The post-911 world through interreligious eyes

Trialogue and Terror: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam after 9/11 by Alan L. Berger, ed., Cascade Books, Eugene, OR;  ISBN 978-1-60899-546-2 ©2012, $30.00, p. 255, plus index

By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.

WINCHESTER, California — Domestic stories primarily covered the front page of the New York Times on September 10, 2001. Succeeding days and months would be different. The 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists led by Osama bin Laden who declared a holy war against the United States in 1998.

Bin Laden announced in the immediate aftermath that the attacks were motivated by the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, sustained sanctions against Iraq, and America’s support for Israel. We now know that the political fallout from the destruction of the twin towers, damage to the Pentagon, and the thwarted attempt to crash into the White House resulted in such things as the consolidation of numerous intelligence agencies into the Department of Homeland Security, the establishment of the Transportation Security Agency, passage of the Patriot Act, and involvement in a protracted war in Afghanistan.

The religious backlash has been a sustained rise in Islamophobia caused by an “alarmist and pejorative press,” which links Muslims-in-general with terrorism, thereby creating a false belief in the inherent militancy of Islam.

Alan L. Berger, chair of the Holocaust Studies Program at Florida Atlantic University and director of the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz, has chosen wisely in his eclectic selection of fifteen articles from respected Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars, theologians, and activists in his newest book Trialogue and Terror: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam after 9/11.

Each of the writers has a personal story to tell about his or her journey toward interfaith cooperation and understanding. None are Pollyannas, who sweep away the interreligious animosity built up over centuries of conflict, which hangs silently over the participants whenever they meet.

For the Jews these include: degrading public disputations, charges of ritual murders, ghettoizations, forced conversions, Inquisitions, second-class citizenships, pogroms, and death. The Christians and Muslims share the atrocities created by the Crusades and the Islamic conquest of Europe; even today, clashes occur between Christians and Muslims in Islamic countries, and let us not forget that Israel and Zionism seem to be inexorably linked with Judaism in the Muslim mindset.

Perhaps most interesting of all are the essays of the five Muslim authors because the average reader in the western world does not often have a chance to gain some understanding of the Islamic perspective of world events through the eyes of moderate, thoughtful Muslims. Khaleel Mohammed reminds us in “Dialogical Interaction or Post-Honor Confrontation?” that just as Christianity and Judaism have sects and movements, so too does Islam. There are very religious Muslims and Muslims who do not pray in a mosque, and the moderate ones are doing a poor job of communicating the true essence of Mohammad’s word, leaving a vacuum to be filled by images of violence crafted by the fundamentalist extreme.

Anouar Majid in his essay “The Semitic Solution” argues that because of a common Semitic culture and language, particularly for the Sephardic Jews, Islam and Judaism are closer to each other than Christianity and Judaism or Christianity and Islam. According to Muhammad Shafiq, author of “Transformation through Dialogue,” says that the events of 9/11 forced many American Muslims to decide where their loyalties lie, just as in World War II immigrant European Americans had to determine if their loyalties lay with the European country of their birth, or America, and Japanese Americans had to determine whether or not their loyalties lay with the Japan. Most, he argues, have concluded that they are American.

A. Rashied Omar, author of ”Islam and Peacebuilding” presents a four-point plan for Muslim peacekeeping, informing us that “in Islamic ethics, the end does not justify the means.” He goes on to say that more academic research is required in the area of Islamic nonviolence, as well as the need for training a new “critically minded” class of Muslim religious leaders, and peace scholars must constantly emphasize the fact that current foreign policy issues are incubators for the creation of new extremist movements.

Yet, even with the rise of American xenophobia, the spread of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, along with the decline of organized religions, these authors have a robust belief that concordance between the Abrahamic faiths can and will be achieved. Trialogue and Terror is an inspiring collection of essays that provides hope for a peaceful future in a world, which according to Jonathan Swift, has just enough religion to hate, but not enough to love.
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Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and Reclaiming the Messiah. He may be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.