The contradiction at the heart of Christian Zionism

A Christian Zionist organisation is planning an interfaith Feast of Tabernacles conference which has drawn the wrath of Israel's Chief Rabbinate.

A statement signed by Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau and Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef reads: "We have learned that missionary elements [working on behalf] of the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem are organizing a large conference during the Sukkot holiday. Some of this organization's goals are to convert Jews [to Christianity]."

The statement continues: "Even though it may be that the conference organizers are friends to the State of Israel, in practice the event constitutes a spiritual danger and undermines [the state's] Jewish character."

Here's the contradiction at the heart of Christian Zionism, or much of it, at least.

Christian Zionists have a genuine theological commitment to the State of Israel, whose existence is regarded as a fulfilment of prophecy, and a desire to see the safety and prosperity of Jewish people. There's often a sharp awareness of how Christians have treated Jews in the past and a desire to make up for it, as far as possible.

But most of them believe that God's desire for Jews is that they become Christians, and that – not surprisingly – is a problem for Jews.

It has to be said that most Christian Zionists are more nuanced in how they approach proselytism. Not all of them talk about Jews becoming Christians; they are to become Messianic believers, or accept that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. Furthermore, they are publicly wary about targeting Jews for conversion. One of the most influential Christian Zionist organisations in the US is John Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI). In a 2010 article for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Hagee wrote: "Like all people of faith, we Christians firmly believe that our religion is true. But we also believe in religious freedom and have enormous respect for the Jewish faith. The first rule adopted by Christians United for Israel was that there would be no proselytizing at our events. CUFI exists only to honor and support the Jewish people, never to convert them."

However, whether Hagee thinks that Jews need to repent and turn to Christ is not quite as clear-cut as the quote suggests. He's also said that he rejects the so-called 'Dual Covenant' theology, which teaches that Gentiles are saved by faith in Christ and Jews by keeping the Torah. It seems more likely that he has simply detached proselytism from CUFI's agenda.

What about the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, whose plans for an interfaith gathering have – not for the first time – touched a raw nerve in Israel's religious establishment? A position statement by its Executive Director Emeritus, Malcolm Hedding, says that the fact that Israel does not comprise all its historic territory is because of its "spiritual condition". He writes: "As a nation, Israel remains in rebellion against Jesus of Nazareth and this factor has more to do with her present struggle than we are prepared to admit!...Jesus is a Jewish Messiah and the only way of salvation."

It is undoubtedly true that ICEJ doesn't see its prayer gatherings as proselytism. But it's also true that it shares the normal evangelical belief that salvation is through Christ alone. Conversion might not be part of the strategy of Christian Zionist organisations – they would lose far too much credibility when it came to relating to Jewish partners if it were – but it's still an integral part of their theology.

So for evangelical Christian Zionists – which is most of them – there are fundamental questions about their relationship to Jews which are not really resolvable to the satisfaction of both sides. Jews are glad to be supported unconditionally, as Christian Zionists do, but at the same time they are deeply wary of their hidden agenda. An article on Christian Zionism in the Jewish Post is headlined 'Israel's Most Hated Friend'. However, in a telling conclusion, author Alana Goodman concludes: "Christian Zionists may have some faults, but we can't waste time waiting for a 'perfect' friend of Israel to come along. There are too many people who hate the Jews unconditionally, and not nearly enough who love us the same way."

For some, this contradiction at the heart of Christian Zionism is only one of its flaws. Critics see it as based on a mistaken reading of Scripture and contributing to the continued impasse between Israel and Palestine. While not all Christian Zionists are politically active, some take very definite positions. Pat Robertson in a 700 Club broadcast said that the incapacitating stroke suffered by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was because he was "dividing God's land" (he had enforced the withdrawal of Jewish settlers from Gaza). The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was for the same reason: "For any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, 'No. This is mine.'"

In a part of the world where everything is political, theological support has a way of morphing into something else. Recent opposition to President Obama's hard-won agreement with Iran on nuclear weapons drew heavily on the perceived threat to Israel of a bad deal. The evangelical constituency on which many Republican politicians rely was vocal in its criticism of the President, lending its weight to the opposition.

Christian Zionism, particularly in its political form, has far more traction in the US than in the UK – and among Christians in the Holy Land, who see the effects of a narrow religious nationalism daily, it has none at all. In 2006 senior Palestinian Christian leaders from the Roman Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Anglican and Evangelical Lutheran Churches issued the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism, describing it as a "false teaching that corrupts the biblical message of love, justice, and reconciliation". It does not oppose Zionism as such, but stresses that Jews and Palestinians should be able to live together, saying: "We call upon all people to reject the narrow world view of Christian Zionism and other ideologies that privilege one people at the expense of others."

Here, too, is a dilemma for Christian Zionists: how can they express whole-hearted support for Israel and at the same time hear the voices of those for whom this support carries a very different message?
Follow @RevMarkWoods on Twitter.

The contradiction at the heart of Christian Zionism
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The contradiction at the heart of Christian Zionism

http://peace-forum.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-contradiction-at-heart-of-christian.html 

London's Muslim mayor invites Trump to 'educate' him on Islam

London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan has invited Donald Trump to England's capital city to “educate” the bombastic US presidential candidate about Islam.

Khan rejected the notion that Islam was incompatible with modern Western values and said Trump’s “ignorant” views on Islam were “playing into the hands of extremists.”

“I want Donald Trump to come to London so I can introduce myself to him as a mainstream Muslim, very, very comfortable with Western liberal values, but also introduce him to hundreds of thousands, dare I say millions of Muslims in this country, who love being British, love being Western,” the new mayor said in an interview with NBC News on Friday.

In December, Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States after a deadly mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which was inspired by the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.

The proposal triggered widespread criticism and condemnation in the US and around the world.

Protesters gather outside of the Republican National Committee where Donald Trump was about to meet party leaders on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on May 12, 2016. (AFP photo)
“I want to educate Donald Trump. I want to show him that you can be Muslim and be Western,” said Khan.

Khan, the son of a Pakistani bus driver scored a resounding victory in last week's London mayoral election over his billionaire Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith, who was accused of running a “dog whistle” campaign of drawing attention to Khan’s Muslim faith and trying to link him to extremist groups.

Khan condemned Goldsmith's campaign as coming “straight out of the Donald Trump playbook,” and said he would help Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton beat the billionaire businessman.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, told the New York Times this week that he was “happy” about Khan's election and that the Muslim mayor could be an exception to his proposed ban.

Khan rejected Trump's exemption, and said he will try to visit the United States before the November presidential election.
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/05/14/465528/Khan-wants-to-educate-Trump-on-Islam-

The Jewish Intellectual Who Predicted America’s Social Collapse

The great American sociologist Philip Rieff (1922–2006) stands as one of the 20th century’s keenest intellectuals and cultural commentators. His work was stunning in its intellectual breadth and depth. Rieff did sociology on a grand scale—sociology as prophecy—diagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. Although he wasn’t a Christian, his work remains one of the greatest gifts—even if a complicated and challenging one—to Christians living today. (Tim Keller often lists Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic as one of his essential “big books” on culture.)

Rieff began his academic career in the 1950s and 60s by focusing on the work of Sigmund Freud. According to Rieff, Freud’s exploration of neurosis was really an exploration of authority, as Western man was realizing the idea of divine authority is an illusion. God doesn’t exist; therefore, he isn’t a legitimate authority. Freud recognized that as belief in God faded, psychological neuroses multiplied. Instead of correcting this by pointing persons back to God, however, Freud sought to heal by teaching his patients to accept this loss of authority as a positive development.

Thus the therapeutic culture was born. In place of theology, Freud and his progeny left us with sociology. Rieff warned that the tradeoff would not be a fruitful one.

Religion in Our Blood

Though Rieff rose to prominence as a public intellectual in the 1970s, he suddenly withdrew from the public eye for more than three decades. In fact, it wasn’t until the year of his death—2006—that he re-entered the public square with the publication of his magnum opus, My Life Among the Deathworks.

Deathworks is a devastating critique of modern culture, focusing on our vain Western attempts to reorganize society without a sacred center. According to Rieff, a patently irreligious view of society—which the Western world desires—isn’t only foolish and destructive, but impossible. We can no more live without a religious framework than we can communicate without a linguistic framework or breathe without a pulmonary framework. Religion is in our blood, and the more we deny it, the sicker our society becomes. As Rieff surveyed the 21st-century Western world, he perceived the sickness had become nearly fatal.

Cultural Works of Death

To expose the problems of modern society, Rieff outlines Western history according to three cultural “worlds,” each representing a time period (not a separate sphere of existence). The first was the pagan world, enchanted by its many gods. Following this was the second cultural world, one dominated by monotheism. This era has only recently given way to the third cultural world, our present age, in which many wish to do away with the gods altogether.

As Rieff saw it, human civilizations have always understood social order to be underlain by sacred order. The latter always and necessarily funds the former by providing a world of meaning and a code of permissions and prohibitions. Sacred order translates its truths into the tangible realities of the social order. Thus culture makers and cultural products served as middlemen between sacred order and social order, between God and society.

But the spirit of our third cultural world seeks to undo all of this.

Within this three-world conception of history, Rieff placed Christianity in the second cultural world. Christian monotheism provided the sacred foundation on which Western society was built, and gave individuals a place to stand. Virtue wasn’t just taught explicitly but reinforced implicitly through cultural institutions—in such a way that it shaped the instinctual desires of each successive generation. Most importantly perhaps, the underlying sacred order provided a powerful means of opposing social and cultural decadence.

The third cultural world, however, defines itself by its desire to sever this sacred/social connection. Whereas each of the first two worlds sought to construct identity vertically from above, our third world rejects the vertical in favor of constructing identity horizontally from below. Rieff knew the result of this rejection would be nihilism: “Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing” (Deathworks, 12). 

Rieff pulls no punches in describing the cultural fruits of this project, describing them as deathworks. Instead of causing society to flourish (via works of life), modern cultural products function as subversive agents of destruction (works of death), undermining the very culture from which they arose. Rieff indicts an array of cultural elites—but especially Freud, Joyce, Picasso, and Mapplethorpe—for their role in poisoning society. “The guiding elites of our third world,” he observes, “are virtuosi of de-creation, of fictions where once commanding truths were” (4). Wishing to forget religion and rebuild society (irreligiously) from the ground up, these elites carefully construct a contemporary tower of Babel.

Enslaved to Desire

Of course, the attempt to construct a religionless society is as absurd as the attempt to reach God with a physical tower. As Reiff notes, “Culture and sacred order are inseparable. . . . No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order” (13). Yet our third world continues its production of deathworks as a “final assault [on] the sacred orders, of which their arts are some expression.” Deathworks, then, are “battles in the war against second culture” (7). In Rieff’s eyes, the third world is now busy with self-congratulatory festivities in honor its apparent rout.

One of the front lines of the contemporary battle is the notion of truth. The third-world perspective abolishes truth, leaving only desire. Yet desire proves to be as fierce an authority as any god—and jealous to boot. Nature, after all, abhors a vacuum. So the throne on which God once sat doesn’t remain empty; it’s simply filled with the more erratic god of desire.

The chief desire in our American third-world culture is sexual, and this desire demands freedom of exercise. You may now believe or disbelieve in the existence of God (yawn), but you must never question the dogma of absolute sexual freedom, nor restrict its public exercise.

Onward to a Fourth World

Christians who resonate with Rieff’s grim assessment may be tempted to go back, attempting to retrieve the lost Christendom of a previous age. But Rieff pushes us forward to envision a fourth world. We cannot ignore the deathworks our third cultural world has created, but we can work towards a world in which sacred order once again underlies social order. And if Rieff is right, the time for such change may be sooner than we think. The third cultural world seems powerful now, but its foundations are weak and already starting to crumble. A world founded on material desire, after all, may promise much, but our society requires much more (see Rieff’s The Crisis of the Officer Class, 6). 

Even amid a crumbling third-cultural world, we must recognize that the fourth world will not enact itself; it awaits a people who will speak and act responsibly. Responsibility in a time such as this will involve a return to seemingly defunct notions of truth and virtue. And this will become increasingly possible as our culture undergoes a “radical disenchantment” with the permissiveness of third-world culture (Crisis, 169). It seemed so liberating to fire God from his post and live without limits! But a world without boundaries is a frightening—not a freeing—place. We must recover the beauty of the “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.”

When we read the events of our own time with Rieff-like eyes, we’re able to recognize many cultural products of our time as deathworks, and their authors as subversive agents undermining social order. But while Rieff generally takes aim at the creative class, we can expand our vision to include not only elite artists but also more ubiquitous culture-makers—popular entertainers, media outlets, corporate giants, and Supreme Court justices. As one example, we might point to the Supreme Court majorities who created “rights” to abortion and same-sex marriage out of thin air; those decisions are social deathworks in the deepest sense.

And yet, as helpful as Rieff is in identifying the cultural deathworks of contemporary society, his prescription for overcoming them is deficient. He often glances backward, pointing society to the moral code of a previous era. He also points forward, speaking of a future that ought to follow our corrupt age, a future defined by a virtuous cultural elite. But Rieff could never fully articulate a vision for either. He understood well the poison, but could never fully formulate the antidote.

Where Hope Prevails 

As he looked backward, what Rieff saw dimly was the biblical doctrine of creation. Had he reached for the wealth in that Christian doctrine, he might have grasped the enigma of humanity—of our created goodness and fallen badness—along with the Bible’s rich teaching about human flourishing. Moreover, what Rieff yearned to see in the future can only be found in a fully Christian eschatology, in its powerful and beautiful vision of Christ’s consummation of the kingdom. Only a Christian eschatology, rooted in the atonement of Christ and awaiting his triumphant return, can provide both avision for the future and the power to work toward it. We don’t merely need a heavenly vision; we need divine power to bring heaven down to earth.

This is what Christianity, and Christianity alone, offers. The resurrection of Jesus declares that where death seems to have the final word, the ending is not ultimate. God will restore the earth, and his kingdom will prevail. What he created, what he mourned over as it reveled in deathworks ranged against him, what he pursued and redeemed—this he will restore, from top to bottom. And what finally grounds our hope—a hope that, sadly, seems to have eluded Rieff—is that we’re privy to this finale before the finale. Though we live in the muddy middle of the script, we’ve caught a glimpse of the last scene.

As those who know the end of history’s story, then, Christians can engage in cultural activity with a humble confidence. As dark as it may seem, the realm of culture will one day be raised to life, made to bow in submission to the King. Since Jesus will gain victory and restore the earth, we remain confident. And since it will be his victory, we remain humble.

The 20th-century missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin aptly captured this idea of Christian hope and action, even amid a culture of death:

[A transformed society] is not our goal, great as that is. . . . Our goal is the holy city, the New Jerusalem, a perfect fellowship in which God reigns in every heart, and his children rejoice together in his love and joy. . . . And though we know that we must grow old and die—that our labors, even if they succeed for a time, will in the end be buried in the dust of time—yet we are not dismayed. . . . We know that these things must be. But we know that as surely as Christ was raised from the dead, so surely shall there be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness. And having this knowledge, we ought as Christians to be the strength of every good movement of political and social effort, because we have no need either of blind optimism or of despair. (Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History, 55)

By Bruce Ashford,  the provost and professor of theology & culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He co-authored the recently-released One Nation Under God: A Christian Hope for American Politics (with Chris Pappalardo) and the author of Every Square Inch: An Introduction to Cultural Engagement for Christians. You can follow him atwww.BruceAshford.net and on Twitter. 
http://flip.it/T_.Fp

How Islam Created Europe

In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent.

Charles Auguste Steuben's painting of the Battle of the Poitiers in 732. The Frankish leader Charles Martel's victory over Muslim invaders is seen as a decisive moment in European history. Wikimedia
Photo by: Wikimedia
Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now.

For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”), as the Romans famously called it. It included North Africa. Indeed, early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

After the breakup of the Roman empire, that northward migration saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization, with the classical legacy of Greece and Rome to be rediscovered only much later. It would take many more centuries for the modern European state system to develop. Slowly, though, feudalism, whose consensual give-and-take worked in the direction of individualism and away from absolutism, gave way to early modern empires and, over time, to nationalism and democracy. Along the way, new freedoms allowed the Enlightenment to take hold. In sum, “the West” emerged in northern Europe (albeit in a very slow and tortuous manner) mainly after Islam had divided the Mediterranean world.

Islam did much more than geographically define Europe, however. Denys Hay, a British historian, explained in a brilliant though obscure book published in 1957, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, that European unity began with the concept (exemplified by the Song of Roland) of a Christendom in “inevitable opposition” to Islam—a concept that culminated in the Crusades. The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.

In the postcolonial era, Europe’s sense of cultural preeminence was buttressed by the new police states of North Africa and the Levant. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders—borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents—Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration. Precisely because the Arabs lacked human rights, the Europeans felt at once superior to and secure from them.

Islam is now helping to undo what it once helped to create. A classical geography is organically reasserting itself, as the forces of terrorism and human migration reunite the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe. The Continent has absorbed other groups before, of course. In fact, Europe has been dramatically affected by demographic eruptions from the east: In the medieval centuries, vast numbers of Slavs and Magyars migrated into central and eastern Europe from deeper inside Eurasia. But those peoples adopted Christianity and later formed polities, from Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south, that were able to fit, however bloodily, inside the evolving European state system. As for the Algerian guest workers who emigrated to France and the Turkish and Kurdish guest workers who emigrated to Germany during the Cold War, they represented a more containable forerunner to the current migration.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have no desire to be Christian are filtering into economically stagnant European states, threatening to undermine the fragile social peace. Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.

Meanwhile, the new migration, driven by war and state collapse, is erasing the distinction between the imperial centers and their former colonies. Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions and comparative studies, as Said intuited it might. Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.

Although the idea of an end to history—with all its ethnic and territorial disputes—turns out to have been a fantasy, this realization is no excuse for a retreat into nationalism. The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.

“The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. As the great Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed, “History does not turn back … All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades.”

The question is thus posed: What, in a civilizational sense, will replace Rome? For while empire, as Said documented, certainly had its evils, its very ability to govern vast multiethnic spaces around the Mediterranean provided a solution of sorts that no longer exists.

Europe must now find some other way to dynamically incorporate the world of Islam without diluting its devotion to the rule-of-law-based system that arose in Europe’s north, a system in which individual rights and agency are uppermost in a hierarchy of needs. If it cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void. This would signal the end of “the West” in Europe.

By Robert D. Kaplan, theatlantic.com
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-islam-created-europe/476388/

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Islamic Revival رساله تجديد الاسلام ‏

An in-depth study of the Qur’an and Islamic religious history reveals startling facts. “Risala-e-Tajdeed-ul-Islam” is a message to develop positive change in the thought and practices of Muslims.

قرآن اور اسلام کے گہرے مطالعه سےحیران کن حقائق کا انکشاف ہوا، "رساله تجديد الاسلام" مسلمانوں کے انداز فکروعمل میں مثبت تبدیلی کا پیغام ہے:

https://bit.ly/Islamic-Revival-Mag

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Urdu: https://Quran1book.blogspot.com 

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Prophet Muhammad's Everlasting Promise of peace and security to Christians - St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai

حضرت محمدﷺ کا عیسائیوں کے ساتھ عہد [اردو]

النبي محمد وعد الآخرة للمسيحيين

وَأَوْفُوا بِالْعَهْدِ إِنَّ الْعَهْدَ كَانَ مَسْئُولً

Keep your promises; you will be called to account for every promise which you have made! (Quran; 17:34)

PROPHET MUHAMMAD'S PROMISE TO CHRISTIANS   Muslims and Christians together constitute over fifty percent of the world and if they lived in peace, we will be half way to world peace. One small step that we can take towards fostering Muslim-Christian harmony is to tell and retell positive stories and abstain from mutual demonization. In this article I propose to remind both Muslims and Christians about a promise that Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) made to Christians. The knowledge of this promise can have enormous impact on Muslim conduct towards Christians. Muslims generally respect the precedent of their Prophet and try to practice it in their lives. In 628 AD, a delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery came to Prophet Muhammed and requested his protection. He responded by granting them a charter of rights, which I reproduce below in its entirety. St. Catherine’s Monastery is located at the foot of Mt. Sinai and is the world’s oldest monastery. It possess a huge collection of Christian manuscripts, second only to the Vatican, and is a world heritage site. It also boasts the oldest collection of Christian icons. It is a treasure house of Christian history that has remained safe for 1400 years under Muslim protection. The Promise to St. Catherine:"This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate. No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants. No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)."   The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical. They make the promise eternal and universal. Muhammed asserts that Muslims are with Christians near and far straight away rejecting any future attempts to limit the promise to St. Catherine alone. By ordering Muslims to obey it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable. Muhammed declared Christians, all of them, as his allies and he equated ill treatment of Christians with violating God’s covenant. A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any duties! The document is not a modern human rights treaty but even thought it was penned in 628 A.D. it clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of work, and security of the person. I know most readers, must be thinking so what? Well the answer is simple. Those who seek to foster discord among Muslims and Christians focus on issues that divide and emphasize areas of conflict. But when resources such as Muhammad’s promise to Christians is invoked and highlighted it builds bridges. It inspires Muslims to rise above communal intolerance and engenders good will in Christians who might be nursing fear of Islam or Muslims. When I look at Islamic sources, I find in them unprecedented examples of religious tolerance and inclusiveness. They make me want to become a better person. I think the capacity to seek good and do good inheres in all of us. When we subdue this predisposition towards the good, we deny our fundamental humanity. In this holiday season, I hope all of us can find time to look for something positive and worthy of appreciation in the values, cultures and histories of other peoples. References See for example Life and Teachings of Muhammed by Amir Ali, p. 176. click to read it. Links: The original charter does not survive, but several copies are now extant in the library of St Catherine, some of which are witnessed by the judges of Islam in order to lend some force to its semblance of authenticity. The traditional explanation which accounts for the loss of the original claims that during the Conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman sultan Selim I in 1517, the original document was seized from the monastery by Ottoman soldiers and taken to Selim's palace at Constantinople.[2][1] A copy was then made to compensate for its loss at the monastery.[1] On the other hand, it is also possible that the charter was simply renewed under the new rulers, as other documents in the archive suggest.[3] Traditions about the tolerance shown towards the monastery were reported in governmental documents issued in Cairo and during the period of Ottoman rule (1517-1798), the Pasha of Egypt annually reaffirmed its protections.[1] In 1630, Gabriel Sionita published the first edition of the Arabic text, with Latin translation, under the title Testamentum et pactiones inter Mohammedem et Christianae fidei cultores. The origins of the document has been the subject of a number of different traditions, best known through the accounts of European travellers who visited the monastery.[1] These authors include the French knight Greffin Affagart (d. c. 1557), the French traveller Jean de Thévenot (d. 1667) and the English prelate Richard Peacocke,[1] who included an English translation of the text. Since the 19th century, several aspects of the Achtiname, notably the list of witnesses, have been questioned by scholars.[4] There are similarities to other documents granted to other religious communities in the Near East. One example is Muhammad's letter to the Christians of Najrān, which first came to light in 878 in a monastery in Iraq and whose text is preserved in the Chronicle of Séert.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achtiname_of_Muhammad The contents of letter are however generally in line with the special privileges granted by Islam to Christians as  People of the Book.  نص العهد: "هذا كتاب كتبه محمد بن عبدالله إلى كافة الناس أجمعين بشيراً ونذيراً ومؤتمناً على وديعة الله في خلقه لئلا يكون للناس على الله حجة بعد الرسل وكان الله عزيزاً حكيماً كتبه لأهل ملته ولجميع من ينتحل دين النصرانية من مشارق الأرض ومغاربها قريبها وبعيدها فصيحها وعجميها معروفها ومجهولها كتاباً جعله لهم عهداً. لا يغير أسقف من أسقفيته ولا راهب من رهبانيته ولا حبيس من صومعته ولا سايح من سياحته ولا يهدم بيت من بيوت كنائسهم وبيعهم ولا يدخل شيء من بناء كنائسهم في بناء مسجد ولا في منازل المسلمين فمن فعل شيء من ذلك فقد نكث عهد الله وخالف رسوله ولا يحمل على الرهبان والأساقفة ولا من يتعبد جزيةً ولا غرامة وأنا أحفظ ذمتهم أين ما كانوا من بر أو بحر في المشرق والمغرب والشمال والجنوب وهم في ذمتي وميثاقي وأماني من كل مكروه فمن نكث العهد الذي فيه وخالفه إلى غيره وتعدى ما أمره كان لعهد الله ناكثاً ولميثاقه ناقضاً وبدينه مستهزئاً وللّعنة مستوجباً سلطاناً كان أو غيره من المسلمين المؤمنين." تعتبر الجملتان الأولى والأخيرة في هذا العهد حاسمتان، فهما تجعلان الوعد أبدياً وعالمياً. يؤكد النبي محمد (ص) أن المسلمين يقفون مع المسيحيين من قريب وبعيد، ويرفضون فوراً أية محاولات مستقبلية للحد من وعد دير القديسة كاثرين وحده. من خلال أمر المسلمين باحترام الوعد حتى يوم القيامة، يُفشل الصك مرة أخرى أية محاولات مستقبلية لإلغاء الامتيازات. هناك ثلاثة حقوق لا يمكن التنازل عنها. أعلن النبي محمد (ص) أن المسيحيين جميعهم حلفاء له حيث ساوى بين معاملة المسيحيين السيئة مع انتهاك عهد الله تعالى. ومن النواحي المثيرة للاهتمام والإعجاب في الصك أنه لا يفرض أية شروط على المسيحيين للتمتع بميزاته. يكفي إنهم مسيحيون، ولا يُطلب منهم تغيير إيمانهم ومعتقداتهم ولا أن يدفعوا جزية ولا تكون عليهم أية التزامات. هذا صك حقوق دون أية التزامات. ليست الوثيقة معاهدة عصرية في حقوق الإنسان، ولكنها، ورغم أنها صيغت عام 628 بعد الميلاد فإنها تحمي بوضوح حقوق الملكية والحرية الدينية وحرية العمل والأمن الشخصي. أعرف أن معظم القراء سوف يقولون "وماذا بعد؟". حسناً، الجواب بسيط: يركز هؤلاء الذين يبغون رعاية الفتنة بين المسلمين والمسيحيين على قضايا تتسبب بالفرقة والنزاع. ولكن عندما تطرح موارد مثل وعد النبي محمد (ص) إلى المسيحيين ويتم إبرازها فإنها تبني الجسور. وهي تلهم المسلمين أن يرتفعوا فوق عدم التسامح الطائفي وتولد حسن النية لدى المسيحيين الذين قد يكونوا يتعاملون مع الخوف من الإسلام والمسلمين. عندما أنظر إلى المصادر الإسلامية أجد بها أمثلة لا سابق لها من التسامح الديني والشمولية. تجعلني أرغب بأن أصبح إنساناً أفضل. أعتقد أن القدرة على السعي لما هو صالح وصنعه متأصلان فينا جميعاً. عندما نكبت هذا التوجه نحو الصلاح فإننا ننكر إنسانيتنا الأساسية. آمل في أعقاب فترة الأعياد أن نجد جميعاً الوقت للبحث عن أمر إيجابي يستحق التقدير في قيم وتاريخ وثقافة الشعوب الأخرى. St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt                                          A Picture of Prophet Muhammad's Letter to St. Catherine's Monastery Dr. Muqtedar Khan | 08.22.2010 This article was published in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette [03.25.2007], Daily News Egypt [03.09.2007], AltMuslim [03.03.2007],  Pakistan Link,  Middle East Window, Turkish Daily News [04.10.2007 ], OpEd news [03.19.2007],Ikhwanweb [02.11.07],  and many other places.. Article also available in:   English   |  Indonesia   |  عربي   |  اردو   |  Français Courtesy Common Ground News Service http://www.ijtihad.org/Prophet%20Muhammed's%20Promise.htm Return to Ijtihad http://www.ijtihad.org/Prophet%20Muhammed's%20Promise.htm Minorities in Islamic State: The hand book highlights the rights of minorites... Read more: Protection of Minorities, a Religious Obligation of Muslims: http://islam4humanite.blogspot.com/2015/03/non-muslims-in-islamic-society.html حضرت محمدﷺ کا عیسائیوں کے ساتھ عہد [اردو] ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~ Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace  A Project of  Peace Forum Network Peace Forum Network Mags Books, Articles, Blogs, Magazines,  Videos, Social Media Overall 2 Million visits/hits Follow @Peace_Forum

If Christian EU, Why not Muslim Union?

Writing in 1751 Voltaire described Europe as `a kind of great republic, divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions.

They all have the same principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world.` But they also had a lot of war.

Fifty years ago in a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn and William Gladstone, the early advocates of European unity, could only dream, a united Europe became a reality.

War, time and time again, has interrupted the pursuit of that objective. Continued civil war across the continent, across the centuries, has pitted French against Germans, British against kallans, Czechs against Poles, Serbs against Austrians and Spaniards against Spaniards reaching its dreadful climax in World Wars One and Two. As Jan Morris has written in her Fifty Years of Europe, `great cities lay in ruin, bridges were broken, roads and railways were in chaos.

Conquerors from East and West flew their ensigns above the seats of old authority, and proud populations would do almost anything for a pack of cigarettes or some nylon stockings. Europe was in shock, powerless, discredited and degraded.

Over the ages no other continent has been the scene of so much war.

Many, if not most, of that generation wondered in 1945 if they`d ever see Europe again in any state of grace or glory, much less unified.

The fact that the urge to bury the hatchet and forge common institutions has come so far in such a short time against such a background is arguably for the world as a whole the twentieth century`s greatest political achievement. (Following the Declaration of Independence it took the US nearly 90 years to establish a fully mature common currency; Europe has travelled the same course in 40 years.)

Yet this astonishing and triumphant success begs the question:
What is the glue that holds it all together? 
After all what is Europe?
Geographically, it is no more than a peninsula protruding from the landmass of Asia. Culturally, it has always been a potage of languages, peoples and traditions. Politically, it is a moveable feast of the 35 sovereign states in post Iron Curtain Europe nine have been created or resurrected since World War Two.

Indeed it is religion, not politics nor the single market and monetary union that through the ages has made Europe one, held it together through its vicissitudes and bloody wars (many, tragically, of religious origin) and provided the common basic morality and common identity that made the EU, makes a single currency workable, the Schengen agreement making passport-free travel possible inside most of Europe today and political union a tangible, if still hotly debated, goal tomorrow.

Broadcasting to a defeated Germany in 1945, the poet T.S.

Elliot reminded his audience that despite the war and `the closing of Europe`s mental frontiers because of an excess of nationalism it is in Christianity that our arts have developed, it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe until recently have been rooted. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will depend on the Christian heritage for its meaning.

Of course, today one can ask what do the contemporary European cults of finance, sports, TV, pop culture, eroticism and Ryanair flying wherever it wants have to do with a Christian heritage? Nevertheless, the fact is through changing fashions, through wars big and small, the idea of Europe that persists is essentially Christian unity of principles and peace in relationships. On its own, economic self interest never would have created the EU and, more recently, monetary union. Economic, legal, social and monetary unions have been driven all along by men and women who were essentially idealistic and visionary. From Jean Monnet, the founder of modern Europe, to Helmut Schmidt, Valery Giscard D`Estaing, Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl, the founders and creators of the EU and the euro, the urge to remove the causes of belligerency and to form institutions that would further the development of a common democracy has been a central purpose.

Europe is not first and foremost a political concept or a un ancial convenience. It is an ideal. Thus it will never be complete. We will work at it all our lives, as will future generations.

For the British to decide not to pull out now can only happen if the university-trained elite together with the leadership of the pro-European trade unions (most of them) educate the public on the history and the ideals of Europe.

Extracts from "Big question for UK on European Union", By Jonathan Power 
Dawn.Com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummah

Ummah (Arabic: أمة‎) is an Arabic word meaning "community". It is distinguished from Sha'b (Arabic: شعب‎) which means a nation with common ancestry or geography. Thus, it can be said to be a supra-national community with a common history. It is a synonym for ummat al-Islamiyah (Arabic: الأمة الإسلامية‎) (the Islamic Community), and it is commonly used to mean the collective community of Islamic peoples. In the Quran the ummah typically refers to a single group that shares common religious beliefs, specifically those that are the objects of a divine plan of salvation.^[1][2] In the context of Pan-Islamism and politics, the word Ummah can be used to mean the concept of a Commonwealth of the Believers (أمة المؤمنين ummat al-mu'minīn).

www.oic-oci.org

Read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union 
www.europa.eu
https://plus.google.com/+AftabKhan-PeaceForum/posts/Ejb2xdJoSgN
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