John Roughan: Deafening silence on the bombings in Bali

A couple of weeks ago our best known Muslim, Ahmed Zaoui, was invited to Auckland University to explain the essential goodness of Islam. He duly prepared a speech that quoted copiously from the Koran and the life of the prophet to show that it is fundamentally a creed of tolerance and peace.

I have no doubt he was heard with respectful attention by liberal-minded people who would run a mile, quite understandably, from a similar exposition on Christianity.

Now, I may have missed something, but I haven't seen or heard a word from Mr Zaoui about the tragedy in Bali last weekend. Probably no media have approached him - we are polite these days - but I would have thought he might have taken the initiative at a time like this.

After all, he is not keeping his head down while he awaits the next phase of his bid for refugee status. He went on stage with Dave Dobbyn at the New Zealand Music Awards on Wednesday night and helped him sing a song called Welcome Home, which won Dobbyn the Songwriter of the Year Award.

The only reason that Mr Zaoui has not come forward of his own accord about the latest bloodbath must be that he has nothing new to say about it. Had we approached him he would no doubt have repeated the message that the perpetrators are misrepresenting the truth of Islam and the media who report their affiliation are perpetrating a slur on a great religion.

We have all heard this enough and have taken it to heart. So much so that I had to catch myself on Sunday night when we briefly debated whether to use "Jemaah Islamiyah" or "Islamic radicals" in a front page heading. Properly, we went for the phrase that would be more widely understood but there should have been no question.

Murderous sects such as Jemaah Islamiyah are Islamic in the same way that the Destiny Church is Christian. They may inhabit an outer fringe of the faith but the religion cannot really disown them and at a certain point it should accept some moral responsibility for them.

Every time another outrage is committed in the name of Islam, I try to imagine what would happen if something on this scale was occurring within Christianity.

Suppose radical Christians had an active political following a good deal larger than the 0.6 per cent the Destiny Church had to its name when the final results of the general election were posted last Saturday. And suppose those active young political adherents were given to deeds a good deal more terrifying than the chants and haka Destiny's people performed in their march on Parliament some time ago.

Suppose that for the sake of some demented crusade to restore God-fearing government to all the world, militant Christians were detonating car-bombs outside embassies, hijacking airliners and flying them into buildings, walking into crowded nightclubs and restaurants with their bodies wired to explode in the vicinity of as many people as possible.

Don't you think that at a certain point, the world's mainstream Christian denominations would feel an urgency to do something?

Christianity is as divided as Islam, possibly more so. But I have no doubt that if suicide bombing had become a heroic and heavenly cause among the young of the Christian world, church leaders would have been meeting long ago and trying by now to combat the trend with all the religious and civil authority they could muster.

Maybe responsible forces within Islam are trying to do something that we don't read about. But I think we would be aware of it, if only because Muslim self-criticism would be reported in some sections of the Western media with glee.

And that, I suppose, is the reason nothing seems to be happening. Islam is not secure enough to tackle openly the cancer cells it plainly contains.

For that reason the analogy with Christianity is probably unfair. The world's most dominant countries are Christian in a cultural, if not strongly religious, sense.

Listen to a moderate Muslim speak and you form the impression the power and influence of the West is as threatening and resented as it is to the militants. That is cold comfort if it explains the lack of an organised Islamic response to terrorism, because it would also suggest the motive, if not the method, of terror enjoys mainstream sympathy.

Islam, like Christianity, is a monotheistic religion which did not tolerate the survival of pre-existing beliefs and practices in the places it colonised. Having displaced their older cultures it has left non-Arabic places like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia inordinately dependent on their religion for their cultural and national identity, as Europeans did until just a few centuries ago.

Bali, as many New Zealanders know, is an island of cultural security in the middle of this seething Islamic sea. Somehow its old and thriving Hindu-Buddhist heritage escaped the conversion of Indonesia but it is not escaping the jihad now. The tourism attracted by its cultural security has made it an irresistible target for Java's crazed.

Previously they planted bombs, now they are wearing them.

Murderous matrydom has come closer to home and we need to hear resident Muslims condemn it.