"He is a thinker....... that means
he knows how to make things simpler than they are...."
Nietzsche
Before
discussing the issues of Modernity and the Muslim world we need to grapple with
the concept of modernity in general and see how it fits into the scheme of our
contemporary social structure.It is
vital to grasp this before turning our attention to the Muslim world as such.
The term
modernity has been used several times in the introduction and indeed in the
title of the book itself.An explanation
or at least a definition is in order. The term 'modernity' is and has been used
in several ways especially in the Christian world.Rather than going through the semantics of
what is current I propose to suggest adefinition of the term and use that as the basis of the following
chapters.
“ Modernity
is the process and consequence of institutional change effectuated by
sociological carriers, those carriers being urbanisation, pluralisation,
privatisation, secularisation, globalisation, centralised bureaucracy,
market-based supply side economics and the spawning of high technology.”
As the
chapters unfold these terms and definitions should form a system of thought and
also act as a grid by which to interpret much of what is happening in the world
today.A far more effective definition
of Modernity was coined by Marshall Berman in his "All that is solid melts
into air", New York, 1982, where he states:
"Modern environments and experiences
cut across all
boundaries of geography, ethnicity, of
class and
nationality, of religion and ideology;
in this sense
modernity can be said to unite all
mankind.But it
is a paradoxical unity, a unity of
disunity: it pours
us all into a maelstrom of perpetual
disintegration
and renewal, of struggle and
contradiction, of
ambiguity and anguish.
To the
casual observer this seems a horrific definition with which to begin any study
of modernity.However, that is the
case.Modernity is a vast viral
intrusion of negative social consequences that cannot be viewed lightly.One has to note that Max Weber, the father of
sociology, broke down in emotional trauma when he meditated on the impact of
the emerging modern world.Karl Marx
himself, speaking of modernity, simply described it as "all that is solid
melts into air".
As we
grapple with the impact of modernity upon the Muslim world we are also
grappling with forces set for our own destruction.We are facing the era of T.S. Eliot's
"men with hollow chests", of Nietzsche's "weightless
culture", of Martyn Lloyd-Jones' "shallow church".Perhaps Yeats summed it all up when he wrote:
'Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world....'
Beyond
Ideas
If you
look at the list of carriers mentioned in the earlier definition you will
notice that the suffix is "isation" rather than "ism".Simply put, "isation" is about
processes whereas "ism" is about ideas.In this gap between ideas and processes is
the greatest lesson that needs to be grappled with in the modern world: ideas
are no longer the dominant forces fashioning the way people live.
Historically,
Christianity has been highly effective in the realm of ideas.When some new idea emerges to attack the core
of Christian belief we have raised up apologists and thinkers able to elucidate
a response with great clarity and save the faith from seeming destruction.When we move beyond ideas we find ourselves
on very difficult ground -unnatural and unfamiliar ground.As a result, in the cosmic battle for the
hearts and minds of women and men we have unknowingly abandoned great tracts of
land simply by ignoring the fact that the ground even exists.The concept of "isation" is very
simple to identify, but very difficult to respond to.Processes of change via the carriers listed
in the definition are at the heart of the new cosmic battle of the church.
Urbanisation
The
current debate concerning urbanisation is quite novel to
observe
and, from a Christian standpoint, instructional.One side of the debate paints the picture
that urban culture is in effect a model of control, of logic, social
organization and reason, an ordered structure governed by communications systems,
timetables, and impersonal planning that directs the lives of millions without
their being aware of it.This would be
considered the more classical view of modernity.On the other side of the debate are the post-
modernists who suggest that the city is really a melting pot of unrelated icons
and signals which all merge together into a stew of cultural confusion.
Jonathan
Raban in "Soft City", London, 1974, said:
" The city dweller was not someone
given over to
calculating rationality.The city was more like a
theatre, a series of stages upon which
individuals
could work their own distinctive magic
while
performing a multiplicity of roles....
for better
or worse the city invites you to remake
it, to
consolidate it into a shape you can
live in.You,
too.Decide who you are, and the city will assume a
fixed form around you."
It is
probably true to say that in some measure both perspectives can be correct at
the same time.Within the urban
experience there is at the same time a loss of control yet also a clear taking
"of" control in unique ways that are unknown in a rural
environment.Perhaps these are two poles
of a dialectic.What they do show us,
though, is that urbanisation is not intrinsically an idea but a process.There is no smoke-filled room in Geneva where
aconspiratorial body gathers to decide
that if we urbanise we
can create
an anonymous socially-alienated culture.Rather urbanisation is a process that has accelerated in the last 200
years in the west and in the last 50 years in the east.
The
process works on the basis that industrial centres need
to be
established to create economic growth.These industrial centres then draw people from rural areas in search of
work.This process, by its very nature,
means that women and men become socially-alienated by the sheer size of the
urban centres.As a result they lose
touch with their roots and their traditions.
So, when
we look at urbanisation from this perspective we see that it is a sociological
or institutional process rather than an idea.The results of urbanisation are obvious.Women and men live in a culture where they are no longer held
accountable to strong sociologically-enforced
traditions.
Autonomy emerges by way of
anonymity.Urban women and men feel
socially alienated whilst at the same time feeling crowded out by human
nearness.A good exampleof this is traveling by Metro or underground
in any
great
city.At rush hour one's body is literally
pushed up against someone else, often to the point of embarrassment.The paradox is that at just such times, when
one is physically closest, one feels more alone and alienated from humanity.When we step on a metro we become no longer
people but rather "packages waiting delivery" as Jaques Elull, in
"The Meaning of the City"has
so aptly described us. The issue is that this has nothing to do with ideas but
all to do with natural sociological processes.
Pluralisation
In Martin
Heidegger's "Metaphysics" he goes far beyond Kant's 'object' and
'subject' and talks more about the permanence of being.This metaphysical substance of being is of
great importance to us since the "quality of being" can be observed
as an intense outgrowth of the aspirations of modern women and men.A "kinder and gentler" place, a
more tolerant place of acceptance.This
was far from Heidegger's mind but he hit the vein in his search for something
different:
"If the great decision regarding Europe
is not to
bring annihilation, that decision must
be made in
terms of new spiritual energies
unfolding
historically from out of the
centre."
These new
spiritual energieswere not to be of a
teutonic nature of exclusivity and elitism as eptitomised in the Nazi era.
Rather they would produce a new spiritual energy that would be
"inclusive", tolerant and pluralistic. The issue, however, that was
to elude even Heidegger was not the idea of "the new spiritual energy"
but the process that would produce it "from out of the centre".
There is,
as I have mentioned earlier, a distinct difference between the idea of
pluralism and the process of pluralisation.Pluralism as an idea is certainly the result of pluralisation as a
process but there is a difference. Pluralism as an idea or concept is, simply
put, tolerance for all peoples no matter what their basic world view or
orientation in life.Obviously there is
much that we applaud in the basic pluralistic idea now current.There really seems to be nothing worse for
modern women and men than to be surrounded by the narrow prejudices of
ignorance and racial intolerance.Yet at
the same time there is much about pluralism that dilutes and homogenises
convictions and beliefs to the point where to hold to certain traditional
beliefs is tantamount to being intolerant.
Pluralisation
is not an idea but rather a process.For
our purposes, pluralism, the idea, is less important than pluralisation, the
process.For over two hundred years industrialisation
has drawn together peoples who are intrinsically different for the purpose of
industrial production.It is very
important to grasp the following: when peoples of unlike faith and tradition
are drawn together they are "forced" to live in some kind of
pluralised
relationship.Without this, production
itself would be affected.It is not the
idea or the philosophy of pluralism that is the key point but rather that
pragmatically there is no other option if production is to be unaffected.This process of forcing co-existence is at
the heart of change.One can see the
difference between peoples whose hearts reach out to each other in ecumenical
tolerance and a process whereby there is no other option than to be tolerant to
those co-producers in the work place.
Privatisation
The
process of privatisation can best be described by means of this metaphor or
analogy.Three villages lie a certain
distance from an industrial centre.As
the magnet of urbanisation pulls, people from each of those villages are drawn
to find work in the city.One village is
Muslim, another Catholic and the third Eastern Orthodox. Historically, the
three villages have had little to do with each other because their ethnicity,
religion and traditions are in opposition to each other.However, when people from these different
villages work in the factory together they are forced to co-exist, not for the
goodness of brotherhood but for the objective of production.As a result the work environment develops to
the point where each representative must keep his or her personal feelings
concerning the other religion and culture "private".In short, their religion is forced to become
irrelevant to their "public" world ie the factory, but can be
exercised in their private world. It seems that it is almost impossible to have
faith anywhere other than in one's private world.This dichotomy is possibly the most important
issue facing all religions today in industrial and information-based work
places.
As the process
compounds, a clear distinction between the public and private world emerges and
thus faith becomesintrinsically
irrelevant to most people's everyday lives.Some of the more absurd cases to be observed arevery sad scenarios in fundamentalist religion
in America, where it is not uncommon to meet people who would work for the
government making instruments of destruction or nerve gas but would define
themselves as pro-life as they lie before the bulldozers at abortion clinics in
anti-abortion demonstrations.
Secularisation
It is
important as before to see the difference here between "ism" and
"isation".Secularism is in
fact the philosophy of a tiny minority of the western and eastern worlds.In short, the secularism that might best be
described as semi-atheistic or hard-core agnostic is in fact a decreasing
rather than increasing conceptual world view.Nevertheless, this is very different from being "secular".A secular person is not an ideologue.In reality some may have a religion well
entrenched into their private world; others may not. The issue is
relevancy.Secular people are best
described as individuals for whom religion is irrelevant.They are not for or against but rather
neutral. This neutral secular mass is the fastest growing movement in the
world.In 1900, less than 0.5% of the
earth's population considered itself secular.Today the number is around 25% of the world's population.What is interesting though is that these
'secular' people will have a variety of religious tags attached to their names:
Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist etc.Their private religion is not the issue; the relevancy or irrelevancy of
their religion is the important point to note.I suggest that the vast majority of urban dwellers on all continents
would be considered secular in one sense or another.
The
Changing Islamic landscape
According
to most observers, the Muslim world is floating around the one billion
population mark.The rate of growth by
birth is over 800 times as fast as in Europe and North America.For around the next 75 years the Muslim world
will double in number about every 25 years.Compare that to, say, Scandinavia which will take about 600 years to
double it's population.It sounds
ominous.The fertility cycle is highly
geared to rapid Muslim growth whereas the birth rate in the west is decreasing,
with some nations even havingnegative
birth rates.
Now
balance this with two other factors: principally, the Muslim world, with the
exception of Subsahara,is nearly 50%
urban.Add to that the fact that the
average age of a Muslim is dropping.Today around 60% of all Muslims are under the age of 19 years.This alone fundamentally changes the profile
of the "average" Muslim from say 75 years ago, when less than 10% of
the Muslim world was urban.The truth is
that the profile of the 'average' Muslim is not asdepicted in missionary magazines: an old man
on a camel with deep lines etched into his face and a woman standing beside him
in a veil that covers her from head to foot.The 'average' Muslim is now an urban teenager.As we go into the main body of this book we
will see the forces of change affecting this urban teenage generation.
To return
to the central theme: being secular is not an idea but a process. Islam is
certainly on the march but its own inner structure is secularising at a high
speed.The ultimate destiny of the
Muslim world is to be like the Christian world, nominal and secular.
Another
example, this time from the Christian world, may illustrate the point of the
process.Historically Christianity
functioned around a Church calendar.Sunday was the beginning of the week and the sacred aspects of the
church seasons governed the way we viewed the life of the church.Today it is very different.Now, Sunday is part of 'the weekend', a
secular concept.For the majority of
people the church calendar does not exist.Instead we now have a secular church calendar.We remember Father's Day, Mother's Day,
Remembrance Sunday and (God forbid) even in some cases Halloween.The structure of church life is secular.Is this important?Are we not more relevant?That is not the issue.The principle is that sociological forces
have homogenised the sacred in the life of the church to a point where very
little is sacred any more.At this point
is the process that should intrigue and interest us far more than what is right
and wrong.It may be added here that
many sociological observers of American Christianity perceive it as simply a
secular sociological movement in the process of decline and possible
marginalisation from the flow of American culture.
That same
process of secularisation is not unique to North America nor to
Christianity.The process of
secularisation strips all that is sacred out of its path regardless of whether
it is Christian, Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist.
Globalisation
We turn
again to Heidegger's "Metaphysics" to define the
process of
globalisation and its obvious impact in ending the concepts of space and time
as we have known them.
"From a metaphysical point of view,
Russia and America
are the same; the same dreary
technological frenzy,
the same unrestricted organisation of
the average man
At a time when the furthermost corner of
the globe
has been conquered by technology and
opened to
economic exploitation, when any incident
whatsoever,
regardless of where and when it occurs,
can be
communicated to the rest of the world at
any
desired
speed; when the assassination of a king of
France and a symphony in Tokyo can be
experienced
simultaneously, when time has ceased to
be anything
other than velocity, instantaneousness
and
simultaneity, and time as history has
vanished
from the lives of all peoples...then,
yes, then
through this turmoil a question still
haunts us like
a spectre: what for?Whither?What then?"
To put the
same sentiment into less heady yet just as powerful words we look to James
Joyce:
" I hear the ruin of all space,
shattered glass and
toppling masonry, and time one livid
final flame."
There are
several factors at work in the globalisation process.Firstly, there is the obvious influence of
the media.There are very few countries
in the world where one cannot buy Pepsi, watch MTV or CNN or see a picture of
Madonna
(the latter one) in some shop window.The huge increase in pop cultural interchange is without doubt a
phenomenon.One has only to view the
lists of the top ten films around the world and look at the top forty music
charts to see that the whole world has raised a white flag of surrender to
Hollywood and American pop culture.
Beyond
this are other features that need to be considered, one being the area relating
to the disappearance of space
and
time.Once it was believed that the fax
machine was powerful but now with the Internet the fax machine seems
ancient.The fax gave instant access and
thus essentially brought to a close the time-space gap of global society.The Internet is transforming the way that
space and time loss is controlled. In 1995, the Internet sign-up level was15% a month.The online culture, which is developing into a network of subcultures,
is causing the world to grasp a
new form
of reality, a reality which is shifting the relational structures that have
governed the last 200 years into something totally new that has yet to be
consolidated.
Add to
this global thinking.When an ethnic
group declares independence and breaks away from its host country it looks like
fragmentation.That is only partially
true.For as soon as independence is
declared the new group's first
action is
to join the United Nations and apply for funding to the World Bank.Their road signs will conform to
international standards, as will their central bank, their
postal
regulations and their time zones.To put
it simply,there is no such thing as
isolation from the world community.Like
some wood-eating beetle, globalisation bores its way into every crevice and
sanctuary of the human
family.Countries may try to avoid and reject the
process as Iran and North Korea have done, but they will be forced, one day,
one way or other into the global community.
Looking at
economic pressures helps us to see this even further.Joel Kotkin the economist says in his
magnificent book "Tribes" that the undergirding culture of supply
side economics is a Protestant/Jewish world view.He has a point.If you subscribe to the concept of Profit and
Loss you are functioning on the presupposition of cause and effect. You may
well be a Hindu and subscribe to the philosophical concept of "both...
and...." but don't
expect to
do business on the international money market with that idea or you will be
"both" broke "and" embarrassed. International economics in
itself reinforces the concept of religion being relevant in the private world
but neutral to the public world.
These
forces that are at work through technology are also creating new tribal entities
that I have come to call the "new secular tribe".In short, the yuppie in Djakarta has more in
common with a yuppie in London than with a fellow countryman living 20 miles
south of him in a village.One can say
the same about teenagers.Teenagers
worldwide are increasingly looking alike, watching the same music videos
wearing the same running shoes, having the same haircuts and developing the
same value systems based on the pop culture
input they
receive.
These
issues lie at the heart of my basic thesis about the secularisation of
Islam.As we continue we shall look at
several processes that will help us understand the paradigm- shift that is
taking place before us.As we look at
these
in detail
my thesis will be quite radical at times and will confront much of the standard
and generally accepted missiological teaching on contextualization.That confrontation is partial rather than
total.It is not as simple as "either...
or...".The fact is that each
Muslim culture is at a different stage in the process of modernisation.So, in certain cultures the text of this
thesis will be highly relevant yet to rural cultures in most Muslim countries
it will be totally irrelevant.The issue
relates more to the trends and shifts that are taking
place before
us.If my thesis is correct we shall see
an
increasing
trend towards secularisation in Islam, which will in turn dramatically affect
the anatomy of the Muslim whom we are seeking to influence.
Chapter Two
The Impact
of Modernity on Faiths
"It
is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
Epictetus.
In the
previous chapter we looked at the basic ingredients of modernity and at
howsociological "carriers"
have created a paradigm or an eyeglass through which to view the world.Now we need to look at the impact of
modernity.It is only in the last two
hundred years that evangelicalChristendom has made any significant gains outside the European ethos. In fact one could go so far as to say that
evangelical Christianity until 100 years ago was a Euro-centric religion.There are many ways of looking at the gains
in the last two hundred years at the global level.Those who are more supernaturalist would ascribe
this to the final great wind of the Spirit which will bring in those from every
"nation, kindred and tongue".The sociologist would be a little more cynical and ascribe the movement
to sociological rather than spiritual factors.
Perhaps
the two ends of the spectrum are not quite as farapart as one might think.It may well be that in the hands of God,
sociological paradigms are part of a master plan of history.Whichever proves true, the gains made in the
last two hundred years do seem to correspond to the gains made at the time of
the Roman Empire, the sociological carriers being the vehicle by which the
message is transported.Without going
too deeply into the debate, one could suggestthat something very significant is taking place that is not the result
of prayer meetings and hard work.The
prayer and sacrifice of earlier generations would be in question if it were
that simple. The actual reality is that growth in many senses today is based
upon the fact that religion in a growing number countries is no longer a prime
issue but rather a secondary issue compared to economics.Modernity is breaking up the fabric of all
that is structured.This fragmentation
involves the destruction of the sociological forces that previously caused
people never to question the faith or beliefs of their host culture.
To sum up,
modernity strips faith from culture.One
can see this happening in a variety of ways around the world in different
religions.Along with Judaism, Hinduism
is the oldest of the great religions.It
has evolved from
approximately
1500 BC, with the Upanishads, Brahmana, Mani and Bhagavad Gita being landmarks
along the way.The central feature of
Hinduism and the one that has dominated its world view has been the
caste-system.This system has stood
through all the principal changes of direction over the centuries, and has
undoubtedly been the greatest stumbling block for Christian missions to Hindus.
Crudely put, Christianity has very often only functioned well in Hindu cultures
when it has operated within the caste structure as opposed to transcending it.
Yet in the
past 50 years modernity has been eating at the heart of Hinduism.Recent years have witnessed the emergence of
what is loosely called the coalition of the OBC's, the "Other Backward
Castes". This intrinsically political movement has attracted large numbers
of people who
are
"inter-caste" but believe that they are not allowed to progress
financially beyond a certain level.The
movement has become so large that it is without doubt one of the major blocs in
India today.We tend to think of Hindu
fanaticism
as epitomised by the more extreme Hindu groups suchas the RSS and the BJP, whereas in fact the
real force to contend with in India is the OBC's.Modernity and the quest for equality atthe consumer level has eaten at the heart of
the caste-system.Astonishingly, in
Uttar Pradesh thousands of OBC's converted to Buddhism in reaction to the caste-system.For Hinduism modernity means the potential
death of caste.
In the Buddhist
world modernity has taken on the prime ideology and affected it with equal
power but in a different way.Some
implications of modernity have their roots in the Enlightenment movement of
Europe.Principally, the concept of the
high view of science, logic and reason are woven into the fabric of
modernity.This was alluded to in an
earlier chapter where I mentioned the eastern world view of "both...
and..." as opposed to the governing principle of "cause and
effect", which is the essence of science and commerce in the modern
world.In a nutshell, empirical science
is at odds with a Buddhist world view.The result is that, for example in Thailand, one may well be committed
to an eastern perception of reality (or rather of the non-existence of
reality),
but that perception has very little sway over the economic values of supply and
demand and cause and effect of the modern world.Those historical values must therefore be
deposited in one's private world and cannot be permitted to affect decisions
about the way international business is carried out.The ultimate destiny of Buddhism is for it to
become an important part of one's private world but irrelevant to the public
arena.One could then immediately
argue that
Buddhism has made great strides in the west in recent years, which appears to
destroy the above argument.
In fact,
cults and mystical religion, along with alternative medicine, are very much a
part of modernity.However, they must be
seen as attempts to fill the void of modernity's loss of religion.
Appearances
are often very different from reality.WhereasGautama Siddartha created
the world view that developed into the Tripartaka which was able to entrench
itself in Asia for over two thousand years, the new Buddhism of the west is a trend
that comes for a time and is then replaced by something else.Changing religion and refocusing on a variety
of 'roots' experiences is more an expression of the inability of religion to
sustain itself in the modern world than a picture of religious revival.
For
Judaism another set of circumstances applies.Prior to 1815 the number of Jews converting to any other religion was
negligible.Today the number of Jews
converting to Christianity, Hinduism and atheism is staggering.At the
heart of
the Jewish ethos is the 'exclusivity of the genetic' ie it is possible to
convert to Judaism, but the reality is that to be a first class Jew one needs
to be born a Jew.With mass migration
from Eastern Europe (where social structures had been solidly in place) to the
weak cultural ground of industrialised western Europe and America, a whole new
process has developed.It is estimated
that over a third of all Jewish people in America are now marrying non-Jews.This is a far cry from 'Fiddler on the
Roof'.The fact is that the sociological
enforcement agencies which once held assimilation in check have now broken
down.As a result a Jew can marry a
non-Jew with very little trouble in comparison to earlier generations. To sum
up: urbanisation means that individuals are anonymous so it's not my business
if my neighbour is this or that. Pluralisation means that we need to be
tolerant. Secularisation means that religion is irrelevant, and
privatisation
says my religion is only relevant in private so who cares who marries
whom?One can apply the same standards
to sexual orientation and divorce.That
which was once taboo is now acceptable.The real issue is not values but context.
As has
been mentioned earlier, Christianity has taken quite a battering from modernity,
yet it was the scientific thinking and reason emerging from the
post-Reformation era of Christianity that produced the groundwork for
modernity. Many books have been written on this subject, perhaps the
most
significant being Os Guinness's "The Gravedigger Files", so I will
not pursue this line much further.The
fact is though that modernity has produced a hyper- subjective instantaneous
form of religion in the Christian world.It is no wonder that thousands of evangelicals are converting to Eastern
Orthodoxy in order to find some history, roots and tradition.At the other end of the spectrum it also
explains why otherwise decent and normal human beings, who are nice to cats and
dogs and vote Conservative, now seek forms of religious expression that incorporate
clucking like chickens and rolling around the floor losing control of their
bowels under the auspices of "the Spirit moving".
All
religions are affected by modernity although the effects differ according to
many impulses and conditions and contexts that a religion finds itself in. The
central reality is that modernity does not take prisoners and all religions
will suffer under the impact of modernity.The 'suffering' may take the form of Islamic liberalisation, Hindu loss
of caste, the Buddhist crisis with empirical reality, Jewish assimilation or
Christian paganism and secularisation.The critical question ,that is grappled with in the final chapter is, is
it worth trying to give one bankrupt religion to another bankrupt religion?
I have
coined a term - "the viability gap" - to wrestle with this.Is the Christianity currently being
propagated viable in its confrontation with modernity?Viability has little to do with
'relevancy'.'Relevancy' can be created,
as we have seen in liberal Christianity, simply by taking out those elements of
the religion that give offense.Neither
is viability intrinsically a truth issue: we have witnessed the nauseating
banality and mindlessness of American fundamentalism doing untold damage to
lives worldwide when truth is used as a blunt-edged knife to rip at the souls
of many poor unsuspecting creature.Viability is more concerned with the issue of authenticity.Authenticity tends to blend truth, relevancy
and incarnational living. Nothing is more horrifying than speaking to groups of
zealous young people out to 'reach the world', only to discover that the vast
majority have little or no idea of what it really is that they are supposed to
be giving away. The viability gap facing us today is growing wider and many
predict that evangelicalism may soon be facing its greatest survival test
ever.Time will tell.
The crisis
of modernity, and its impact upon faiths, is clearly evident to representatives
of all shades of
religious
expression.In a strange and cynical
way, religions that would once have been naturally antagonistic to each other
find themselves becoming allies at worst or co-belligerents at best in the
fight for survival.Perhaps the greatest
challenge facing the Christian world is the possible annihilation of the
present paradigm and its replacement with something yet to be revealed.
Chapter Three
Muslim
Children in the Modern world.
"Imagination is more
important than knowledge"
Albert Einstein
One
striking feature of modernity is the way in which globalisation and
market-driven economics come together in the mid-to-late 20th century growth of
immigration.Put simply, a 'magnet
factor' comes into play when large urban
centres
create the potential for low-income labour resources beyond the capacity of the
national labour pool.This trend, which
began in the 1950's and 1960's, has caused significant numbers of people to
leave their own nations and
move to
western industrial centres in search of work. Originally, immigration was
encouraged as a means of developing cheap labour streams, but in recent years
things have changed as capitalism has been so successful that it can now
function adequately - for an elite - but with a vast pool of unemployed people
whose future hangs in the balance. As a result there has been a shift in
attitude, and hostility is now often expressed towards immigrant communities.
From a
sociological stand point we have crossed the Rubicon by virtue of the fact
that, as with all the ingredients of modernity, once a process is in motion
there can be no return to the original paradigm.Intermarriage, cultural assimilation and
sociological paradigm-shifts have changed the face of global culture to a point
where cultural homogenisation in the long term is the only direction in which
we can move. When one meets someone called Ali Mohammed who talks with a
Yorkshire accent and complains about missing his fish and chips when he had to
go on a summer holiday to Pakistan, one begins to get the point.Even greater 'cognitive dissonance' takes
place when one meets a Cockney named RamPrakash McKensie in a French restaurant
in west London and the two of you are served Chinese food on plates made in
Mexico and drink Californian wine with a French name!
In short,
the cultural structures that have governed the world for generations are being
rapidly replaced by fragments of the original held together in a dubious yet
new homogenised mass.
The
implications for immigrants as a whole are significant. So often the response
by Muslim communities is to create 'roots experiences' for the immigrant
population.Building mosques and Muslim
community centres and energising Muslim missionaries to bring the prodigals
home are just some of the strategies utilised to offset the impact of
modernity. It is a losing battle.Modernity cannot effectively be defeated by such means.
Within
immigrant communities those most affected by this conflict are perhaps the
children who have been born in host countries.There are several ways in which one might analyse this dilemma.I have chosen to look at four areas: the
school system, the media, the use of computers and the ambient flow of culture.
Children
in school
Schools in
western Europe and America are becoming increasingly more pluralistic in the
way that they operate. At first glance one would think that a more liberal and
open approach to cultural diversity would in fact allow children to be less
ashamed of their roots and able to express their cultural norms and
traditions.Strangely enough, the
opposite is actually true.
The very
fact that our schools are becoming more multi-cultural increases the sense of
pluralism in our midst.In short, the
message is that we no longer have cultural absolutes but that we are all
"children of God" with the need for tolerance and understanding.That message inevitably eats away at the idea
of exclusivity or absolutes. The attempt to be more open at the cultural level
creates a sociological paradigm in which the supremacy of the culture of origin
passes away.Children in schools in
America and Europe are becoming the most "non-absolute" cultural
identity group that has ever existed.
The Muslim
community is in effect aware of this by default, and Muslims of course have
systematically sought to build their own schools to preserve their own
culture.This is simply a parenthesis to
modernity.The people making the decisions
to build schools are usually not the fanatic fringe but rather the more liberal
and tolerant leaders of their communities.Even in these cultural safe havens, tolerance is becoming part of the
agenda, in order to prepare children to grow up in the culture at large.
I believe
that the long term effects of this will be significant and the trend seems to
be more towards homogenisation and tolerance than towards fire bombs and race
riots.Noisy minorities will, as always,
be heardabove the silent majorities,
but noisy minorities are not, in this case, a reflection of a cultural trend.
Children
and the media
Children
incline more than adults toward an image-based epistemology, or form and
process of learning.The learning
processes of children arerelated more
to models observed than to information processed by logic and reason.The implications for the visual media as
significant value-moulders are obvious.
Generally
speaking the media in America and Europe have certain things in common.Their message is clearly not one of
absolutes, but one driven by product consumerism.It is important to make a point here.There is no question but that in the western
world we are moving away from product-based consumer-economies to
information-based ones.However that is
not evident at the purchasing level to the average individual.We are still very much entrenched in
hard-core consumerism and all the indications are that this will continue for
some time.At the heart of consumerism
is the concept of significance.One
"feels" significant if one owns a specific consumer product.This sense of significance for younger
children is very much wrapped up in toys and clothes and consumer products in
general.The mass media feed such issues
to the exclusion of values.
One does
not have to go too deeply into media analysis to realise that the primary
signals to children today are not towards honouring their parents and
religion.Increasingly, at TV series
level, and certainly in Hollywood, the adult is viewed as impotent in
decision-making and very often it is the child who becomes the saviour of the
situation.The long-term impact of the
media on Muslim communities has yet to be seen, but one senses that it will not
enhance the religious status quo that has shaped Muslim thinking for
generations.
The use of
Computers
Increasingly,
children in an urban context are becoming computer-literate. This will
obviously be relative to a multitude of socio-economic circumstances.Whereas at present maybe only a small
minority of immigrant Muslim children own computers, access to computers is
growing
and will
continue to grow.
There are
several issues at stake here.Perhaps
the most
obvious is
the sense of advantage the child has over an adult who is not
computer-literate.This sense of
advantage is not usually a conscious one, but unconscious in that the
"world" and the perception of reality of those who have and do not
have access to computers is stark in its contrasts. The outworking of this is
clear.Those who are computer- literate
can gain access to a vast array of services that are denied to the
computer-illiterate.
Michel Fourcaut has made a study of insanity
and the political use of that term; his conclusions suggest that after
industrialisation those members of society whom an elite want removed from the
main stream of a culture are banished to institutions that we call
hospitals.In some measure a similar
process is taking place in modern culture except that in this context
banishment does not occur as a result of some executive decree but as a result
of sociological forces of attrition.Not
to be computer- literate means that an individual will be increasingly
marginalised
from the mainstream flow of culture. Conversely, this process creates an
identity and community of those who are literate in this area.Thus the consequences for the younger
generation are definitive: the children of traditional Muslims will have more
in common with a hi-tech view of reality and less with their traditional
roots.The process without having a
central idea behind it has the power to re-orientate the reality of the
individuals who function within the process.With online culture growing so rapidly the trend will be for far more
services for children within the cyber-community.This can only increase further the distance
of urban Muslim immigrant children from their historical roots.
The
ambient flow of culture
Most
sociologists talk about social enforcement agencies.In a Muslim context this looks something like
the following:
the call
to prayer is heard five times each day in most Muslim-dominated countries.More important than its being a call to
prayer is the fact that it enforces the central belief-system of Muslims.Five times daily they hear
"There
is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the prophet of God". The mere
existence of the call to prayer acts as an enforcement to what one has been
taught or believes.
When one
adds to this call to prayer the architecture, dress fashion, smells and music
of a typical Muslim country then one can simply identify an ambient flow of
culture.That flow in itself reinforces
the beliefs to which people subscribe.
By
contrast, when one looks at the ambient flow of culture in the western world
today it is neither Christian nor Muslim nor of any religious persuasion.The ambient flow
of culture
in the west is secular.Mosques exist,
but so do temples and synagogues and churches and strip clubs and, especially,
shops - shops that promise significance by the purchase of their goods.
How do the
members of the Muslim community in Detroit, Bradford, Lyon or Berlin
respond?They build microcosms of their
original culture -shops, cinemas,
mosques and so
forth.However, rather than this enforcing the
'roots' culture as in the Muslim country where that is "all" you see,
the message of the ambient flow of culture is that this society is made up many
different pluralistic entities. For a child this is very significant.A child unconsciously travels through life in
the city observing all kinds of differing icons and images that relate to
religion and culture. By default they come to an inward conclusion that they
live in a pluralistic culture that allows for all the varieties of expression
that are around them.
When these
four areas - the school system, the media, the use of computers and the ambient
flow of culture - are drawn together, one can only reach one conclusion: there
is a definitive diluting of the exclusiveness of the culture of origin.
From a
missiological standpoint, many applications can be drawn from this.It is certainly a lot easier for a Muslim family
to send their children along to the children's meeting at the local church than
it would have been in their country of origin.As a result all kinds of children programmes have been set up.There are however two 'downside' factors
involved in this.Firstly, it is far
easier for a child than for an adult to be influenced by existential emotion in
an evangelistic setting.We have all
heard ugly stories of little children putting their hands up in meetings as a
result of peer pressure, to 'ask Jesus into their hearts'.Secondly, it is also more acceptable in a
pluralistic culture to 'make decisions' on any issue because the decision does
not amount to much anyway.
To view
this in a positive rather than negative light the following categories may be of
value in considering approaches to Muslim children.
1.Method
of Learning
As has
been mentioned earlier we know that children learn through the use of pictures,
symbols and images. This can only increase in the modern world as the culture,
especially children's culture becomes increasingly orientated away from a
print-based epistemology and moves towards an icon- or picture-base.The use of film and video despite its
possible negative impact may be a means of sharing truth with Muslim children.
2. The
death of childlike innocence
Few would
dispute the fact that through the media, more
pluralistic
schools and the ambient flow of culture, children are losing their innocence
and becoming more exposed to issues that previous generations would have known
nothing about.This means that issues of
sexuality in particular will increasingly become more part of children's
lives. For
pre-teen children this can be a source of great conflict.Finding ways of using the message of the
gospel as a statement concerningpurity
for young people who lose their purity may be anantidote to the secular forces at work in
their young lives.
3.
Cognitive dissonance in gender definition
Increasingly
children in western cultures are making friends across the gender gap and are
carrying these friendships into their teenage years. This process seems to have
started in Britain at some point in the 1970's, and it means that traditional
cultural male and female roles will be affected
and
possibly traumatized.It is difficult to
know how this will develop.
4.
Bilingualism
There is
some indication that immigrant children, who are the principal subject of this
chapter, effectively thinkbilingually.It may well
be,(though as yet unproved and an excellent potential dissertation topic) that
children grapple in different languages with different issues. There may in
fact be a distinction or a categorisaton taking place in the minds of bilingual
children, so that spiritual issues may be dealt with in their thinking
processes in a different language from other issues. Or family issues may be
dealt with in one language and all issues relating to their public world in
another language.
This
should suffice to show that Muslim children in the context of modernity are in
the midst of an enormous conflict.How
this will eventually express itself has yet to be seen.The indication is that pluralism will prevail
with a series of noisy back to roots parentheses along the way.
What is
critical, however, is that the future of culture and the emerging Muslim
convert church lies in the hands of these children. In every generation we tend
to discover this too late.
Chapter Four
Muslim Youth and the Michael Jackson
factor
"Learning without thought
is useless;
thought without learning is
dangerous"
Confucius
In
Indonesia in the 1990's a wonderful example of modernity emerged. A journalist
seeking to carry out a serious study of Indonesian youth came up with the
conclusion that in Indonesia Michael Jackson was more popular than
Mohammed.Tragically the journalist was
inprisoned for printing his findings.
There is
undoubtedly a massive realignment taking place around the "generation issue"
at a global level.In the first chapter
I made reference to the emergence of new "tribal entities"
categorized as "secular tribes".It appears that all over the world young people, irrespective of
nationality or religious background are adopting similarities in dress,
language and values which form them into a cultural entity.There are several forces at work here.
As a
result of industrialisation a gap emerges so that fathers and sons no longer
work together in the family business and mothers and daughters no longer work
together in the home.With no ideology
behind it, industrialisation has caused the break up of the family into
fragments.
Friendships
emerge and develop amongst young people who gravitate towards those in similar
circumstances to themselves."My
parents don't understand me; how about yours?" is uttered in hundreds of
languages by millions of teenagers.
Conservative
pressure-groups calling us back to traditional values as an antidote to this
fragmentation of family life may be correct, but would they be willing to pay
the price and move society back to pre-industrial cultures?
Unfortunately,
that is what would effectively be required to change the results of a
generation gap that has been widening for several generations.The longing for identity, accentuated by
isolation from family, is one of the most powerful forces creating this new
global secular tribe.
We need
now to introduce the issue of global communications. Astonishingly, the issues
facing teenagers globally are becoming closer and closer as time goes on.So when a voice bemoans the agonies of the
day the audience is multi- cultural.At
a less serious level, taste in entertainmentis becoming increasingly similar globally at youth level.In Beijing in the late 1980's the American
journalist Barbara Waters was interviewing groups of urban Chinese
teenagers.She asked them their
favourite song.They all chimed in,
"We are the World" (the anthem from which grew such wonderful
movements as Band Aid or Live Aid, andbroadcast to over 1 billion people with Phil Collins giving the final
song in both England and America with a quick Concorde trip in between).What was astonishing was that when Barbara
Waters asked if they could sing it, they did so in perfect English.The huge advance of MTV and Asian MTV and the
growth of CMT is allowing young people all over the world to have synchronized
entertainment.The number one TV
programme worldwide in over 100 countries in 1995 was 'Baywatch'.Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album
sold over 70 million copies worldwide.Papua New Guinea, perhaps the most geographically segregated place on
earth at the cultural level has been reporting that its tribal youth want to go
to Port Moresby to work, in order to buy short wave radios to listen to western
rock music in the jungle.Northern
Greenland, an equally isolated region, has just started to receive live
television by a digital compression signal selector.Even to think in religious terms of today's
teenagers being culturally Muslim, Hindu or Christian is perhaps one of the
greatest mistakes we could ever make.John Lennon was quite prophetic when he sang "Imagine there's no
heaven; imagine there's no hell....all the people shall live as one".Incidentally, the United Nations chose to
play that song to its General Assembly and recognise a minute of silence for
world peace.The new motto should be
not, "They beat their swords into ploughshares," but rather,
"They beat their missiles into CD's".
Despite
the preceding evidence, it would be naive to put a case for the total
disintegration of Islamic values within the various youth cultures of the
world.The issue more than anything is
the concept of an identifiable trend that gives no indication of reversing
itself, and there are of course notable exceptions, the most obvious being
Iran.Iran is what sociologists would
call a parenthesis to modernity - a conscious and quantifiable attempt to buck
the trend and reverse the cultural flow so that it becomes like that of a
previous generation.In 1993, dramatic
steps were introduced in Iran to enforce the dress code.Satellite dishes have been banned to ward off
the inflow of American pop culture.Teams of "baseej" culture-enforcers have been
created,
largely from poorer sections of south Tehran.But as Friday morning wakes, to the ever-decreasing number of chanting
students calling for the downfall of the great Satan America, hordes of young
people prepare to go to
Darakeh, a
town ten miles north of Tehran, for a weekend of pop cultural indulgence.The party-goers are in the majority and
continue to grow in number.There is in
fact a parenthesis within the parenthesis.
The volume
of information about these issues is endless and the temptation to revel in it
needs to be resisted, so we move on to some analysis. Principally, American
youth culture is, broadly speaking, the icon-based model that global youth is
following.Massive contributions are
made by British, Irish and German influences, but the overall master of pop
culture is America.It is therefore
worth looking quickly in broad terms at the impact of modernity on American
youth and suggesting that some of these trends are emerging within the global
framework.These may be points to watch
for in the Muslim world as the years go on.
Within
American youth culture, it is possible to identify a series of components that
differ greatly from those of their parents' generation.
1.
Over-exposure to a 'soundbite' view of reality.There is of course a reductionism at work at all levels of all
cultures.This reductionism could almost
be described as a plank of modernity, and it is most clearly seen in the realm
of media communication.Principally, as
a result of lack oftime and of short
attention spans, communication has been largely reduced to soundbites.The priorities of those soundbites reflect a
twisted and confused value system.A
young person in America may watch 30 seconds of news aboutBosnia but then be given 5 minutes on
sport.An anchorwoman who can barely
pronounce her own name may say, " In Kara-chi an earthquake hit the city
with hundreds killed but the big news of the day is that the Orioles lost to
the Blue Jays". A soundbite view of reality is one of the consequences of
the modern media.
2.
Cynicism towards the needs in society.
Connected
to this soundbite view of reality is the ultimate conclusion that nothing is in
fact real.Simply Red, in their album,
"Stars" talk about " the world that may not even be here".They have a point.This contorted view of
reality
ultimately creates enormous confusion within the teenage mind.American teenagers can sit in easy chairs
eating food that would feed three families for a day in Africa and
simultaneously watch pictures of those same Africans starving to death before
their eyes.If this
becomes
too hard to bear would they think of not eating the sandwich?Hardly.Instead the remote control can change channels and take them to another,
less challenging, realm of reality.The
end result is that there is an increasing cynicism about the needs of
others.Does this make American
teenagers hopeless slobs who need, as my Dad used to say, "to go in the
army"?. I don't think so.We should
rather cultivate a merciful attitude towards their culture and try to
understand it.For our purposes we need
to take these things as pointers as all the indications are that this is how
all teenagers are ultimately going to act.
3. Decline
in teenage voting.
Barry
Macguire's 60's anthem, "Eve of Destruction" had the chilling line concerning
the culture of Vietnam: "You're old enough to kill but not for
voting".The fact is that now
teenagers can vote they do not.There is
an increasing sense of distance from the public forum.It has been given up.The real culture is now the wellspring of
subcultures that have sprung up, from Seattle grunge and Rave
to New
Jerseys gangs.That weekend trip for
Coca Cola
and a snog
in the back of a car in Darakeh, Iran, is the first step on the road to punk,
grunge and the Bandito's.
4. No
sense of their place in an historical or geographical context.
Surveys of
education in America are astonishing.We
all know the statistics on how America produces the most illiterate teenagers
in the industrialised world.What is
interesting though is that this does not apply only in matters of mathematics
and science.From a sociological
perspective, perhaps the most alarming statistic of all is the total absence of
understanding about where they fit in to either history or Geography.On a personal note I have often wept for
American young people, as they are simply "lost" and
"isolated".They really are
the characters described in Hans Arp's poetry :
"falling
backwards into nowhere from whence we came". Modernity will without doubt
extend this environment of cosmic and actual alienation within the "global
youth tribe" We should weep not just for American youth but for the
global
youth of tomorrow.
5. No
sense of the world being a place to change or revolutionise.
What is
interesting for those who were the pseudo- revolutionaries of the 1960's is
that this generation of Americans does not see the world as a place to change -
I am of course speaking here of the general rule, not of all the admirable
exceptions.One can only imagine how
easily controlled a global generation will be as long as they are provided
enough drugs, sex and rock and roll.
6. An
extreme sense of entitlement towards family and society.
Perhaps
the most difficult area to deal with is the sense of entitlement that has
affected American youth culture.There
is an overwhelming belief that their families and society owe them
something.This attitude is very
self-indulgent but not self-analytical.There seems to be a total absence of ability to analyse actions - to
know themselves.If one adds to this
their parents' need for victimization to justify their sin then one can only
imagine the confusion that results.This
sense of entitlement demonstrated by
American
youth, which, incidentally, feeds into their parents' feeling that they are
victims of their teenage children, alienates youth-culture from the rest of
society. This in turn has a de facto result of enhancing their
own
"tribal identity", bringing them even closer to each other and
increasing further the alienation from their parents.
The values
that have driven this movement are almost certainly being exported
worldwide.Of course in each culture
those values are fed into a different
socio-religious
context.Nevertheless all the
indications are that these same values are emerging at a global level.
In the
light of the preceding categories, to imagine that reaching an urban Muslim
teenager who wears a Mega Death tee shirt, Nike running shoes, and Levi Jeans
and who listens to MTV in one of many cities in the world can be accomplished
without a new type of contextualization is probably a great mistake.A potential tragedy is that we will create a
generation of missionaries schooled in methods that were effective 20 years ago
but which are fast becoming irrelevant in the broader world.After much traveling
in many
cultures, over the past 5 years in particular, my overwhelming sense is that
our battle in Muslim missions will not be in the realm of contextual relevancy
in the traditional Islamic sense of the word but that we will be
obscurantist
to the massive teenage Muslim culture that is becoming value-orientated by
Hollywood not the local mosque. My ultimate fear is that we will profile the
Muslim in a wayequivalent to saying in
America that the average American looks like an Amish farmer in Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania.
Let us
look a little at this teenage Muslim group from the perspective of avenues of
contact, and move the focus from the problem to some solutions.
There is
no question but that there is a paradox here. In one sense global youth-culture is being led
into a value system that is excessively anti-Christian in its make up. Yet at
the same time there is a level of sensitivity and yearning at the core of this
same culture.It should be
noted here
though that this yearning is different from the 1960's search for meaning.This goes deeper than that; it is more like a
search for a reason not to commit suicide.It really is that chilling.There
are however important issues to grapple with.
When
modernity accelerates as it does the end result is that the psychological
membrane of protection between the inner self and the social self becomes
thinner and thinner.An anecdote may
help to explain this.In the 1960's
Edwin Muskie was running for President in America.In the process something unkind was said
about his wife and he began to cry on TV. Most analysts believe this was the
single greatest blow to his presidential bid: these were the days when John
Wayne
still epitomised the ethos of male personhood in American culture.Meanwhile in Zambia Kenneth Kaunda was always
crying on television.Most analysts said
that
this was
what kept him in power! Today not to be sensitive is not to be elected. The
reason this is so is that modern women and men are increasingly fatigued by
modernity. When the body becomes tired the tendency to giggle or cry
increases.Modern society is
sociologically tired and thus giggles and weeps.
A turning
point in many ways came on MTV when the "unplugged" series had as its
guest the hotel-smashing rebel voice of dissent, Rod Stewart.On the programme he sang "Maggie
May", "Sailing" and all the old great hits.He then sang, "Have I told you lately
that I love you?" and prefaced the song by speaking about his new wife,
the gorgeous young model Rachel Hunter.As Rod Stewart sang this anthem for the secular world one could almost
feel the longing for transcendence coming not just from the man but from a
whole culture.Rod Stewart then began to
cry and choke up.It was deeply moving
and I for one wept with him.It
certainly created a trend and of course was cellophane-wrapped.An observer of Michael Jackson stated that
three times on his world tour Michael cried in the same way at the same point
in each performance when he sang "Heal the World".Maybe he took a little license but I would
suggest there is something deeper under all this.I would go so far as to say that there is a
profound longing in the "global youth tribe" and that longing is for
purity and innocence - the very ingredients of goodness that have been stripped
out of their lives by modernity.My
greatest desire is that when I speak or write on the subject we would see
missions raised up specifically to reach Muslim urban youth, that we would
grapple with their value systems, love them intensely and incarnate innocence
and purity in their midst.
Chapter five
The Modern Urban Muslim
Marriage
"We are, I know not how, double
in ourselves,
so that what we believe, we
disbelieve, and
can not rid ourselves of what we
condemn."
Montaigne
One of the
most controversial aspects of the image of Islam has been the perception of
young brides forced into marriage with men they neither know nor love.Yet perhaps the great embarrassment or
paradox is that the cultures which
have most
aggressively attacked the concept of the arranged marriage are the ones with
the highest divorce rate as a result of the romance-choice model.It may be suggested that the issue is
increasingly becoming a non-issue as all
the
indications are that Hollywood has won and that arranged marriages are becoming
a diminishing trend. There are actually however phases to the process. There is
predominant in many Muslim cultures a 'halfway house' between the old school,
"you get who we give you" and the modern, "I will have who I
want". In many cultures a compromise takes place whereby provisional
arrangements are made but the couple is then asked to meet and see if they like
each other.There are of course varying
degrees of this as well.The bride is
encouraged towards a certain match; if she falters then the magnificent Muslim
guilt-machine goes into action.One has
to have been party to this to realise that the Jews run a distant second place
to the Muslim female guilt-industry!What is important however is the trend and the direction of the trend.
The
traditional process ofthe arranged
marriage is difficult to represent in general terms because we are talking
about such a huge diversity of cultures within the Muslim world. Nevertheless,
there are common threads running through a majority of cultures and we can
build at least some
semblance
of a composite picture.It is worth
though initially making mention of extremes in the spectrum.
In certain
parts of Subsahara the practice of female circumcision is carried out to this
day.In fact, in Somalia there has been
a revival of this practice.The basic
premise behind female circumcision is that women cannot be expected to control
their sexual desires.So the clitoris,
an erogenous area, is removed to protect the woman from temptation.
Consequently sexual intercourse fails to give the woman any pleasure other then
the knowledge that she is pleasing her husband and potentially increasing the
human race.This darker practice of
certain Islamic cultures is far more widespread than is generally acknowledged.
I would
suggest here by way of a parenthesis that in our attempts to love and build
bridges to our Muslim friends we frequently refuse to acknowledge and confront
the primitive realities of the way women in traditional settings are so often
treated.My own view is that modernity,
in bringing into being the feminism epitomised by women's movements in North
Africa and Palestine is in this instance a positive social development.
Too often
missions coming from a conservative perspective breed a male dominated-world
view which fits quite well into a Muslim paradigm.There is much to suggest that a new Christian
theology of the role of women may well be overdue in the modern world.Understanding the emerging relationship
structures of urban Muslim couples requires some understanding of the same issues
within the Christian
community.
Only time will tell whether we are bold enough for such a radical re-think.
One can
draw on a series of generic ingredients to give a
very broad
sense of what a rural and traditional Muslim marriage arrangement looks like.
1. The
marriage is arranged by parents and relatives.
The
rationale behind this issue is that the parents know best who would be a
suitable partner for the child.(This
applies equally to both male and female.)As a result the actual arrangements for the marriage are made without
the consent of those being married.
2. The
time frame
It is
important to understand that often the marriage is arranged long before the
actual wedding.Consequently the
security of marriage is assumed before worries about remaining single occur.
3. The relationship
Often the
parties being married will have little or no contact with each other before the
wedding. There is therefore a certain degree of anonymity involved, so romance
can not
effectively exist prior to the marriage.The contracting of the marriage (as opposed to conversation and
courtship in western models) becomes the basis of the
relationship.
4. Age
difference
Traditionally,
and this varies so much that it is hard to draw general conclusions, the man is
significantly older than the woman. In
extreme cases there may be a very largeage difference, in others less, but almost always the male is older.
5. Living
accommodation
In most
cases the young bride will move into her husband's home, where she will come
under the authority of the mother- in-law, who will frequently be abusive and
autocratic. A celebratedlegal case in
Britain in the 1990’s showed the power of the Asian mother in law. An errant
daughter in law was determined to be such an irritant to the mother in law that
she was murdered by her husband under orders from his mother.
6.
Decisions concerning money
Living in
an extended family means that financial decisions will be made without
reference to the new wife.She may have
an allowance but will not in general be given a voice or a vote about where and
how money is spent.
7. Dowry
In many
cases a dowry will be a part of the marriage agreement.The wife will usually bring some sort of
financial package (either cash or kind) into the
marriage.
8.
Opinions and beliefs
The opinions
and beliefs of the wife in a rural context will be very limited.She may well have opinions that differ from
those of her extended family but she will keep these to herself.Perhaps more importantly, any questions she
might have would not even be considered as the wife is seen not as an
individual entity but rather as a satellite to her husband and mother-in-law.
9.
Sexuality
It is
difficult to draw general conclusions but broadly speaking one could say that
sex is regarded as being more for male pleasure, while female fulfillment is
considered to come from having children.
One has to
reiterate that these are very broad generalisations with which to attempt to
define
hundreds
of cultures and language groups over a vast geo-political spectrum at a variety
of levels of cultural development.Nevertheless it draws some kind of a picture for us to observe and from
which to create categories.
The modern
urban marriage.
1.
Urbanisation as a factor
The very
fact that urban centres are increasing to such an extent in the Muslim world is
important.Urbanisation by its very
nature creates anonymity.Anonymity in
its turn creates the emergence of far greater personal autonomy.
How many
times has a Muslim woman been told by her brother or uncle, "You would never
wear that skirt if you were back in the village"The very anonymity of urban life removes the
primary sociological enforcement agencies that rural cultures produce.Distance from family is the most important
issue in Islam losing its grip on urban culture.
2. The
choice.
Increasingly,
younger people in urban centres are meeting each other at university or in
other places where they have free access to one other.Much conflict is created for families as this
trend continues.In short, the fundamental
plank of Muslim marriage, the arrangement, is being
removed.
Another
parenthesis may be in order here: in recent years especially in the
contextualisation movement a trend has developed to affirm the concept of the
arranged marriage by using the western models of immorality and divorce
and social
fragmentation as a negative contrast.Obviously this is said with the best of intentions and motivation, so
one must be very careful in confronting it.Nevertheless to compare western society to eastern society is to tread
on very fragile ground.
In the
west modernity has removed all concept of the sacred to a point where any sense
of shame in conduct or attitude to outward behaviour has passed away.However, whereas western society tends to be
open about its cultural weaknesses, in the Muslim world behaviour, especially
in the area of morality, is very much a hidden issue.The sexual impropriety in Muslim cultures
defies description.The difference is
that in the west it is in the open; in the east it is hidden.The syphilis rate in many Muslim cultures is
extraordinarily high.The use of
prostitutes is staggering: child molestation is chilling and worst of all the
opportunity for a victim to appeal for help is
often
non-existent.
Another
issue arising from these east-west comparisons
is
happiness.It is at best naive to assume
that a low divorce rate among Muslims proves the cultural superiority of
Muslim-style marriage, when the fact is that it is impossible for most Muslim
women to leave their marriages.Because
of this, it is impossible to know how many Muslim women are unhappy and would
seek divorce if that option were open to them.
3.
Romance.
In urban
Muslim centres romance according to the western model is emerging more and more
as the basis of the decision to marry.Very often the romance model has come into these cultures by way of
cinema and television.Whereas in the
initial stages of the traditional marriage there was no romance it is now a
very large part of the relationship.
4. Age
Difference.
Increasingly
the age gap between marriage partners is lessening, often to within two or
three years. There are huge sociological
implications
to this which will explored in the next chapter.
4. Living
arrangements
Frequently,
the new urban marriage is such that the couple live in an apartment separate
from the in-laws, and we shall look at the many obvious implications of this.
5. Opinion
and Belief
Whereas in
a rural situation the bride would not have opinions distinct from the extended
family, in the city and
its
protective anonymity, ideas that would be unacceptable in a rural setting may
be explored.This may be one of the most
important issues of modernity and Islam and will be explored in depth in the
next chapter.
6. Dowry
As the
choice ofa marriage partner has been
made outside the control of the family the dowry is not usually a prominent
feature of urban marriages.This in
itself places the
couple who
are the same age and have chosen each other on a far more equal footing.
7.
Sexuality.
Increasingly,
couples are sexually active before they marry. This is in stark contrast to a
more traditional situation where the male would often be sexually active with
prostitutes but the woman would invariably be a virgin.
The issue
of virginity is slowly changing in urban centres. For a bride to be a virgin
would still be considered traditional by London standards but not if one
compares it to rural North Africa.There, on the wedding night the marriage is consummated whilst the
guests are still gathered.The woman
must bleed as proof of her virginity. Her bloodstained underwear is then shown
to the guests, who cheer.The underwear
is then draped over a drum and paraded
through
the street with the drum being beaten by the exultant husband.
Sexuality
in an urban Muslim context is also increasingly a mutually pleasurable
experience.Female orgasm - which would
be beyond the comprehension of many rural brides - isbecoming a central part of the marriage
experience.
Chapter Six
Conversation and the making
of reality
"Language is a virus from outer
space...."
William Burroughs.
Conversation
as being the means of defining reality is a view held by many sociologists.
Perhaps the most understandable and succinct is Peter Berger.Berger's book "The Homeless Mind"
is an excellent study and should be read by those who desire to explore the
subject further.
An
illustration may help: an English working-class boy meets an American girl in a
cross-cultural training session for evangelism in some region of the
world.They are able to 'connect' around
the vision for reaching, let's say, the Gujaratis of North West London.They have the same views on the inspiration
of Scripture, the Trinity and world evangelism.As long as they concentrate on certain generic tasks outside their own
individual cultures they are able to communicate effectively.
Eventually,
committed to the task of world evangelism and prayer and fasting, they fall in
love.They marry in the ministry and
then go to America for a visit.At this
point the young English working-class boy realizes that his in-laws are, to his
way of thinking neo-fascist commie-bashing bigots!To his wife they are simply Mum (or rather
Mom) and Dad.The young Englishman
realizes that his wife actually believes that Martin Luther King was a dirty
commie and that the 'illuminati' control everything from the United Nations to
the Anglican Church.The ultimate
horror, which brings the English boy to his knees in laughter and disgust, is
that his wife's family actually believe that America not England won the war!
His wife
then realizes that this super young man who prays so hard and loves to
evangelise actually votes for the British Labour party, is not opposed to
having a glass of beer and does not believe that Jesus had short hair and
would have
voted for Ronald Reagan if he could have done....
Suddenly
conflict emerges at the most basic level in ways that neither of them would
have thought possible.They try to pray
it through, ignore it out of their lives and certainly never bring the subject
up in front of either set of parents.
Gradually
over a period of time whilst living in America the young Englishman becomes
very unsettled in his heart as he loves his wife.His mother-in-law gives , as her opinion that
all gays should be registered and then put in concentration camps.Whereas once his reaction would have been to
go for a walk and long for the normality of being at Ealing Broadway eating
fish and chips, he now starts seeking compromise with these people who are
epitomised by his wife whom he loves.
Time goes
on and in conversation with his wife he starts to build bridges.She sees that he is building bridges and she
reaches out as well.Maybe Martin Luther
King was not someone she would like as a Bible teacher on the book of Ephesians
but she sees now that it was important for a strong role model standing for
justice to emerge in the black community.He then reads a book and discusses with her how his view of history may
have been skewed, and that perhaps his view of the second world war was a
little too ethno-centric.She then
cries, they make love and he begins to love America.
She then
hears the stories of how the working masses in Britain suffered so much in the
19th century and how the Labour party had helped swing the balance.They go for a walk and agree that there is a
liberal bias in the American media and that whereas neither of them believe
this is due to the 'illuminati' they do see that some kind of conspiracy is
taking place.Over the space of six
weeks together “conversation” becomes the basis by which both of them redefine
history.This process was not based on
logic and reason and it has no empirical base to it.It was, in short a sociological process that
took place between the two parties because they wanted to redefine history and
thus reality for the sake of their relationship.Conversation is the most powerful force in
existence for defining and redefining reality.I would suggest that for most people reality as a whole is based not
upon rational data but upon the social context within which people liveand conversation as the data base for
decision-making.
I would go
even further and suggest that in the modern
world
reality is a perspective of some revealed material or data that is defined and
redefined in a person's consciousness by conversation.The data is the raw
material
but conversation creates perspective concerning that data.This issue of reality is fundamental and will
be
explored a
little more in the next chapter.
Let us now
project this idea of conversation into the lives of the two marriage paradigms
that we viewed in the previous chapter.Imagine the type of conversation that takes place between the
traditional rural couple.She is 15
years old and he is 15 years older.Her
first sexual experience causes her to be traumatised rather than bonded to her
husband.The type of conversation
carried on between this husband and wife is very limited in terms of both
intimacy and honesty.For this young
bride to question any of the principal issuesenforced by the culture and family would be unthinkable.She may find some other women to talk with
and even complain to but in the relationship with her husband she will in
effect remain sealed up.This process
becomes so entrenched that two distinct lives are lived.Outwardly and even at an emotional level a
certain measure of happiness may exist, but inwardly all kinds of torments and
ambiguities exist.The reason is that
the social self and the inward self are lived in two distinct categories.
Project
this now onto our urban couple.They are
the same age and they chose each other for marriageon a basis of romantic love.They do not live with the extended family and
are reasonably self-sufficient financially.The way that they process information through conversation is completely
different.She questions his mother's
influence on him.At first he is
offended; then, as time goes on, through conversation he sees her point, if not
fully.This might never have happened in
a rural setting where they were all living together.She is socialising her husband by changing
his perception of reality through conversation.The very fact that they are the same age, intimate and have
chosen
each other allows for a far greater level of honesty to exist.
There are
importantissues at stake here.Women will socialise men one way or another
over a period of time.It is a part of the
relational structure of the way men and women function. In short, one wonders
if men might not ultimately eat their children if they did not have women to
socialise them.The process in more
modern situations is however far more open and one has to say real.The urban Muslim couple's ability to choose
and change direction in thought, opinion or action is far greater than that of
their rural counterpart.
I would
suggest that herein lies one of the most powerful issues relating to Muslim
evangelism.
1. The
young urban couple is anonymous and can thus make friends with Christians in
ways that their rural counterparts could not.
2. By
nature they are going to be far more experimental than their rural counterparts
and thus will be more open to new ideas.
3.
Pluralisation means that they will be far more open toviews other than their own world view.
4.
Conversation could be the bridge to redefine their view of reality with
reference to God and the meaning of existence.
We
automatically encounter a problem here, not from the Muslim standpoint but from
the standpoint of the Christian who is seeking to do the sharing of the
Gospel.In the West
we tend to
lean in the direction of convincing the individual that our position is right
and then seeking to bring that person to agreement and then commitment.This model does not function well in this
setting.Reflection is
a very
important part of the processing of the information that has been given.Thus success usually comes from sharing a
thought to be considered; then in reflection over a period of time the
redefinition of reality seems to take
place.Thankfully, the "sock it to 'em"
style of sharing the gospel is not a major feature of Muslim evangelism, yet I
would emphasise again that the process of sharing
needs to
be based on conversation plus reflection, more conversation and more
reflection.
Chapter
Seven
Fringe Culture
Let him that is without Sin cast the first
stone
Jesus
One of the
increasing issues of the modern world is the growth in the number
of people
who outwardly declare themselves to be homosexual or Lesbian. The
reality is
that we just do not know in actuality if the large numbers of today
are in
fact an expression of the fact that more people are gay or if in fact
more
people just admit to being gay. Europe is less open in many senses than
America
yet in terms of acceptance in the main stream of culture and media
Europe and
in particular Britain has been quite cavalier in her willingness
to give
air time on network television to gay issues and films. This would be
almost
unspeakable by way of abomination in American society.
What is
interesting to observe is the increase of gay activity in the Muslim
world. Despite
the antics of Lawrence of Arabia the reality is that
Homosexuality
and especially Lesbianism has been very much an underworld
issue.
This is of course changing at a very high pace. Cities such as Jakarta,
Istanbul
and Cairo are somewhat leading the way in the "coming out factor" of
Muslim
background gay men and women.
Increasingly
in the Muslim world transvestite communities are developing and
the whole
transsexual culture may well follow. Transexuality in some forms is
men who
retain their male genitalia but have hormone treatment to develop
female
breasts and skin tone.
As a young
man reading the works of Charles Marsh trekking through the
mountains
of inner Algeria reaching small Muslim villages, I gathered in my
mind what
it would be to reach the Muslims in a similar way. Sitting on the
floor
drinking tea and then opening my Bible and with a beard, hat and a salami
I would
evangelise. What a shock to be sitting in a night club in an urban
Muslim
community and be talking to someone who one is not quite sure if they
are male,
female or neither or both.
Whatever
easy answers made up ones world view of Muslim evangelism previously,
encounters
with the growing fringe culture in many Muslim cities is enough to
cast
oneself fully on the belief that all life is a mystery but in the midst
of it
there is a God who loves his fallen creation and has implanted into our
hearts and
lives a message of redemption.
The
following are some outlines to work with in terms for grappling with these
issues.
1. The trend
will continue.
When we
find something uncomfortable there is a tendency to convince ourselves
that it is
either not there or that it will go away soon and is just a passing
trend. The
fact is that homosexuality as a trend shows no signs of diminishing
but rather
the reverse. If one does not have gay friends now, in the coming
years one
will either find out that some of ones friends are gay or will be
in regular
contact with openly gay people.
2. The
trend will continue in the Muslim World
As the Muslim
world continues to urbanise there will be an increase in those
either
coming out or choosing the gay lifestyle as an option. This will cause
an
upheaval at many levels and may be one of the factors that forces a removal
from
strict Islamic law to be a part of the main stream culture.
3. A
growing number of Gay people will seek to become Christian
The above
mentioned issues may be annoying at worst but simply in themselves
will not
force us to face the issues of reaching a gay community or a
transsexual
community. What will be very confrontational in our lives will be
when
someone who is gay knocks on our door saying "what must I do to be
saved".
I would
suggest that we need to rethink our basic premise of how we have
attacked
this issue in the past. We may be able to have a better track record
in the
Muslim world than we have done in the west.
I would
suggest that we grapple with the issue of what is sin. When it comes
to the
bottom line sin is so often viewed as something we do or do not do. In
short, we
view sin or sins as actions. If we are really pushed, it is so often
seen as
the transgression of the law of God. As a result of that we can do no
other than
to create levels of sin. Our rhetoric has so often been that all
sin is the
same in the sight of God but we know that our attitude towards gay
people and
someone who snitched a cookie from grandma Buggins kitchen shows
that we do
have a hierarchical view of sin. From a theological perspective it
may be
worth thinking through whether sin is something we do or anything that is
within in
me by nature that falls short of the Glory of God. If it is the
latter
then we can do nothing else than to subscribe to the belief that only
"the
ongoing" work of the blood of the cross is sufficient to cleanse me from
"the
ongoing falling short of the Glory of God" that I experience.
That
single leap into the theological light can transform the way that we view
the world
around us. Modernity does by it's very nature cause us to quantify,
categorise
and create priority structures. The moment we do that to sin the
moment we
have created a theology, perhaps unawares, that will only work under
certain
circumstances and cultural conditions.
If we
believe this and then add to it the belief that it is the "goodness of
God that
leads men unto repentance" then we are beginning to create a paradigm
that may
have something to say to the fringe cultures of both the West and the
Muslim
world.
There is a
definite trend in recent years for a reaction to the flower power
love fest
theology of the 70's and 80's. It goes something like this "itis
all well
and good talking about the love of God but how about the Holiness of
God".
The heads begin to nod and the " lets bash the fags brigade" feel
very
comfortable.
My question has been then "how about the Holiness of God?" how
can it be
satisfied and in reality protected? Is it by more abstentions from
the taboos
of our culture? Is it by more piety and sacrifice? If it is then
we have
created for the first time an effective means of Gods Holiness being
able to be
approached by man on the basis of his own strength and works.
In my mind
when we do an audit of our own hearts and minds it may leave us
with a
different attitude towardsthose, many
of whom are tormented beyond
description,
who are not able to function in the God given sexual paradigm
that the
Bible teaches is God's intrinsic plan for humanity.
Chapter Eight
Divorce, Traditional
Values And Femenism
As Far as
The East Is From The West So Far have I Scattered Your Transgressions
From You
Says The Lord
Isaiah
One of the
features of the modern urban experience is the increase in the
divorce
rate. The tragedy that this has produced within many communities
is
difficult to over estimate. Yet whilst saying that there needs to be a balance
struck so
that we do not view this subject from a biased position. The loss of
traditional values is often pointed to as the
reason for the increase in divorce
and as
result conservativelobby groups are
seeking to make divorce harder
once more.
The basic premise is that a bad father is
better than no father. Whereas I am
sure there is great virtue and sincerity in
the debate it does tend to be based
on a very weak premise. When you have looked
into the eyes of a little boy
who is traumatized to the point of self
hypnosis to avoid the memory of a
father
that beat him mercilessly with a belt the
argument
takes on a new dimension. When you have seen the fear in the eyes of
a woman
whose husband would smash widows if he could not get enough sex in
the way
and quantity that he wanted it, then suddenly the banners calling us
back to a
morality that made divorce an impossibility seems to sag and wilt.
When you
have held in your arms a teenage girl who hated beyond all
description
an abusive father and as a result did not know how to love life,
then the
call for a return to theVictorian era
seems rather shrill and empty.
The
pundits and plaudits may bauk at the use of an isolated instance to make
a point
but the facts seem to bare out that the isolated incidence is reaching a level
that can
be termed almost common place.
The Core
Issue Behind Divorce
It is in
fact the anonymity that the urban experience creates that lies
underneath
the huge increase in divorce in the modern world. It could be
argued
that we live in a more hedonistic culture than a hundred years ago but
my sense
is that the hedonism of today is probably a reaction to the
weightlessness
of culture than it is some wicked new selfishness that has
emerged.
Just as
there has been a progressive move towards high ratio divorce in the
western
world so it will be so in the Muslim world over a period of time.
We have
seen the increase of civil divorce in more secular Muslim countries
like Turkey
but all indication is that it will continue in urban centres
globally.
Traditionally Islamic divorce has been stereotyped with a husband
simply
raising his hand three times and saying "I divorce thee, I divorce thee
I divorce
thee". In actuality it is not as crude as that in much of the Modern
Muslim
world. There are increasinglylaws that
do begin to give some status
to the
divorced woman,yet there is a long way
to go.
The issue
of divorce as with the issue of feminism has many connotations that
relate to
Christian witness to Muslims. Put simply, the divorced segment of
Muslim
societies around the world is becoming significant. Seeing divorced
people as
a group with specific needs and specific avenues to reach them is
going to
be an increasingly important issue.
In general
terms in America and Britain there is still a high level of
nervousness
concerning divorce within the Christian community. It is without
doubt one
of the great stigmas of the modern Christian. To be divorced at
best means
that you will be treated with kindness in the same way someone with
AIDS is
treated. At worst, it can be quite tragic.
The
Pragmatic Argument Or The Absolute Argument
Much of
the reasoning behind the divorce debate is that culture and society
is
fragmenting . The result of that fragmentation is that we are producing a
generation without fathers and couples who
only care about their subjective needs.
To put this on hold one needs to analyze the
substance of the argument.
"Divorce
is evil and needs to be stopped because fragmented families are the
result".
If this
position is held one has to accept that the argument is based upon apragmatic not an absolute premise. In other
words, it is bad because these are the results. It is not based on an absolute
which would
say it is
bad because God has said so. Of course absolutes are summoned about
divorce,especially Matthew
Chapter 5.
Yet in this same chapter one is told that if ones right eye offends one and
causes one to sin then it must be plucked out. If we give the same literal
equality to the plucking out of the eye as we do to
divorce
then we must ask some very serious questions on why the church as a
whole is
not one eyed. This may seem extreme and produce some heavy breathing
or eye
raising but it is worth mentioning that the early Church father Origen
took this
verse seriously and castrated himself because of his tendency to
lust.
Hopefully the point is being made. Invariably we fall back on an
absolute
statement of scripture quite selectively ignoring other equally
powerful
statements to back up that which is an intrinsically pragmatic
statement.
The Basis
Of Staying Married
If one were to do a study of the Victorian era
in Britain in which
divorce
was so low that it was negligible one would have to grapple with some
other very
strong issues. The fact is that spousal rape was fully accepted in
law as a
part of the husbands right. It was legal for a husband to beat his
wife as
long as it was with a stick no thicker than his thumb. The reason that
divorce was
so low in the Victorian era was, that just as in the contemporary
Muslim
world,the divorced woman had no status
nor rights. Divorce was not even
legalized
until 1857. All income of the divorced woman was confiscated by the
husband. A
divorced woman could not enter into a legal contract, borrow money,
buy or
sell property and her savings belonged to her husband. Most chilling
she had no
right over her children what so ever. Without seeking to be to
cynical
one may be excused for believing that the lack of divorce in that
glorious
day of traditional values may have had more to do with the sexist
bias of
the judicial system than it did with the stability of the home and a
loving and
kind relationship.
The
Bondage OfNew Freedoms
The reason
for higher divorce levels today has nothing to do with traditional
values
being superior but more to do with the fact that today in the modern
world,
this so called fragmented society, a divorced woman can have rights
under the
law. I think another point to mention here is that in the 19th
century
there was equally as much fragmentation in the family by virtue of the
fact that
husbands died far earlier than today, leaving wives without status and their
children
being left on the streets. The child poverty statistics of the 19th
century
are staggering. There was far greater disenfranchisement of the family
by
political inequality than there is today through divorce.
Dealing
With Reality
The
reality is that divorce is a part of the modern world. It is at high
levels in
the western world because women no longer have to suffer in silence.
Is it
good? absolutely not. Is it Gods desire? absolutely not. Will it
continue
in cultures of social democracy? absolutely. It is also going to
emerge in
the Muslim world as an ever growing feature. I would suggest that
it will be
the great debating point in Islamic circles in the next ten years.
The reason
for this rather painful short chapter is to say the following. We
need to
grapple with the divorce issue in the west and come up with a far
better
theology and attitude and response than we currently have. Without this
we will
have great difficulty dealing with this issue in the Muslim world. If
we can
establish an incarnational model of the atonement for the divorced
population
it may be a major avenue of contact in reaching the huge number of
divorced
Muslim women that will exist as modernity continues to accelerate in
the Muslim
world.
Feminism
as Bridge Building
Islam is
stereotyped as being oppressive to women. That is too simplistic a
statement.I would suggest that
historically all systems of thought over 200 years old have been used by men to
oppress women.Islam has been one of the
last to shed its oppressiveness.One of
the unique features of modernity is that through globalisation we can now judge
all cultures with one standard of practice or opinion.Let me put it another way: cultures grow and
evolve at different levels according to different circumstances.One culture may come to the same conclusions
as another culture but it may take 50 years longer or even more.The fact that South Africa had an apartheid
system in the modern world was odious, hopefully to us all.What made it so odious was that all other
enlightened cultures had sought to abandon such backward thinking years before.
Therein lies the issue.Britain had been
forced by a whole series of events and personalities to surrender its empire.
One could say that the process began in 1919 at the Paris peace conference when
Woodrow Wilson came to Paris with the League charter and the vision for
"self- determination".If that
did not start the process the end of the second world war certainly did.But let us imagine if there had been no
second world war and no Gandhi, would Britain have given independence to its
former colonies?I would suggest not
unless they were forced to.Thus, the
enlightened British in the 1980's called for an end to
apartheid
but they might well have been still "unenlightened" if they had not
gone through the process in a traumatic way due the second world war.
One can
say the same about other issues, in this casefeminism.Each culture is
emerging at different levels of change.It is only because the space-time continuum as we have known it has now
passed away as a result of high technology that we are able to judge different
cultures simultaneously.As with earlier
illustrations, there is little doubt that power in the gender issue would not
have been ceded by the benevolence of men who felt the time had come for them
to be more open-minded.
The fact is that even in the United States
women did not obtain the vote until the early 1920's and then only because the
issue was forced.In Britain it took
suffragette extremism to balance inequality in the gender issue.Likewise in the Muslim world a similar debate
is raging.There are women's movements
all
over the
Muslim world but Morocco and Palestine are the two which have definitely led
the way.However it is important to
understand the resistance to the issue.It is very similar to that of fundamentalist Christianity and needs to
be grappled with.
The
possibility of a wonderful and open door for the Gospel using feminism as the
means to connect may be lost because of the entrenched cultural primitivism of
western fundamentalist Christianity.The
issue here is not one of pragmatism but rather of what is the absolute
standard.I would suggest that in both
Christianity and Islam we depend more on pragmatism and fear of the loss of
power than on absolutes in scripture as the basis of strategy.
An Islamic
Perspective
The
Hadith, which is regarded by most Muslims as being as authoritative as the
Koran, has some interesting points of debate.In Al-Matba's al-Bahiya al-Misriya page 46, Vol.16 which is the commentary
by Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, one reads the words of al-Bukhari, "Those who
entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity".That seems rather a strong statement for
anyone to swallow.The Muslim feminist
then counters with the fact that A'isha, the youngest bride of the prophet,
fought the battle to defend the orthodox faith at the time of the prophet's
death.By many Muslimscholars however, thiswas considered "bid'a", ie an an
innovation based on errant behaviour.This may sound
familiar to those acquainted with the views of
some Christian fundamentalists.When
Deborah was raised up to judge and defend Israel she was, according to many
commentators, in "bid'a", that is, God allowed it to happen as a
judgment upon the men because they were not godly and were neglecting their
responsibilities.I would suggest that
in Islam and Christianity a crucial issue is at stake and that is concerning
the basic equality of women within the life and culture of society.
The
Challenge to Re-think
From a
Christian perspective my overwhelming feeling is that our position on women is
based on reaction rather than reality.
The Bible
is filled with paradox. Acceptingthis
can create a dialectical view of much value. So often by selective emphasis
upon one aspect of paradoxical truth we create extremism. Reality is that truth
emerges from the dialectical tension that paradox creates.
I would
suggest that we tend to take one aspect of the paradoxical truth of scripture
and then use it not as one pole of a dialectic but rather as a full and
concrete absolute to make a point that has nothing to do with the heart and
mind of God but all to do with the retaining of power by men.This sloppy, chauvinistic view of life and
the Kingdom of God will not stand the onslaught of modernity.What is needed is a total rethink on the
issues of the role of women and for this to be used not as a means of
compromise but rather as a means of opening doors for hungry and thirsty women
in the emerging secular Muslim world.
Chapter Nine
The restoration of the
Sacred
"Mine is a long and sad
tale!"
said the mouse turning to
Alice.
"It is a long tail,
certainly," said Alice,
looking down with wonder at the
mouse's tail,
"but why do you call
it sad?"
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis
Carroll
My friend
Stuart McAllisterand I were standing in
a field on the outskirts of Vienna several years ago. I had been agonising over
the impact of modernity and was quite apocalyptic in my prognosis for the
evangelical church in the future. As we spoke and wrestled with ideas at both
the subjective level as well as at the objective level. He offered a statement
that was to underpin what this concluding chapter is all about. Simply put and
in short, he said, "you are trying to find the answers within yourself at
a subjective level, truth is not to be found there, it is only going to be
found in the objective revelation that God has provided". Those words were
to some extent to become a message of optimism in much of my thinking.
In
actuality, there is a universal angst that hangs over many of us as we look at
the prospect of Muslim evangelism. It seems as if the more the Muslim world
opens the weaker the Gospel and the
evangelical
church is becoming at a corresponding level. The door flies open to new levels
of input through modernity but modernity in the same process destroys the fabric
of the church that is going through the open door. The Homogenisation of the
sacred in the Muslim world corresponds with the same process in the evangelical
world. The end result is chilling to the memory of the martyrs of missions to
the Muslim world.
This
concluding chapter is an attempt to look outside of the subjective for a
response and to turn to the objective in such a way as to look to build new
models, that have fabric,substance and history, for the reaching of the new
secular Muslim world for Christ.
The
homogenisation process
One of the
processes alluded to in previous chapters is the process of
homogenisation.This process is at the
same time an essential ingredient of modernity and also an effect of modernity,
as opposed to other processes that we have considered as carriers of
modernity.In short, the
homogenisation
process affects every aspect of culture and is closely related to the process
of reductionism.It is a paradox in that
simultaneously with more knowledge becoming available to us and giving us a
variety of experiences we are also becoming more and more narrow because we are
all becoming the same.(I have to inject
a subjective note here and say that for me no ingredient of modern women's and
men's pain causes me to weep over the world more than the way that we are
losing our uniqueness of mind and being forced into increasingly narrow
categories.To run laughing down a hill
in a city park is acceptable not because to be unique is acceptable but because
we are anonymous. That is the ultimate
pain for artists and sensitive people who struggle to run and laugh.It is not that our creativity has ceased to
offend; it is that we are ignored.)
David
Harvey in his benchmark book "The condition of Postmodernity",
Oxford, 1990, talks about the "totalizing effect of modernity".He also grapples with the idea of the
homogenisation process:
"If modern life is indeed so
suffused with a sense of the fleeting, the ephemeral, the fragmentary, and the
contingent, then a number of profound consequences follow. To begin with,
modernity can have no respect even for its own past, let alone that of any
pre-modern social order. The transitoriness of things makes it difficult to
preserve any sense of historical continuity. If there is any meaning to
history, then that meaning has to be discovered and defined from within the
maelstrom of change, a maelstrom that affects the terms of discussion as well
as whatever is being discussed".
Harvey
does something for us in his definitions that is painfully absent from
contemporary Christian think tanks.He
tells us that the "terms of discussion" are being changed by
modernity as well as the discussion itself.One would have to concede that this loss of genuine categoriesmay be at the heart of much of the dilemma
facing missiology today.The very
categories themselves have been lost in the maelstrom of change that modernity
has produced.We could be facing
Berger's "plausibility" crisis or, an even more horrifying thought,
we may be on the brink ofan "
issues substance silence".
What we
must do, however, is to fight through and grapple over the issues of modernity
as outlined in this short book and howthey are affecting the thrust into what we have for so long termed the
Muslim world.
The
sacred
The role
of the sacred is rapidly declining in our midst as modernity unleashes itself
upon the Church.I sense that the great
challenge for world evangelism lies no longer in recruiting people to go to
'the regions beyond' but rather in facing the fact that our message, lifestyle
and cultural essence have been so homogenised that our message is in danger of
becoming impotent. It is such an irony that the time of greatest openness for
the Gospel in the whole of history has occurred at the time when the very
message that we bear has all but disappeared into some kind of subjective
existential experience that has little connection with the profound beauty of
the creeds and scriptures which affirmed that "sinful men and women can be
reconciled to a holy God by the blood of the cross of Calvary".I would suggest that the centrality of that
truth has been under attack at all levels imaginable.The following categories are I believe the
battlegrounds and the place for restoration.It may seem as though I am moving the argument for Muslim evangelism
into the realm of some kind of restoration or reformation movement in the
western Church.I have to confess that
is exactly where I believe the battle for the emerging secular Muslim world is
to be fought. If we can see the restoration of the sacred in our midst "as
we go" to the Muslim world it may become a central part of our strategy
for actually reaching the Muslim world.
Conversion
Throughout
history conversion has been a deeply sacred and serious subject.There are times when conversion came quickly
in power encounters in a variety of ways but more often than not conversion was
a series of steps.There came an enlightenment
to the problem of sin; there came conviction of sin; along with that conviction
of sin came a wrestling and a struggling with all the elements of man's
rebellion towards God.Sin was not so
much violations of laws or crimes committed. Rather sin seemed to be everything
within us that came short of the glory of God.When the recognition of helplessness arose then the message of the
cross, the resurrection and the free gift of God through Christ gave the sinner
the sense of release and freedom.
That
process and revelation when it was in motion was something that "God"
seemed to do rather than man.The need
for speed and decision and activity seems to have been a very small part of
conversion in the lives of women and men throughout much of Church history.In short, there was something sacred about
conversion. If we then compare that to the modern world a different set of
circumstances has
come into
play.We have succumbed to what
sociologists are now calling "speed up".That is that everything around us is speeding
up and thus we find ourselves at every level in a rushed situation.It is a consequence of modernity that
conversion has become rushed and easy and very often just an existential 'buzz'
that is 'easy come and easy go'.
Thankfully,
over the past 35 yearsthat has not been
the case in the Muslim world. Conversion has been a very long and burdensome
experience for many.The fact that it is
not easy lies at the root of why we have not seen more success.The reason I mention this here is that this
will change.As the sociological
forces
allow teenagers, young married couples and women to be reached in a far easier
manner, then we will be tempted to bring a modern gospel into a modern
context.Let me say no greater
abomination can exist than that this door of Islam- closed for so long - should open as a result
of modernity and that then a modern cheap Gospel should be given.I would suggest that we create study groups
within the endless round of conventions and task forces, to ask the question,
"What is the Gospel?".I would
suggest too that significant numbers of missionaries themselves do not fully
understand the historic gospel of grace and its application. We need to restore
this aspect of the sacred into our world view.
It does
sound unorthodox but in reality the soteriological issues relating to Muslim
conversion may not be so much in the field of contextualisation but rather a
rebirth of historic thinking in the midst of those seeking to take a “ Gospel
of conversion”to the Muslim world.
Baptism
Throughout
history baptism has undoubtedly been one of the most serious issues in the life
of the believer.Charles Marsh, the
great missionary to North Africa in the early part of this century wept as he
told a group of us that, for the first twenty years of his ministry, of all the
people he had seen won to Christ not one had lived 9 months beyond their
baptism.This dear man discipled his
friends not to live for Christ but to die for Christ.Certainly in the western world baptism has
lost much of its sacred essence.No
greater obscenity has emerged in the Kingdom of God than that denominations
bearing this sacrament as part of their name have turned it into a circus act -
fast and easy and eventually disposable.Whether we are talking about child baptism or adult believers' baptism
there is a great need for a rethink about its role in the church.It is a very
serious
issue and needs to be treated as such.
I would
suggest that we would all agree that at the first generation level we would
baptise converts. The debate over covenant versus Baptistic traditions can
follow. We would all agree that Baptism is a sacred sign of initiation into the
family of God. It needs to be handled with the utmost care when applied to new
Muslim converts. As the loony fast and easy brigade are set loose on the Muslim
world with their chocolate covered Gospel, be assured that funtime baptism is
not far behind. Lovingly it needs to be resisted and sacred models of Baptism
must be held to with a fierce loyalty.
Prayer
Historically
prayer has been viewed as sacred communion between God and man.Once a year, we read in the Old Testament,
the High Priest walked into the sanctuary of the Holy of Holies bearing in one
hand the censer filled with burning coals and in the other incense.There before him stood the ark of the covenant
upon which, between the golden seraphs, was the cloud of smoke that was the
Shekinah glory of God.As the High
Priest dropped the incense onto burning coals smoke erupted and mingled with
the cloud on the altar.The smoke of God
and the smoke of man became one, joined in utterly sacred and total
symbiosis.Surely, this is a picture of
prayer - the glory of Christ and the symbol of the holiness of God joining with
humanity which he loves and redeems by the blood of the atonement.Yet today prayer has taken an increasingly
modern twist.We are told that God is
interested in the little things of our lives yet that
seems to
be all that he is ever given.The
paradox is that God is seen either as a great transcendental Shylock in the
skies sawing away at our flesh to shave off a pound of it or as some superhuman
rock star with lottery tickets for all who would simply "try
him".There seems to be a clear
sociological reason why the reformed church movements, the orthodox churches,
and, to a lesser degree, the catholic churches are making so much ground in
terms of evangelicals converting to them.The 'cheap and nasty' God of fundamentalism and the happy-go-lucky God
of evangelicalism and the 'breath-with-no-lungs' God of the charismaticshas left a generation of people confused and
alienated.If the concept of prayer as
something sacred or wonderful could be restored, it might well resolve much of
this dilemma.At the heart of modernity
is the concept that man must have rational control over his or her destiny.
Prayer that feeds into rational man with rational control will have profound
implications for emerging Muslim convert churches. Prayer that casts mans
destiny into the hands of a sovereign God will create a healthy first
generation Muslim convert community whose intrinsic spirituality may quickly
surpass the arrogance of American and European Christianity.
Communion
Perhaps no
other subject has created more debate throughout history than that of the
sacrament of Holy Communion.Whichever
way one looks at this one can see clearly how the sacred aspects of it have
been homogenised out by modernity. Again we have to turn to America as the icon
of
accelerated
modernity.In evangelical fundamentalism
the communion service has all but been relegated to a juice and cracker break
at the end of a boring service once a month. Youngsters giggle and pass notes
about who fancies who
then take
the cup and the bread.It never ceases
to amaze me that a culture that can create taboos of almost psychotic proportions
about other minor issues in their midst can allow the central sacrament of the
church to become nothing but an almost meaningless game or ritual.The restoration of the communion service to a
place of sacred seriousness is fundamental to our being able to export some
kind of healthy Christian experience to the emerging secular Muslim world that
we are seeking to evangelize.
Ritual,
Tradition and Liturgy
One of the
clear issues of this homogenisation process that we are looking at is the fact
that all ritual and tradition ultimately becomes absent from our cultures,
whether it be a marriage ceremony that bears no resemblance to any other
marriage or simply church life itself taking on an entrepreneurial and
subjective character.An awareness of
this loss of tradition and ritual is vital to our understanding of the life and
future of the church.In short, ritual
and tradition become very often the vehicles by which truth is carried down.I appreciate the argument about the new and
old wineskins but I must say that balance has swung so far the other way - into
the subjective - that very little of ritual and tradition and liturgy
remains.At the darkest moments of my
life in the last years I found it impossible to pray.Nothing would come out, nothing.The despair was so great that whereas
intellectually I knew that God was in his heaven and that his sovereign will on
earth would be fulfilled, it meant nothing to me in terms of my own experience.I was so dry.I chose a new route and that was to mouth each morning the words of the
Nicene Creed.Each morning, whilst my
heart was empty and broken, eternal and historical truth came from my lips and
affirmed
the
faith.Without that creed I do not know
what I would have done.
In a day
of super hypersubjectivity the need for creeds and liturgy has probably
increased rather than decreased.There
is a safety, there is a solidity and there is a substance to these
time-honoured creeds that act as a place for holding the secular world
accountable.I don't think it is remiss
to suggest that perhaps the reason why so much utter nonsense in the realm of
belief and practice has come out of America is a result of religion being
entrepreneurial andas a whole anti-
liturgical.Liturgy is a track down
which truth may be delivered and it can keep the Church focused upon what is in
fact truth. For our Muslim friends it is the ritual of the five times a day
call to prayer that has often caused the propositions of Islam to be enforced
into heir thinking. It is the modern world that has drowned out the call to
prayer from the mosque. Imagine what state Britain would be in today if five
times a day the Nicene creed were read or chanted from every church steeple in
the country.
Catechism
The use of
catechism has often been the prerogative of the more developed liturgical
churches throughout the last 200 years.Evangelicalism has affirmed the need for teaching but has allowed
subjectivity to be the basis of communicating that teaching.So when we should be teaching the body of
saints what it means to be declared justified by the blood of the everlasting
covenant we are in fact teaching them how to have a better sex life.Far be it from me to be a sex-buster, but one
can see how the hyper-subjectivity of modernity has determined what we learn
and how we learn it.The role of
creative catechism may be one of the principal deterrents to modernity.
For new
convert churches the role of catechism could be a fundamental building block as
opposed to getting them swaying in the wind with the rest of evangelicalism.
There is
no doubt that the nature of the Muslim world is changing.The trend towards secularisation can only
increase.There will be those who seek
to avoid or slow down the process.They
will eventually lose.Modernity will win
the battle against Islam.The challenge
confronting the church is twofold.We
must define our own character in the light of modernity while at the same time
seeking to bring the message of the Gospel into a fragmenting Muslim
world.There are no set answers; that is
apparent to us all.Nevertheless, a
rethink concerning the role of the sacred in our own midst and in the emerging
churches may be one of the keys to reaching the emerging Muslim world.
Ishmael my brother
I long to see you free
To loose your chains of
bondage and cause your eyes to see
The crimson flood of
Holy Blood upon God's altar laid
The total payment for
your sin that brings new life within