IS ISLAM ABLE TO APOLOGIZE?
Julia Duin

Washington Times
is-islam-able-to-apologize/
April 23 2009

Friday is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorating the mass
killings of up to 1.5 million Christian Armenians overseen by the
Muslim leaders of the Ottoman Empire starting in 1915.

With the centenary anniversary coming up in six years, this issue is
not going to fade away. President Obama handled the issue gingerly
and avoided calling the killing "genocide" during his recent visit
to Turkey, but some 1 million Armenian Americans – who helped to get
him elected last year – are happy to keep reminding Mr. Obama of his
campaign promise to call attention to the massacre.

"People are advising Turkey to recognize it and apologize on behalf
of their ancestors and be done with it," says Wadi Haddad, retired
professor of Islamic studies and Christian-Muslim relations at
Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. "The Armenians are not going to
ask for reparations."

What would contrition for the genocide look like from a secular
state based on a religious tradition – Islam – that does not practice
corporate repentance?

Muslim scholars tell me the holy month of Ramadan takes care of the
sins of the individual, but not those of a nation. There’s no concept
of national sin, which may be why the Shi’ite Iranians have never
apologized for their sacking of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

The concept of national repentance started with Jewish prophets
in the Hebrew Scriptures. Christians then ran with the idea, with
modern examples including President Lincoln’s 1863 call to a day of
national repentance and fasting. His idea lives on in the National
Day of Prayer on the first Thursday of each May.

Plus, Christians ranging from the late Pope John Paul II to bands of
evangelical Protestant missionaries have apologized for the excesses
of the Crusades. But what Islamic entity has apologized for the 300
years of conquest that provoked the Crusades?

"The idea of being sorry for what’s happened in the past is a Western
way of expressing things," Mr. Haddad says. "Nations elsewhere in
the world do not do this."

However, he added that his wife, Georgetown University professor Yvonne
Haddad, lost two Armenian Orthodox ancestors during the genocide.

"Individual Muslims can express regret or repentance, but I don’t
know what the appropriate institution would be to express Islamic
regret," Georgetown University Islamic history professor John Voll
told me. Christianity has corporate bodies representing its various
divisions, he added, but "in Islam, there is no corporate structure
that represents the umma [world Muslim community]."

Corporate repentance requires an acceptance of corporate guilt,
an idea that dates back to original sin.

"Islamic theological tradition does not involve a concept of original
sin," he said. "Muslims think Adam and Eve disobeyed God and were
expelled from the garden, but God did not curse them."

If the majority religion of Turkey does not have a concept of common
guilt, can Turks apologize for their past?

"If there is an expression of regret, it’d be from the Turkish
parliament," he said. "But one of the important dimensions of Kamalist
Turkey is that it represents an institutional break with the Ottoman
Empire. A lot of Turks would say the parliament cannot speak for the
actions of the old empire."