A Christian-muslim Inter-text Now: From Anathemata to Theme

In an internet society ‘text’ can mean some trivial thing. Not so its long link with ‘textile’ as something significant woven into words that might even be ‘holy writ’. Meant this way here, ‘Inter-text’ has to do with how—not whether—we think of God. The Qur’an has a laden phrase about ‘esteeming Allah a true esteem’. What ‘measure’, what criteria? Christian and Muslim are in clear kinship about the answer, but—inside it—present a sharp contrast. Together they see the human situation as a trust with the earth as God’s viceroys so that nothing is merely secular, since all is meant for hallowing. Things are only ‘under us’ as we are ‘under God’. This central truth grows ever more urgent now and, with it, the issue that divides. Is this vocation to be ‘on God’s behalf ’ an education into law, served by a political control that makes us amenable? Or, in all realism, must it not be a redemption into love, because we are willful and perverse? Otherwise, why that ringing ‘Perhaps’ in the Qur’an? This—between us—only belongs inside the common stake of the God who has ‘let us be’. It is a theme that demands to bypass the sundry anathemas we have had for each other so long. ‘To understand God we must first spell man.’ When we do so, we discover many other ‘texts’ between us about, for example, the task of scholarship with Scriptures, the temper of religious authority, the inter-liability of the sexes and the humility that learns sincerity.