And once the west had succeeded in destroying the Ottoman Empire – which was partly what the First
World War was about – “they [the Europeans] never were happy to see any possibility of the re-emergence
of a really orderly and progressive state on an appreciable scale in the area.” But in more modern times,
Islamic scholars would renew an interest in Christian thought and teachings.
This did not involve any intention of “converting” – in itself a word which has become a cliché and thus
obsolescent – but out of what humanist scholar Tarif Khalidi would refer to as “a particular Muslim
fascination with Jesus...” Khalidi – still gloriously alive – once spoke to me “of another age and another
narrative when Christianity and Islam were more open to each other”, a period when the traditional images
of Jesus in Islamic art were like “a love affair between Islam and Jesus”.
Once described as “the foremost Islamic scholar of our time” by Edward Said, Khalidi – a Palestinian
Muslim whose mother was a prominent Lebanese feminist – is the latest translator (into English) of the
Quran. But he is also the author of a wonderful book of Muslim stories about Jesus, a body of literature
which he calls the “Muslim gospel”. In Islam, of course, Jesus is greatly revered as a prophet, although his
divinity is rejected.
Khalidi perhaps naturally enjoyed the company of the Imam Mousa Sadr, the Iranian-Lebanese philosopher
and Shia leader in southern Lebanon who did more to lift his people from squalor than any contemporary –
until Colonel Moammar Ghaddafi had him murdered in Libya in 1978. “He [Sadr] took on the Christians of
Lebanon in an extraordinary manner,” Khalidi says. “He revived Islamic interest in Jesus and Mary. He was
an extraordinary performer. He almost embraced Christian theology. He would lecture in churches with the
cross right behind him!”
The battle for the soul of Islam between Sunnis and Shias – today, between the Sunni autocrats of the Gulf
and the four-decade old Shia Islamic Republic of Iran and its unfortunate allies – has been a sad and
wearying feature of this great, wondrous, often misunderstood, misinterpreted and sometimes, for a
Christian, deeply confusing faith. If the seventh century martyrdom of Hussein and Ali are a passion play of
betrayal and blood whose pain may be framed at Kerbala and Kufa as well as the betrayed and bloodied man
on the hill at Golgotha, then perhaps this calvary unites Christians and Shia rather than Christians and
Sunnis. Our attempt to understand the divisions within Islam fascinated our Christian ancestors. The 17th
century cleric George Abbot, later Archbishop of Canterbury, compared the differences between Sunni and
Shia to those between “Papistes and Protestant”.
Western ignorance was heightened by just the kind of Catholic-Protestant parallel which Archbishop Abbot
drew. For the difference between the two sects is theological, not doctrinal. Sunnis stress the unity of the
community, Shiia the integrity of government. This is echoed in the Iranian-Saudi polemic today: “you are
splitting the community’’ versus “you are an unjust government’’. Thus when Churchill created the Iraqi
state with a Sunni king from Arabia but with a largely Shia population, a real ‘line in the sand’ had been
drawn long before George Bush senior used that phrase as he sent American troops into Iraq for the first
time in 1990.