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The Calls of Kairos and IslamHarith GhassanyPublished online: 14 Jul 2010.

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Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2002

The Calls of Kairos and Islam

HARITH GHASSANY

ABSTRACT The greatest challenge to Christianity during the second half of the twentiethcentury emerged from liberation theologies and speci� cally from the point of view of pitting theChristian faith against the most despicable conditions of inhumanity. Oppressive contexts andconditions gave rise to deep re� ection on what it means to be a Christian in situations whereChristians oppress fellow Christians. The negative goal of Muslim–Christian relations requireslooking into both religious traditions to see how the messages of Islam and Christianity havebeen misappropriated and distorted to serve the interests of the powerful. The positive goal willbe to rediscover the emancipatory functions of Islam and Christianity in the midst of historyand culture, and direct the resultant awareness to serve present and future objectives ofMuslim–Muslim, Christian–Christian and Muslim–Christian relations.

Muslims and Christians have an option to interrogate their past and present so that theycan be guided by a liberated inter-faith dialogue and inspired by mutual tolerance. Thisis not at all easy given that their imperial pasts and present are more powerful andin� uential than the cultures of tolerance, peaceful communal co-existence and co-operation between their respective religious communities. Where ideally there shouldbe no contradictions between the message of Islam and Christianity and the behaviourof Muslims and Christians, the reality is that such contradictions do exist and can neverbe resolved by either spiritual or secular wishful thinking. The question posed byTolstoy—‘Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my death?’—isprofoundly secular and spiritually explosive and has the potential to disturb theslumbering consciousness of Christians as well as Muslims.

An all time proven distortion of human nature which works so well to drive a wedgebetween humanity and divinity has always been the excessive accumulation of powerand wealth, with the resultant creation of pride, as well as fear of an awakeneddemocratic opinion. There are two main paths to boost Muslim–Christian co-opera-tion: to unmask the institutions of accumulated wealth and power and expand thescope of freedom in the present and the future; or to continue to work as stakeholdersin wealth and power and preserve the status quo. Expanding the scope of freedomrequires unceasing understanding and interpretation of both the Qur©an and the Biblefrom the point of view of the ‘present world’ of the reader.

Sixteen years have passed since the revised second edition of The Kairos Document(KD 1986) was published. The KD is a small but very powerful document written ina broad and monumental style that can elicit all sorts of re� ections and reactions as wellas inspirations. The text is a proclamation of prophetic faith couched in terms of astruggle in a Kairos (crisis of opportunity). Like other manifestations of liberationtheologies, the spirit of KD can only be understood and appreciated against thebackdrop of the movement of liberation theology that originated in South America inthe 1970s and the important fact of the Cold War. The context is the situation of

ISSN 0959-6410 print/ISSN 1469-9311 online/02/030303-11 Ó 2002 CSIC and CMCUDOI: 10.1080/09596410220220145507

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304 Harith Ghassany

con� ict in South Africa, where even after the abolition of apartheid in 1994 theeconomic disadvantage of the black African majority has not yet been restructured soas to fundamentally change the message of the KD. The message is also relevant tomany other contexts where human beings are being suffocated by structures of auth-ority, hierarchy and domination.

Even before the dismantling of apartheid and the beginning of reconciliation, theimpact of the Kairos had gone beyond South Africa to include El Salvador, Guatemala,Korea, Namibia, Nicaragua and the Philippines, and we now have it in our hands as theDamascus Document (DD 1989). The DD is a proclamation of faith and a call toconversion which has involved hundreds of Christians who helped in its preparationand thousands more who have chosen to put their signatures to it. The context of theDD is indeed very broad in scope and not only includes the seven countries mentionedabove but can easily be expanded to include Eastern Europe, the United States and theUnited Kingdom, and indeed the whole world.

This paper attempts to evaluate critically both the text(s) and the context(s) of theDD. The � rst section will evaluate the signi� cance of the DD in light of the role of theChristian churches and the understandings of liberation theologies in South Africa,Korea and the Philippines. The second part will describe in detail the major strengthsand weaknesses of the document by taking into consideration its biblical foundations,theological presuppositions, sociocultural perspectives, inter-cultural understandingsand collaborative formulations. Part three will discuss the importance of the DD interms of both its ecclesial rami� cations and its sociopolitical consequences.

The case narratives of liberation theologies provide examples of how the generalconditions of oppression on the peripheries in� uenced and produced speci� c Christianresponses within the genre of ‘liberation theology’. Similar and on the rise are theperipheral conditions that exist in the developed centers of the West, but these and theirChristian responses are not covered in this paper. The fourth and last section willattempt to identify a common ground agenda where the concerns of the DD can be setinto dialogue with some Islamic interests, beliefs and social commitments.

Social Con� icts at the Peripheries

The con� ict situation in South Africa is by no means over simply because blackAfricans have at last acquired political power. It is the bottom-up social reconstructionthat will constitute the real challenge to the African National Congress, the politicalparty that took over power from the dismantled apartheid regime. Even a moral agentof the stature of Nelson Mandela admits, ‘But I have discovered the secret that afterclimbing a great hill, one only � nds that there are many more hills to climb’ (Mandela1994, 751). The underdeveloped situation in South Africa neatly con� rms and � ts intowhat the DD describes as a ‘violent political con� ict, but also the phenomenon ofChristians on both sides of the con� ict’ (DD 1989, 1). According to the DD, there areonly ‘two antagonistic forms of Christianity … referred to with a variety of differentnames’ (DD 1989, 1). These include ‘State’ and ‘Prophetic’ theologies. The DD hasdropped the middle category of ‘Church Theology’ which is found in the KD (KD1986, 9).

The omission of ‘Church Theology’ is in agreement with Klippies Kritzinger’squestioning of the usefulness of the KD’s distinction between ‘State Theology’ and‘Church Theology’. Kritzinger raises the radical question: are they (State

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The Calls of Kairos and Islam 305

Theology and Church Theology) not to be viewed as two sides of the same whitetheology committed to racism and capitalism? (1988, 142).

From the point of view of the DD, both the white Dutch Reformed Church of SouthAfrica and the ‘English-speaking’ churches are representative of ‘State Theology’, which‘is simply the theological justi� cation of the status quo with its racism, capitalism andtotalitarianism’ (KD 1986, 3). ‘Prophetic Theology’ is represented by those SouthAfricans (black or white) who are severely critical and � ght a system of repression (whiteor black) and call for the repentance and conversion of the defenders of the status quo.The DD recognizes racism as ‘one of the most serious and lasting legacies of Europeancolonialism’ which ‘has been institutionalized and legalized in the form of the notorioussystem of apartheid’ (DD 1989, 4). The DD does not equally condemn black racismagainst whites as practised within certain South African political parties and groups.

The DD’s treatment of racism does not relate directly to the system of economic andpolitical exploitation and is therefore open to the kind of criticism presented by theNigerian author Olubayo Obijole, as being ‘integrationist’ because it does not challengethe conditions of repression. Racism is a moral justi� cation of the inferiority of theexploited by the exploiter that is necessary before economic and political exploitationcan be carried out without the intrusions of a disturbed conscience. Racism, whentreated separately from economic and political exploitation, falls prey to the thesis thatBlacks are oppressed because they are not white. This thesis is refuted by Obijolebecause Blacks can and do oppress and exploit fellow Blacks, as Whites can and dooppress fellow Whites. To Obijole, ‘exploitation does not depend upon race althoughracism is used as a capitalist category and as a tool for exploitation’ (Obijole 1987, 208).

In dealing with social and political issues of racism and imperialism, the DD remainsfaithful to what Manas Buthelezi calls the ‘anthropological methodology that beginswith the contemporary situation, focusing on factors that reveal the continuing op-pression and dehumanization of blacks’ (Ferm 1988, 68). No hint is given by the DDat the searches for indigenous African religions that form Buthelezi’s second ethno-graphic approach.

A possible explanation is the distinction between the anthropological and the ethno-graphic approach that is implicitly made in the DD. Such a distinction has its uses andabuses. On the one hand, the anthropological approach has the advantage of dealingwith immediate social issues but overlooks the pre-histories of liberation theologies. Onthe other, the ethnographic approach in the South African case is arrested in itsattempt to ‘uncover African world views and myths that will serve as the conceptualframe for African Theology’ (Ferm 1988, 68) and so overlooks pressing social issues athand.

The South Korean situation has shown us clearly that the anthropological andethnographic approaches need not be separated as Buthelezi seems to suggest. TheKorean Minjung Theology is ‘particularly important for its creative combination of thetwo chief features of liberation theology in the Third World. On the one hand MinjungTheology is a theology growing out of the grass roots—the minjung—in their struggle forliberation. On the other hand, it seeks to relate itself to the indigenous Korean setting,incorporating the Shamanistic tradition in a constructive way’ (Ferm 1988, 98).

The word minjung is mentioned only twice in the DD. It � rst appears in the‘Preamble’ to the document where Minjung Theology is one of the various names givento ‘Prophetic Theology’. It appears again in the discussion on ‘People Against Imperi-alism’ as another name for the ‘the people’ who have come of age as new historicalsubjects.

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Insisting upon an anthropological approach that ignores cultural and religious cus-toms, the DD leaves much to be desired. The anthropological approach is as importantas the ethnographic and historical. How can anyone understand minjung theologywithout understanding its etymology, the concept of han, the mask-dance and otherfeatures of the local culture of the people? Culture particularizes theology in ways whichmay or may not � t into the generalized framework of liberation theology. What isimperative is to include the cultural dimension, whether it negates or supports theassumptions of liberation theology. The DD has markedly betrayed its neglect of thecategories of culture that construct, and are in return constructed by, the very worldwhich it seeks to understand and change.

The DD does not deal directly with the issue of the two Koreas or their possiblereuni� cation, but speaks of Western imperialists’ use of the tactic of divide and rule,and their co-operation with local rulers (collaborators). The authoritarian socialistNorth Korean regime is spared criticism. The North–South divide is signi� cant forKorea’s minjung theology and for its analogy of site, which sees the Palestine of Jesusas being at the periphery of the Roman Empire, so that the Bible can best beunderstood at the periphery where the minjung are located. Jesus Christ was of theperiphery and struggled with the minjung only to incur ‘the ire of the religiousauthorities, who handed him over to the Roman procurator to be cruci� ed’ (DD 1989,3)

Moley Familiaran, who is from the Philippines and is Deputy General Secretary forCo-operative Christianity, is squarely rooted in the analogy of site of minjung theologywhen he explains: ‘The content and aim of our prayers are not different from Israel’sin its revolutionary movement, in its internal class struggles, and its colonial depen-dence upon the world powers of its day’ (Familiaran 1984, 10).

The Filipinos have known only too well the realities of colonial dependence and haveopted for a theology of struggle with its implicit analogy of a peripheral site, instead ofa theology of ‘liberation’. The Unites States of America went to liberate the Filipinosfrom the Spanish, and then the Japanese moved into the Philippines to liberate thearchipelago from the United States, which then went to ‘liberate’ the Filipinos from theJapanese. The Filipinos, who rightly claim that they have had a good dose of ‘liber-ation’, are now determined to � nd their own means of struggling for liberation in thePaci� c Palestine.

Caution must be exercised against temptations to overemphasize the signi� cance ofthe DD for what is happening in South Africa, Korea and the Philippines. Liberationtheologians have been very wary of generalizations that tend to overlook the particularhistories and contexts in which theologies emerge and operate. The DD, because of itsanthropological tendency to generalize on the basis of particular social and politicalissues, has paid little or no attention to culture, history and the biblical hermeneuticsof the countries it represents.

Repentance or Conversion?

One of the strongest overriding themes of the document is the biblical theme of Saul’srepentance and conversion that provides the very title of its proclamations. Saul was thegreat persecutor of the followers of Jesus Christ who converted after a spiritualencounter with Christ, who appeared to him saying, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecuteme?’ Saul replied, ‘Who are you Lord?’ He said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting’(Acts 9 :3–5).

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The Calls of Kairos and Islam 307

The story assumes that repentance and conversion can come from an unearthlyJesus; in other words, from an otherworldly spirituality. What was so special about Saulthat made him bypass the persecuted followers of Jesus Christ and join them only afterhe experienced the special spiritual relationship with Jesus? Could he not have encoun-tered Jesus more concretely among the persecuted, the despised and the powerless, andthrough them reached Jesus?

Preferential treatment of the poor and the oppressed is given strong biblical supportin the DD. The poor are blessed (Luke 6 :20), the rich are condemned (Luke 6 :24),the mighty are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up (Luke1 :52). God hears the cries of the poor and ‘leads them across the seas and the desertto the promised land’ (Exodus 3 :17). He is the Yahweh who liberated the Jews fromthe Pharaoh and slavery and demands a strict monotheism of ‘You shall have no godsexcept me’ (Exodus 20 :1–2).

But who are the poor who are given preferential treatment by God and by liberationtheologians? Are they the materially poor or are they the spiritually poor, or both? Arethe poor held in high esteem because they are spiritually stripped of all egoistic desiresand as a result reintegrated with the Rich Logos, or God who is not in need of humansustenance? This is an important question because one is never sure if the preferentialtreatment of the poor is preferred because it stimulates the Marxist imagination of thepresumed historical agency of the proletariat, or because it coincides with liberationtheologians’ Christian spiritual understandings of poverty.

In quoting these verses from the Bible, the DD fails to point to the fact that extremesof poverty and wealth in most cases mitigate against having faith in God. The questionof the social responsibility of the wealthy seems to be more critical to human co-opera-tion and communal co-existence than does the question of abstract faith that fails toaddress the contingencies of the human condition. This is why the DD is foundwanting when it comes to issues such as the lack of regulations to control � nancialspeculation in the world economy, environmental movements and harmonious relation-ships among Christians and between Christians and Muslims in the economic andpolitical exploitation of international wealth-making endeavours. It is not enough toquote the blessing of the poor and the condemnation of the rich without at the sametime unveiling the tools, mechanisms and strategies of wealth-making and their rela-tionship to poverty.

A major weakness of the biblical foundation of the DD is that it mainly operatesunder the assumption that the Bible is, according to Itumeleng Mosala of the Depart-ment of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, the ‘Word ofGod’ which ‘carries the implication that there is such a thing as a non-ideologicalappropriation of scripture’ (Mosala 1986, 177).

The DD has acknowledged the ‘Church’ as the site of struggle, but not the Bible.This distinction is crucial for the theological suppositions that are derived from theformer assumption. The Church is the site of struggle between two types of Christians:oppressors and oppressed. ‘Is God on both sides?’ asks the DD. Is neutrality possibleor simply an ‘indirect way of supporting the status quo’? (DD 1989, 8).

There are gods and God in the DD. The gods of the oppressors (idols, money,power, privilege), not to mention Edward Said’s ‘gods that always fail’ (Said 1994),have appropriated the God of the oppressed and converted him into:

… a God who blessed the powerful, the conquerors, the colonizers. This Goddemanded resignation in the face of oppression and condemned rebelliousness

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and insubordination. All that was offered to us by this God was an interior andother-worldly liberation. It was a God who dwelt in heaven and in the Templebut not in the world. (DD 1989, 11)

Even the Jesus of the oppressed is different from that of the oppressor:

[Jesus] seemed to � oat above history, above all human problems andcon� icts … His approach to the poor was therefore thought of as condescend-ing. He condescended to make the poor the object of his mercy and com-passion without sharing their oppression and their struggle. His death hasnothing to do with historical con� icts, but was a human sacri� ce to placate anangry God. What was preached to us was a completely other-worldly Jesuswho had no relevance to this life. (DD 1989, 11)

Both the God and the Jesus of the oppressed are other-worldly, an absentee lord andan absentee Jesus. These assumptions are in direct contradiction with the God whoblessed the poor and the Jesus who struggled with and for them.

Then there are those who take no sides, the neutralists, believers in building bridgesfrom the middle in order to avoid dealing with the banks. The DD offers two reasons,two assumptions that explain the silence and the lack of involvement of the neutralists.Looking at them at close range, the neutralists are not as neutral as they would like usto believe. They are, in fact, deeply involved but they lack the awareness to know orhave enough awareness to choose not to know. Neutrality, silence and lack of involve-ment are explained by the DD in the following way: ‘the reason lies in a life that is notconfronted by the suffering and struggling of the poor, and therefore, the choice of aconvenient God who does not challenge us to take part in a movement for change’ and‘the reason lies in a choice of privilege and power, and a conscious defense of the statusquo’ (DD 1989, 15).

Intellectual Domination and Freedom

Those assumptions being insuf� cient and inadequate in themselves, the oppressorshave developed an antagonistic dualism to justify their behaviour. By separating thespiritual from the material, they think they have succeeded in keeping

… God out of their political and economic interests. They say that they areonly interested in the soul, but in fact they are very concerned about thepolitical and economic status quo … They say we must keep religion out ofpolitics, but invoke a kind of religion that supports the status quo. (DD 1989,20)

The oppressors fall back on the other-worldly God of Jesus to worship their own idolsof money and power when these signify unaccountable accumulation and lack of socialresponsibility towards the less fortunate. Politics, economics and sel� shness havecompromised their faith. It is the obsession with their position in society that alienatesthe rich from a liberating God and Jesus, the poor and the powerless, the non-personswho are described in the DD. It is a new Babel where words such as ‘colonialism’,‘collaborators’ and ‘imperialism’ have been replaced by euphemisms such as the ‘globaleconomy’, ‘free market’, ‘end of ideology’ and ‘end of history’, ‘clashes of cultures’ and‘partnerships’ or ‘mutualities’.

The bad news is the globalization of a rampant monoculture of free market ideology,unequal international trade systems, monopolistic multinationals, the media and an

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The Calls of Kairos and Islam 309

elitist understanding of democracy and human rights. The good news is the collapse ofauthoritarian or so-called ‘scienti� c socialism’ and ‘Marxism–Leninism’, disillusion-ment with power politics and institutionalized religion and the possible re-emergence ofcivil society. It is the fresh Kairos of emancipatory spirituality with a secular groundingthat can not only criticize the rampant monoculture and unipolar world, but also callfor the integration of neighbourhoods and meaningful participatory work experiences,which illuminates the human heart with imagined alternatives while integrating the bestsecular practices.

The problem with the DD and with almost all the emancipatory narratives whichemerged during the Cold War period is that they failed to heed Michael Bakunin’s(Karl Marx’s rival in the First International) trenchant advice:

No state, however democratic, not even the reddest republic—can ever givethe people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and adminis-tration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interferenceor violence from above, because every state … is in essence only a machineruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellec-tuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better thando the people themselves … But the people will feel no better if the stick withwhich they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick’. (Dolgoff 1980, 338)

Liberation theologians need to engage themselves in the discussion of the conquest ordestruction of state power, the primary issue that divided Bakunin from Marx. Whatkind of social structures represent the powers that be, and which ones represent thealternative power of the people?

Liberation theology in general does not elucidate or elaborate on this question. Itmentions Basic Christian Communities but does not locate the discussion on wherethese belong in the discussion of the conquest or destruction of state power. Thein� uence of Marxism in liberation theologies precludes this discussion, given that thestrength of Marxism is in the critical analysis of capitalism. As far as the state isconcerned, Marx and Lenin stood for its conquest and spoke of its dissolution from amagical and opportunistic point of view.

The cultural framework of the DD can be described as ‘modernistic’ and ‘statist’ inthe sense that its contents hardly re� ect the cultural world-views and possible socialsystems of the people it represents. As already mentioned, African, Korean and Filipinoindigenous categories are totally ignored by the signatories of the document. Thesignatories are culturally biased and too immersed in statist political philosophies toinclude the categories of thought and social practices of the people on whose behalfthey speak.

Inter-cultural understanding has to include the themes of the Africanization ofChristianity, African polygamy, Shamanism and other indigenous beliefs fromNicaragua, El Salvador or Guatemala, etc. It is the strong sense of awareness ofcommon colonial experiences, of cultural imperialism and the cultures of silence and ofresistance that is shared by the signatories of the DD while inter-cultural understandingof traditional beliefs and practices is in strategic retreat. Does this mean that the DDis not a challenging document even within its own terms of reference?

The document is a warning, an invitation to conversion and a call for solidarityamong the oppressed. Very few people know or have heard about it—it can simply beignored among the new narratives of the new Babel. The KD raises on the humanhorizon the serious question: who will be attracted to the Church if the vision of the

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310 Harith Ghassany

DD is realized and materialized? When the structures of oppression are unmasked,nothing can comfortably hide any more. The true face of the Church is at last seen forwhat it really is, and the followers of God and Jesus, and the world in general, cancontinue to struggle with a new hope. Is not Western civilization ethically linked moreclosely to Christianity than to any other religion? Can Christianity as a spiritual forceliberate Western civilization?

The DD has successfully shown that the enemies of God and of Jesus Christ arespread throughout the world and united. It is well to remember that one-fourth of theworld’s population are Muslims. Can the call of Kairos � nd an echo of solidarity in thecall of Islam? Can the two calls stimulate and challenge each other into new forms ofsolidarity and dialogue? Has Islam in the second half of the twentieth century ever beenchallenged by Muslims the way Christianity has been challenged by liberation theolo-gians? Can these be the questions of the 21st century?

Islam—Authoritarian and Progressive

The potential and opportunities for dialogue between the concerns of the DD andprogressive Islam are immense. Establishment Muslims, and especially the Muslimmasses, are quick to object to the suggestion that there is both an authoritarian and aprogressive tradition in Islam. The usual objection is ‘Islam is one’. Of course no onecan deny that the differences between Shõ ¨ õ and Sunnõ Islam are somewhat super� cialwhen it comes to articles of faith, the major point of contention being the issue of theright of succession to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and reverence for the perse-cuted members of his house (Ahl al-Bayt), which provides a powerful ethical symbolismthat distinguishes tyranny from justice.

Anti-authoritarian Islam has many manifestations in some Sufõ and Sunnõ traditionsand in Shõ ¨ite and ‘Ibad õ forms of Islam. These very same traditions can exhibit formsof authoritarian Islam which are indifferent to any meaningful participation in shura(consultation), jihad and ijtihad, and to the unveiling of unjusti� ed structures ofauthority, hierarchy and domination which are against the spirit of Islamic freedom.The point is that, like Christianity and other religions, Islam as practised by Muslimsharbours both authoritarian and libertarian currents.

The Qur©an makes a direct invitation to the ‘People of the Book’, Christians andJews:

Say: ‘O people of the Book! come to common terms as between us and you:that we worship none but God; that we associate no partners with Him; thatwe erect not, from among ourselves, lords and patrons other than God.’ Ifthen they turn back, say ye: ‘Bear witness that we (at least) are Muslims(bowing to God’s will).’ (Q. 3 :64)

The qur©anic verse is in agreement with the DD’s statements and especially when itproclaims that ‘the worship of money, power, privilege and pleasure has certainlyreplaced the worship of God’, or when it quotes from the Bible: ‘They worshipped andserved the creature instead of the Creator’ (Romans 1 :25). According to the DD theynot only worship and serve their lords and patrons, but also what those lords andpatrons have created: ‘the worship of money, power, privilege and pleasure hascertainly replaced the worship of God’ (DD 1989, 16).

The DD has an implicit invitation and a serious challenge to offer Muslims. Thechallenge is to relate the Muslim faith to the not-yet-kingdom of this world, i.e. to start

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The Calls of Kairos and Islama 311

with this-world with all its imperfections, to allow our social realities to interrogate theIslamic message and vice versa. And this is not possible without a social analysis ofoppressive structures and a struggle to create equitable institutions. The DD’s assump-tions of Christian oppressors and oppressed can easily be extended to include Muslimoppressors and oppressed. Muslims are on both sides of the con� ict. Is Allah with therich and powerful, or with the poor, orphans and women? Muslim scholars cannotrespond to this challenge in an either/or fashion because not all the rich are necessarilyevil since, according to Islam, they have rights and obligations and so do the poor,orphans and women.

The Third World Christian theologians who signed the DD declare that ‘we arefollowing the path of a cruci� ed Christ’, but the Qur©an categorically denies thecruci� xion of Jesus Christ:

That they said (in boast) ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Apostleof God’; but they killed him not; nor cruci� ed him, but so it was made toappear to them. And those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no(certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for a surety, They killedhim not: Nay, God raised him up unto Himself; and God is Exalted in Power,Wise. (Q. 4 :151–8)

The Qur©an denies that the Jews killed Jesus, a basic doctrine of Christianity which isequally of utmost importance to liberation theologians. If Jesus was not the unfortunateand abandoned Apostle of God, but was actually rescued by God, how then does thisradical interpretation strengthen or weaken the argument of liberation theologians andthe possibilities of inter-faith dialogue between Muslims and Christians? The devastat-ing assertion is that God had deceived the enemies of Jesus and the deception was lateraccepted as a major pillar of Christian doctrine. The serious question, which alsore� ects some of the concerns of Itumeleng Mosala, is whether the DD has realized theideological rootedness of the Bible which may not only re� ect White theology, butworse, the theology of the oppressors at the time of or after Jesus.

The Qur©an and the Prophet Muhammad are treated by a majority of Muslims in another-worldly fashion. This is partly due to the distorted belief that since secularismmust always mean disbelief in God or because disbelief in God can in some cases beassociated with secularism, then all secularism is based on the principle of the denial ofa belief in God. The belief is that secularism has no faith even though the fact of thematter is that it can be practised by believers as well as disbelievers. The essential ideais to take seriously the place we are living in regardless of whether we consider the worldwe are living in as a springboard to the next world of spirit or of matter. In either caseour world is very important and we can use what God or the laws of nature have givenus to improve ourselves. There are no contradictions between secularism and spiritual-ity. The contradiction is in the denial of one at the expense of the other.

The methodology of Islamic fundamentalism and of Arab/Muslim thinking suffersfrom a chronic lack of social analysis in addressing the surrounding social realities andconditions. What Muslims badly need and the DD offers is, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, a‘worldly interpretation’ of the Qur©an and the life of the Prophet Muhammad whichsays something to us who are the sons and daughters of our time and to those who willcontinue or come after us. Many Muslim responses to the notion of liberation theologyand Islam are available in the works of Farid Esack, Ali Engineer, Shuroosh Irfani andAli Shari©ati. Very few Muslim scholars have dealt critically with the cultural andphilosophical construction of the Muslim interpretive intellectual tradition, as can be

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312 Harith Ghassany

found in the works of Muhammad Shahrur (1990) and Muhammad Abed al-Jabry(1999).

What is speci� cally interesting and potentially very rewarding about the work ofShahrur is the way he places the Torah, the Bible and the Qur©an as divine interven-tions that more or less coincide with the historical evolution of human thought from aless to a more rational intellectual sophistication over time. Shahrur’s challenge is toapproach the Qur©an as if it had been revealed today with the Prophet Muhammad inour midst as the only way to separate what is historical and cultural in Islam, what isdivine and necessary and what belongs to human freewill and choice which is left opento human reason and possibilities. The Bible, according to Shahrur, was not inherentlyequipped to deal with the scienti� c revolution and that is why it was overthrown andChristianity became limited to the Church. He sees the inherited intellectual traditionof Muslim scholars limiting Islam to the mosque, not, however, because the text islimited but because of the temporary inability of Muslims to relate the text to theconditions and knowledge of their times (Shahrur 1990).

As an example, the Prophet Muhammad has been desocialized, his supportersconverted into a vague vanguard of a golden era which is too lofty and ahistorical forhuman reality to emulate. The image of the Prophet has been distorted. Only his � rstthirteen years of non-violence in Mecca, when he was militarily too weak to � ght theenemy, are emphasized. His victories in battle over his enemies are acclaimed andglori� ed as feats of manliness and military craftsmanship. But what do they mean tocontemporary Muslims living today? Was the Prophet Muhammad an empire builderor was he a God-inspired genius of spiritual transformation and the idealization of theIslamic commune? Or was Islam, like Christianity, early on overtaken by the imperialquest so that it usurped the spiritual and social fabric of the commune?

Madelung comments with regard to the Umayyad assumption of the caliphate:

In a wider historical perspective, Islam was now taken over by the state. Justas three centuries earlier Roman–Byzantine despotism had appropriatedChristianity and strangled its paci� st religious core, and turned it into a toolof imperial domination and repression, so it now appropriated Islam, stran-gling it as an instrument of repressive social control, exploitation and militaryterrorization. (Madelung 1997, 326–7)

Oppressed Christians cannot face the imperialism of their Christian oppressors alone.They may be surprised to � nd that they have more in common with oppressed Muslimsonce they realize the common ground that is open to both of them. The DD inparticular and liberation theologies in general provide an analytical framework ofreference which can serve Christians as well as Muslims and Jews. It is the frameworkof a common God who together with His prophets is a Liberator of humankind fromthe Pharaonic mentality and who uplifts the lowly and the humble via non-elitist formsof struggle and institutions.

The in� uence of the thought of Karl Marx on liberation theology and hence on theDD is unmistakable. Such an in� uence is not absent among some Muslim scholars andactivists, but Marx never became a Muslim idol to inspire an Islamic theology ofliberation. The end of the Cold War also raises many questions of whether liberationtheology can remain vigilant with the call of Kairos in spite of the dwindling in� uenceof the once dominant anti-imperialist voice. Can liberation theology imagine a post-im-perial Christian alternative without the political kingdom of Marx? Or is the option nowopen for a new Christian–Muslim collaboration, especially after the atrocities of 11

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September? The signi� cance of the DD has to take into consideration the cultures ofthe society it represents. The hidden assumptions of the Pharaonic and Mosaicmentalities reach the conscious through the unconsciousness of cultures. The founda-tions of the cultures of silence and of resistance must be laid open for all to see and herespirituality and secularism are invaluable prerequisites. Sometimes we have to delvedeep into history to understand the invention of the sayings of the Prophet Muham-mad, or the cruci� xion ideology of Jesus, or look very closely at the present andinterrogate the varieties of secularism, the spiritual meaning of poverty and the poor—human constructions which may have slipped through our liberation nets.

REFERENCES

AL-JABRY, Muhammad Abed (1999) Arab–Islamic Philosophy: a contemporary critique (Houston TX,University of Texas Press).

DD (1989) A document signed by Third World Christians: The Road to Damascus [DamascusDocument] (London, Catholic Institute for International Relations).

DOLGOFF, Sam (Ed.) (1980) Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal, Black Rose Books).FAMILIARAN, Moley (1984) ‘1984: A time of crisis, a time of hope. What are the nations up to today?’,

paper submitted by Moley G. Familiaran to the Baptist Prayer Conference at Columbus, OH, 30April–3 May.

FERM, Deane William (1988) Third World Liberation Theologies: an introductory survey (New York,Orbis).

KD (1986) The Kairos Document: challenge to the Church, 2nd edn rev. (Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans).KRITZINGER, J. N. J. (1988) ‘The Kairos Document—a call to conversion’, Missionalia, 16, 126–45.MADELUNG, Wilferd (1997) The Succession to Muhammad: a study of the early caliphate (Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press).MANDELA, Nelson (1994) Long Walk to Freedom (London, Abacus).MOSALA, Itumeleng J. (1986) ‘The use of the Bible in Black theology’, in: Itumeleng J. MOSALA & Buti

TLHAGALE (Eds), The Unquestionable Right to be Free: Black theology from South Africa (New York,Orbis).

OBIJOLE, Olubayo (1987) ‘South African liberation theologies of Boesak and Tutu—a critical evalu-ation’, African Theological Journal, 16, 201–15.

SAID, Edward (1994) Representations of the Intellectual (New York, Vintage).SHAHRUR, Muhammad (1990) Al-kitab wa-al-qur©an [The Book and the Qur©an] (Damascus, Al-Ahal õ

lil-T½ iba¨a wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzõ ¨).

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