FOREWORD

by Kenneth Cragg

'By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept' is hardly how to think of Muslims in the waters (from the sky) of Bradford or amid the fogs of Wolverhampton. They are a resilient folk, with a strong sense of community, for the most part hard-working, thrifty and law-abiding. Yet there is point in beginning a preface to this study with the psalmist's words. He, we know, was referring to the bitterness of exile away from the land of his fathers and the traditions of his worship. He found it impossible to 'sing the Lord's song in a strange land'. By classic Islamic norms there is something like 'exile' in not being inside Dar al-Islam, the realm of Islam'.

Thus there is something exilic about the Muslim condition in Bradford or Birmingham. To be sure, here can be a Muslim Lord Mayor, as last decade in Bradford. But the feel of 'exile' underlies all else, however rooted, though the Muslims are with three generations of retrospect. It is other faiths who are supposed to be 'minorities', dhimmis, confined to their

‘religious rites', and rights, but having no say as equal citizens.

Full citizenship is, indeed, enjoyed by Muslim communities in English towns and cities, but the minority condition otherwise has to evoke self-study and re-orientation for which the majority community should find lively sympathy. For it must send Muslims back to their essential roots, adjusting to being a religion - a vocation and a principle. The Islamic Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, with its lively Quarterly journal, is set to do that with exploratory studies in the various aspects of minority destiny.

It needs little imagination to gauge what these are. How do we hold in one the authority of a traditional faith and the necessity to acknowledge the plurality of beliefs around us? How does our God-awareness grapple with what is positive and what is negative in the secularity around us? How do we cope with the attitudes of intellectual liberalism when we are schooled to the perhaps, unexamined authority of our one. final Qur'an? How do we pass from dismay, passive acquiescence, or bitter hostility, to a wise evaluation of what confronts us? So much in secularity offends the social, family and marital ideology of Muslim life. The issues can bring strain between the generations, with dangers of emotional tension, if not division, between elders strong on traditional inter-family matches, and the young bent on their own responsibility like their peers with whom they are at school. Should Muslims cultivate a sort of ghetto mind and shield it by mosque education? Can their set of mind consent to belong, without forfeiting all that is compatible with doing so and ordering wisely what is not?

The questions multiply. What of the Christian part in their human complexity? It is easy for Muslims, with their erstwhile triumphalism to think that Christianity is effete, a faith that 'has shot its bolt', or to believe themselves immune from the factors in technology and modernism' that have beset the West. We all need patience, discernment and wise neighbourliness in a perplexing situation. Those qualities presuppose every Christian effort to understand Islam, to penetrate the Qur'an studiously, and to appreciate how and why Muslims react. It will be wisest if we can identify the positive features of Islamic doctrine - the implications of the unity of God. the sense of the trust of creation, the high dignity of human creaturehood, the awareness of nature as entrusted to our grateful and perceptive care, and the priority of praise and gratitude in our sense of being alive. For all these are genuinely Qur'anic. It will be well also to recognise the common truth that - as the Qur'an puts it - 'there can be no compulsion in religion'. (Surah 2.256) So that, in minority condition, Muslims may readily forgo, rather than regretfully miss, that wielding of power which so strongly characterised their founding in the 7th century.

Perhaps, then, to revert to Psalm 137, we can hope that the harps can be taken down from the trees and Muslims free themselves from the inhibitions and perplexities of the exilic condition, as those who have found and rightly possessed a second home. And let those of us who 'name the name of Christ' and kneel by His Cross sustain a lively commendation of that faith as being at the heart of that home's story.