Fawaz Turki, a senior coilumnist for Arab News, has a thought-provoking piece entitled, “America’s ‘Wacky Ideas About Islam’ and the Gulf In Understanding: The shocking lack of knowledge in the United States about Islam is matched only by an even greater intellectual shortfall in the Arab World in understanding the West.”

Turki bemoans how little Americans, including academics, actually know about the Arab lands and Islam, for example,

Perhaps then, Americans would come to realize, for example, that jihad (struggle by an individual, or collectively a community, to transcend the limitations of the self through spiritual discipline) does not translate as “holy war,” that Allahu Akbar (a call by a Muslim in a moment of crisis, or wonderment at the objective world, to assert that “God is greater” than the challenges at hand) does not mean “God is great,” and that shahid (a fallen patriot who dies defending his holy cause) is not a martyr, a term unique to Christian iconography denoting a person in early Christianity who refused to renounce his religion and died defending it. …

And so Turki proves guilty (a little) of the very misunderstanding he accuses the West of. As I happened to have explained in last Sunday’s sermon, “Recovering martyrdom,” Christians are made martyrs not by dying while defending the Christian faith, for in Christian history martyrdom has always been passively attained. Christians who refuse to renounce their faith under persecution, even at the cost of their lives, may come to be acclaimed as martyrs. This is qualitatively different than the Muslim concept of shahid, in which giving actual offensive battle in war can be seen as a true act of worship.

Nonetheless, it not a major nit to pick in an otherwise decent article, and I have to plead guilty to referring to shahidis as martyrs myself (although Turki doesn’t address that al Qaeda itself calls suicide bombings “martrydom operations”).

But this part caught my eye:

There is no doubt about the fact that for Americans — who have yet have to recognize their ignorance about the issue — an intimate acquaintance with Islam will be enriching not only for practical reasons of national security … but for intellectual reasons as well. When you get to know a person’s religion, you get to know their expression of human spirit, their inward preoccupations and their archetypal concerns. After all, there are many junctures where Islam and Christianity intersect, representing a basis for unity for the two worlds they define. What divides Muslims and Christians in modern times are not their religions — which are not antithetical by any means — but their politics.

I applaud Turki’s apparent attempt to separate mosque and state, but it’s a wet firecracker. He glosses over the fact that Arab politics, especially in Saudi Arabia, are generally controlled by Islam. It’s impossible for America to relate to the Arab countries purely on the basis of politics and not religion.

Furthermore, Turki seems unaware of the very vast chasm separating basic Christian doctrines and theology from that of Islam, only three examples of which are Original Sin (a concept that does not exist in Islam), the divinity of Jesus Christ (renounced as heresy in Islam) and divine atonement for human sin (nowhere in Islamic theology). Those are just starting points.

Those religious differences “divide” Christianity and Islam only because Islam is politically intolerant of Christianity. It’s all fine for Turki to say, “Can’t we we all just get along?” when getting along means I as a Christian cannot freely practice or proselytize in almost any Muslim country. If he really believes that our respective religions “are not antithetical by any means” then let him campaign in Saudi Arabia for full religious freedom for Christianity there.

Nonetheless, Turki does admit his own society has a long way to go:

But what of the unutterable monotony of debate by Arab critics about the Euro-American world? We complain, often bitterly, as I have just done, about how little Westerners know about our societies. But in the end, I have to say this: Despite their at times inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation, American commentators, analysts and academics still know more about the Arab world than their counterparts there know about the United States.

How many think tanks are there in the Arab world that devote themselves to the study of the American world? How many Arab universities are there with American Studies departments? How many Arab researchers have written about the United States — its foreign policy, its social life, its popular culture, its history, its political system — with penetrative grasp, with resolute objectivity, a genuine focus on facts untainted by conspiracy theories and the rhetoric of the 1950s and 60s about those darned American imperialists lurking behind every one of our lamp posts?

Let’s see, that would be about, uh, none, I think.

We all have a long way to go. (hat tip: Watching America)