Rowan Williams on Islam

one question about the church needing to take a greater firm stand against the islamification of this country another asked how do you love your neighbor if he hates you brackets Islam write caution against the use of a word like islamification the percentage of the population of this country that is Muslim remains very very tiny what I suspect people are worried about is a long term for two things a long-term demographic shift in Europe with the growing numbers of an Islamic population and the perception that in this country a certain bias is shown towards the Islamic community out of the nervousness of offending the latter problem I think illustrates quite a level of confusion and sometimes ignorance in government about the nature of religious communities themselves a reactive and anxious attempt to forestall extremism not very successfully combined with a view that treats all religious communities in this country as almost equally eccentric and alien and one of the conversations which I regularly have to have across the river from Lambeth Palace in London in the Palace of Westminster is to try and say to people in government actually the Church of England present in every community in this land remains a very distinctive vehicle for promoting community regeneration and understanding and that's part of the history but what's special about you don't be afraid of working with the grain of that and don't think that in order to relate to faith communities overall you have to have a representative group of every single religious tradition for every particular purpose in ways that disable decision-making on the ground relations between Christian and Muslim communities in many of our cities are good actually I spent some time last year on a similar Tarsus and visit in the northwest and discovered some very good practice going on in Burnley and other northwestern towns a year before that on a visit to Birmingham I opened a Family Center run jointly by the local church a rather evangelical church and the local mosque now those buildings of friendship are part of the answer to both those questions and they arise not from Christian nervousness but from Christian confidence we're not embarrassed to be ourselves as Christians and in our approach to Muslim neighbors we are confident in being who we are not aggressive not oppressive but happy in our skills we work from that we engage and in that way in that way we seek for a future which is not Islam fide which is not simply the imposition of another tyrannical religious authority we seek for a way in which we come together these citizens and that's I think rather important here as for loving the people who hate us well free there's nothing very new about that that's really what Jesus is talking about and I guess that's what he meant by loving our enemies you know um we're called on to love . and that love is as i was saying not just a matter of doing good it's also a matter of being able to seek always something that the stranger even the most threatening stranger might have to give you so don't assume muslims hate Christians . don't assume that there is a single coordinated alien plot to take over this country recognize the terrifying reality of extremism and remember that it terrifies most muslims as much as it does anybody else and ask what can be done in terms of local friendship to draw out this common citizen identity that we seek heaven knows it's it's not as simple as that sons but that's some of what i want to say in response i'm quite happy for christians to stand up and defend who they are but i think they should do it in a careful realistic awareness of the fact that the average Muslim in this country and elsewhere is a lot more like the average Christian at the human level than you might suspect and be willing to work with the grain of that

Channel: LincolnDiocese

Views: 46,440

Keywords: islam, islamification, archbishop, of, canterbury, dr, rowan, williams, sharia, law, question, lincoln, cathedral, terror, terrorist, terrorism, fundamental, fundamentalist

Id: 6lhEJAx_pMo

Length: 5min 38sec (338 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2010