THOUGHT FOR THE DAY - 28th November 2007

The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool

When Gillian Gibbons left Liverpool in July to teach in Sudan she had no idea she’d become the centre of an international incident. Here in Liverpool she’d taught in one of our Church Schools. Since her under arrest in Khartoum she’s filled our newspapers for allegedly allowing children to name a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. For her, an innocent act; for others deeply offensive. If found guilty she could face punishment of 40 lashes, 6 months in prison or a fine. This episode shows that although the media have shrunk the earth into a global village, we’re still a planet of many cultures, where in spite of a myriad satellite dishes we can continue to live poles apart in different worlds.

It’s the sentence of 40 lashes that jolts us, making us realise the chasm between two cultures, where one person’s joke can be another person’s insult. All this came home to me when I was debating at the Oxford Union. No, not with David Irving and Nick Griffin but last year with Jyllands-Poston the publisher of the Danish cartoons that had mocked Mohammed. The motion was ‘This House believes that freedom of speech should be moderated by respect for religion’. But the students were in no mood to make any concessions to religion and the motion was duly defeated. Freedom of speech was that day’s moral absolute.

The debate highlighted the difference between two cultures. It’s not that religion isn’t important in the West. But it has to fight for its place alongside other competing ideologies; sometimes it’s admired, other times it might be challenged or even ridiculed. In the Muslim world religion occupies a very different place.

Not so long ago I did a course on Islamic Theology at Oxford University. The lecturer a Muslim convert surprised us all by his opening remarks: ‘There is’ he said, ‘no such thing as Muslim theology!’ By this I understood him to mean that God was beyond discussion by mere mortals. To think that we could sit around debating him was demeaning and almost blasphemous. And I have to confess that when I hear myself and other Christians talking theology I do sometimes wonder what sort of incredulous smile might be creasing the face of God!

But as for Gillian Gibbons her plight is that she has strayed innocently from one world into another, from one faith into another. The one golden thread between the two is the common belief in God’s compassion and that’s why the religious leaders here in Liverpool, both Muslim and Christian have appealed to the Sudanese government in the name of God most merciful to set her free.