Rain and the Rhinoceros

The right of liberal democratic states to defend themselves with nuclear weapons – and this seems to be accepted by the international community – is in effect an affirmation that suicidal war can be legitimate. This leads me to the thought that the suicide bomber belongs in an important sense to a modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of a free political community: To save the nation (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.

Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 63.

In his provocative article, “Communion and Otherness,”1 Zizioulas states not without a tone of lament, “The world at this moment is dominated by Western culture.”2 In a time when Western political and economic systems dominate and exert themselves on the world, Orthodoxy cannot afford to become merely another “‘exotic’ religion offering refuge to those seeking mystical and other extraordinary experiences.”3 Instead, following the ancient church as a model, Orthodoxy, especially those members living in the West, must engage and strive to transform culture. Zizioulas urges the Orthodox church “to relate tradition to the problems of modern Western man, which are rapidly becoming the problems of humanity in its global dimension.”4 The individualism that is rooted in the “very foundations of this culture” regrettably views the happiness and rights of the individual so highly that it makes “protection from the other. . . a fundamental necessity.”5 As a result, “we are forced and even encouraged to consider the other as our enemy before we can treat him or her as our friend.”6 Acceptance of the other is always conditional on the basis that this other does not “threaten our privacy or insofar as he is useful for our individual happiness.”7In Zizioulas’ assessment the values and ideals of Western culture, heralded by the United States in particular, actually perpetuate fear of the other.

This essay is broken up into two parts. In the first section, we will make the case that the Bush administration with the help of the media8 has constructed a depersonalized and stereotyped Arab/Muslim other9 to justify a seemingly unending “war on terrorism.” In the second section, we will undertake a study of Zizioulas’ theology of the Eucharist to support our thesis that the Eucharist enacts a vision that resists all methods of depersonalization and stereotyping by opening up a set of human relations in which the other is affirmed as particular and unique. Our hope in this paper is to offer a small contribution to the recent retrieval of the social meaning of Christian worship.10

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1. The article first appeared in John Zizioulas, “Communion and Otherness,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 38.04, pp. 347-361. A revised form of the essay appears as the introduction of Zizioulas’ recent publication Communion & Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 1-12.
2. Zizioulas, “Communion and Otherness,” 348.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid
5..Ibid., 349.
6. Ibid., 349.
7. Ibid., 349.
8. I am fully aware that the term, “the media,” carries some ambiguity. By media, I mean to refer specifically to mainstream corporate news outlets, such as CNN or The New York Times. Analysis of other forms of media, such as the portrayal of Arab/Muslims in film, literature, theatre, photography, and art is beyond the scope of this paper and has been discussed elsewhere. See, for instance, Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in film (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
9. Of course, the Western construction of an Arab/Muslim other is hardly a recent phenomenon. Here, I take Edward Said’s basic thesis for granted. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon books, 1978. See also, Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Said’s basic thesis is that knowledge of the East in Western imagination has been generated primarily by constructs that juxtapose the East as the antithesis of the West.
10. See especially William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2003) and Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998); Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells eds., The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

A Swedish newspaper has published a cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad in a negative light, to say the least.  Although the Swedish government has announced that it regrets any pain caused by the publication of the cartoon, the Swedish artist does not feel much regret. If you recall, last year thousands of Muslims took to the streets in response to a cartoon of Muhammad that was printed in a Danish newspaper.

I was listening to the BBC last night and they reported an artist defending the publication of the cartoon. The artist is reported to have said that “Muslims in Sweden need to decide whether they are Muslims or Swedes.” I think this raises an important point. Indeed, Muslims do need to decide to whom they swear allegiance. In the same way that Christians need to decide whether they swear allegiance to America or Jesus

Of course, many people in the West, Christians included, do not seem to understand the problem at all. For most Christians living under democratic regimes the question that we would have to choose between allegiance to the state and allegiance to Jesus is quite foreign. After all, we have “religious freedom.” Our religious freedom, however, is only good so long as we keep it private. It is this privatization of faith to which we have become so accustomed. This is precisely the reason why it is difficult for many Western Christians to understand why Muslims would have a problem “integrating” into democratic societies. In much of the Muslim world there is no separation between private and public life. Faith is a public thing and when faith conflicts with the state it is not at all obvious that one should obey the state in these scenarios.

The cartoon of the prophet is offensive to Muslims because they take the sacred seriously. Indeed, in the mind of the Muslim freedom of expression has its limits. Our inability to comprehend why Muslims would react the way they have simply shows how deeply our faith has been privatized by the modern nation-state.