Sri Lankan attacks require response from moderate Islam

I am outraged and saddened that the greatest day of the Christian year, the Sunday of the Resurrection, was desecrated by the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka. Nearly 300 people were killed, with 500 wounded in bombings of churches and hotels.

The evidence is that violent Islamists committed these horrific acts.

Now is the time for major Christian leaders—the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, among others—along with leaders of other faiths, to come together with leaders of modernist Islam and condemn these attacks as an attack on members of God’s one human family and as an attack on God himself.

It might seem presumptuous that I, a Christian, would speak to Muslims and tell them what to do after Sunday’s attacks, but I think I have a right, indeed a duty to do so, because members of my Christian family were murdered. I must respond, for they cannot.

Modernist Islam, made up of disparate groups now, should coalesce and should speak with one voice, repudiating this violence and the perpetrators, denouncing them and separating them from Islam—in effect, excommunicating them from the faith.

Modernist theologians within Islam should reinterpret for this 21st Century context—which includes many different people, cultures and views of ultimacy or God—passages of the Koran that, upon a literal or natural reading, appear to endorse and encourage attacks on people of other faiths or no faith in God.

A new hermeneutic or interpretative framework should be, in this Christian’s opinion, love—doing only good to the other, whoever he or she is, working for that person’s flourishing, regardless of faith or the absence of the same.

Modernists should widely disseminate their enlightened teaching and actively engage with violent Islamists, demonstrating the fallacy of their literalism and the affront to the one true God that their version of Islam poses to the one human family, which was created by the God who loves all and who sustains all—Jew, Christian, Muslim. All.

The Most Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, says that “If it’s not about love, then it’s not about God.”

As there was a major reform of Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, and as there was further reform in the 18th and 19th Centuries with the expansion of scientific knowledge, so there should be a thoroughgoing reform of Islam.

Furthermore, and specific to this holy weekend’s atrocities, religious leaders of all faiths must unite and must work together in Sri Lanka to heal the wounds—physical, psychological and emotional—left by the attacks.

This effort should be led by Muslim modernists, with the full and visible leadership and participation of leaders of all other major religious traditions, along with others of good will.

These actions should be only the start, the minimum response to this horror.