Via Martin Marty, we find this interview in the Wall Street Journal with former Israeli spy, former Muslim, and convert to Christianity, Mosab Hassan Yousef. In his convert's zeal, Yousef says of his former co-religionists:
At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.
"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."
This is, as the saying goes, unhelpful, on multiple levels.
First, Yousef's agenda in all of this, to sell a book, is pretty transparent. While I'm sure he's 100% sincere in his religious outlook, he publicizing a perverse and distorted understanding of both Islam and Christianity with these claims.
Second, it's important to bear in mind that his condemnation of Islam is a condemnation of a small, particularly virulent strain in a religion of over a billion people, the vast majority of whom would never contemplate or approve of terrorism, nor would their leaders.
Third, as Marty points out, the idea of a fanatical, murderous, warrior God is not unique to Islam, but is certainly well represented in both Jewish and Christian texts as well. All three religions have a violence problem, both in terms of their texts and in terms of their history. It's what we do with those texts and that history that defines how we go forward.
Fourth, as a general matter, condemning another person's God concept is a loser as a strategy to promote communication. As an evangelical Christian, Yousef may understandably feel compelled to share his faith with the Muslim community from whose ranks he came. But if so, he's picked an awful way to do so. People of different faiths can and do disagree, and ought to be able to talk honestly about those disagreements. But insofar as the conversation starts with someone saying "now, let me tell you why your God is the essence of evil," no real communication can take place.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for Yousef. I have no doubt that it was difficult to break with his family, friends, and community in order to adopt a new faith. And given the history of Hamas, I'm sure its dangerous as well for him. Nevertheless, what he's done in this interview, and presumably also his book, isn't going to help anyone. Certainly not himself, and almost as certainly, not the many other Muslims he hopes to reach through his evangelization.
Martin Marty, echoing Rene Girard, summarizes things well:
Henceforth? Max Scheler wrote that an apostate “is engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past.” There may be plenty against which to react, but one has to ask what good his demonizing of his neighbor’s God will do in the already mutually demonizing conflicts of our day. What René Girard calls “the mimetic principle” is in action here and these days: You say something about our God and they say something worse about ours, so we say something “worser” yet about theirs, in a constant escalation which can lead to neither security for us or a better (in our eyes) alternative for them.
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