Martyrs, Muslims, and Moral Superiority

Pope Francis’s beatification of 124 18th and 19th century Korean martyrs during his visit to South Korea triggered an unusual complaint from a Buddhist abbot, which John Allen, Jr. briefly noted in his piece summarizing the Pope’s visit. Allen recounts the Buddhist’s complaint thus:

‘Many Buddhists risked their lives to save Christians in that time, but now the Church wants to forget this part of the story,’ he groused. He charged the celebration amounted to an unwarranted claim of moral superiority.

This comment—especially the accusation of a claim of moral superiority—is perplexing and seems to have little to do with beatification; the process of beatifying or canonizing martyrs has less to do with condemning their murders and more to do with recognizing the martyrs’ faith and courage. There is no “unwarranted claim of moral superiority” unless the commemoration of the martyrs included the argument that the martyrdoms occurred because of some flaw in Buddhism’s moral teachings or in the moral fiber of Korean Buddhists. In such a case, mention of those Buddhists who put themselves at risk to protect their Christian neighbors would provide helpful, even necessary, nuance to a critique that would otherwise make the speaker look either ignorant or ungrateful. It is one thing to recognize the courage of martyrs or simply mourn their deaths, but it is quite another to place the blame squarely and unfairly at the feet of an entire people or religious tradition.

This accusation of unwarranted claims of moral superiority may not apply to the beatification of the Korean martyrs, but it may well apply to some Western discussions of ISIS (or whatever we wish to call it: I sympathize with those who suggest “Daesh” or “Caliphake”). Bill Maher-style blanket denunciations of Islam as if militancy were its only result are perhaps the most obvious examples of this tendency (given the way in which unwarranted claims of moral superiority are the hallmark of New Atheism, this should be unsurprising), but they are not the only examples.

Calls by Western media personalities for moderate Muslims to denounce militant violence might also be criticized on these grounds. They call for these denunciations as if prominent Western Muslims haven’t been obligated to defend their presence in our society more or less constantly since 9/11. If we were actually interested in discussions among Muslims about the use of violence or the proper relationship between religious and civil law, we wouldn’t be asking the same basic questions every time the topic comes up or wondering what religious authorities within any given Islamic sect (how many of us could readily identify ISIS as Sunni?) we might consult to find an answer.

Artur Rosman’s approach to this topic is no more productive than these other two. Unlike Maher and his ilk, Rosman doesn’t assume or argue that the authority of the Islamic tradition is behind militancy, and unlike the media personalities, he doesn’t solicit responses from moderate Muslim authorities despite not having the patience to listen or understand. Rosman warns us against projecting our religious expectations onto other faith traditions, calling the tendency to look for central authority figures capable of denouncing militancy and terrorism the “papist temptation.” He’s quite right that there is no Muslim Pope, but entirely wrong in his assertion that there are no authority structures in Islam beyond the local mosque. No sooner does he warn us against the Papist temptation than he falls into its opposite, the Protestant temptation.

Rosman’s argument about the absence of authority in Islam is easily refuted. Anyone familiar with a legal ruling or “fatwa” is probably aware that not just any Muslim can issue one: only a trained and recognized scholar can legitimately and authoritatively interpret Islamic scripture and law, and such scholars are even then held accountable to the established schools of jurisprudence.

If that knowledge weren’t enough, there is also the fact that a group of these legitimately trained scholars has recently issued an open letter denouncing the self-proclaimed caliph and his followers. The letter not only attacks ISIS’s actions, but its intellectual and religious foundations. All of this is done by appealing to the well-established set of norms for Islamic jurisprudence.

As the letter points out, ISIS eschews the rigorous scholarly training and precise formulas that have long been the prerequisites for authoritative interpretation of Islamic scriptures: from an orthodox Sunni standpoint, ISIS’s interpretations hold no more authority than those of any Muslim layman. Rosman’s suggestion that this self-proclaimed caliph signals a centralization of Islamic religious authority, then, is also exactly wrong: this self-proclaimed caliph and his band of thugs represent not the centralization of authority, but its decentralization. We are witnessing not the rise of a would-be Muslim Pope, but a would-be Muslim Martin Luther.

But enough about Rosman’s error—back to the mainstream (but no more learned) discussions of ISIS, which either condemn Islam outright or petulantly demand that moderate Muslims speak out against ISIS, completely oblivious to the fact that they already have. The scholars in the letter discussed above are far from the only ones to object to ISIS’s interpretation of Islam. Muslims have demonstrated a level of solidarity that is far more risky and far more controversial than anything we’ve accomplished through social media campaigns, and their reactions are far more authentic than the sorts of Pavlovian responses to the word “genocide” that advocates of Iraqi religious minorities have been trying to elicit from Western leaders.

Even these appeals on humanitarian grounds were quickly cast aside by cable news shows in favor of arguments that the Caliphake presents an immediate threat to American security. These arguments, in turn, fell by the wayside once Ebola became the most pressing threat to the homeland. The West is no more eager to intervene in this genocide than it was to intervene in Rwanda in 1994.

When the history of this conflict is written, the heroes won’t be the American leaders who argued over whether or not the President had the authority to order military action without Congressional approval, but the people of the Middle East who stood up to the terroristic thugs by whatever means were available to them—not least those who recognized that they had not only the religious authority, but the moral responsibility to utterly dismantle a media-savvy thug’s claim to religious and political authority.

Perhaps someday we will be able to see in the deaths of these Middle Eastern Christians what Tertullian saw in the Roman persecutions. Perhaps the witness of these martyrs might help inspire us in our efforts to evangelize our own cultures. Perhaps the persecution will not even be the last word on these ancient Christian communities. Until it becomes clear what good things God plans to bring out of the evil that parades itself around in front of the entire world, though, we should recognize that those through whom God has most directly answered our prayers regarding ISIS are not our own indifferent leaders, but Muslims.