5/5/03

AU PROFESSOR: CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS DIFFERENCES IN COMMON

AUBURN -- Like many other Americans, Richard Penaskovic sees a culture clash as Muslim, Jewish and Christian religions converge in the Middle East. But the greater conflict is within, not between, religions, says Penaskovic, director of the religious studies program in Auburn University's College of Liberal Arts.

"Christianity and Islam are both historically intolerant of each other and of other religions," said Penaskovic, adding that both religions have tilted back and forth many times between tolerance and intolerance through the centuries.

Despite such historical conflicts as the Christian Crusades in the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire's European conquests, most modern adherents of Christianity and Islam accept believers of the other faith on human, if not religious, terms, he says.

Devout Muslims may want Christians to convert to Islam, and devout Christians may try to convert Muslims to Christianity, but they do so peacefully, said Penaskovic, religious studies professor in the Department of Philosophy.

While other religions, including Judaism, have their own examples of intolerance, they lack the numbers and territorial reach of Christianity and Islam, he said. Even in the United States, Muslims greatly outnumber Jews.

Both Christianity and Islam face renewed internal struggles between fundamentalists and moderates or liberals for the minds and hearts of believers, he said, noting that Jews went through a similar struggle in the 19th century.

The irony, he said, is that many fundamentalist Christians and many fundamentalist Muslims often have more in common with each other than they do with more moderate and liberal members of their own faith.

Fundamentalism, he said, has special appeal to people who view themselves as oppressed and to those who feel left behind or bewildered by the modern world. Christians who are joining the more fundamentalist congregations are looking for stability in a fast-changing world and are not finding it in the older, more mainstream churches, he said.

Penaskovic said radical strains of Islam provide a similar refuge for vast numbers of Muslims in countries that have been left behind by the industrialized world.

"It is hard to live in a world of gray. In a time of rapid social change, people are comforted by absolutes," he said. Those who accept and even thrive in such times do not necessarily abandon their beliefs, as some fundamentalists claim, but are much more likely to adhere to mainstream religious denominations, he added.

Penaskovic noted that fundamentalist religious leaders of both Christianity and Islam portray members of the older, more mainstream movements within their own religion as spiritually lost and their leaders as corrupt.

"There is a long history of intolerance in which people reject the sincere beliefs of others, even in their own denominations," he said.

Penaskovic cited the tug-of-war within the Southern Baptist Church over the inerrancy of scripture, with many Baptists seeing the Bible as the literal word of God and others seeing it as subject to interpretation. He also noted that the Catholic Church is in conflict over homosexuality, with some Catholics viewing it as a sin condemned by God and others seeing it as a condition given by God to be judged in the broader context of a person's life.

Although Christianity lacks the Islamic concept of jihad, many people have used Christianity as a cover for violent behavior, he said. The difference, he says, is that Western society treats such individuals as insane or monsters, or both, while some Islamic societies are under the sway of radical religious leaders who identify terrorists as martyrs.

Terrorists, both Islamic and Christian, are subsets of the most fundamentalist strain of their religions, Penaskovic said.

"Those who practice terrorism in the name of religion, any religion, are drawn to spiritual leaders who speak in absolutes and are essentially at war with the world," he added.

However, most fundamentalists, whether they are Christian or Muslim, are sincere in their beliefs and do not wish to harm anyone, he said.

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may03:AU-religion

CONTACT: Penaskovic, 334/844-4616.