[The Wide Shot] Meet the ‘muslim’ Jesus
‘How can I respect the faith of others while holding fast to mine? I found one of the most compelling answers in Islam.’
When Filipino lawmakers debated the divorce bill in the House of Representatives, one of the most disturbing arguments came from Richard Gomez, a 1980s matinee idol who is now the 4th district representative of Leyte.
“The Philippines is largely a Catholic country, and I believe that our laws are there to serve a majority of the Filipino people,” Gomez said at the House, explaining his vote against the divorce bill.
Reacting to his argument, I wrote in the June 2 edition of The Wide Shot, “Hmm, okay, so what about the minority? Should we treat them as ghosts, as figments of our imagination?”
I believe that this is one of the downsides of being in a country where one religion forms a huge majority – 85.65 million people, or 78.8% of the population. We lack an appreciation of our minorities – and the plurality of beliefs that deserve our acknowledgment, tolerance, and respect if we are to call ourselves democratic.
I myself have been a Catholic since birth, and I continue to practice my faith as part of a 2,000-year-old religion that promises a New Heaven and a New Earth. But I am also a citizen of the world, where only 17.67% of the global population – or around 1.38 billion people – belongs to the Roman Catholic Church.
So I am constantly in search for answers: How can I respect the faith of others while holding fast to mine?
I found one of the most compelling answers in Islam.
Terrorism, especially the 9/11 attacks in the United States, has fueled many misconceptions about the Muslim faith. One stereotype of Muslims is that they are intolerant of different beliefs, to the point that they kill “infidels.” We have to note, however, that terrorists are different from ordinary believers, as they claim “religious” motives to justify violence and cloak political objectives.
Islam, after all, comes from the Arabic root word salam, which means peace. Islam is a religion of peace.
But religions of peace – including Catholicism – can also be intolerant of other beliefs, even if we keep terrorism out of the picture.
What can Islam teach us about respect?
Exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism
Before we answer this question, let us first understand an important framework.
In what is called the theology of religions, scholars have explored the different ways by which religions regard other faiths. The three major approaches in the theology of religions are as follows:
- exclusivism, which means only our religion is valid;
- inclusivism, which means other religions can be valid, but ours is the best; and
- pluralism, which means all religions are valid.
Terrorists, while distorting religion, use exclusivist interpretations of their sacred texts to defend their acts of violence.
For centuries, the Catholic Church has taught the exclusivist doctrine of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church, there is no salvation). This gradually evolved, however, as European explorers encountered more non-Christianized people in the farthest parts of the world.
A watershed moment occurred in the early 1960s, when Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, that tackled the Catholic Church’s engagement with the modern world. One of the subtopics discussed in the council, also known as Vatican II, is the church’s view of non-Christian religions.
In the Vatican II document titled Nostra Aetate, Pope Paul VI proclaimed on October 28, 1965: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”
Coming from the centuries-old exclusivist doctrine of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, the Catholic Church showed streaks of inclusivism. Still, many Catholics maintain exclusivist views of other religions to this day. Many Catholics also espouse pluralist views – and one of them is a Jesuit priest, Father Jacques Dupuis, who wrote the 1997 book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.
It is natural for members of a single religion to espouse different views – whether exclusivist, inclusivist, or pluralist. No religion is ever a monolith.
‘Difference is good, but conflict is evil’
So yes, in Islam – as in Catholicism – there are exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist views of other religions. We can talk more about exclusivist and inclusivist views in future columns, but for now, allow me to delve deeper into Islamic pluralism.
I take comfort in pluralist readings of the Qur’an, which, I think, is more explicit than the Bible about embracing religious diversity.
Mahmoud Ayoub, a respected Islamic Studies scholar who holds a doctorate from Harvard, explained his pluralist view in the 2000 paper titled “Islam and the Challenge of Religious Pluralism.”
In his interpretation of the Qur’an, Ayoub said “humanity began as one and must remain one, but it is unity in diversity.” Such a diversity is not due to “degeneration” or poor understanding. “Rather, religious diversity is a normal human situation.”
“What the Qur’an decries is not diversity but discord or conflict,” Ayoub wrote. “Difference is good, but conflict is evil.”
He said, “What we should be aiming for, as the Qur’an enjoins, is acceptance and appreciation of the plurality of cultures and religions, but within the unity of faith in the one God.”
Ayoub then cited a Qur’anic verse, which is one of my favorites.
The Qur’an (5:48) states: “If God had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (His plan is) to test you in what He hath given you: so strive as in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is to God: it is He that will show you the truth of the matters in which ye dispute.”
In this verse, Ayoub said, “The idea that human diversity is a divinely instituted, or at least divinely sanctioned, phenomenon is clearly affirmed.” He added, “Likewise, this verse asserts that the ultimate judgment with regard to the differences among mankind will be for God to make on the Day of the Resurrection.”
‘Jesus is muslim’
He then proposed a way by which Muslims can find common ground with other religions.
Ayoub noted: “Islam is not, according to the Qur’an and early Prophetic tradition, the name of a religion. Rather, it signifies the attitude of the entire creation before God.” The word islam, after all, means “submission to God.”
Ayoub said that “islam applies to any human beings or human communities which profess faith in the one God and seek to obey God in all that they do and say.”
So what about people like Jesus who submit to God?
Ayoub makes a distinction between Muslims, with a capital “M,” and muslims with an “m” in lowercase. The former are members of Islam as an institutionalized religion with its own rituals as well as “its juridical and social principles and customs,” which began in the 7th century. The latter are people who practice islam – submission to God – in a generic sense.
If one would regard Islam only in the “narrow sense” – that is, as an institutionalized religion – then “neither Jesus nor any of the people of faith in God before Muhammad were Muslims.”
“But in their attitude of total obedience to God, Jesus and all the prophets of God and their followers were muslims, submitters to God,” he explained.
Following this line of thought, I – a Catholic since birth – am also a “muslim.”
‘Part of God’s plan’
“What then is the challenge that the Qur’an presents to us today?” Ayoub said. “The challenge is this, that we all have faith in God and compete with one another in righteous works. It follows from this challenge that all people of faith respect one another and that they believe in all of God’s revelations.”
Imtiyaz Yusuf, another Muslim scholar, also wrote in 2010: “The Qur’an does view religious diversity as a natural way of human life, thought and society, which should not be seen as abnormal. Rather it should serve as a means for competition to do good between religious communities.”
The diversity of religions, according to Yusuf, “is a part of God’s plan and will last as long as the world lasts.”
My view, as a Catholic, is that God willed religious diversity because only then can we truly fulfill the exhortation of Jesus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22: 39). Love, after all, is an act of the will – an effort to extend oneself for the good of the other, inspite of painful differences.
Remember, too, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 29-37): the one who helped the wounded man was not the priest or the Levite, but the Samaritan traveler who was an outcast at that time. Being “different” was not a hindrance. It even drove home the point of Jesus, who then told the scholar of the law who was testing his knowledge, “Go and do likewise.”
I believe God willed religious diversity because what is there to love if we are all the same? – Rappler.com