This is part two of a three-part series about a network of interfaith centers in the Muslim world. Click here to read part one.
When Wageeh Mikhail was a boy, a Muslim mob attacked his Presbyterian church and killed his Sunday school teacher in the Upper Egyptian city of Minya. Though he remembers little about the event itself, he recalls praying for the assailants. And he still feels emotional remembering how he honored the childhood lessons that told him to love his enemies.
It was not the last time he had to.
Three decades later, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Islamist supporters of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi alleged that Christians had collaborated against him and used that pretext to set dozens of churches on fire. In some locations, Muslims defended the local houses of worship.
Among these was Mikhail’s childhood church. The subsequent Sunday, grieving members worshiped in the burned-out pews—this was the extent of their protest. And across the country, Christians refused to escalate the conflict.
Though Mikhail was living in Cairo at the time, he mourned from afar and again remembered his Sunday school lessons. Today, Mikhail is the director of the Network of Centers for Christian-Muslim Relations (NCCMR) and has a clear message: Muslims are not the enemies of Christians.
“Islam has been a practical and theological challenge to the Christian faith,” he said. “But we must work together.”
CT previously introduced Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Franciscan hermit from the re-Christianized island of Majorca in modern-day Spain, who advocated winsome relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. During the Crusades, he penned a novel in which a representative sage from each religion argued persuasively about his faith, without rancor, and the three remained friends.
NCCMR is similarly countercultural today but in a different direction. In a world in which interfaith dialogue can seek a relativistic commonality among the monotheistic religions, NCCMR’s partners, representing 18 centers in 13 countries with five additional applicants, recognize the call to conversion as an essential part of each religion. At formal events, the members agree to forgo Christian evangelism and comparable Muslim da’wa. Yet as individuals they are free to witness. Mikhail emphasized that all participants believe in freedom of religion—and its propagation.
“Christians have to evangelize,” he said. “The one who said ‘Do not kill’ also said ‘Go and make disciples.’”
NCCMR has faced sensitive issues beyond evangelism. During last year’s inaugural meeting, several attendees voiced concerns over rumors of an international conspiracy to merge Islam and Christianity into one religion. Mikhail assured them the network’s mutual commitment was to honor each faith as an exclusive religion with claims to divine truth.
Keeping in spirit with Llull’s characters, members agreed to avoid arguments and direct challenges over their respective religion’s superiority. Yet the network also made clear that NCCMR is not for religious leaders who assert that all paths will lead to God.
Mikhail appreciates Llull. But his vision for dialogue comes from his ancestors. In the early 1990s, he studied at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo (ETSC). Though many of his professors were Egyptian, they used textbooks largely imported from the US. From this he assumed that all good theology came from the West.
An American reoriented his theological geography. In Mikhail’s third year at ETSC, Mark Swanson, now professor of Christian-Muslim studies and interfaith relations at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, offered a course on Arab Christian heritage. Mikhail’s perspective radically changed.
In time, he discovered the “beautiful” 9th-century conversation between an Abbasid caliph and a Melkite bishop. He admired the “deep and difficult” defense of the Trinity by a 10th-century Jacobite theologian from modern-day Iraq. And he noted the apologetic works of a 13th-century Coptic bishop in Egypt, which contributed to the local revival of the Orthodox church.
Arab Christians have lived under Muslim rule for the last 1,400 years, but the realities of their situation have varied widely. Periods of harsh persecution bracket periods of cooperation, beginning with the Islamic conquests and the imposition of second-class dhimmi status on those named “People of the Book” by the Quran, namely Christians and Jews.
Mikhail, however, highlights how Muslims and Christians built the Abbasid civilization together. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Christian from the Church of the East in modern-day Iraq, was the chief translator associated with Beit al-Hikmah (the House of Wisdom), rendering Greek philosophy into Arabic. For 300 years, Mikhail points out, the Assyrian Christian Bukhtishu family served as the doctors of the caliphs and founded the leading medical school in Persia.
Unfortunately, Muslim treatment of Christians often depended on the whim of the leader, Mikhail said. Within a generation, the Abbasid-era golden age gave way to the destruction of churches and imposition of a special dress code for Christians and Jews.
Historian Philip Jenkins has highlighted how times of Christian persecution often correlated with outside pressure on the Islamic empires. Yet these were not always characterized by a sectarian lens, Mikhail noted. Arabic literature at the time of the European Crusades labeled them as the “Wars of the Franks,” emphasizing the political dimension over the religious.
On the shelf in Mikhail’s office sit 36 well-worn, pastel-colored volumes from a 40-plus series of early Arabic manuscripts of Christian-Muslim encounter. As opposed to the Latin dialogue of 12th-century Peter Abelard’s Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian, or even Llull’s winsome yet foreign-crafted debates, this Lebanon-published collection chronicles how local Arab believers dealt with the ascendant Islamic faith.
These manuscripts include the ancient treatises Mikhail celebrated above, but most are not available in English. He hopes the NCCMR can secure funding to translate them one day. The respectful approach of historic Arab Christianity can serve not only as a retort to polemic tendencies in the West, he said, but also as a reminder to global Muslims that the church of Jesus was first—and remains—an Eastern faith.
The network has launched a one-year diploma program in Muslim-Christian relations, which it aims to build into a master’s program. Other projects in development include a dictionary of Muslim-Christian relations and a yearly rotating symposium. NCCMR’s recent webinar featured an Islamic defense of religious liberty, which CT will report on in the next piece in this series. Christians need to learn Islam from Muslims, Mikhail said, as Muslims need to learn Christianity from Christians. This can happen only in dialogue.
“Bitterness must not shape our future,” Mikhail said, “only hope and love.”
