SENTINEL WATCH August 7, 2006 Issue

RADICAL THOUGHT VERSUS THOUGHTFUL RADICALS

WALTER RODGERS

AFTER HANDLING several reporting assignments in Iraq in recent years, I am convinced that the "new religious radicalism" that is gripping parts of the Middle East is a bit misleading. It is neither new nor radical. Besides, against the backdrop of the past thousand years, current terms such as "radical Islam" and "Islamist radicals" are less than helpful, and sometimes inaccurate.

The violence that we moderns associate with Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and militant Islam has been the standard fare in that region for a thousand years. And the violence has not by any means been the exclusive province of Islam then or now. In 1098 ad, during the First Crusade, Christian knights from France razed the Syrian city of Ma'arra and wiped out Muslim men, women, and children. Later, when these same Christian knights went on to conquer Jerusalem, they boasted that they rode into the city through Muslim blood. Many in the region today, fairly or unfairly, see the current violence as being imposed by foreign military occupation.

And what is perhaps mose undervalued in the Middle East today is a genuinely radical theology practiced by thoughtful radicals willing to challenge the cycle of violence with confident prayer that refuses to accept killing as indigenous, inevitable, or natural.