IN HIS NAME, EXALTED
Christians and Muslims Seeking Peace
by Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen
The fundamental call for peace over many centuries in both the Christian and Muslim worlds has been a call for unity to fight against a common enemy. Historians have suggested that the very idea of Europe as a cultural and political entity is grounded in the perceived need to unite against the common Muslim foe. Muslims have also sought to mollify sectarian strife by calling attention to the need to unite against the attacks of Christians. There are numerous other examples in which people come together and define their own identities through their opposition to a common enemy. In 1952, the term third world was coined by economist Alfred Sauvy in an article in the French magazine L’O bservateur. The meaning changed from Sauvy’s analogy with the tiers état, as it was taken up enthusiastically during the Cold War to describe countries that were neither members of NATO or the Warsaw Pact. So, NATO came to define the West, the First World, against the communist menace and the “underdeveloped” rest over whose resources the Western and Eastern blocs competed. In all of this, we find that the inspiration to seek peace and alliance is coupled with opposition to a presumably hostile other.
What motivates peace, in such circumstances, is inseparable from what motivates enmity toward the other, because it is the perceived need to confront the enemy with a common front that makes local peace among opposing factions possible. Peace is sought as a means of procuring security from an external enemy. This implies that loss of the external enemy might be felt as a threat to internal security. Without the fear of the hostile other, factional fighting among those allied against it might break out.
In his Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) Tomaz~ Mastnak has documented the historical development of the European peace movement through the centuries of the crusades. Crusades were not seen as a form of war, but as a sacred blood sacrifice. Those who sought peace in Europe were exclusively opposed to the spilling of Christian blood by Christians. Although mysticism in all the world’s religions is usually associated with love of all creatures and non-violence, there have been notable exceptions. Mastnak ends his book with a discussion of St. Catherine of Siena.
In the 1370s Catherine promoted the return of the Pope to Rome from Avignon, peace among Christians, and a revival of the crusades to culminate in the Church’s victorious march to Jerusalem. She viewed the crusade as a mystery of blood: “Just as Christ had shed his blood for the salvation of men, so Christians now had to shed their blood for Christ to free his patrimony from impious hands.” (Mastnak, 341) She described the crusade as a wedding feast. When Pope Gregory XI held an audience with Catherine, he explained to her that he wanted to make peace among the Christians so that he could then call them to a crusade. Catherine responded that there was no better way to make peace among Christians than by ordering a crusade. She believed that the result of the crusade would be the conversion of the Muslims, whom she described as “wicked unbelieving dogs”.
Mastnak continues: “The greatest minds of the Medieval Western world . . . as well as mystics and visionaries, all bent their heads and their knees before the spirit of the crusade. They all subscribed—rarely with silence, often with admirable eloquence—to the declaration that it was necessary to eliminate those who had been named infidels and declared enemies. This made the greatest minds at one with the mindless. . . .” (Mastnak, 345–346) The profound understanding of the Middle Ages with all its subtlety and mystical insight was unable to imagine that there could be anything wrong with the most rapacious campaigns against the infidels.
Enmity or Love
The idea that enmity is what legitimizes the state as a political institution was rigorously defended by the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Schmitt argues that there is no political identity without enemies and the potential for war with them.1 At the same time, Schmitt seeks to blunt religious opposition to war by interpreting the phrase, “Love your enemies,”2 as referring only to personal enemies (Latin, inimicus) and not national enemies (Latin, hostis). He writes
approvingly: “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks.” (Schmitt, 29). There has been a revival of interest in Schmitt’s thought among American neo-conservatives because of his critique of liberalism. In works such as his Politische Theologie, Schmitt drew upon Catholic traditionalists to argue that the individualism and pluralism inherent in liberalism debilitate the state.3
Today, simultaneous with the atrocities committed by Muslims and Christians against one another and too often blasphemously justified by appeal to religious loyalties, unprecedented steps are also being taken to promote understanding and dialogue. I am proud to have some small part in the facilitation of these steps, as a result of which there are on-going projects for cooperation and communication between Mennonites and Shi’ites in Toronto and Qom, and between Catholics and Shi’ites in England, Austria, the United States, and Iran. The most visible signs of dialogue are conferences that have been held and are being planned. However, no one should imagine that the point of dialogue is to have conferences! The conferences help us to focus attention on one another, to explain ourselves to others, to seek common elements in faith, feelings and practice, and to attempt to expand upon them. Some of the seminary students in Qom, for example, who observed the last Mennonite-Shi’ite symposium there, have expressed an interest in devoting their careers to the deepening of such mutual understanding.
As Muslims, we take part in dialogue because it is a religious obligation. We are called upon to follow the example of the Apostle of God, Muhammad (s) and the Imams (‘a) in seeking “a common word” between ourselves and “People of the Book”. We hope and pray that through the friendships that we have found in dialogue,
we may prepare the ground for further friendship and mutual understanding, and that with the expansion of this work we may help to move closer toward the lofty ideals of peace and justice. Through dialogue we hope to equip ourselves with the understanding necessary to effectively change attitudes among others with whom we engage when such attitudes result from misperceptions, bias, and unfamiliarity.
Some may judge the attempt to be folly. A follower of Carl Schmitt might say that the promotion of such sympathy with the enemy (for he defines enemies as those with whom our nation is potentially at war) can only weaken the state and make its citizens vulnerable to those who have no inclination toward mutual understanding at all. In diametric opposition to this line of thought, we offer ideals of cosmopolitanism that can be found in both Western and Islamic traditions. According to these ways of looking at citizenship, we are to see ourselves as belonging to a polis that includes the entire world. The enemy we face is not defined by territory, religion, race, or ideology, but by strife and oppression themselves. If it is inevitable that we must define our own identities in opposition to an enemy, then let us heed the Qur’an when in it we are told that Satan is indeed our manifest enemy. Let us attempt, through dialogue and understanding, to find a place for one another in the Kingdom of God.
Notes
1 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
2 Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27).
3 See A. James Reimer, Paul Tillich: Theologian of Nature, Culture and Politics (München: Lit Verlag, 2004), 25–28.
Haj Muhammad Legenhausen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute, Q om, Iran
