PC lecturer discusses cultural, religious divides between Islam and the West

Oct. 25, 2006

One of the country's leading experts on Islam urged Americans to avoid demonizing an entire religion and its faithful during a lecture Wednesday at Presbyterian College.

Dr. John Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University and founding director of the university's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, argued that most of what people in the country know about Islam is filtered through media accounts of extremist behavior into general statements and beliefs about an entire religion.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, Islam was relatively invisible to people in the United States, he said. That changed, though, during the Iranian Revolution of the mid-1970s and the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 that put Islam firmly into the collective minds of U.S. citizens.

"The engagement is in terms of a threat – the Iranian Revolution and the fear of Iran exporting its revolution," he said. "Therefore, we've come to engage another religion – 1.3 billion people – through what a minority of people do and that becomes our experience."

People have a habit of making generalizations about other ethnic groups or religions based on their limited experience – and America's understanding of Islam is no different, said Esposito.

"The problem we've had for so long is that our knowledge of Islam is so limited," he said.

As a scholar on Islamic studies for more than 30 years, Esposito said he still answers many of the same questions about the world's second largest religion. Is Islam a violent religion? Is it compatible with the modern world?

"What does that say about our learning curve?" he said.

Esposito shared some basic information about the Islamic world, noting that Arabs make up a minority of Muslims worldwide. The majority of Muslims, he said, are Asian and African. As believers of an "Abrahamic" faith that shares much in common with Judaism and Christianity, Muslims believe in the same God. They consider Jesus second only to Muhammed as a prophet. The Virgin Mary, he noted, is mentioned more often in the Koran than in the New Testament. Muslims also believe in social justice and the care of the poor and orphans.

So, Esposito asked, why the conflict?

"Because just wars, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder," he said.

Many religions – including Christianity – have embraced the idea of a just war to defend their faith, said Esposito. The conflict between Christianity and Islam, then, emerged because the two religions – which share the universal mission of spreading God's word and supplanting other religions – met and saw each other not only as theological competition but also met historically during the spread of competing empires.

Today, Esposito added, the same problem has emerged. Christianity is fast spreading in Asia and Africa where there are large Muslim populations and countries are competing for global influence.

On a personal level, he said, people in the United States see their own diversity and make distinctions within their own society. But they also equate mainstream Muslims with Islamic extremists

"We need to put a human face on Muslims," Esposito said.

The typical, core beliefs of an observant Muslim, he said, involve persistent prayer, a "real sense of the power and presence of God," fasting, social justice, and the Hajj – none of which is militant. Still, the concept of jihad – which means, essentially, the "struggle" to be a good Muslim – has been hijacked by a minority to become the term for holy war much as the word "crusade" was used in the Middle Ages.

While there are passages in the Koran that deal with violence, Esposito said the same can be said of the Bible and can be taken and used out of context in much the same way Christians often do. Terrorists, he noted, are very good at taking passages from the Koran and using them out of context to fuel acts of violence.

Americans must distinguish between the majority of believing Muslims and the extremists who embrace terror as a weapon, he said.

"Our challenge in the 21st Century, as citizens and as believers, is to get a better fix on what is going on in the Muslim world," he said, "because we live today in a world which is not just Judeo-Christian but Judeo-Christian-Islamic. … We need to see that world because that influences the way we proceed with our globalization, both in terms of our foreign policy and also our domestic policy.

"If we don't do that, we're going to be engaging in wars that we shouldn't be in. We're going to be demonizing people we shouldn't demonize rather than just demonizing the terrorists and at home we're going to erode our civil liberties. The risk is that we'll wake up five years from now and the America we know, love and cherish, and the values we stand for will be no more."