Paul KeenanThe Church is on one frontline against militant ideology, writes Paul Keenan
The reports did not indicate any tone of frustration in Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s voice as he addressed his assembled guests. But it must surely have been there.
Rising to speak before a gathering of the National Press Club in Washington DC on May 10, the retired (though far from inactive) prelate did so fully three months after his return from the city of Marrakesh in Morocco where he had witnessed an extraordinary confluence of thought on the part of 300 moderate Muslim representatives from 120 countries.
The result of this meeting of minds was the Marrakesh Declaration, a determined statement on the rights of minorities in Muslim lands and simultaneously a repudiation of the ideology of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
Readers of The Irish Catholic newspaper will be aware of the declaration as it was afforded full-page coverage here immediately after the late January gathering; so too followers of veteran religious affairs correspondent John Allen, who flagged the Marrakesh event, and wrote of the intended declaration that it “deserves to be both known and encouraged”.
Heartfelt plea
Sadly, all too few media outlets saw fit to acknowledge the Marrakesh Declaration in a similar fashion. For this reason, Cardinal McCarrick used his Press Club address to issue a heartfelt plea to the US media to shine a light on the document for the benefit of Muslim clerics seeking to rein in wayward youth at the local level, and to demonstrate that among those Muslims to be banned from the US by a populist presidential candidate are those who stand publicly and vocally against the excesses carried out in the name of Islam.
Since the rise of ISIS in mid-2014 it has been the call in the West, frustrated at the seeming inaction of Muslim nations to tackle their home-grown terrorists, for them to do more in tackling the group. And slow as the media have been in recognising the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, they have been even slower in highlighting such initiatives as the Marrakesh Declaration. In this regard, Cardinal McCarrick posited the notion of “a conspiracy of silence” in questioning media motives.
And yet, in a conflict that has twisted religious dimensions and targets religious communities based on that very criterion, how obvious is it that religion must be the key factor in sucking the oxygen from ISIS? And what better way than to use the path of their own religion in both calming radical feelings and demonstrating just how ISIS has twisted the original meaning of many Koranic passages to suit its murderous agenda.
This is precisely what Marrakesh was about and the drive that the Catholic Church has been fully engaged with alongside Muslim leaders since.
By way of example, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cardinal McCarrick in Washington DC was Azizah al-Hibri, America’s first female Muslim law professor, and a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom who pointed out for guests that the Marrakesh Declaration insists that “it is unconscionable to employ religion for the purpose of aggressing upon the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries”.
Another example: on May 3 and 4, members of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies of Jordan gathered in Rome for a colloquium on the “shared values” of Muslims and Christians, jointly declaring that “our commonalities are much more than our particularities, and they constitute a solid basis peacefully and fruitfully living together”.
For those who think that mere words are insufficient, take a further (and again, little covered) example.
Faced with a Sunni Muslim community far from united in condemning ISIS, the renowned Islamic centre of teaching at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt is playing its part in tackling ambivalence and propaganda. Via a dedicated team, and since very shortly after ISIS took to cyberspace to disseminate its poison to minds worldwide, Al Azhar employs instant online responses in challenging the Koran as propaganda with the Koran as textual truth for the Muslim community.
Enterprise
The enterprise is fully supported by the university’s key grouping of clerics, the Dar al Ifta, who issue fatwas to the Sunni Muslim world. It is the Dar al Ifta which leads the charge in challenging the so-called religious pronouncement of ISIS leader al Baghdadi and his followers.
But again, even with such examples to hand, the average reader/news watcher in the West is more likely to be treated to commentators despairing at ‘what’s to be done’ about ISIS and debating among themselves the best method of de-radicalising angry young men in Brussels and Birmingham.
Isolation
This is not to suggest that the Marrakesh Declaration is the pinnacle in Muslim actions against the lure of ISIS to be seized on in isolation. A youngster already ripe for radicalisation in, say, France or Britain, is less likely to turn to the call from moderate clerics in the search for a voice which plays to their disaffection and offers immediate and action-filled answers to his alienation from society.
Similarly, though representatives from Pakistan added their names to the document, the inability/unwillingness of authorities there to tackle the regular attacks on non-Muslim communities is a stain on that nation.
But, for all of that, there are those at work in the Muslim world to counter intolerance and persecution, and it is through the efforts of the Church and its supporters that they are being heard in the West.
In the end, the signatories of the Marrakesh Declaration fully recognise that the intolerance shown by ISIS and other groupings is not merely bad for Christians and Yazidis among others, but is seriously damaging to the wider Arab world itself in continuing to deal with a globalised world.
For these reasons and more, Cardinal McCarrick urged western journalists to ensure that the Marrakesh Declaration “gets to the people it has to get to… to the teachers of young people, the professors in universities…to the preachers at the Friday prayers, that they can understand that this is not just a document that has beautiful words but it’s a document that can [bring] Islam back to where it was, what the Prophet himself began to see.
“Our challenge to all of you is: please don’t let this document die.”