McDonalds, Minarets and Modernity

 

McDonalds,  Minarets and Modernity

The Anatomy Of The Emerging Secular Muslim world

 

By Bob Hitching

 

 

  

                              Chapter One.

                        What is Modernity anyway?

 

        "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 a  definition 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 a  conspiratorial 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 example  of 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 energies  were 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 becomes  intrinsically irrelevant to most people's everyday lives.  Some of the more absurd cases to be observed are  very 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 having  negative 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 as  depicted 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 was  15% 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 how  sociological "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 evangelical  Christendom 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 far  apart 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 suggest  that 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 such  as 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 at  the 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.  Whereas  Gautama 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 heard  above 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 are  related 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 concerning  purity for young people who lose their purity may be an  antidote 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 think   bilingually.  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 entertainment  is 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, and  broadcast 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 of  time 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 about  Bosnia 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 way  equivalent 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 of  the 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 large  age 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 celebrated  legal 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 of  a 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 - is  becoming 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 live  and 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 issues  enforced 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 marriage  on 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 important  issues 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 to  views 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 "it  is

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 towards  those, 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 conservative  lobby 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 the  Victorian 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 increasingly  laws 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 a  pragmatic 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 Of  New 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 case  feminism.  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 Muslim  scholars however, this  was 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. Accepting  this 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 McAllister  and 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 categories  may 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 of  an " 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 how  they 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 years  that 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 charismatics  has 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 and  as 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.