Prominent Muslim Baptized by Pope
The most prominent Muslim commenter in Italy, Magdi Allam, was baptized by Pope Benedict at the Easter Vigil in St. Peter's. Via CNN which also has special edited video of the event which has already made it to You tube as you can see below (he is the tall dark young man who is baptized second.)
Via CNN:
"VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Italy's most prominent Muslim commentator converted to Roman Catholicism on Saturday during the Vatican's Easter vigil service presided over by the pope.
An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim, Magdi Allam has infuriated some fellow Muslims with his criticism of extremism and support for Israel.
The deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, Allam often writes on Muslim and Arab affairs."
Allam has already received death threats and security from the Italian government for publicly taking issue with Palestinian terrorists.
"The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said of Allam before the service that anyone who chooses to become a Catholic of his or her own free will has the right to receive the sacrament. "
"In the Il Giornale interview, Allam explained his complicated relationship with Islam and his affinity for Israel.
"I was never practicing," he was quoted as saying. "I never prayed five times a day, facing Mecca. I never fasted during Ramadan."
Yet he said he did make the pilgrimage to Mecca, as is required of all Muslims, with his deeply religious mother in 1991.
Married to a Catholic, with a young son and two adult children from his first marriage, Allam indicated in the interview that he would have no problem converting to Christianity.
He said he had even received Communion once -- when he was 13 or 14 -- "even though I knew it was an act of blasphemy, not having been baptized.
Egypt's highest Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, wrote last year against the killing of apostates, saying there is no worldly retribution for Muslims who abandon their religion and that punishment would come in the afterlife.
Reaction to Allam's conversion was largely muted from Italy's Muslim community.
The Union of Islamic Communities in Italy -- which Allam has frequently criticized as having links to Hamas -- said the baptism was a personal choice.
"He is an adult, free to make his personal choice," the Apcom news agency quoted the group's spokesman, Issedin El Zir, as saying."
What to say?
First of all, I'd love to welcome Allam into the heart of the Church. There are other Muslims making the same commitment this Easter - all over the world and some in the US, I'm sure. A member of our Called & Gifted team in Indonesia was a former Muslim and I met a priest there who was also from a Muslim background. My friend Natalia, meets many MBB's these days (Muslim Background Believers) in the middle east these days. Some of the children of these converts are now entering into Christian leadership. They all need our personal support.
John Allen points out that Allam has been connected with Communion and Liberation for some time and that some Muslims may have already assumed that he was Christian because he has been so public about his most-Islamically incorrect opinions. Actually, this sort of gesture is beginning to sound like just the sort of thing that Allam would do.
However, there will be consequences for others.
Some Muslims who are seeking will be inspired to do the same thing.
And some will be persecuted and some may well die for this.
Why? Because it is so extraordinarily public. The image of a famous Muslim receiving baptism from the Pope's hand in St. Peter's at the most solemn liturgy of the year was watched live by hundreds of millions and now has already circled the globe. It is being prominantly covered by every major news agency in the world as I write - including in the Muslim world. Allam's personal decision could not possibly have been dramatized in a more-in-your-face manner.
To us it is an important gesture of religious freedom and freedom of conscience. To fundamentalist Muslims, it is an open act of public contempt for Islam and humiliation by the most prominent Christian in the world. This is a jihadist spin doctor's dream come true. It won't matter that Allam was never really a practicing Muslim, married to a Catholic wife (A Muslim man is permitted to marry a Christian woman but a Muslim woman may not marry a Christian man in Islam), and living in Italy for a long time.
Will there be reprisals against the Pope? I don't know. We should be praying for him and everyone else involved assiduously. Might it endanger Allam and his family? Absolutely. Might some Italian by-standers be hurt? Its possible. How about Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan? You betcha. But it will certainly affect the lives of Christians living in the Muslim world for years to come. This kind of needlessly public gesture makes them shudder.
By all means, let us propose the gospel to all and welcome all who desire to follow Christ. But lets also be wise and think of the price that they may have to pay that most of us will never face.
Historically, this sort of gesture has actually hamstrung the cause of the gospel in the Muslim world by exacerbating the enmity against those considering baptism, isolating converts from their natural social network, and making the price of conversion the loss of all family (including children) and friendship ties. The result: only the already marginalized became Christians and many didn't go the distance because the social isolation was too terrible to bear. The breakthrough happened when Christians stopped demanding individuals convert in a way that doomed them to isolation and started to work with whole families, tribes, and people groups.
Quietly. Without fanfare. And with great effectiveness.
Because the west is not the whole world. Indeed, we are now a clear minority within the global Christian community. And much that God is doing in our generation isn't about us: our debates, history, and sensitivities.
posted by Sherry W @ 8:38 AM
11 Comments
11 Comments:
PTL for this! I had advocated that a bishop (any bishop) should publicly baptize Muslim converts, and I get this!
(Here is the article for those interested)
May we see many more. And don't forget the heritage of saints who were converts from Islam like St Abu of Tblisi or Saint Akhmad of Turkey. Or the ones who devoted themselves to their evangelization, like Blessed Raymund Lully.
Sorry to post again. I wrote a response to your post which you might want to read.
HERE
"... isolating converts from their natural social network, and making the price of conversion the loss of all family (including children) and friendship ties."
What did Christ say?....oh yeah... "I came not to bring peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man 'against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's enemies will be those of his household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;"
Janice:
Abu Doud and I are having a conversation about something that has been seriously debated in missionary circles for the past 30 years. Since Abu Doud actually knows something about the issue and he is free to disagree with me - especially when he does so graciously. I am free to respond with discussion of developments in the area over the past 30 years that he may not be familiar with.
That's because I did graduate work in Islamics and Muslim missions, my honors BA is in Near Eastern history, I studied with the foremost experts on Islam in the west, spent time in the Muslim world, have had several Muslim friends and know a number of real -life long-term missionaries in the Muslim world. I don't know everything but I do actually know something in this area - and more than 99% of Catholics except for true scholars in the area.
And nothing you have written in all your loquaciousness indicates that you are a scholar of either missions or Islam. Much less that you have any practical experience in the area or are familiar with any of the major players or real discussions among the practitioners.
There's nothing like coming home to graceless ad hominems from someone who manifestly knows nothing about the subject in question to say "enough".
For which you get your comment deleted and you can consider yourself banned - for the fifth time.
I disagree Sherry. I have had considerable ongoing exposure to the situation in Indonesia over several decades, and Pope Benedict's recrafting of the entire Christian-Muslim discourse shows he is a man not only of God but also ideally suited to our difficult times. Thankfully, the Michel/Fitzgerald approach as I understand it is out.) Christians of my acquaintance - both here in Australia and in Indonesia - who are well-versed on Islam are welcoming his gentle yet firm symbolism.
Oh, and by the way, the AP article you cited was wrong in asserting that "Egypt's highest Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, wrote last year against the killing of apostates, saying there is no worldly retribution for Muslims who abandon their religion and that punishment would come in the afterlife."
see the response here:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/017513.php
and also the prominent Al-Qaradawi's view of apostasy that carries immense weight throughout the Muslim world:
http://www.islamonline.net/English/contemporary/2006/04/article01c.shtml
The end result: Pray for all who convert (publicly or privately) from Islam.
After all, we are sort of guaranteed to suffer persecution for His sake.
Sherry,
I'm a regular reader of this blog, but I'm certainly not an expert on missions or Islam (though I do have some knowledge of the subject). I have however studied Church history and theology.
The witness of converts to the early Church, who had to be willing to be martyrs, has always been held up as a model for all Catholics to emulate. It is true that fewer people converted in those dark days, and more when the Church was legalised.
But the traditional view has always been, to quote to Tertullian,'the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church'. Without them the Church does not grow. And without the fervour of such witnesses, the Church is the poorer.
The Pope was indeed, I think, sending a very direct and very deliberate message both to the Islamic world (perhaps as a counter to those who have interpreted the upcoming joint meeting of scholars as an openness on the part of the Church to discuss conversion to Islam) and to Catholics about the necessity of conversion, evangelization, and witness even though it costs us dear.
I agree that we should be praying hard for all those concerned. But we should also be praying hard in support of the courage being shown by all concerned.
All:
The issues that I was referring to in the last two paragraphs of my post have been seriously discussed among the foremost practioners in the field for nearly 40 years now. I was using short-hand since there didn’t seem to be a need to go into what is, for almost all readers, a really esoteric topic.
Clearly, some of my readers think that I am “buckling” under Muslim pressure. But that is reading our discussions and situation in the west into a very different situation which is every bit as relevant to this discussion as western fears of Eurabia. Charging into battle or silent, passive owardice are not the only two alternatives before us.
No one, least of me or the scholars and practitioners I am describing are denying that following Christ involves the risk of offending others. The risk involved for a Muslim to follow Christ is not going to go away, no matter what we do or don’t do. But what if there was real evidence that many more Muslims would hear, be open to, and believe the gospel if we didn’t insist upon converting them as isolated individuals?
In a profoundly family-based culture, if an individual is baptized and then your parents disown you, your spouse divorces you, your children are taken away, your friends abandon you, you lose your job and your legal rights, you had few alternatives. If you were lucky, you could go and live in the western compound with the missionaries who gave you work and a place to sleep. But that just reinforced the deeply embedded assumption that becoming a Christian was to become “western” and cease to be Pakistani or Saudi or whatever. Because the converts had, so often, lost their place in their own culture and were forced to identify heavily with the culture of the western missionaries.
Another factor was that the members of ancient near eastern Christian churches that had survived centuries of Islamic rule, usually regarded (understandably) converts from Islam with great distrust. They assumed that they were spies for the government – and sometimes they were! (I have friends in the near east who have been “befriended” by government agents – it still happens.) The result: there was little or no community support for genuine converts except for the western missionaries. Unless you could actually form a community of Muslim Background Christians.
What some missionaries to the Muslim world in the 60’s and 70’s started to ask was this critical question: “Is the extreme isolation of our few Muslim converts and their resulting near complete dependence upon western missionaries one reason that the mission to the Muslim world showed extraordinarily little fruit after centuries of effort?
(For instance the great Samuel Zwemer, the “Apostle to Islam” saw less than a dozen converts after 40 years of heroic and brilliant labor in the first half of the 20th century. And his experience was normative rather than exceptional. No one, not St. Francis or the early Franciscan missionaries or Raymond Lull or Samuel Zwemer saw a significant national Christian community emerge from within the Muslim community in 8 centuries of mission until the 1960’s. A handful of individuals here and there but almost nothing else.
And they also noticed that many Muslims-turned-Christian were only marginal members of their culture and society to begin with – people with fewer ties to break to begin with – and afterward they weren’t effective witnesses because they had little credibility and lost almost all their natural relationships.
So they began to ask: Was there a way to go about evangelization that did not result in the crippling of their humanity and the loss of most of their relational and cultural ties for the new Christian? Where they could live in the midst of their family and community as a living witness that “one of us” could really be a follower of Jesus Christ?
So they started experimenting with approaches that were not highly individualistic as was normative in the west but respected the communal nature of the culture. For instance, in Pakistan, missionaries stopped trying to win individuals and starting working with whole family units and honoring the role of the family head. They started to see something previously unheard of: whole families being baptized together. Like in the book of Acts and in the early church. And then, whole villages.
Today, there are genuine “people movements” in parts of the Muslim world where tens of thousands of Muslim are coming to faith in Christ as a community. This may not seem large but it is the first time in 14 centuries of Christian-Muslim relationships that conversion have not all been one way: from Christianity into Islam. Because missionaries honored the deeply communal nature of the culture of the people with whom they were sharing the Gospel.
And they have done it all quietly – no names, no specifics, allowing these Christians a chance to grow and be witnesses within their culture rather than become a global cause celebre and therefore, outcasts.
So there is real evidence that, in this case at least, the in-your-face-witness of individuals has not been one hundredth as fruitful. In the area of Muslim evangelization, the quiet conversion of families, rather than the heroic and public sufferings of isolated individuals, seems to be the seed of the church.
So back to Mallam’s baptism yesterday.
I support Mallam’s baptism. Obviously, he must follow his conscience in this matter. Since he is a public figure, his baptism would have public in any case. So there was no question of its being private as might happen in large parts of the near east.
A simple announcement that Mallam had become Catholic would have been sufficient and not generated many waves in the Muslim world because Mallam is not someone serious Muslims respect.
Mallam is not the sort of figure that is going to attract devout, reverent spiritually seeking Muslims of the best kind to Catholicism. He was a non-believing, non-practicing Muslim who has already outraged so many of the Muslim world’s norms that “apostasy” from Islam isn’t much of a surprise. It is the electronic image of the Pope being the instrument of that apostasy that was completely unnecessary.
There was no need to give his conversion undue global importance. Nor is it a good idea to make a man who has delighted in outraging the Islamic community an *international symbol of what it means for a Muslim to become a Christian* by making him one of only seven people that Pope Benedict baptized personally.
Sherry W.
Dear Sherry,
Thank you for the thoughtdul and well-reasoned response to my response to your notes on the Allam baptism.
Just a few comments:
1) I am quite aware of the early limitations of missions to Muslims and I agree that the "mission compound" mentality was in some ways not ideal. But honestly, there has never been an ideal missionary stance. They did the best they could with what they had and if they did their work out of genuine love then God blessed it, even with small fruit. I often think that today when we see the trickle turning into a small stream (in terms of MBB's) much of that was because they had to clear the rocks from the field before anyone could even break up the soil, which was before anyone could plant.
2) I agree that in MENA we should always prefer the conversion and baptism of an entire family or tribal unit. You are are right that this does happen in some places, but culture is becoming more individualistic in MENA, thanks largely to the West and globalization. So yes, family is very important, but not so much as it used to be. Much of this depends on the setting: urban or agrarian.
3) In the case of Allam, his family is already Catholic. So we can hardly say he is being individualistic. Are you saying he should have returned to Egypt to try to evangelize his family and hope that they could all be baptized together?
4) Sometimes there is a question of conscience: the MBB wants to return home to share the Gospel with his family, but he knows this places him in a dangerous situation, perhaps he will be killed. Should he not be baptized prior to his return?
I offer plenty of hypotheticals, mostly related to real cases that I and others whom I work with have encountered.
In the end Islam relies of coercion and fear to enforce its rules. Once enough Muslims leave Islam and say, we are leaving Islam, and once enough Christians stand up to say, hey we are supporting these people, then the coercion by fear will break down, and we will see, "the captives set free."
(Incidentally I am now working on a paper regarding baptism and mission to Muslims! Will let you know when that is published.)
Abu Daoud:
Thanks for your gracious response to my comments.
AD: But honestly, there has never been an ideal missionary stance.
SW: I don’t think anyone is talking about an ideal here. But there is such a thing as demonstrably *better*.
Of course, the great pioneers were doing the best they knew and God honored it and their efforts set the stage for what came later. But it wasn’t simply more effort that started to make the difference.
It was, I believe, Holy Spirit-inspired wisdom, as they prayed and wrestled with the realities in front of them and realized that the classic frontal assault (preaching in the marketplace like Raymond Lull or the early Franciscans) or working with a few individuals (like Samuel Zwemer) wasn’t particularly fruitful and in many ways, was actually hindering the development of a true Christian community.
AD: I often think that today when we see the trickle turning into a small stream (in terms of MBB's) much of that was because they had to clear the rocks from the field before anyone could even break up the soil, which was before anyone could plant.
SW: I would agree, if by clearing the rocks you include figuring out what doesn’t work and coming up with insights that effectively open the door to new possibilities. It wasn’t just doing more of the same thing with yet greater ardor. It was doing new, more productive things with great faith and ardor.
AD: I agree that in MENA we should always prefer the conversion and baptism of an entire family or tribal unit. You are right that this does happen in some places, but culture is becoming more individualistic in MENA, thanks largely to the West and globalization. So yes, family is very important, but not so much as it used to be. Much of this depends on the setting: urban or agrarian.
SW: Of course. Everything depends upon the context to which God has called or led you.
AD: In the case of Allam, his family is already Catholic. So we can hardly say he is being individualistic. Are you saying he should have returned to Egypt to try to evangelize his family and hope that they could all be baptized together?
SW: As I have said already several times: I welcome Allam’s baptism. Really. Truly. As an individual, he should absolutely be welcomed with open arms and he and his family supported generously.
But that could have been done lovingly and well a thousand different ways – none of which required that his face and story blanket the globe within hours of his reception. Being baptized did not require that he become the poster-boy for Muslims considering Christianity and there were a number of obvious reasons why he isn’t a great candidate for poster boydom and may actually be counter-productive.
Apart from the geo-religious-political implications, all this publicity could actually hamper his spiritual growth and that of his family. Being a trophy convert is often not a good thing for one’s actual process of conversion.
Here’s the deal. No one, obscure or famous, gets baptized by the Pope during the Easter Vigil accidentally. And I didn’t notice Vatican spokesman offering comments and clarifications about the other 6 adults baptized in the same liturgy. Someone (and I don’t know who it was) decided to use a globally streamed event watched by hundreds of millions to transform an *individual act of conscience* into a *global phenomena*. It is the wisdom of that decision alone that I question.
By now, we all know the power of the wall-to-wall 24/7 media for good and for bad. I was simply pointing out that there were all kinds of “unintended effects” when you do something like this. They were not intended but many were clearly foreseeable - like the fact that jihadists will use this image to spin their myth of the great “crusade” and that can cause a ton of additional grief for various Christian communities in the Muslim world.
AD: Sometimes there is a question of conscience: the MBB wants to return home to share the Gospel with his family, but he knows this places him in a dangerous situation, perhaps he will be killed. Should he not be baptized prior to his return?
SW: Of course, every situation has to be judged in its complexity. I would never argue against baptism if a person is ready – but I hardly think that part of the plan is to make sure that your MBB goes on CNN to alert the world to his decision to be baptized *before* he returns home.
AD: Once enough Muslims leave Islam and say, we are leaving Islam, and once enough Christians stand up to say, hey we are supporting these people, then the coercion by fear will break down, and we will see, "the captives set free."
SW: And as we have seen, the first real step toward that goal of true freedom of conscience, required working in obscurity within the norms of the local culture rather than a classic head-on challenge based upon western assumptions and values.
Blessings upon you, Abu Daoud!
For my latest comments and more links on this topic, go here:
http://blog.siena.org/2008/03/individual-act-of-conscience-or-global.html
Same here, my response to Sherry's latest is on her comments or it can be found HERE.
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