International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Issue 28:3, July 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (48 pp., 1.6 MB PDF)

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Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Christian Mission

Christianity and Islam share much in common. Each is monotheistic, and each claims universality. Each fosters strong traditions of piety, social action, and justice. Each claims—with impressive, albeit selective, proofs—to be the religion of peace par excellence; yet the history of each attests to the sorry ease with which their holy books are invoked to legitimize or demand violent means to achieve divinely decreed ends. Each has recourse to a rich repository of self-flattering memories, providing followers with the means to excuse, reinterpret, or overlook evil perpetrated in the name of its deity.

It is not their similarities, however, but their apparent dissimilarities that concern most observers. Are Christian and Islamic differences merely cosmetic, or are they foundational, the manifestation of intrinsically antithetical cosmologies? Can we realistically look forward to anything more than the bloody specter of escalating, religiously inspired violence?

In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Penguin Press, 2004), Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit show that Western Orientalism—the focus of Herb Swanson’s article—is mirrored in Eastern Occidentalism. Its more extreme manifestation sees the West as utterly diseased and irredeemably corrupt, a deadly global pestilence. With greed, sensuality, and self-interest as its primary vices, the thinking goes, the West should not—indeed cannot—be saved, any more than can cancer or smallpox. If the patient is to be spared, the disease must be eradicated.

In her lead article, Heather Sharkey shows how Christian missionary activity has been portrayed in Arabic literature as a part of this deadly epidemic. Having for centuries benefited directly from Western intervention in the affairs of Muslim states, missionary benevolence is viewed as a kind of religious wedge, a tool to crack the cultural integrity of Muslim societies, making them fatally vulnerable to the Western blight.

In light of all this, is it time to give up the idea of Christian mission to Muslims? Not according to Colin Chapman, whose careful response is by no means a carte blanche approval of either past or current missionary practices.

While there can be no escaping the cultural and national identities intermingled in the “jar of clay” in which missionaries carry the treasure of the Gospel, they can work hard at practicing the skills that distinguish a human being from a corporation: genuine listening, empathetic accompanying, and patient suffering. Only by insistent attention to the primacy of personal relationships can we and they transcend the siren allure of Orientalism and Occidentalism, allowing the Gospel to be seen, then heard.

 

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Issue 28:3, July 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (48 pp., 1.6 MB PDF)