Fundamentalism in Islam

Yesterday I listened to Ronald Rolheiser give an excellent talk on Augustine. He repeated a quote from Kenneth Cragg twice to end the lecture. Of course, I wanted to find out whom this person was! However, I thought it was "Kenneth CRAIG" and so asked both MadPriest and Crimson Rambler about him when I could find nothing about this mistakenly named priest. I am grateful to MadPriest who wrote: "Perhaps you mean Bishop Kenneth Cragg who is a world renown Anglican scholar and expert on Islam. He's retired now. In fact, he must be in his mid 90s." This info led me to many more sources on google, especially an article from The Christian Century in 1999.

"Cross Meets Crescent: An Interview with Kenneth Craig" explores Christian and Islam ecumenism. I am posting the section of the article that addresses "fundamentalism" in the Islam faith.

What place does fundamentalism have within the full range of Islamic faith and practice?

This is difficult to discuss, because there is no equivalent for the word "fundamentalism" in Arabic. In one sense, Islam is inherently fundamentalist in that it understands the Qur'an to be a literal dictation to Muhammad of a book in heaven. His mental processes or personal preferences are not at all involved in the text of the Qur'an. It is simply the result of a mysterious process of inspiration or revelation that comes down upon him. The orthodox view (with which I don't agree) is that Muhammad was illiterate. That makes the text of the Qur'an all the more God's word, because it couldn't have come from Muhammad. The 13th-century mystic Jalal ed-Din Rumi gives a vivid image of Muhammad's role in transmitting the Qur'an: Muhammad is like a stone lion in a garden. Out of the lion's mouth comes a spout of water. Everyone knows that a cunning plumber has contrived a pipe to use as a conduit to conduct the water through the lion.

In Islam, the more something is of God, the less the human is needed. In contrast, the biblical view is that the more the divine is giving, the more the human is recruited. The biblical prophets are vivid personalities, not ciphers. Each has his own unique style and imagery.

But the Qur'an has been considered a literal scripture from the beginning. This is what accounts for the importance of calligraphy and recitation in Islam. One mustn't make a mistake in recitation, since one is repeating the very words of God. For most Christians, the New Testament is not that kind of writing. We see it as a book about what is antecedent to itself -- the person and work of Christ, the Word made flesh, teaching and suffering among us.

Though the Qur'an does need interpretation, Muslims don't approach it with the kind of almost overconfidence that sometimes marks Christian exegesis of the Bible. A Muslim once said to me, "You play fast and loose with your scripture." That is how Muslims react to our sense that we need to discern what the text could mean -- especially, for example, when we deal with the Gospel of John. We question whether we can accept the text as giving us the actual words of Jesus, as we think the parables do. Why do Jesus' words sound so different in the Fourth Gospel? What is John doing here? Those are legitimate questions for us, questions that are a part of the integrity of our faith. One Muslim has referred to "the liquidity of the Christian scriptures as you treat them." He says it's like the liquidity of capital -- we make it do what we want it to do.

Another factor is that Muslims understand Islam as the final religion, and Jesus as the next-to-last in a long succession of prophets. The Qur'an is the book that perfects and, if need be, corrects all previous revelation, going right back to Abraham. That gives Muslims an enormous sense of finality, which tends to preclude a will to be really critical or even investigative about what they believe.

The article gives this info about Kenneth Cragg:

Kenneth Cragg has been a major figure in Christian-Muslim conversations. He has spent some 45 years in the Middle East as professor of philosophy, as a chaplain, and as assistant bishop in the Anglican Archdiocese of Jerusalem. He has also taught at the University of Sussex in England. His published works include hundreds of scholarly articles and more than 30 books, most recently The Arab Christian and Palestine: The Prize and Price of Zion. Now in his 80s, Bishop Cragg still lectures at Oxford University and in Europe and the U.S. This interview appeared in The CHRISTIAN CENTURY, February 17, l999; copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. This text was prepared for Religion Online by John C. Purdy.

Go here to read the rest of the article.

(What's funny is that Crimson Rambler also sent me a link to the same article I'd found! It's nice to have a resourceful blogging community!)

Also, here's a link to an article about Kenneth Cragg and his writings.