Easter Sunday saw a remarkable event take place in Rome:
Pope Baptizes Prominent Italian Muslim
VATICAN CITY (AP) - Italy's most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.
An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book "Long Live Israel."
As a choir sang, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam's head and said a brief prayer in Latin.
"We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another," Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. "Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close."
Many reports reflected on Allam's courage. He had been threatened with death for criticizing radical Islam well before his conversion. Some commentators discussed the political meaning of the public act of conversion presided over by the Pope. Was this a "shot across the bow" of Islam? How did this fit with the Pope's discussion of the need for reciprocity with Islam? What would this mean for the possible construction of a church in Saudi Arabia, something recently in the news?
I think the highly public conversion is one of the single most subversive and dangerous attacks on radical Islam by the West since we have become aware of being involved in a war with the Islamists.
Consider some comments from Christian Allam, nee Magdi, in an interview last December:
Allam, 55, told the newspaper Il Giornale in a December interview that his criticism of Palestinian suicide bombing provoked threats on his life in 2003, prompting the Italian government to provide him with a sizable security detail.
...
"Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life. And I discovered that behind the origin of the ideology of hatred, violence and death is the discrimination against Israel. Everyone has the right to exist except for the Jewish state and its inhabitants," he said. "Today, Israel is the paradigm of the right to life."
The Anchoress, who always brings a subtle and enlightening touch to events, adds texture to the story in her post, Benedict XVI, Allam & Osama bin Laden - UPDATED. She notes the timing of the public conversion right after yet another missive of death form Osama bin Laden:
So, Benedict and Chrstian Allam have made a response to Osama bin Laden and the response is: you love death; we love life. You deal in death, which is a conquered trade, for the One we follow has overcome death. Death, your idol, has no power over us, because we are alive in Christ, who was slain and who rose, and is Alpha and Omega and with us even now. We eat his Flesh and drink his Blood; he remains in us and we in him.
That’s one powerful message. I hope bin Laden, or whoever is running the increasingly unpopular deatheater glee clubs can manage to take the message in, and find a healthier hobby.
God bless Magdi Christian Allam. God bless the pope who baptized him.
Both Allam in his statements, and The Anchoress in her comments, underline the distinction between a religion that celebrates Death and feeds on hatred and a religion that celebrates life and feeds on love.
There is a deeper and larger story captured in this. According to the Joshua Fund, Muslims are converting to Christianity in record numbers throughout the Middle East. I cannot vouch for their numbers but there is a psychological plausibility to the story.
In my writing, including yesterday's post, I have repeatedly said that radical Islam is incompatible with modernity. This is, of course, not a unique position and of no surprise to anyone paying attention. In many ways radical Islam is a reaction tot he threats that modernity bring. It is a repudiation of the future, explicitly looking back to an imagined "paradise lost" and desirous of nothing less than ecstatic union through death.
Along with the secular difficulties radical Islam contains for its followers, the spiritual difficulties may be even greater. The fact is that hate and rage are painful and exhausting even while they can feel temporarily empowering. The person who is filled with hate and whose primary emotional state is anger lives in a precarious state, with his anger on a hair trigger, ready to attack at any perceived insult, ready to smash and hit and hurt. It is no surprise that as they have been increasingly facing defeat in Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq have been turning their hatred on themselves, killing their allies, murdering those who simply want to stop fighting and "study war no more." Hatred and rage are exhausting. After a time all but the most narcissistically invested need and want nothing more than to take a break from the killing and the hate. Christianity is based on love, ultimately a much more powerful and sustainable emotional state. Love enhances the lover and the loved. It calms and sooths the soul. Hatred can only destroy the hater and the hated. It jangles and disrupts the soul.
Our poets have always known that hate is based on weakness and always presses for discharge, even if the only target available is the self:
I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to startThe dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land
The boy can only become a man by metabolizing his anger and establishing a self based on inner strength, not weakness. It requires giving up the promised land, Utopia, in the here and now and dealing with the real, imperfect world, a world that does not accord with all one's wishes or submit to one's every demand.
A psychological weak spot for the Islamists is the psychic cost of their war that they cannot ever win. They consider themselves at war with the entire world, fighting against those who reveal their weakness to them or threaten their pretensions and fantasies. Their feelings of power, which come from their successful bullying, appeals to losers and misfits but those among them who are less than fully committed to an ascetic, puritanical vision of Islam, who merely want peace in their own minds, can suddenly, at any moment, wake up and realize that there is something out there more powerful than their hate, something that offers them inner peace. Once that happens, the Islamists have lost another soldier.
While the Joshua Fund focusses on conversion to evangelical Christianity, the Pope, as the head of the world's largest Christin faith, remains the symbol and personification of a loving Christianity. Stalin was the last fool who sneered at the Pope's power when he asked how many divisions the Pope had. As a very interested though not directly involved spectator, my money is on the Pope. Love still trumps hate; it just sometimes takes awhile for people to realize it.
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