Rising up to bless Muslim immigrants

Mention “global Muslim immigration” in any Western circle since 9/11, and we touch one of the most sensitive nerves in the media. Unlike any ‘Western’ era since April, 711 AD, when some 7000 mujahideen breached Spain via Gibraltar, have Muslims gained such astonish access, if not welcome, to Western (formerly ‘Christian’) soils.

Through post World War II global treaties, millions of former colonial subjects, including Muslims from 52-majority Muslim nations have migrated –legally or otherwise- throughout the whole world, and above all, to the once unconquerable fortress of Christendom in the now affluent secular Europe -and by extension to Canada, America and Australia.

Not only have millions of Muslims gone abroad in search of better careers, freedoms, and education, and not only have they filled critical cavities in the labour forces, but they have also collectively earned themselves the disquieting reputation of being the most complex -if not the most resistant- religious community to integrate into the Western pluralist societies. They merit, if not pride themselves, on the distinction of being –together with the reclusive Sikhs- the most observed immigrants in the world.

They are on everyone’s conversational radar, especially Christians and missionaries.

This, actually, is good.





Europe on the radar
Europe leads the way in this conversation. No area of the Western world has known a greater influx of Muslim migrants than wider Europe and since the successful terror-inspiring Islamic attacks on the West (New York 9/11, 2001, Madrid March 11, 2004, Beslan Sept 1, 2004, London July 7, 2005, plus a host of failed European terrorist attempts) conservative Muslims have become the most visible minority in every mall, subway, airline, classroom and above all, the media.

The Western world grapples with the enigma of the fury of certain Muslims migrants (and/or their children) in their burgeoning midst. Europe deserves the place of honour in this question in that they exceed the global Western cultures in the percentage of Muslims relative to their (demographically dwindling) autochthon population.

All eyes should be on Europe, especially those of Evangelical Christians.

Freedom of debate
Terrorism has also –initially, at least- freed the debate on immigration. Due to our collective ability to ‘join the dots’ between Qur’an-inspired jihadism and the Qur’an-inspired Muslim foreigners, the explosive question of Muslim immigration vis-à-vis terrorism is now permitted in the Western media.

The titans of the news
Foremost in this debate are Daniel Pipes[1], Mark Steyn[2], Robert Spencer, Patrick Sohkdeo, Bat Ye’or, Bernard Lewis, Paul Belien, and Michael Radu[3]. Retractors are as prolific: John Esposito, Jonathan Snow, Rocco Buttiglione[4], Matthew Parris[5], Richard Cohen[6] and Akar Ahmed[7]. As they see it, true Islam and moderate Muslims are valuable citizens of a peaceful religion whose legitimate grievances come from hateful Western foreign policies and equally hateful commentaries of, among others, Pipes, Steyn, Spencer et al.

The June 2006 Economist entitled its lead cover story: Eurabia: the myth and reality of Islam in Europe. Their editorial conclusion was very sanguine: “Contrary to fears on both sides of the Atlantic, integrating European Muslims can be done!” The European elite continue to pride themselves on empowering the ‘moderate’ Muslim minority migrants (and raiding terrorist cells) as the key to successful integration.

Canada openly imitates multi-cultural European policies while American and Australian authors are accused of watching Europe Muslims far too soberly, far more than even the European themselves. (This article is proof.) All eyes are indeed on Europe, even if all eyes do not see the issue alike.

Demographics
Numbers speak. Since WW II, the population of Muslims immigrants into Europe has swelled to equal the total population of Norway and Sweden combined, namely some 14 million souls in the European Union.[8] While in the Greater Europe, the number rises to 44 million. (Muslims in North America are catching up to the population of the province of Quebec[9], which ought to give us a moment of pause.)

While Muslims gravitate chiefly to urban centers, they constitute in the EU what amounts to a scattered ‘nation’, who would now rank as the 11th largest country in Greater Europe -out of a club of 47 nations- that is, if all Muslims were united in one land. Even being scattered, this is weighty demographics. In the present EU infrastructure, they have a collective population that is greater than Greece or Portugal, or Belgium, or Switzerland, or the Czech Republic, or Finland, or Denmark or Hungary.

Plus Turkey
If Turkey is included in Greater Europe (As the BBC-UK, the Economist, Eurocrats and most European elite reckon it will be), then Islamic numbers swell with an additional 69-million European Muslims. Should Turkish EU membership gain approval within the next 12 years, Turkey alone would rank as Europe’s 3rd language, ahead of French, English, Italian and Spanish and the combined Turkish & others Muslims in Greater Europe (among some 800 million) would be large enough to form the third largest ‘nation’ after Russia and Germany. This, the Egyptian Jewish writer Bat Ye’or calls the coming Muslim in Europe dilemma in her 2005 text: Eurabia: the Euro-Arab axis.

Islamic hopes
As proudly ‘prophesied’ by maverick Libyan leader Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi, aired on Al-Jazeera TV on April 10, 2006.

We have fifty million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe - without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.

Allah mobilizes the Muslim nation of Turkey, and adds it to the European Union. That's another 50 million Muslims. There will be 100 million Muslims in Europe. Albania, which is a Muslim country, has already entered the EU. Bosnia, which is a Muslim country, has already entered the EU. 50 percent of its citizens are Muslims.[10]

Give us power
That Islamic leagues in Western nations demand greater political empowerment is justified, as they see it, by their growing population, their upward mobilization, their highest ranking birth rates in Europe, their increased intermarriages with Europeans, and their international solidarity with the 1.2 billion worldwide ummah.

Add to that their unshakeable conviction that they represent Allah’s supreme religion on earth, that Islam embodies the world’s highest ethics, that they have Allah’s manifest destiny to rule the world, and that segregation strengthens their identity and Europe’s dreaded historical phantom of ‘religious strife’ threatens to re-haunt the future.[11]

Islamophobia
Add to this confidence a conspiracy complex of Islam of Muslim leaders that everyone hates them. Says moderate American scholar Akbar Ahmed: “People in the Muslim world really believe that Islam is under attack.”[12] Adds al-Qadhafi concerning the historic Christian texts: “the holy texts of the West, of Europe and America, call for hatred, there is no doubt about it.”[13] The effect of increased intellectual scrutiny of Islam in the Western press is for Muslim immigrants to defend Islam with every increased alarm. Notes Steyn: “Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.”[14]

Allah's wrath
This vocalization of Islamic politics and their grievances worldwide are what Gilles Kepel fuels a movement he entitled ‘The Revenge of God’ in his 1994 book.[15] Never have Muslims spoken more collectively -even in all their cultural diversity- more angrily, and more proudly than in today’s globalised world.

Allah on line
That a global forum even exists for Muslims to be seen and heard is only possible through the secular (read, enemy’s) globalised media networking of TV, radio, Internet and cell phones is merely taken for granted. Finally, include in all of the above that the best educated Muslim elite now live in Europe and we have sufficient reasons to wonder if Muslim boasts of eclipsing Christianity in Europe are not, indeed, inevitable.

And the US too
Nor is increased segregation of Muslims a strictly European phenomena. Writes Geneve Abdo:

From schools to language to religion, American Muslims are becoming a people apart. Young, first-generation American Muslim women — whose parents were born in Egypt, Pakistan and other Islamic countries — are wearing head scarves even if their mothers had left them behind; increasing numbers of young Muslims are attending Islamic schools and lectures; Muslim student associations in high schools and at colleges are proliferating; and the role of the mosque has evolved from strictly a place of worship to a center for socializing and for learning Arabic and Urdu as well as the Koran.[16]

A Missiological Response

With such sobering data, how are the wider church and her missionaries to respond to Muslim immigrants? The most notable Christian reaction in Europe to Muslims comes from the Vatican.

Roman Catholic
The 2005 election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy has been followed by an internal shift in Roman Catholic interpretation of their Vatican Two Council overture to Islam. Unlike the passionate promotion for ‘dialogue among monotheists’ held between 1975-2005 and the unequivocal loyalty to the ‘oppressed Palestinians’, Roman Catholic theologians now emphasize the proclamation of the Lord Jesus Christ more than irenic dialogue, and the defense of the oppressed has shifted from the Palestinians to the oppressed Christians in Muslim lands. Benedict XVI is increasingly calling Islamic theologians to renounce their historic violent-prone dogma and only promote peaceful doctrines.[17] For Liberal Christians, this is the loss of an ally -as they had with Pope Paul John II- in their powerful pro-Palestinian coalition, while for Evangelicals this is a promising shift towards a more Trinitarian proclamation.

Eastern Orthodox
The context of the Orthodox and Eastern Christian reaction in the Levant is entirely framed by the sizeable exodus of Middle East Christians from their previous second-class ‘dhimmi lands’ to the freedom of the West. Those who remain in Middle Eastern dhimmitude continue to appease Muslim politicians with anti-Israeli solidarity, pro-Arab appeals, while testing the political waters with their human-right minority demands.

The Russian Orthodox reaction to Muslims in Eastern Europe remains today as they have since the loss of the Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, varying between resistance, aggression, mutual non-interference and reciprocal misgivings. That there are no know conversions of Muslims to Orthodox churches is sufficient commentary in itself.

Liberal Protestants
The voices of mainline liberal Protestant theologians prior to 9/11 (Karen Armstrong[18], John Esposito, Annemarie Schiller et al), were collectively aligned with academic social science research on Muslims, as well as being champions of the zealous pro-Palestinian Episcopal scholar, Edward Said (1935-2003). Liberal writers have been confident defenders of the universal monotheistic credo: ‘we all worship the same God’.

True to their convictions, liberal theologians have faithfully defended the Muslim’s protestations of being a ‘religion of mercy and peace’, of entitling Muslim migrants to right to immigrate to the West, of heaping culpability on Western politicians for the damage caused by their Islamophobic ‘war on terrorism’, and for maintaining terrorism has nothing to do with true Islam.

Liberal theological loyalty to the Palestinian cause is unequivocal: ‘salus palestini suprema lex esto (the welfare of the Palestinians is to be the highest law.) They are the closest ‘Christian’ allies to the Muslim immigrants and Palestinian causes and condemn all concerns of failed integration as ‘fundamentalist fear mongering’.

They also speak for a noticeable decreasing percentage of Christianity and have failed to gain any ground among a far more pro-Israel Protestant constituency.

Evangelical and Conservative Protestants
The Evangelical responses to Muslim immigration are of late vintage. The collective marginalization of Evangelical researchers on Islam (all conveniently grouped with fundamentalism), and the sleeping posture of the Western Evangelical churches concerning Islam gave Evangelical Islamic missiologists no wider audience than in-house fellow missionaries to Muslims.

For them, 9/11 marks a ‘coming out’ of the Evangelical voice (to borrow a phrase from the gay glossary.) Evangelicals are the ‘new voice on the block’, although the inclination of certain untrained writers to merely quote violent surahs and Hadiths and thereby to demonise Muslims has done more damage than good, as Warren Lawson illustrated clearly in the summer edition of CT.

Fear untreated
Indeed, if fear left untreated turns to hate then we have a time bomb ticking in the pews of America and beyond. Western Christians are increasingly apprehensive of Muslim immigrants in their community and they need urgent help to know how to respond to them.

Yet the few courageous that have tried their hand at evangelism, quickly find that even moderate Muslims (for example, at gas stations) are eager amateur theologians, who rarely listen while monopolise the conversation in a matter of minutes, and the sputtering Christian, unwittingly, hands away the store in the opening concessions, and decides to only smile in future encounters. Tongue-tied timid Christianity brings no honour to Christ.

Discernment
How might we discern the Lord’s hand in Muslim immigration? To borrow Augustine’s adage: ‘if it were not for heretics, we’d all be asleep on our Bibles’ we might well now say: ‘if it were not for Islam, we’d all be asleep in our pews’. Consider the following blessings that come with the Muslim immigrants amongst Western Christians.

1. First, it is infinitely easier to reach a Saudi Arabian student studying in Baltimore than in Riyadh. Whatever our soteriological bent, is not God ‘calling’ Muslim immigrants to our cultural doorsteps? Might these not be amongst those prepared by him, and who might be close to the kingdom? Our missiological response to the influx of Muslim immigrants must be: ‘Great! How can we engage them effectively?’ Anything derogatory we say may not be from the Spirit.

2. Second, the Muslim near us will cause us to pray for the Muslim everywhere. Since the Muslim identity is linked to events in the Middle East, Darfur, Iraq, Iran, etc, so should our prayers. The Muslim next door is a superb prayer reminder, and the failure to pray might invite God to allow for more emphatic knocks on our cultural door.

3. Third, the assertive identity of Muslims in the West is forcing us to face an humiliating phenomena of ‘reverse colonization’. There is only one belief more arrogant than that of Westerners: Islam. Even as our distant forefathers in, say, 1888, colonized the ‘pagan infidels’ of, say, Polynesia, Africa and the Amazon, enforcing our style of government, business, ethics, belief and schools, even so now, the Muslims are proactively colonizing their former colonial subjects in Canada, France, England, etc. Westerners taught them well and they embarrass us to a correct posture of humility.

Indeed, how can we disprove to them that we are not depraved pagans when all they have to do is turn on our living room TVs, glance at our DVD-film collection or see our popular novel collection? Protests aside, we look more ‘pagan’ to the Muslims than any previous Protestant generation.

4. Fourth, the Western failure to integrate, convert and/or intentionally bring passivism to Muslim immigrants ought to give us apocalyptic goose bumps. Western thinkers need heaven’s help to find tenable solutions to avoid the possible Balkanization or ghettoisation of increasingly disgruntled multi-cultural European cities.

If segregation is on the rise, what will, say, London look like in 2025? If the segregated Muslims become the most political and militant voice in a possible future ‘Londonistan’, how might an alternative model be brought to Muslims leading to a non-political, non-militant Islam in, say England?

5. Fifth, in a Christian world where Western men wrestle deeply with their crisis in masculinity and fatherhood, Muslim Background Believers (MBBs) will bring confidence and loyalties to families, in an even more promising way than Islam is bringing the same father/family loyalties to the Afro-American converts to Islam.

Converted Muslim men and women promise to do more than fill our tithing envelopes and fill the empty lumber of our pews; they may well succeed in reversing some noxious social trends in the post-modern churches.

6. Sixthly, the unabated scorning by Muslims of Christianity, or our spiritual liberty values, of our Holy Bible and our Triune God will awaken the best in us. Islamic pressure will lead to greater unity amongst Christians of all denominations, and the conversion of Muslims anywhere will be cause of rejoicing in the suffering church everywhere.

7. Finally, in the Christian language of sacrifice and suffering, converted Muslims will bring more honour to Christ in our generation than any other Christian community on earth because they will invite more of God’s grace, mercy, Scripture and power into their desperation than any other believers on earth. Many will deserve the honorary seat of martyrdom next to our Lord, a place that has been vacant all too long in our air-conditioned Western Christianity.

conclusions
We do well then to welcome and bless the Muslim immigrants amongst us as God’s intended hand of moving the most Gospel-resistant hearts among the world’s most affluent, comfortable Gospel Christians.

And, in the divine purposes of God, we might soon realize that we cannot do without the emerging converted MBB churches; not only to rescue us from irrelevance in a secular-imploding world but to even witness in our lifetime how Islamic theology can be Scripturally taken captive in submission to the Lordship of Christ Jesus.

Endnotes
[1] Daniel Pipes. ‘Europe under Siege’. New York Sun. October 18, 2005,
from http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3043
[2] Mark Steyn. The Century Ahead: It's the Demography, Stupid!’ The New Criterion, January 02, 2006. From http://127.0.0.1:4664/cache?event_id=40765&schema_id=1&q=Muslim+%2B+demographics&s=zpSLtxT5NH39reuR15xCHFVWPGA.
[3] Michael Rahu. ‘Londonistan is Still With Us’. Foreign Policy Research Institute. August 2006, from http://www.fpri.org/
[4] Vatican Forum. ‘Buttiglione Foresees a Europe of Strong Faith’. Zenit News Agency. December 01, 2005.
From http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=64600
[5] Matthew Parris. ‘Suicide bombings will pass – they are just a grisly terrorist fashion’. The Sunday Times of London. August 06, 2005. From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-1723062,00.html
[6] Richard Cohen. ‘Hunker Down with History’. The Washington Post. July 18, 2006.
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701154.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns.
[7] Akbar Ahmed. ‘Five Years After 9/11, 'Dialogue' with Islam Cause for Hope . Interview transcript with Akbar Ahmed’. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Tuesday, August 22, 2006, Bethesda, Maryland, from http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=124
[8] From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country. In the European Union there are 14 million Muslims, constituting 3.12% of the population, while in the greater Europe, there are 44 million, that is 6% of the whole.
[9] Quebec’s population estimate is: 7,598,800. Muslim total is 6,214.168, although 6 million Muslims in America is a more frequent citation in the news, making the North American population easily approaching 7-million.
Islam in the United States 5,558,068
Islam in Canada 656,100
[10] Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi . Libyan Leader Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi: Europe and the U.S. Should Agree to Become Islamic or Declare War on the Muslims Following are excerpts from a speech given by Libyan leader Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on April 10, 2006. From MEMRI TV, clip #1121, from http://www.memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S5&P1=57#
[11] Mark Steyn. ‘Pan-Islamism challenges idea of nation state’. Sun Times, August 13, 2006.
From http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn13.html.
[12] Akbar Ahmed. Ibid. See also Peter Grier and Mark Rice-Oxley: ‘Five years after 9/11: a shifted view of the world: The winners and losers that are still churning the world's politics. The Christian Science Monitor. September 11, 2006, from http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0911/p01s02-usgn.html. “Much of the hostility that some Islamists bear toward the US "is driven by one of the most powerful of human emotions, a sense of indignity and humiliation," says Lawrence Harrison, an adjunct lecturer in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "That's a quite new foreign- policy problem."
[13] Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi Ibid.
[14] Mark Steyn. Ibid.
[15] Gilles Kepel. The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World. 1994.
[16] Geneve Abdo. ‘Notion of assimilated American Muslim is wrong, too. Story is one of increasing alienation’. Houston Chronicle. Sept. 9, 2006.
From http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4175192.html . See also Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States, Islamic Council of Europe, London, England, 1980, pp. 169, that gives an Islamic framework for non-assimilation to maintain their Muslim identity.
[17] Reuters News. Pope: Islamic 'Holy War' Against God's Nature. NewsMax. Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006. From http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/9/12/123426.shtml?s=ic
[18] Karen Armstrong. Islam: A Short History. 2001. In the book review of the Random House they wrote: “Readers who have followed her lately are learning her more optimistic ideas about what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common. Three of these books--"A History of God" (Ballantine, 1993), "Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths" (Knopf, 1996) and "The Battle for God" (Knopf, 2000)--show what unites the faiths. Each, Armstrong writes, has developed the image of one Supreme Being who was first revealed to the prophet Abraham. All have historic links to Jerusalem. And more recently, each has built up a rigid conservative strain as a reaction against the modern world. “From http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/karmstrong.html