US evangelists outline prejudices against Islam

Daily Star staff

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Sept. 11 has made combatting Western stereotypes of Islam an even more urgent task, attendees at a seminar on interfaith dialogue agreed on Monday.

The seminar, entitled Building Bridges and Reconciliation Between Christianity and Islam, was organized by Reconciliation Walk, a US-based evangelical Christian organization.

Attendees at the seminar, held at the Meridien Commodore Hotel, presented academic papers on Christianity and Islam and analyzed the polarizing effect of Sept. 11 on East-West relations.

Hareth Chehab, the co-chairman of the National Lebanese Committee for Christian-Muslim Dialogue, praised the organization for its other work “in bridging Western and Eastern ways of thinking through more communication between Christians and Muslims.”

Matthew Hand, the organization’s Middle East director, presented a paper on Western stereotypes of a violent Islam following the terrorist attacks on the United States.

“The common notion among Christians in the West is that Islam is in essence a religion of violence, and this assertion has been stated outright as a fact or raised as a suspicion in virtually every article or public commentary,” Hand said.

“Thus, while the (US) president has affirmed Islam as a religion of peace … the vast majority of Western evangelical Christians … believe that Islam is essentially evil … contrasted with the pure goodness of their own Christianity,” Hand continued.

A simplistic reading of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis has solidified these perceptions, Hand added.

However, there is some hope, he suggested.

“I hope that as people of faith we can break through these simplifications and understand the underlying evil that pits us one against the other.”

Hand said that reconciliation required both sides to exercise humility. He said the process would begin when Westerners take their questions and concerns directly to Muslims, and not by conducting self-referential analyses, “that reveal the arrogance and prejudice with a deep-seated conviction that we possess all there is to know.”

Fawaz Gerges, a Lebanese- American professor of international relations at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, applauded Hand’s paper, saying the author “flushes out the major points … and gives us hope.” “Having spent 25 years in the West, I can say that there is no serious interaction between Muslims and Christians or between East and West which examines the major grievances. It’s like two ships passing in the night” said Gerges, who is also a published author on the issue of civilizational conflict and a current Middle East commentator for the US television network ABC.

He said that the majority of Americans subscribe to negative stereotypes of Arabs.

“I see it in the eyes of my neighbors and I am terrified of carrying an Arabic newspaper in my car for fear of being persecuted,” Gerges said.

“Americans pigeon-hole Islam in what they see as ‘bin Ladenism’ and it terrifies them, but they are at fault in that they don’t make a clear distinction between bin Laden sympathizers and terrorists,” Gerges said.

He explained that there are many Arab and Muslim bin Laden sympathizers because they share a history of grievances against the United States, “and examples abound, ranging from the 1 million Iraqi children dead to the conflict in Palestine and the Occupied Territories.”

Mohammed Sammak, the dialogue committee’s other co-chairman, told attendees that violence has never had a place in religion.

“I think there is a manipulation of religion in a violent way, otherwise we would be saying that the teachings of religion lead to violence and that’s not true,” Sammak said.

But Sammak said that the image of a violent Islam has long been propagated by western leaders.

“In June 1994, John Calvin said after leaving his post as secretary-general of NATO forces in Brussels that we have finally come to the end of a useless Cold War that stretched 70 years and have reached the real axis of war that has been continuing for 1,300 years, meaning the conflict with Islam,” Sammak said.

He also said that Richard Nixon that same year in his book, Seize the Moment, described Islam as “uncivilized and barbaric but it doesn’t draw too much public attention because it possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves.”

These images of Islam, handed down over time, do little to create dialogue, said Ibrahim Shamseddine, the president of the Association for Charity and Culture.