Over the weekend, as we remembered the attacks of ten years ago, I was presented with two views of Islam.
The first view is that of the Dutch Politician Geert Wilders, as delivered
in these two videos of
a speech he gave in the United States to an organization that calls itself the Florida Security Council. Each video lasts about 10 minutes. These were posted on another blog, but I don't remember which one it was.
The second is that of Dom Christian de Chergé, the prior of a Trappist monastery in Algeria who was beheaded along with six of his eight fellow monks by Islamist insurgents on May 21, 1996. He had written this Last Testament a couple of years earlier, when danger became apparent, but the monks decided to remain in their monastery. The following text is given, along with
a summary of the facts and an analysis and explanation here.
When an “A-DIEU” takes on a face.
If it should happen one day—and it could be today—
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church, my family,
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept that the Sole Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I ask them to pray for me—
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to be able to link this death with the many other deaths which
were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems, alas, to prevail in the world,
even in that which would strike me blindly.
I should like, when the time comes, to have the moment of lucidity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me
down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder.
To owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be,
would be too high a price to pay for what will, perhaps, be called, the “grace of
martyrdom,”
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism encourages.
It is too easy to salve one’s conscience
By identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the
extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: they are a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I
have received from it,
finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel,
learnt at my mother’s knee, my very first Church,
already in Algeria itself, in the respect of believing Muslims.
My death, clearly, will appear to justify
those who hastily judged me naïve, or idealistic:
“Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!”
But these people must realize that my avid curiosity will then be satisfied.
This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—
immerse my gaze in that of the Father,
and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them,
all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, and filled with the Gift of the Spirit,
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and to refashion the likeness, playfully delighting in the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that joy in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which sums up my I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you
were doing.
Yes, I also say this THANK YOU and this A-DIEU to you, in whom I see the face
of God.
And may we find each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God,
the Father of us both. Amen. In sha ‘Allah.
Algiers, December 1, 1993 – Tibhirine, January 1, 1994.
(As translated by Donald McGlynn, “Atlas Martyrs,” Cistercian Studies 32/2
(1997):188-89. )
The life and death of these monks became the subject of the movie "Of Gods and Men," which was released in 2010 to widespread acclaim. The text was read on Sunday at Mass by the priest during his homily on forgiveness.
I'm planning to add some thoughts of my own in another post.
