In this brief paper, I would like to offer a personal experiences to illustrate ways that Christians and Muslims might present their faith to each other. My point of departure will be my experience in teaching an introduction to Christian theology to Muslim students in Turkish theological faculties.

ANKARA, IZMIR, KONYA, URFA

Between 1981 and 1994, I served in the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (formerly known as the Secretariat for non Christians). In 1985, the Rector of Ankara University contacted the Vatican with a proposal to invite a Catholic theologian to present lectures in the context of the History of Religions requirement in the curriculum of the Ilahiyat Faculty. As my own academic background is in Islamic thought, it was felt that my understanding of Islam would help me to present Christian theology to Muslim university students. Hence I was asked to respond to the invitation of Ankara University.

Ankara University

In the autumn of 1986 I took a small apartment near the university and attended the formal opening of the academic year. My salary was jointly covered by Ankara University and a teaching grant from the Fulbright Foundation. Ankara has the largest and oldest theology faculty in Turkey; in my course there were perhaps 200 students.

The course had four parts: 1) An introduction to the Bible and its basic teachings. This included a study of the Christian concept of revelation and Biblical inspiration. 2) The basic doctrines of Christian faith. 3) A history of the Christian community from the time of the Apostles until today. 4) Brief panoramas of the sweep of Christian theology, philosophy, and spirituality. The last point, though by its nature superficial, had two aims: to introduce the students to important thinkers in Christian history and to provide input for the theological students who were simultaneously taking courses in kalam and tawhid, falsafa, and tasawwuf or Sufism.

Since I did not speak Turkish, I was assigned a teaching assistant with a good knowledge of English. I wrote out each lecture and the assistant prepared translations. He was quite conscientious in that whenever there were phrases or concepts he did not understand, we discussed the point thoroughly until he was satisfied he could put my thoughts accurately into Turkish.

The discussions in preparation for the classes were an important element in their success. The planning sessions gradually came to include a core of 5-6 graduate students and through their questions, objections, and often simple incomprehension, I met the problem of "theological language"; terms and concepts that seem obvious and unequivocal to a Christian trained in Christian theology can, to a Muslim well versed in Islamic faith, appear contradictory, pointless, and on occasion even blasphemous.

Problems of translation

Having lived for two years in an Arabic-speaking Coptic seminary in Egypt, I found my knowledge of Arabic and of Christian Arab terminology to be a mixed blessing. Presenting Christian faith in Turkish presents different problems from the same activity in Arabic. Whereas Christian theology in Arabic was already highly developed by the Ninth Century, on a par with theological thought in Byzantium and Western Europe, Turkish-speaking Christians had not produced parallel theological efforts in Turkish. Although some Turcophone Christians, like the Gagauz of Moldava, have Biblical and liturgical texts in Turkish, Christians in Turkish-speaking regions generally write and pray in the languages in which the Christian tradition had been handed down for centuries, e.g., Syriac, Greek, Armenian, Georgian. As a result, the Turkish language today does not possess a ready-made Christian vocabulary or a Christian theological tradition.

Translating my lectures into Turkish was thus a challenging endeavour. I approached the task by thoroughly talking through each subject with my teaching aide and the other graduate students, until they could rephrase it to our mutual satisfaction as an adequate expression of what I as a Christian believe. I studied Turkish and, living as I did in an entirely Turkish-speaking environment, before long could follow enough to be sure that my idea was getting accurately conveyed. The whole process depended upon the quality of the graduate students. I found them to be highly conscientious, careful to "translate", not only my words but my exact ideas, into good Turkish. They had no hesitation about saying that a certain phrase or concept was nonsense to them. They well understood the importance of faithfully reproducing my ideas without adding any changes of their own.

Reactions of the students

At the beginning of the lectures, I explained to the students that I was not interested either in proselytism or in polemics. I was not trying to convince them of anything; I had no hidden agenda. I was simply attempting to explain what Christians believe and how we practise our faith in worship and daily life. The lectures would not treat Christian faith from a comparative intent of establishing which is better — Christianity or Islam, or who is right or wrong. I simply wanted to present Christianity as it is understood by those who believe and follow it.

How did the students react to the lectures? As one might expect, their reactions were various. Few of the students had any previous knowledge of Christianity whatsoever. They had some information, unsystematic and often inaccurate, the source of which was usually popular films like The Name of the Rose, The Thornbirds, Shoes of the Fisherman. The students came from towns and villages in Anatolia where most had probably had never met and certainly had never discussed religious matters with a Christian.

Thus, the most common reaction was curiosity. I was someone from a very different world with ideas on God, human life and society that were new and unfamiliar. Many students would remain for hours after lectures to ask more questions and debate points that I had raised in the lecture. Often over tea or at lunch, they would invite me to talk about aspects of Christian faith. This curiosity extended not only to me, but many wanted to visit the chapel at the Vatican Embassy or one of the churches in Izmir to attend the Eucharistic service.

A second reaction was polemics. Some students, usually not very numerous but quite vocal, wanted to debate my presentation with the intent of proving that Christianity was in error and Islam was correct. This often did not indicate a very deep opposition to my lectures, but was more in the line of the time-honored practice of mujadala, academic disputation, in Muslim lands. I made it a practice not to enter into debate, stating that my task was simply to give a complete and sound exposition of Christianity, from which they were free to draw their own conclusions.

On the positive side, I noticed a progression which took place. Polemical attitudes were most to the fore so long as the students did not know me well: my first weeks at the Theology Faculty or on those occasions when I delivered guest lectures elsewhere. After the novelty of my presence wore off and I became an accepted part of the life of the Faculty, students were more ready to listen openly without following a penchant for polemical argument. After several months, with some students I could sense further movement. Their questions were less of the type: "What do you Christians believe on this issue? Here is what we Muslims hold", and more along the lines of: "How do we Muslims and Christians, believers in God who want to do His will, living in today’s world, approach this specific question of faith?".

Izmir, Konya

When the other Faculties of Theology in Turkey (there were eight at the time) learned that there was a professor of Christian theology at Ankara, several extended invitations to give guest lectures or to present short courses of 1-4 weeks. In this way, I came to deliver lectures at Theology Faculties in Bursa (Uludag University), Istanbul (Marmara), Izmir (Dokuz Eylul), Kayseri, (Erciyes), Samsun (Ondokuz Mayis), and Urfa (Harran).

After delivering lectures in Izmir, the Rector invited me to give a course the following year similar to that which I had been offering at Ankara. I returned the following year and taught a semester course at Dokuz Eylul University. While basically the same, the course was enriched by the questions, reactions, and objections of the students in Ankara. For example, I came to the conclusion that my treatment of the question of the Christian understanding of the Redemption was inadequate, and so in Izmir I presented the dogma with greater care and attention to Muslim sensitivities. I added surveys of developments in Christian theology, philosophy and spirituality to coordinate with similar courses the students were simultaneously taking on parallel Islamic themes.

The third year I was invited by Selcuk University in Konya, where I gave a semester course of Introduction to Christian theology. The following year I was unable to offer a full-semester course, but I returned to Turkey to give a series of lectures in Ankara, at Erciyes University in Kayseri, and at Marmara University in Istanbul.

Urfa

Most recently, in 2000 and 2003, I lectured at Harran University in Urfa in Eastern Anatolia. Modern Urfa is a fascinating city in that it is the crossroads of three great Middle Eastern civilizations: the city is one-third Turkish, one-third Arab, and one-third Kurdish. Ancient Urfa is also interesting. It is one of the traditional locations of the birthplace of Abraham and the nearby ruins of Harran are associated in the Bible with Abraham and his family. The cave in which, according to ancient Jewish and Islamic traditions, the child Abraham was hidden from the tyrant Nimrod, is a much-revered pilgrimage site.

I found the atmosphere very different from what I had known many years before in Ankara. There were virtually no students who sought to engage in harsh polemics. A great shift in atmosphere seems to have occurred since 1986, in that it is no longer a novelty to have a Christian professor teaching Christian theology. Moreover, in Urfa I discovered that many of the students’ questions concerned issues of contemporary Europe, rather than the text-based questions raised in the first years of my teaching. The widespread availability of internet with its access to broad realms of information is clearly a factor in the changing mentality of the students.

Spiritual exchange

The students at the Theology Faculties were not interested simply in an intellectual presentation of Christian faith but, as their questions indicated, they wanted to know about Christians’ interior life of faith before God. How do Christians pray? Who is Jesus Christ for you personally? How can you know someone who died almost 2000 years ago? What does it mean that Christians claim to encounter Christ in the sacramental life of the Church? Is it true that Christians only pray once a week? As an unmarried priest, don’t you find your life unnatural? You belong to a religious order (tarekat); why did you choose this life? How does one become a member? What do you do during your time of probation (novitiate)? What are the vows or promises you make? Through the students’ questions, I felt it important to introduce them through the course to the great figures of the history of Christian spirituality.

In Ankara and Konya, some Muslims who were interested in the interior life of believers had regular meetings to share their religious experiences. Some were connected with Sufi orders, others were not. I received several invitations to meet with them, and we discussed many issues connected with prayer and devotion, and the love of God as it is experienced by religious believers. With these people, we all found it enriching to compare the methods and types of prayer in Christianity and Islam.

The teacher is taught

I should not give the impression that the imparting of knowledge and the intellectual and spiritual growth were a one-way street, that I was giving and the students receiving. I learned much from my colleagues on the faculty and the students. The willingness to spend time and energy on making me, a foreigner, feel at home in Turkey were beyond anything I had known in Europe or North America. The openness of the teaching staff in arranging a faculty seminar on Christian-Muslim themes showed an intellectual commitment and curiosity that continually surprised me.

More importantly, I learned much from being integrated into the rhythms of the Islamic life cycle. During my stay, several of the graduate students went through the complex and subtle process of betrothal and marriage, an activity that engaged both families as well as the staff of the Theological Faculty. I came to see that this lengthy and involved procedure laid a strong basis for a sound marriage. Once I was invited when a family accompanied, with prayers and readings from the Qur’an, a grandparent at the moment of death. Living among committed Muslims during the fasting month of Ramadan, breaking the fast with them after sunset, rising in the early hours before dawn, taught me the sense of communal solidarity that is reinforced in the time of Ramadan.

Ref.: Text from the Author. Given at the SEDOS Seminar, May 2003.

〔 source from " SEDOS ( Service of Documentation and Studies ) "〕