One of my favorite writers on religion and politics is Ismail Royer of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team at the Religious Freedom Institute, where I am also affiliated. He’s got an incredible story – an American convert to Islam who was indicted in 2003 for assisting the Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba and spent over 13 years in federal prison. Now, he advocates against Islamic extremism and for interreligious peace, reconciliation — and, yes, religious freedom. His story is here.
Exemplary of his writing is a piece he published in Public Discourse last week explaining why the Bladensurg Cross, which stands astride a Maryland highway and whose removal as a violation of the Establishment Clause is soon to be considered by the Supreme Court, ought in fact to be allowed to stand.
A devout Muslim, Royer is honest about the differences between Islam and Christianity. That’s good. Religious peacebuilders, as I know from having been involved in this work for many years, are often religious pluralists, hail from the liberal side of their traditions, and tend to elide the real differences between faiths, eroding their credibility among the people who most need to be convinced. Not Royer:
Islam differs from the Christianity of America’s founders in many ways. It firmly rejects the trinity and the Christian doctrine of salvation.
But he also finds much in common in the two traditions:
But as in the Christian faith, our spiritual and moral order derives from our relationship with our Creator. Muslims worship the God who revealed Himself to Abraham and the Children of Israel, and we understand ourselves to be participants in the history of this revelation and the continuing drama of its fulfillment.
Likewise, for Muslims, God’s revelation is the foundation of our rights and duties toward our fellow man. The Quran obliges upon Muslims the substance of the Ten Commandments. It states that God has “honored the Children of Adam,” conferring on them a status that compels each of us to treat others with the dignity they are due irrespective of their religion. The Prophet warned against striking another person in the face because God created Adam in His image, and he said, “He who wishes to avoid hellfire and enter heaven should die believing in God and the Last Day, and do unto others what he wishes to be done unto him.” Thus, notwithstanding historical and current rivalries, the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage of Christian and Islamic civilizations substantially overlap in their values, foundations of order, and Semitic and Greek roots.
Most of all, the two faiths have in common an interest in opposing a repressive sort of secularism:
For these reasons, Christianity and Islam share an inherent antipathy toward the ongoing ideological revolt against God that manifests itself in the militant secularism found in parts of continental Europe and Asia, and increasingly in the United States. The Quran says of such people, “They know only the outward appearance of the life of the world, and are heedless of the Hereafter.” This amounts to idolatry with the creation as the object of worship: and while Islamic theology deems Christians to be astray, it does not equate idolatry and Christianity.
He believes that Muslims have a strong interest in the religious character of the United States:
The civilizational substance preserved in the American order is common to Islam, even if few or no Christians realize it. It is thus appropriate, even urgent, that American Muslims seek to preserve this order against encroachments by totalitarian secularism because doing so means preserving what remains of a civilizational order that proceeds from belief in God. For these secularists do not want simply to live peaceably within this order, which the constitutional settlement entitles them to do; rather, they want to scrap this settlement and replace it with their own totalizing vision of society in which good lies not in “regressive” religious traditions, but in the whim of the autonomous self.
He then takes to task both Christian and Muslims who acquiesce in various ways to this secularism. Read the rest of this incisive and compelling piece.