“The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World”

December 2, 2013 By Dan Wilkinson 

In the West, Islam is popularly depicted as a religion rooted in hate and violence, as a belief system inherently antagonistic towards other religions — particularly Christianity — and as synonymous with terrorism and totalitarian theocratic rule.
But there is another face of Islam, a face that garners little attention on the evening news and is virtually ignored by those who traffic in — and profit from — divisive fear mongering. This is an Islam practiced by millions around the world, an Islam defined not by violence but by respect, an Islam that remains true to its founder’s revelation.
In The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World (Angelico Press), John Andrew Morrow sets out to offer concrete textual reasons, from the Prophet Mohammed himself, for an understanding of Islam that moves beyond stereotypes and reasserts the truly inclusive foundations of Islamic belief.
Morrow presents six covenants written by Muhammad to Christian communities and argues that these letters and treaties, which proclaim and define peaceful and mutually respectful relationships with Christians, have the potential to serve as a foundational source of Islamic belief and practice, on equal footing with the Koran and the hadiths.
Bringing modern historical scholarship and textual criticism to bear in his study of these rare and largely forgotten documents, Morrow refutes the notion that Muslims and Christians necessarily stand at odds with one another, instead offering “a compelling case that the original intent of Muhammad was not to create a strictly Muslim state, but rather a confederation of the People of the Book,” (xii) and presents persuasive reasons for believing that “tolerance of Christians who are at peace with Muslims forms an intrinsic part of the Islamic tradition.” (108)
Morrow opens his book with a detailed but accessible biography of Muhammad, focusing in particular on the Prophet’s formative interactions with Jews and Christians, interactions that were characterized by mutual respect. This respect didn’t stem from watered-down syncretism, but rather from a robust adherence to core beliefs and an honest acknowledgement of the similarities and the differences between the Abrahamic faiths. This tolerance was “… undoubtedly founded on the recognition that theological matters that went beyond the most fundamental tenets of monotheism … were best discussed among scholars, theologians and esoterics, in line with the wise and balanced Islamic separation between the Outer and the Inner, between that which must be accepted by all Muslims and that which will necessarily be understood only by the few.” (59)
It is against this historical backdrop that Morrow presents the six covenants, devoting a chapter to each and offering commentary and critical evaluation of these “controversial and highly disputed document[s].” (65) His discussion is even-handed, though at times overly sympathetic. Morrow interacts with textual difficulties adroitly, but invariably casts his lots in favor of authenticity, even when at times evidence supporting such a conclusion is entirely lacking. For Morrow, the spirit of Islamic belief is able to bridge such evidential gaps. Fortunately, Morrow doesn’t allow this tendency to trump the evidence itself, and he readily acknowledges shortcomings in the textual traditions.
The middle section of the book consists of the texts themselves: Arabic transcriptions, photographic reproductions of extant manuscripts and a variety of corresponding English translations. I appreciate the inclusion of actual source documents, but as a lay-person, they meant little to me — I assume that scholars will find them useful.
In the final section of the book, Morrow discusses the specific challenges facing our understanding of these texts, including the records of witnesses associated with the various covenants, the transmission of the documents themselves and the broader contextual implication of the covenants. He concludes with suggestions for areas of further study in this nascent field. The book closes with an extensive appendix, detailed bibliography, maps, photos and a detailed index.
Thoughtful, accessible and scholarly, The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World offers important evidence for understanding Islam as a religion founded on ideals of respect and tolerance, ideals that, if evinced today in the way that Muhammad originally intended, have the potential to redefine modern religious and cultural interactions.
More information about the covenants themselves can be found online at The Covenants Initiative , which also features an online petition for Muslims to sign declaring the binding nature of the covenants. More details about the book can be found on the Patheos Book Club page.
“And dispute ye not with the People of the Book, except with a means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong (and injury); but say, “We believe in the Revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; and our God and your God is One, and it is to Him we bow (in Islam).” Qur’an 29:46

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Dan Wilkinson
Dan is a writer, graphic designer and IT specialist. He lives in Montana, is married and has two cats. He blogs at CoolingTwilight.com.

Is Pope Francis Leaving Vatican At Night To Minister To Homeless?

 Posted: 12/02/2013 5:24 pm EST  |  Updated: 12/02/2013 5:28 pm EST

A recent interview with Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, the "Almoner of His Holiness," raised speculation that the Pope joins him on his nightly trips into Rome to give alms to the poor, and it turns out that the rumors are probably true.

A knowledgable source in Rome told The Huffington Post that "Swiss guards confirmed that the pope has ventured out at night, dressed as a regular priest, to meet with homeless men and women."
Krajewski earlier said, “When I say to him ‘I’m going out into the city this evening’, there’s the constant risk that he will come with me," and he merely smiled and ducked the question when reporters asked him point-blank whether the Pope accompanied him into the city.
He's not the only Pope known for nocturnal wanderings. There are stories of Pope John XIII sneaking out to enjoy the beauty of Rome in the evenings, and reports tell of Pope Pius XII dressing as a Franciscan during WWII to help smuggle Rome's Jewish population to safety. More recently, Pope Benedict XVI popped out unannounced to visit an art exhibit.
When Pope Francis was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, he was known to sneak out at night to break bread with the homeless, sitting with them on the street and eating with them to show that they were loved.
And we love him for doing it now.

 

10 Things Traditional Christians Got Terribly Wrong

10 Things Traditional Christians Got Terribly Wrong

Although progressive Christians have been at the forefront of social justice, conservative Christians are often on the wrong side of history. When Christians get political, they often do so because they believe that they have God on their side. This is true whether they are progressive or conservative, and throughout most of American history there have been both. (You’d think that the conflicting claims about what God wants would lead to more doubting, but here we are.) Looking over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God’s wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they were speaking on God’s behalf.

1) Slavery. Both sides of the American slavery debate claimed to be speaking from profound Christian conviction. The Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery, something pro-slavery Christians routinely pointed out. Abolitionists took a broader, less literal view of the Bible. Unsurprising that this divide led to the South being, to this day, home of the most people who take a literalist, fundamentalist view of Christianity.
Of course, nowadays you can’t find even the most literalist fan of the Bible who is willing to agree with their predecessors in the 19th century who believed the Bible endorsed slavery. Of the many things conservative Christians have gotten wrong over the years, the pro-slavery argument is probably the one that is least likely to be revived by modern fundamentalists.

2) Women’s suffrage. Unsurprisingly, conservative Christianity was hostile to women’s suffrage, just as it’s been hostile to women’s progress every step of the way. Women’s “God-given” roles were routinely referenced in arguments against giving women the right to vote, such as when Susan Fenimore Cooper—daughter of James Fenimore Cooper–wrote in Harper’s that “Christianity confirms the subordinate position of woman, by allotting to man the headship in plain language and by positive precept.”
While the argument is clearly wrong in retrospect and disavowed by most modern conservatives, there are still some Christian conservatives who continue to believe that the issue isn’t resolved and should still be up for debate.

3) Evolution. From the second it became evident that the Biblical story of creation was wrong and life on earth evolved over millions of years of random mutation, many Christians were aghast and resisted the truth getting out as hard as they could. Because of this, there have been multiple times throughout history where Christians embarrassed themselves by being wrong in a dramatic courtroom setting. The Scopes monkey trial is the most famous, but the Dover trial of 2005 over the teaching of intelligent design in schools is up there in terms of sheer humor. The Republican-appointed judge even went so far as to describe the Christian conservative defenders of creationism as liars pushing a theory of “breathtaking inanity.”

4) Pain relief for childbirth. The Bible explicitly lays out pain in childbirth as Eve’s punishment for sin, so unsurprisingly, that’s what many Christians in the 19th century believed had to be so. Once reliable pain relief in childbirth began to be developed, therefore, there was a lot of resistance to it from Christians who feared it defied God to let women have some relief. The truth is that pain in childbirth is not a punishment from God, but the product of evolution, which is a far from perfect process. Eventually, the argument that women owed it to God to suffer through childbirth faded to the fringes of right-wing Christianity. “Natural” childbirth has seen a resurgence in popularity in the secular world since the 1960s, but that was more of a reaction to some medical overreach than a belief that women are sinful and deserve to suffer.

5) Catholics. Modern American conservative Protestants embrace Catholics and have even started to borrow some Catholic arguments against things like abortion and contraception. But in the early 19th and 20th centuries, there was widespread anti-Catholic sentiment, much of it tied up in hostility to Catholic immigrants. There was even an anti-Catholic political party in the early 19th century. Catholics were viewed as idolaters and drunkards by many Protestants, but by far the most bizarre relic of anti-Catholic paranoia is the fear that evil shenanigans were going on in nunneries. A woman writing under the pseudonym “Maria Monk” penned a best-selling book where she claimed to have escaped a convent where she was forced to be a sex slave and pressed into the act of killing babies and hiding their corpses. Needless to say, none of her accusations should be taken as anything approaching true. Anti-Catholic paranoia also led to another Christian-led folly…

6) Prohibition. Hostility to Catholic immigrants was a large part of the reason temperance mania took over many Protestant communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the fact that Jesus was a wine drinker, abstinence from alcohol—and forcing abstinence on others by force of law—became a major Christian cause during this period, leading up to Prohibition. This was true, even though many in the temperance movement were also aligned with the suffragist cause, making Prohibition one of the few Christian follies that weighs as heavily on the progressive Christian tradition as it does the conservative one. Luckily, it took little more than a decade for the bigtime error that was banning alcohol to be fixed.

7) Segregation. Religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. led the desegregation movement, but it’s also important to note that the pro-segregation movement was also conceived as a Christian one. Arguments against “race mixing” were largely framed in religious terms. The judge who initially ruled against the interracial couple in Loving v. Virginia argued that the “Almighty God” put people on separate continents and “did not intend for the races to mix.” Christian right leader Jerry Falwell got his start fighting to uphold segregation, giving sermons about how integration was offensive to God. As Max Blumenthal noted in the Nation, the modern religious right as we know it started off as a movement to defend segregation.

8) Contraception. From the beginning of the “birth control movement,” Christian conservatives fought to keep women from being able to have sex without getting pregnant. Devout Christian Anthony Comstock successfully convinced Congress in 1872 that contraception was ungodly, leading to a federal ban on sharing birth control information across state lines. This was finally repealed in 1936. In 1963, the Supreme Court ended anti-contraception laws for married women. Finally, in 1971, the Supreme Court also eliminated the last of the god-bothering anti-contraception laws banning birth control for single people. Nowadays, 99 percent of sexually active women have used contraception at some point in their lives.

9) School prayer. Along with supporting segregation and opposing feminism, the third issue that created the modern religious right is the issue of prayer in public schools. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled against school-led prayers, even if they were supposedly voluntary. Instead of giving up a chance to use schools as a way to foist their beliefs on the unwilling, the religious right spent and continues to spend the next 50-plus years trying to find some way to sneak religious indoctrination/bullying of non-believers into public schools. They’ve attempted to sneak it in by having students lead it, as if that makes it less coercive. Recently, in Rhode Island, they tried to sneak it in by having it written on a wall instead of recited. Most attempts fail in court. Even though there’s no evidence that these bullying tactics have ever converted anyone to their faith, they keep trying.

10) Marriage equality. The religious right is still fighting like it’s not obvious that they’re wrong on this one. The tide is shifting so fast it’s quickly becoming apparent that this issue, like segregation, is going to be one where they’ll be pretending they didn’t fight so hard for the side of wrong in a few decades. The majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage. Illinois is becoming the 15th state to authorize it. The momentum is in the direction of justice, and as gay rights proponents said from the beginning, Christian conservatives are, as with most things, on the wrong side of history.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

George W. Bush to Raise Money for Group That Converts Jews to Bring About Second Coming of Christ

The former president follows in the footsteps of Glenn Beck, who addressed the group last year.

—By Sarah Posner

| Thu Nov. 7, 2013 11:51 AM PST

 

 

Courtesy of Messianic Jewish Bible Institute

Next week, former President George W. Bush is scheduled to keynote a fundraiser in Irving, Texas, for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, a group that trains people in the United States, Israel, and around the world to convince Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The organization's goal: to "restore" Israel and the Jews and bring about about the second coming of Christ.
Messianic Jews have long been controversial for Jews of all major denominations, who object to their proselytizing efforts and their message that salvation by Jesus is consistent with Jewish theology. Last year, Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, told Politico that former Sen. Rick Santorum's appearance at an event hosted by another Messianic Jewish organization, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, was "insensitive and offensive." And Commentary magazine, which bills itself as a "conservative American journal of politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues," noted, "it must be understood that the visceral distaste that the overwhelming majority of Jews have for the Messianics is not to be taken lightly." Many Messianic Jews are Christians who have adopted aspects of Jewish ritual observance; others are Jews who share the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah.
Asked about Bush's upcoming appearance at the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute (MJBI) event, Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said, "It's disappointing that he would give his stamp of approval to a group whose program is an express effort to convert Jews and not to accept the validity of the Jewish covenant." Foxman was traveling overseas and unavailable to comment.
[Update: After this story published, Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles' Sinai Temple, whom Newsweek has called the most influential rabbi in the country, tweeted, "this is infuriating."]

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Based in Dallas, the MJBI claims that it acts like the Apostle Paul in helping to "educate Christians in their role to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy and thus save some of them (Romans 11:11-14)." It has Bible schools in 12 countries, an online school of "Messianic theology," and programs to train Messianic rabbis and pastors. Its logos feature a star of David and a menorah, and its website promotes the weekly Torah portion, a "Yiddish Mama's Kitchen," and links to purchase Judaica and books, such as Christ in the Old Testament. The nonprofit organization brought in approximately $1.2 million in revenue in 2011, the last year for which records are available.
At the November 14 event, which will be held at the Irving Convention Center, Bush will discuss his White House experiences, according to promotional materials. Bush, the group says, will "share his passion for setting people free." Last year, Glenn Beck was the star of the group's fundraiser, which was held at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
This year's event is designed to bring in funds for the group's proselytizing operations. And the former president is helping out with more than just speech-making. The most expensive of the ticket packages, which range from $100 to $100,000, includes 20 invitations to a VIP reception and photo opportunity with Bush, 10 signed copies of Bush's book Decision Points, and passes to tour the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Alisa Stephenson, MJBI director of events and partner relations, would not say whether Bush is receiving a speaking fee for his appearance. "We cannot have any outside advertising or any media whatsoever involved in this, so I most likely cannot answer any of your questions," she tells Mother Jones.
A spokesman for Bush and a spokeswoman for the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum did not respond to requests for comment.
At last year’s MJBI fundraiser, Beck received a "Defender of Israel" award. During Beck's time as host of his Fox News program (which ended in 2011), hundreds of Jewish leaders denounced his on-air rhetoric as anti-Semitic—particularly his repeated invocation of Nazis and the Holocaust to demonize political adversaries and his accusation that George Soros is a "puppet master" who collaborated with the Nazis. "One of the reasons why I love Israel so much is I'm a guy who's for the underdog," Beck told the audience. "I'm a Mormon, which is kind of the Jew of the Christian world."
Robert Morris, pastor of Gateway Church in Dallas, which Beck attends, introduced Beck as a "prophet" at the event. Morris told the crowd that his church has supported MJBI because "when we do this, the Bible tells us, it's going to change the whole world. That it's going to hasten the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it's going to bring about worldwide revival."
When asked how the MJBI managed to secure Bush to keynote its fundraiser, Stephenson cited its track record of drawing influential speakers, pointing to the appearance by Beck.
At last year's event, members of the MJBI's board of directors explained the organization's mission of converting Jews to an audience of hundreds who were seated on a professional football field, wearing formal clothes, and eating pork barbecue. Rabbi Jonathan Bernis, a leading Messianic Jew and televangelist who chairs MJBI's board of directors, maintained that "our numbers are growing and growing," because "the Bible predicted that the day would come when the blindness would come off the eyes of the people it all began with." He was referring to Jews. The Bible, Bernis continued, "tells us that the day will come when all of Israel will be saved." The MJBI, Bernis said, "is one of the ministries that God has raised up to bring that to pass." Other featured speakers last year included David Barton, the religious right's discredited "historian," who this week used Beck's radio show to announce that he won't challenge Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in next year's Republican Senate primary.
Another MJBI board member, Rabbi Marty Waldman of Baruch HaShem, a Messianic congregation in Dallas, described his own conversion experience before making a pitch to the audience to donate money to MJBI. Money, he explained, is needed to hasten the return of Jesus. With the funds it collects, Waldman said, MJBI trains "people to preach the good news of the Messiah to the Jewish people." That's important, Waldman noted, because when there are "enough" Jewish people who call Jesus their savior, "some sort of a trigger will go off in heaven, and our father in heaven will say, 'Okay, son, it's time to get your bride.'"
At last year's MJBI event, a group called the Christian Heritage Foundation displayed a collection of Torah scrolls outside the Miller Lite Club at Cowboys Stadium. On the field, a shofar was blown, to applause.
Research for this article was supported by a 2012 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion. The fellowship is a program of the University of Southern California’s Knight Chair in Media and Religion.

 

 

Sarah Posner

Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist covering the intersection of religion and politics. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, The American Prospect, Al Jazeera America, and many other publications. Her website is http://sarahposner.com.