Lina Joy chose her faith long ago. Born a Muslim in the multiethnic nation of Malaysia, she started attending church in 1990 and was baptized as a Christian eight years later. But on Wednesday, Malaysia’s highest court blocked her final attempt to have her conversion legally recognized by the state. It was a blow to her heart as well as her soul. Malaysian law prohibits marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims, so Joy will not be able to wed the Christian man she loves.

Malaysia has long trumpeted itself as a moderate Muslim nation committed to safeguarding the rights of its diverse population, an ethnic olio worthy of a Benetton ad: Muslim Malays, Christian and Buddhist Chinese, Hindu and Sikh Indians, animist indigenous peoples. Indeed, earlier this week in the capital Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi hosted the annual World Islamic Economic Forum, where he held up his homeland as proof that Islam did not equal extremism.

Yet the Federal Court’s ruling on the Joy case undermines Malaysia’s claim of tolerance. Already, several Malaysian states have made renunciation of Islam punishable with prison time. Wednesday’s court decision was greeted by shouts of “God is great” from Muslims gathered outside the courthouse. Those supporting the separation of mosque and state were less jubilant. “This case is not just a question of religious preference but of a potential dismantling of Malaysia’s … multiethnic, multireligious [character],” said Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a lawyer for Joy, before the verdict was announced.

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After an introduction to a Muslim prayer practice in early 2006, [the Rev. Ann] Redding knew she had been wrestling with a call to Islam. She approached a Muslim woman and told her so, and the woman replied, “Christianity has been good to you and you to it, and you don’t have to choose.” That made all the difference in Redding’s choice to practice Islam.

“What Islam has done for me is shed this light on Christianity and shown for me anew what a glorious way Christianity is,” she explains.

“We Christians, in struggling to express the beauty and dignity of Jesus and the pattern of life he offers, describe him as the ”˜only begotten son of God.’ That’s how wonderful he is to us. But that is not literal,” she continues. “When we say Jesus is the only begotten one, we are saying he’s unique in some way. Islam says the same thing. He’s the only human aside from Adam who is directly created by God, and he’s different from Adam because he has a human mother. So there’s agreement””this person is unique in his relationship to God.” Christianity also says that we are all part of the household of God and in essence brothers and sisters of Jesus. Muslims take the figurative language of “only begotten,” make it concrete and contradict it: God “neither begets nor is begotten.”

“I agree with both because I do want to say that Jesus is unique, and for me, Jesus is my spiritual master,” Redding says. “Muslims say Mohammed is the most perfect. Well, it depends on who you fall in love with. I fell in love with Jesus a long time ago and I’m still in love with Jesus but I’d like to think my relationship with Jesus has matured.”

She added that what Islam does is take Jesus out of the way of her relationship with God, “but it doesn’t drop Jesus. I was following Jesus and he led me into Islam, and he didn’t drop me off at the door. He’s there, too.”

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There is a burgeoning literature of Muslim views of Jesus. Nazir-Ali discussed the view of Jesus as presented by Rageeh Omar in his TV Series The Miracles of Jesus. Omar believed that Jesus’ miracles were presented as a sign of his divine authority and of God’s victory over evil. Omar claimed however that the Quran does not emphasize the miracles of Jesus because this could lead to him being seen as divine. Nazir-Ali asserted contrary to Omar that the Quran does affirm that Jesus’ miracles occurred by God’s leave. For the Quran Jesus is a prophet, apostle, the Word and spirit of God, and even mentions his death in 19.33 and 3.55. He hoped that Omar can address in a future series what he has learnt from Christian tradition about Jesus and what his Muslim background has taught him. To understand Jesus and his movement, we have to look at the Jewish people for information and inspiration. To the Jewish community Nazir-Ali asked how far the Jews can within the integrity of their own faith see the marks of the coming messianic age in the figure of Jesus. Hindus and Hinduism itself has been changed in surprising and important ways by the encounter with Jesus. The criticism of caste, the emancipation and education of women and the tendency to ethical monotheism took place under explicitly acknowledged Christian influence. But the key question in Hinduism has to do with the uniqueness of Jesus as the Word made flesh whose death enabled human beings to have open intimacy with the God who is the source of their being. Jesus presented himself as divine wisdom in the search of the excluded, disreputable and the lost. The female form of wisdom affects our understanding of women as in God’s image sharing in a common mission with men but distinctively. Redemption in Christ does away with false distinctions, oppression and subordination which result from the Fall and human sinfulness but not with a similarity in difference which is an aspect of God’s will for humanity.

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–Our story starts with a small sandstone 10th-century Armenian church, on an uninhabited rock less than 500 yards wide, in a remote Turkish lake that changes colors like moods and sometimes bubbles like soda. If you had seen the ruins of it, as I did in 2000, you might cry. Its roof was gone. Its bas-reliefs, chiseled by master carvers a millennium ago, of Adam and Eve, of saints and kings, were wearing away in the wind. It was an empty husk that had not heard a Mass in more than 90 years.

In March, after years of painstaking restoration, Turkey reopened the church as a museum. Among the ambassadors and visitors at the opening ceremonies, I roamed the grounds. The building is now magnificent. Its roof is restored and its reliefs cleaned.

The Church of the Holy Cross is one of the holiest sites for Armenian Christians, who once made up one-third of the population around Van. They were driven out by the Ottomans in 1915, when some were suspected of supporting Russia-backed terrorist attacks. During World War I, the Ottomans were allied with Germany and Austria, fighting Russia, Britain and France. While most Turkish historians concede there was a massacre of Armenians (while pointing out that Armenians slaughtered Turks from 1890 to 1915 and that most Armenians were relocated, not slain), they hesitate to call it genocide. The Armenians do not hesitate–and sometimes compare it to the Holocaust. The Armenian Diaspora has emerged as a real political force in Western Europe, complicating Turkey’s plans to join the European Union.

The re-opening of the church was a peace offering by the AKP, Turkey’s Islam-oriented ruling party, but all did not run smoothly at first. After spending millions on the structure, the Turkish government refused to restore the stone cross on the steeple. Turkish journalists were quick to criticize. Ultimately, common sense prevailed.

“I cannot say we will have the stone-cross back there tomorrow, but I do not see any problem in that,” Culture Minister Attilla Koc said. He wanted time for an “academic council” to consider the issue. Mr. Koc’s answer might not sound “revolutionary” to our ears, but Turkish News columnist Yusuf Kanli declared it so. Many Christian churches have been waiting for decades for permission to restore their churches at their own expense.

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CANON Andrew White, the Chaplain of St George’s, Baghdad, and head of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, spoke on Wednesday of his fears and hopes for the five British men kidnapped in Iraq on Tuesday. Four of them are his close friends.

Speaking from Baghdad to the Church Times, he described the kidnapping as a “very, very complex and difficult situation”. He feared that it could be linked to the killing last week by the British of Abu Qadir (also known as Wissam al-Waili), the leader of the most militant wing of the Mehdi army, a Shia militant group.

The British men were seized near the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, a Mehdi army stronghold. The five ”” a computer expert and four bodyguards ”” were taken from a finance-ministry building. Four worked for GardaWorld, one of many security firms in Iraq guarding VIPs, coalition contractors, and other officials. GardaWorld is a Canadian-owned business, but is staffed mainly by British people.

Employees of the company have given their services free to Canon White because of the importance of his work in Baghdad, and he described them as close friends ”” people with whom he shared his life. The fifth man is a contractor, working for a company providing technical advice to the Iraqi government.

The kidnappers wore police uniforms, and staged the capture without firing a shot, senior Iraq officials told the BBC on Tuesday.

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Stephen Crittenden: The plight of Christian minorities in the Islamic Middle East is one of the 20th century tragedies to which we pay least attention.

From the Copts in Egypt, to the Maronites, the Melkites in Lebanon, Orthodox and Chaldeans, the Christian population of the Middle East is a fraction of what it was, and more vulnerable than ever. Nowhere is the situation worse at the moment than in Iraq. And few groups are more vulnerable than the ancient Assyrian Christian community. In fact, this week the Italian journalist Sandro Magister, has warned of the end of Christianity in Iraq.

In early May in a heavily Christian suburb of Baghdad, a Sunni extremist group began broadcasting a fatwah over the loudspeakers of the neighbourhood mosque: the Assyrian Christian community had to convert to Islam or leave, or die. Their Muslim neighbours were to seize their property. The men were told they had to pay the gizya – the protection money Jews and Christians traditionally had to pay to their Muslim overlords – and families were told they could only stay if they married one of their daughters to a Muslim.

More than 300 Assyrian families have fled, mostly to the north into the Kurdish region of Iraq where they are not welcome either They are sleeping in cemeteries, they have no food, more than 30 of their churches have been bombed, their children are being kidnapped and murdered.

Rosie Malek-Yonan is an Assyrian-American. She is a successful film and television actor who has appeared in many popular shows including Dynasty, Seinfeld, E.R. and Chicago Hope. Her novel, The Crimson Field, is a fictionalised account of the little-known Assyrian genocide that took place at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War One at the same time that the better-known Armenian genocide was taking place. She recently directed a documentary film on the same subject. And last year she was invited to give testimony before the US Congress about the plight of Assyrian Christians in Iraq. Rosie Malek-Yonan spoke to me from her home in California.

Rosie Malek-Yonan: The Assyrian people are the indigenous people actually of Mesopotamia, before it even was Iraq. All of that area was Mesopotamia and is the original homeland of the Assyrians. They date back to over 6,000 years and were always concentrated in that region.

Stephen Crittenden: And Christianity was accepted by Assyrians, well virtually in apostolic times, right at the very, very beginning?

Rosie Malek-Yonan: Right. Assyrians were actually the first nation to accept Christianity as an entire nation, not just individuals, but the entire nation, and we built the first church of the east.

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The strategy is almost heresy on Wall Street: Find a top-performing investment by seeking out a mutual fund with some of the industry’s strictest ethical screening requirements.

Yet that approach, if adopted, would work in at least one case. The Amana Income Fund, which avoids not only alcohol, tobacco, and gambling stocks but also pork producers and lenders who charge interest, received a Lipper award earlier this year for outperforming 180 equity income funds ”“ screened and unscreened ”“ over the past three years.

Amana Funds dominate the relatively small niche of socially responsible investing (SRI) that aims to reflect Islamic law, or sharia. The idea is for an entire portfolio to reflect moral values from the Koran, which deems pork products unclean and regards the charging and paying of interest as immoral endeavors that foster exploitative relationships.

“If Islam forbids it, then we’re not going to buy it,” says Monem Salam, deputy portfolio manager at Amana Funds. That principle generally “keeps us out of trouble,” he says, by requiring the funds to avoid such ticking time bombs as Enron and WorldCom, which imploded in accounting scandals a few years back. Both were too heavily leveraged to pass muster at Amana.

In theory, Islamic funds face an uphill battle since about half of the stock market universe ”“ including most financial services companies ”“ is off limits to them. But in practice, Islamic funds fulfill their moral ideals in considerable measure by mimicking some revered habits of billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

For instance, because excessive stock trading amounts to gambling in the eyes of Islamic authorities, Islamic funds practice a buy-and-hold strategy that helps keep trading costs down. Also, concern about the ethics of borrowing and lending leads Islamic fund managers to avoid deeply indebted companies, such as several big-name airlines, which tend to stumble in recessions and in times of slow economic growth. Both practices are quintessential Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, based in Omaha, Neb.

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