Dialogue of the deaf and blind

Inquirer: The Christians say that we must love our enemies. What do The Enlightened say?
Enlightened One: Enemies? What enemies?

One of the fascinating qualities of the Left is that they are unable to recognize an enemy who is staring them in the face. Unless he's a white Christian Republican. Enemies are just friends you haven't understood yet, stereotyped, exoticized and "othered" by racist or ideological paranoia.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejead's appearance at Columbia reminded me of an incident I was present at while finishing up my PhD at the University of Toronto in the mid-80's.

Hans Kung, the uberliberal SwissGerman former Catholic theologian, was part of some interfaith conference on Scripture and something-or-other. It included various Christian churches, Jews and, rarely for that time, Muslims. At the closing meeting, the theme was "What Can We Learn From Each Other", a touching passtime beloved of the highminded.

Hans made some appreciative comments about this and that and then when he came to Islam, he suggested that Islam could benefit from using the critical methods that Western scholars had applied to the Bible for the last hundred years: form criticism, text criticism, etc.

For the benefit of those of you who are UnEnlightened, these undertakings treat the Scriptures as ordinary historical texts and use all kinds of approaches to date them, find their real (as opposed to named) authors, dissect the various editions they went through prior to their current form, speculate on the oral traditions behind them, etc. It disabuses people of the notion that the Bible was written by prophets or apostles and lets them know that it is a vast company of tendentious editors who comprise the Sacred Writers. (Could this be academic projection? never mind). This study is the staple of all seminary education.

One of the participants in this interfaith love feast was a blind imam or mullah (I don't know which), an Islamic scholar. When it came his turn to reply, he was escorted to the stage by his reverent acolytes and then he thanked Hans for his suggestion but made it very clear that such an activity was wholly inappropriate. His remarks went something like this: "It is acknowledged by Christians and Jews themselves that the Old and New Testaments are documents written over many centuries, perhaps a millennium, by many different people, with different versions and corrections, and as such your methods fit your holy books. However, the Holy Quran was dictated by the Archangel Gabriel directly into the ear of the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) as the pure and unadulterated message of Allah. Consequently, such techniques would not only be useless but impious."

I could hardly contain myself. Here were all these scholars, utterly encased in Western liberal worldviews, for whom the notion of a dictating archangel was as silly as the flatness of the earth. But here was their Third World guest (blind, no less!) , unashamedly and with complete conviction, telling them that while their shabby and corrupt pseudo-scriptures could be criticized till the camels came home, the accurate Arabic Divine Text of Islam had nothing to do with such carryings-on. They were all silent, trapped by their own political correctness, unable to contest the man's assertion. He smiled.

How often has this scenario been played out since then!

It is funny, too, how Western liberals have no trouble believing that Right Wing Christians truly intend to take over the country and create the Republic of Gilead, but refuse to take at face value the proclamation of a man like Mahmoud --president of a country that is eerily like that very fictional Atwoodian place-- that their future is either conversion to Islam or submission to its power.

Enemies? What enemies?