined with the pliant Christian participants in making a mockery of the discussions.

The Christians usually began by denouncing the crusades, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial expansions into Islamic lands, and the more recent Cold War policies of the United States against various nationalist movements in the “Third World.” They readily identified themselves with “the west” and its history, only to castigate all western protagonists and proponents, past and present. Their Muslim counterparts began in the same vein. They denounced the crusades and argued that the same crusading spirit worked equally behind the colonial expansion and the unquestioning American support of Israel against the Palestinians. These were the crucial moments, they argued, when the “west” (Christianity) encountered the “east” (Islam) and behaved shamefully. The listeners nodded in agreement. One Muslim speaker mentioned the expulsion of the Moors from Spain as another such moment, and all heads were further lowered in sorrow and shame.

Amazingly, no one asked how the Moors arrived in Spain in the first place, or what had brought Muslims to the land of the Testaments. It was as if there had been no imperial expansion of Islam, no Arab conquests of Syria, North Africa, and Spain. I’m not denying the horrors of the Reconquista and the crusades. I merely wish to point out the absurdity of denying any agency to the Muslims themselves. Islamic history unfolded as a series of conquests. This is not to say that Islam spread only by the sword or that Christians and Muslims should argue over who shed less blood. It is simply to acknowledge that the sword was very much present in the story of Islam’s expansion, too.

When this acknowledgment is not made, interfaith dialogue soon turns into an incoherent comparison of Islam, a faith without history, and Christianity, a history without faith. More, the inordinate emphasis in such dialogues on the scriptural and juristic aspects of religion, with the simultaneous neglect of the experiential and salvific, turns the two faiths into two ideologies, of which one seems to control all of history while the other appears to have no agency at all—one standing for a body of aggressors, the other for a cohort of victims.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  The above text is an extract from C. M. Naim, “Getting Real about Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” Word & World 16, #2 (Spring 1996), 180, http://www.luthersem.edu/word&world/Archives/16-2_Islam/16-2_Naim.pdf (accessed March 27, 2007). The four Christian-Muslim dialogue events were held in 1993 at the American Islamic College, the Lutheran School of Theology (both locations in Chicago) and at the Parliament of World Religions.

 
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