IT’S a very long way from the cloisters of Cambridge to the Iraqi city of Mosul, where at least a dozen Christians have been killed this month, and hundreds of Christian families have fled, in that country’s latest sectarian mayhem.
But Rowan Williams, head of the 80m-strong Anglican Communion, and Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, were doing their gallant best to minimise the distance as they presided, this week, over a new effort by the world’s leading Muslim and Christian scholars to understand each other. The threat facing Iraqi Christians had “undermined a centuries-old tradition of local Muslims protecting and nourishing the Christian community”, the two clerics carefully opined, as they pledged to create links between Western academia and Muslim universities, like Egypt’s 400,000-strong al-Azhar campus, a place which had already been awarding degrees for two centuries when Cambridge was founded in 1209.
I fear that this seemingly innocuous piece had me reaching for the sick bag. First of all, the cringing genuflection to a Muslim university that had, so they say, been awarding degrees two centuries before Cambridge. Second, here’s the difference between Cambridge and Al Azhar: In Cambridge you will only find that crudely antisemitic work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion taught as a vicious forgery. At Al Azhar you will find it taught as fact. In 2003, a new edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots, was published in Arabic in Egypt . That edition was published jointly by Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa (Professor of Comparative Theology in Al-Azhar University ) and a journalist. It carried what purported to be a foreword by the Grand Mufti. He has since publicly and vigorously said that the did not write the foreword, and has called the book a forgery. ButI believe that the professor of theology still teaches the book as fact. Third, we note that the pope is implicitly blamed for the violence that followed his academic and historical observations in a lecture. ‘Do no harm’ says the journalist smugly. Excuse me? How strange that we have reached a state where riots and killings are blamed not on the senseless people who do them, but on the anodyne words spoken by a world leader. The effect of this kind of article is to silence us in the West. We cannot speak the truth without fear of being blamed for the totally disproportionate and even violent reactions of others.
I seem to recall that Islam was spread at the point of a sword.
Jaw-jaw is what Rowan does. [url=http://www.theird.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=807&srcid=807 ]George Conger has a scathing piece on the Lambeth un-conference.[/url]