Carla Hinton
Charles Kimball, author of the new book “When Religion Becomes Lethal” shares the book’s premise and his message to those interested in religion and politics.
Recent world events have made Charles Kimball a popular speaker and commentator.
Kimball, director of the University of Oklahoma’s Religious Studies program, recently released his new book, “When Religion Becomes Lethal.” He said the new release is not a sequel to his 2002 best-seller, “When Religion Becomes Evil,” but more of a conversation about Judaic, Christian and Muslim relations in today’s world.
In this question-and-answer format, the busy author discusses his latest effort:
Q: Why did you decide to write this book at this particular time?
A: Well, this has actually been a book that is 30 years in the making. The first chapter of the book will catch a lot of people’s attention. It’s called “Christmas With the Ayatollah.” I’m one of seven Americans who actually met personally with the Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran hostage crisis. I was a 29-year-old doctoral student at Harvard studying Islam and comparative religion. I was in the Middle East. There weren’t very many people, very many Americans back in the 1970s who were really studying Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, so I was included in this very high level group of clergy. I’m also an ordained Baptist minister, so I’m a clergy person, too. It was very obvious in Iran, with the toppling of the Shah, that a totally new day was dawning. There was a new way that some people were thinking ... of kind of a revived way of religion and politics. I was really thrown into the middle of this incredibly intense white spotlight of national attention. I spent many hours with the student militants in the embassy compound. I spent a lot of time with the different ayatollahs, and I write about this in the book. Then, because of my involvement with the Arab-Israeli conflict, I’ve been to the Middle East 40 times over the years, and I’ve spent a lot of time with heads of state, I’ve spent a lot of time in the White House. I’ve spent a lot of time in refugee camps and with Jewish settlers in the West Bank. So I’ve had not just a lot of academic training but a lot of experiential involvement in our government and with the conflicts in the Middle East.
I talk about the unfolding of the dynamics that are shaping the Middle East and the U.S. today, I would say, in terms of religion and politics especially. I’m taking my own history and knowledge and my involvement in Judaism, Christianity, the Bible and Islam and try to help people find a more coherent way of working through this thicket of information that for many people just appears very confusing.
Q: You said you have coined a phrase in this book. What is it?
A: I have a term that I coined that I like and that is a lot of people, a lot of non-Muslims, when they approach the Middle East and they think about Islam, they have what I called a “detailed ignorance.” In other words, they have a lot of details, they have a lot of images and a lot of ideas that they’ve seen on TV or they’ve picked up here and there, but they don’t have often a coherent way of bringing those into some kind of context of understanding why someone may do this or why someone might say that.
Rather it’s just like “This happened and these people are violent,” “This happened and these people seem crazy.” ... I want people to understand that Islam is not monolithic; it’s not one thing. It helps when you can think in comparative terms. Some Christians have very rigid ideas about what Christianity is and what God requires, but I think most people will acknowledge that that isn’t the only way that Christians understand things. They know there are Quakers and Russian Orthodox and different kinds of Catholics, Pentecostals, and so they recognize that Christianity is not just one thing. The same is true for Islam. Islam is not monolithic. Indonesia is not Iraq. Algeria is not Afghanistan, and so part of what I’m trying to do is help people take a step back and think in more thoughtful ways about this world’s second largest religion and some of the dynamics at work. It’s not as daunting a task as people think. You don’t have to become an expert on Islam to begin to have a more coherent understanding.
Q: Why do you think this book is timely?
A: I would argue and do argue in the book that we are at a very critical and dangerous time in world history where it’s now very clear where small numbers of people can wreak havoc on a very wide scale. So even if it’s only a small percentage of Muslims who have embraced violent extremism, it’s still a very dangerous percentage because it doesn’t take very many people with the kinds of weapons of mass destruction to really wreak havoc. We’re at a dangerous time, and we have to find ways of living together, working together more constructively, obviously at the international level, but I would argue increasingly at the local level.
Q: Can you explain what you mean by that?
A: I talk a lot about the rise of Islamophobia in the United States and even the Shariah law issue here in Oklahoma. With those kinds of things, I think we need to understand the fear that motivates some people but also how can we defuse that, engage one another in a constructive way. For example, the death of bin Laden. He has been “Exhibit A” in religion becoming lethal as someone who is murdering thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Muslims in the name of Islam and for his political agenda. I see him as someone who used religion. He was not a religious leader, but he used religion to incite people to murder and to justify murder. We have to name that for what it is: This is a corruption of religion for the vast majority of Muslims. That doesn’t indict the whole religion of Islam anymore than someone the kind of slaughter of Bosnian women and children at the hands of some Serbian Christians in the 1990s. That certainly doesn’t represent Christianity in the minds of most Christians.
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