I am not interested in mixing Christianity with Islam. Either they are right that Jesus is a man, or the Watchtower (who falsely claim to be “Jehovah’s Witnesses”) are right that He is the archangel Michael, or we Christians are right that He is “very God, begotten not created”, as the Adeste Fidelis terms it.
We cannot all be right. We could all be wrong and the nihilist view that He is mere legend might conceivably be true, though absurdly unlikely, but each grouping believes different things more than one of which cannot be true of Jesus at once.
Mixing Islam and Christianity would be possible if this were a secondary point, up for negotiation, but that is not the case, not for them and not for us.
So what I expect from Muslims is that they allow an open debate. They cannot expect to be able to preach to us about shirk and Allah not having partners and then put their fingers in their ears when e clarify that Jesus is not Allah’s partner, He IS Allah, to the extent that Allah mean the Creator God, rather than a specific view of God which only embraces the Father and ascribes to him none of the fatherly aspects that Christianity does.
If a Muslim comes here and wants to set out a dawah stall, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I would grant them that liberty. The bad news is that I would only grant them that liberty on the basis of there existing similar liberties for Christians and others in his country of origin.
If a Muslim wants to build a Mosque, or attend a mosque which another Muslim built, fine. But only for nationals of places where I have the right to go unperturbed to an Evangelical church or a Catholic or Orthodox church with no barriers to building a thriving community in his place of origin.
I would not grant them any more rights than I would expect Christians to be granted in their countries. I would not expect them to arrange things so that Christians had reserved jobs in the food industry, for example, which is what the halal meat industry amounts to in the West for Muslims. If there has to be only Muslims involved in the value chains and production flows of halal food, then in the spirit of our Consumer law which already exists in other areas, it should only be placed on offer publicly if labelled up that Christians and other non-Muslims have not been allowed to participate in the making of this product. In plain text, not with some foreign word that we don’t all understand, why should we?
In Poland there one law about which foreign Companies are allowed to set up branches in Poland without incorporating. I was worried about UK Companies losing their Branch privileges on Brexit because at one time this privilege was only for EU Companies and those from one or two contracted countries. Now the rule extends to any country which allows the same privilege to Polish Companies in their economy. And that seems to work very well.
I think this “Gegenseitigkeitsprinzip”, to give it a posh German name the ichthyologist and explorer Harro Hieronimus once taught me, ought to be used a lot more often in society, in relations between people and businesses it’s self-evident, but needs to be made more evident in dealings between communities and countries.
The Correspondent: A Novel
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Seems to me that Islam is not a “faith” in the sense of other religions. It is more of an imposed-from-birth ideology.
Alan.
It is, it is an ideology and it is a system which embraces and codifies a number of points of how states are run also, therefore getting into the politics of a place where there were no Muslims before is as important to most of them as getting a package for the Hajj.
Only one in ten Muslims ever get to go on Hajj. This comes straight out of the maths, knowing what the capacity is for pilgrims to go there. But far more than one in ten are politically active when they are in a different country. And this even in countries they fled to when their own Muslim country became unbearable. It is something that cannot be helped, which is why if we are taking people in to help them out we should understand how they mean to use citizenship rights should they acquire them. If they are going to repeat the in-built algorithms that turns country after country into an Islamic State and then fights to make sure that is never reversed, then we may not be able to afford to allow Muslim immigrants the privilege of acquiring the vote, even for some generations.
This was of course the German “Gastarbeiter” idea, and in the end they have allowed children pof immigrants to nationalise, in which case they had to drop their initial nationality. But dropping one’s initial nationality doesn’t equate to dropping the Muslim code, aka. the ‘deen”. And the deen is what is making them do what they do, not the fact of being a Pakistani, Afghan, Tajik, Bangladeshi, Egyptian or even Saudi.
Secularism is no answer if secularism means a default to atheism/agnosticism/menefreghismo. We need to preserve and reinforce the Judeo-Christian heritage.