Bush Honors Muslims at White House Dinner
| Bush has hosted an iftar dinner annually for the last six years in the State Dining Room. This year, he opened with the traditional Ramadan greeting of “Ramadan Karim” and praised Islam for bringing “hope and comfort to more than a billion people around the world.” |
OK, so some folks would say that doesn’t qualify as separation of church and state.
Whatever. That’s not my issue here.
Rather, I would like to know what hope and comfort Mr. Bush sees Islam offering the world.
In fact, just what does Islam offer the world in a positive, upbuilding way?
Say on the scale of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
Mr. Roth, I could almost think that you were asking me to post in reply to your blog again, if I didn’t know that you just ignore and delete my pesky emails! 🙂
All religious are susceptible to political exploitation and corruption. Christianity (Ireland in recent history for example) and Judaism (Jewish civilian attacks against Muslims for example) have not been immune. Unfortunately, this is also a very real and terrible problem amongst some Muslims. But it is no more representative of Islam than are the violent wartime commands by God to Moses, Joshua, et al, things that should be taken as representative of Judaism or, by association, Christianity.
If you have web access, here is an informative, intelligent, insider’s link concerning fanatacism in Islam : http://www.sunnipath.com/resources/PrintMedia/Articles/AR00000138.aspx
As a religion following the God of Abraham, Islam shares with Christianity many of the most beautiful teachings and values of God. Because Islam does not exist entirely independently of earlier revelations (it acknowledges and accepts the teachings of God in the Old Testament as well as many of the teachings of Jesus) there is perhaps nothing quite so new and world changing as the Ten Commandments. Islam rather seeks to restore to the world the original, pure, monotheism of Abraham, that it believes was God’s true design for all people of the world.
But in the believer’s life, what percentage after all is really fireworks and what is simply quiet, obedient, contentment? Islam first of all reinforces a whole-life acknowledgement of the one God. If good comes, it is from God; thank and praise Him. If suffering comes, it is from God; accept it in all loving trust and obedient submission. Muslims pray to God forehead to ground more than 5 times each day; as a result it is very difficult to forget oneself and fall into dishonesty, immorality, or other sin with this ever present mindfulness of God.
People in the West who have converted to Islam find their lives changed by these things. They convert, marry, have children and raise wonderful religious families. Their communities care for each other nearly on the level of those Anabaptists who live in community. They get educations, practice business, are peaceful and friendly neighbors, reach out to people who feel, deep inside, that there must be something more than what they have, that there is a God and we can be closer to Him in Islam, the original revelation of God, than in any other belief system.
The hope and comfort offered by Islam to its billion and a half adherents is the daily knowledge that God is control, that human lives have meaning, that God hears our cries and no matter the suffering or war or starvation or sickness. That there is a world after this one, where God’s justice will have been set and those who have loved and served Him alone, without partners, will have paradise that the allegorical language fails to adequately describe. All these things in what they psychologically offer individuals or what they sociologically offer the world are not so much different than Christianity or Judaism, but they are in every way just as positive in the world as Christianity and Judaism.
Islam, perhaps in some ways comparable to the Amish or Hutterites, is less concerned about the concrete or worldly advancement of civilization and more that people are living their true lives, in obedience to and love of God. I would hope that there are no Anabaptists who mock and scorn “what good ever comes to the world out of Islam” while being unable to answer to the same demanded standards what material good ever came into the world out of the Anabaptists. What literature or art of man is there to produce, when you have the Word of God as perfection? This is one example. Not all people see things this way, but for those who put God first and only, whether Muslim or Christian, I know that this is not foreign.
Politics are one issue. I don’t think it is inaccurate to say that Anabaptists don’t hold much to the man-made governments and their systems and actions. If the dark forces behind every world government in power that use and exploit its citizens were gone, it would be a peaceful existence, because the corruption does not come from within Islam any more than it is the New Testament, or even the Old Testament, telling Christian George Bush to send his largely Southern Baptist armies to murder and rape people. Politics are one issue, and politics are not religion even when governments and soldiers subscribe to a certain religious text.
Read the Quran, with a commentary. Muhammad Asad has probably the best version. If you read it, in its entirety and not out of context excerpts like the unbelievers like to attack against the Christian Bible, you will look at these troubled actions of some parts in the Islamic world and ask yourself, where is that coming from? That is not Islam.