The theological incompatibilities between Christianity and Islam are, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, fundamental and irresolvable. But theology does not exist in a vacuum. It generates law, shapes social order, and determines how communities organise themselves and relate to those outside their boundaries. The question of how Islam has historically treated — and how certain currents within Islam today propose to treat — those who do not share the Islamic faith is therefore not merely an academic theological question. It is a question with direct implications for the lives of Christians, Jews, and other minorities living in Muslim-majority societies, and for the values of pluralist democratic societies in which Muslims and non-Muslims live side by side.

This chapter examines three areas where classical Islamic law creates genuine tensions with the principles of human dignity, equal citizenship, and religious liberty that Western democratic societies regard as foundational: the status of non-Muslims under the dhimma system, the question of apostasy and freedom of conscience, and the treatment of women under classical Islamic jurisprudence.

The same caveats that applied in the previous chapter apply here with equal force. Classical Islamic law is not monolithic. There is enormous diversity of opinion and practice within the Muslim world. The majority of Muslims living in Western democracies do not seek the application of classical Islamic law in its full form to their fellow citizens. Muslim reform movements are engaged in serious and sustained argument for interpretations of Islamic law that are compatible with human rights and equal citizenship. All of this must be held alongside the honest assessment of what the classical tradition actually teaches and the recognition that in the Western world, Muslim communities occasionally do call for implementation of Shariah Law in substitution of the Western legal systems.

I. Sharia: What the Word Actually Means

Few words in contemporary public discourse generate more fear and misunderstanding than sharia. In Western media and political debate, it is often used as a synonym for brutal corporal punishment — flogging, amputation, stoning — and associated exclusively with the most extreme applications of Islamic law in states like Saudi Arabia or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. This usage, while not entirely without basis, is a serious distortion of what sharia actually encompasses.

The Arabic word sharia means, literally, the path to the watering hole — the way to the source of life. As a theological concept, it refers to the totality of God's guidance for human life: the moral, ritual, social, and legal framework through which Muslims seek to live in accordance with God's will. It encompasses everything from the five pillars of Islamic practice — prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, and the confession of faith — to detailed rules about commercial transactions, family law, criminal penalties, and the conduct of warfare. [85]

The actual legal content of sharia is not a single fixed code. It is the product of centuries of scholarly interpretation and jurisprudential development across the four major Sunni legal schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali) and the Shi'a Ja'fari school, each of which arrived at different rulings on many questions. The study of sharia is the study of a living, contested, and internally complex tradition of legal reasoning — not a monolithic system with one answer to every question. [86]

With that important qualification in place, it remains true that classical sharia — as developed in the great centres of Islamic learning across the centuries — contains elements that are in direct tension with contemporary human rights frameworks. Three of these are particularly significant for the question of Christian-Muslim relations.

II. The Dhimma: Protected but Subordinate

The dhimma is the classical Islamic legal institution governing the status of non-Muslims — specifically Jews and Christians, the People of the Book — living under Islamic governance. The word means protection or covenant of protection, and the system it describes was, in its historical context, a significant step toward the formal protection of religious minorities — certainly more generous than what most Christian-majority medieval states offered to their Jewish and Muslim minorities.

Under the dhimma system, non-Muslims were granted aman — security of life, property, and religious practice — in exchange for certain obligations. The most significant of these obligations was the payment of the jizya — a poll tax levied specifically on non-Muslim adult males as a sign of their acceptance of Muslim political sovereignty. In exchange, they were exempted from military service and permitted to practise their religion, maintain their places of worship, and administer their internal community affairs according to their own laws. [87]

The Quranic basis for the jizya is Surah 9:29: “fight the People of the Book until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled”. The phrase “while they are humbled” — or, in some translations, “in a state of subjection” — is theologically significant. It indicates that the jizya is not merely a revenue measure but a sign of the dhimmi's acknowledgement of Muslim sovereignty and their acceptance of a subordinate social position.

The nineteenth-century Quranic scholar Sheikh Ahmed as-Sawi was explicit: “the purpose of the jizya was for non-Muslims to show they were humble and obedient to the judgements of Islam”. [88]

Beyond the jizya, the dhimma system imposed various additional restrictions on non-Muslims that varied across time, place, and legal school. These typically included prohibitions on: building new places of worship or repairing existing ones without permission; riding horses (a status symbol reserved for Muslims); bearing arms; holding certain public offices; and displaying their religious symbols publicly. Dhimmis were often required to wear distinctive clothing. In some periods and places they were forbidden to build houses taller than those of Muslims. The call to prayer - for example ringing church bells - could not be made publicly. [89]

It is important to acknowledge that the actual application of these restrictions varied across Islamic history. The Abbasid caliphate, the Fatimid caliphate, and the Ottoman millet system all offered non-Muslim minorities periods of considerable tolerance and even flourishing. The greatest era of Jewish intellectual life in the medieval world occurred under Muslim rule in Iberia, presently Portugal and Spain. The dhimma system, at its best, produced communities of remarkable cultural richness and inter-religious interaction.

But the system, even at its best, was not one of equal citizenship. It was one of protected subordination. Non-Muslims were permitted to exist and to practise their religion — but as subjects, not as equals.

The distinction is fundamental, and it matters for the question of whether classical Islamic governance is compatible with the principles of equal citizenship and religious liberty that modern democratic societies regard as non-negotiable.

III. The Jizya and Human Dignity

The specific question of the jizya deserves particular attention because it illuminates the theological foundations of the dhimma system's incompatibility with modern human rights frameworks.

In classical Islamic jurisprudence, the jizya is not simply a tax. It is a theologically freighted institution that expresses the correct ordering of the relationship between Islam and other religions under Islamic governance. Non-Muslims pay it as an acknowledgement that Islam is the true religion and that they are living under God's sovereign order as administered by the Muslim community. Their payment is, in the words of the classical tradition, a sign of their submission and humiliation.

The classical scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya specified a detailed procedure for the collection of the jizya designed to communicate and reinforce the dhimmi's subordinate status:

1. The collector should be seated,

2. The dhimmi should stand;

3. The dhimmi's payment should be made in person;

4. The collector should seize the dhimmi by the collar and say “Pay, O dhimmi”;

5. The dhimmi should be reminded that the jizya is an alternative to death. [90]

This procedure was not always followed in practice, and many jurists disagreed with its details. But its existence in the tradition illustrates what the jizya was understood to signify.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 1, states: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief (1981) specifies that no one shall be subject to discrimination on the grounds of religion. The jizya system, as classically understood and applied, is structurally incompatible with both of these principles — not merely in its practical details but in its theological foundations.

This is not said to condemn Islam or Muslims, most of whom do not seek the reinstatement of the jizya system in contemporary societies. It is said because the theological foundations of the dhimma are real, they are grounded in Quranic text, and they continue to shape the thinking of significant segments of Islamic opinion worldwide. Where the classical framework prevails — whether in law or in social attitude — the equal dignity of non-Muslims is not acknowledged. And it is forcibly denied. [91]

IV. Apostasy and Freedom of Conscience

The question of apostasy — leaving Islam — is one of the most acute points of tension between classical Islamic law and the modern human rights principle of freedom of religion and conscience. The Quran itself is more ambiguous on the subject than the hadith literature, containing the famous declaration “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) alongside verses that speak of God's judgement on those who turn back from faith. But the hadith — the recorded sayings and actions of the Prophet — and the classical jurisprudence tradition that drew on them are considerably more explicit. [92]

The most frequently cited hadith on apostasy states:

“Whoever changes his religion, kill him”

This hadith, found in the collections of Al-Bukhari and others, was interpreted by the classical legal schools as establishing the death penalty for apostasy from Islam — for both men (immediately) and women (after imprisonment and repeated opportunities to recant, in the majority position). [93]

All four major Sunni legal schools — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali — as well as the Shi'a Ja'fari school, prescribed death for apostasy in their classical formulations, though with significant variations in procedure, the definition of apostasy, and the conditions for repentance. This is not a minority opinion within classical Islamic jurisprudence. It is the mainstream position.

The practical application of this ruling has varied enormously across Islamic history and continues to vary today. Many Muslim-majority countries do not formally prescribe the death penalty for apostasy in their civil law. But social consequences for apostasy — family ostracism, community pressure, loss of employment, and in some contexts physical violence — remain common across much of the Muslim world. In countries where classical sharia is applied as state law, the death penalty for apostasy remains on the books.

The Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), represents Christianity's most authoritative modern statement on freedom of conscience. It declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. It affirms that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to their beliefs, and that this right continues even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth. [94]

The classical Islamic doctrine of apostasy is in direct contradiction to this principle. It does not merely impose social pressure or community disapproval on those who leave Islam — it prescribes their death. The incompatibility with the Christian understanding of human dignity and freedom of conscience could not be more complete.

Here again, it is essential to note the reform voices. Contemporary Muslim scholars including An-Na'im, Mohammed Arkoun, and many others have argued forcefully that the death penalty for apostasy has no genuine Quranic basis, that the hadith on which it rests are of questionable authenticity or limited application, and that the principle of “There is no compulsion in religion” should be understood as the Quran's definitive position on freedom of conscience. These arguments are serious and deserve engagement. But they remain contested within the tradition, and the classical draconian position retains enormous authority. [95]

V. Blasphemy and the Limits of Speech

Closely related to the apostasy question is the question of blasphemy — the utterance of statements deemed insulting or disrespectful to God, the Prophet Muhammad, or Islam. Classical Islamic law prescribed severe penalties for blasphemy, including death for the most serious offences. Many Muslim-majority countries retain blasphemy laws today, and they are applied with considerable frequency — disproportionately against religious minorities, including Christians. [96]

Pakistan's blasphemy laws — among the most severe in the world — have been used repeatedly to prosecute Christians on the basis of accusations that are often motivated by personal disputes rather than genuine religious concern. The cases of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who spent years on death row following a blasphemy conviction before being acquitted in 2018, and of numerous other Pakistani Christians, illustrate the devastating human consequences of these laws for minority communities.

The freedom to speak, to question, to criticise, and yes, to disagree with religious claims — including the claims of Islam — is a foundational value of open democratic societies and of authentic intellectual and spiritual life. Christianity itself has had to learn, painfully and slowly, that the suppression of dissent and the punishment of heresy are incompatible with the dignity of the human person and with the nature of genuine faith. The Church's own history of inquisitions and religious persecution is a cautionary tale about what happens when religious authority is combined with coercive power. Thus, genuine concern is justified regarding what exactly would Islamic blasphemy laws would look like in Western cultures, if Islam were ever to become prevalent and unchecked in the Western world.

Classical Islamic blasphemy law represents the same error — the confusion of genuine religious devotion with enforced conformity. Authentic faith cannot be compelled. God is not honoured by the silencing of those who question his existence or dispute his attributes. These are points that the Christian tradition has arrived at through hard experience, and they are points that the Islamic tradition is only beginning, in many of its expressions, to engage seriously.

VI. Women Under Classical Islamic Law

The question of women's status under classical Islamic law is one of the most contested and most significant in contemporary Muslim-Western relations. It is also one that requires particular care — because it is an area where the gap between the diversity of Muslim women's actual experience and the Western caricature of uniformly oppressed Muslim womanhood is large and consequential.

Muslim women are not a monolithic group. They include heads of state, Nobel laureates, Supreme Court justices, leading academics, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists. The diversity of their experience across fifty-plus Muslim-majority countries, and within Muslim minority communities in the West, is enormous. Any account of women under Islamic law that ignores this diversity is not an honest account.

With that firmly stated, there are specific provisions of classical Islamic jurisprudence regarding women which are in direct tension with the principle of equal human dignity and the legal equality of men and women that Western democratic societies regard as fundamental.

Surah 4:34 is the most controversial verse in the Quran on the subject of gender. It states — in most translations — that men are the guardians or protectors of women, that righteous women are obedient, and that in cases of marital discord a husband may: admonish his wife, then separate from her in bed, and then strike her. The Arabic word used, idrib, is a form of the verb daraba, which has a range of meanings including to strike, to beat, to tap, to set an example, and even — in some contemporary rereadings — to go away from. [97]

Classical Islamic jurisprudence overwhelmingly interpreted this verse as permitting physical discipline of a wife in cases of serious disobedience — subject to conditions that attempted to limit its severity: the striking must not leave marks, must not be to the face, must not be intended to injure. Contemporary Muslim scholars are deeply divided on the verse. Some argue for the most restrictive possible interpretation: a symbolic tap with a small stick, or even no physical contact at all. Others, including some prominent figures in contemporary Islamic institutions, continue to defend a broader application.

The verse cannot be made to disappear by creative translation, and it should not be. What it requires is honest acknowledgement, alongside the equally honest acknowledgement that Muslim women themselves — scholars, theologians, and activists — are among the most vigorous critics of patriarchal interpretations of this and related texts, and that they are making serious arguments from within the Islamic tradition for readings that honour the equal dignity of women.

• Beyond Surah 4:34, classical Islamic law contains a range of provisions regarding women that reflect the social norms of seventh-century Arabia rather than the principle of equal human dignity:

• inheritance rules that award daughters half the share of sons (4:11);

• testimony rules that count a woman's evidence as worth half a man's in certain contexts (2:282);

• marriage and divorce rules that historically gave men unilateral divorce rights (talaq) while requiring women to pursue judicial proceedings; and

• rules of guardianship (wilaya) that require a male guardian's consent for certain legal transactions. [98]

Many Muslim-majority countries have reformed these provisions substantially in their civil law. Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia, and others have enacted family law reforms that bring their legal systems much closer to international human rights standards, drawing on Islamic jurisprudential resources to argue for these reforms from within the tradition. These developments are significant and should be acknowledged.

But the classical positions remain normative in many contexts, and they remain the teaching of most major Islamic institutions. Where they prevail, they create conditions of legal inequality, emotional and psychological damage, and physical harm danger for women - and often even female children - conditions which are incompatible with the principle of equal human dignity.

In the United Kingdom alone, several cases gained prominence within the Press and the Public Opinion sphere:

1. Sara Sharif (2023): In one of the most widely reported recent cases, 10-year-old Sara Sharif was found dead in her Woking home with dozens of injuries, including "probable human bite marks," burn marks from a domestic iron, and spinal fractures. Her father, Urfan Sharif, and stepmother, Beinash Batool, were found guilty of her murder after it was revealed she was subject to two years of torture, including being beaten with a cricket bat and a metal pole.

2. Jasmin Chowdhury (2012): Solicitor Mohammed Rahman beat his wife, Jasmin Chowdhury, 32, to death in their London home. Rahman had habitually treated her violently over several years, leading to a brain injury that caused her death. He sent a text message to her sister to "remove her dead body".

3. Suma Begum (2023): Aminan Rahman was convicted of murdering his wife, Suma Begum, 24, by strangling her in a "jealous rage" while on a video call with her boyfriend. He then placed her body in a suitcase and threw it into the River Lea in London.

4. Kulsuma Akter (2024): Habibur Masum was convicted of the "callous" murder of his estranged wife, Kulsuma Akter, who was stabbed multiple times in a public street in Bradford while with her baby. She had been living in a safe house to escape his domestic abuse.

5. Banaz Mahmod (2006): While primarily recognized as an "honour killing," 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod was tortured and strangled by two men, Mohammed Saleh Ali and Omar Hussain, acting on behalf of her father and uncle. She was beaten and raped for two hours before her death because she left an abusive arranged marriage.

6. Mashal Ilyas (2024): In May 2025, Begum was found guilty of murdering his daughter-in-law, Mashal Ilyas, by asphyxiation. She was found with multiple facial injuries, bruises, and asphyxiation marks after being targeted by her father-in-law following domestic tensions.

These cases are often highlighted by organizations such as the Muslim Women’s Network UK (https://www.mwnuk.co.uk) and Karma Nirvana (https://karmanirvana.org.uk), which campaign against domestic violence and honour-based abuse.

VII. The Christian Parallel and the Difference

Christians engaging with these questions from a position of moral superiority would be making a hypocritical mistake. The Christian tradition's own record on the equal dignity of women, the rights of religious minorities, and freedom of conscience is not one of unbroken enlightenment.

The Church spent centuries defending the persecution of heretics and the forced conversion of Jews. It legitimised slavery. It denied women positions of leadership and full civic participation on the basis of theological arguments drawn from the same Pauline letters that informed its soteriology. The treatment of religious minorities in Christian-majority medieval Europe — pogroms, forced baptisms, expulsions — was arguably worse than the treatment of religious minorities under the classical Muslim dhimma system.

These are not peripheral footnotes to Christian history. They are part of it, and they require honest acknowledgment. Any Christian who addresses the question of women or minorities under Islamic law without this acknowledgment is engaging in a form of selective memory that undermines their credibility and their charity.

The relevant difference is not that Christianity had a better record. It is that the Christian tradition — through a long, painful, and incomplete process of theological development, prophetic challenge, and sometimes violent internal conflict — has arrived at formal institutional positions on human dignity, religious liberty, and gender equality that are broadly consistent with the modern human rights framework. Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom, Gaudium et Spes on human dignity, and the broad consensus of mainstream Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox theology on these questions represent genuine developments of the tradition in a direction consistent with universal human rights. These developments were not always quick or willing — but they occurred. [99]

The question for Islam is not whether such development is possible. It clearly is — the reform movements examined in the previous chapter demonstrate this. The question is whether it has occurred at the institutional level, and whether it is occurring with sufficient breadth and depth to ensure that the formal commitments of Islamic governance and law in Muslim-majority societies are compatible with the equal dignity of all their citizens.

The honest answer, across much of the Muslim world, is not yet. This is not a permanent verdict. It is an observation about where much of the tradition currently stands — and it is an observation that the most serious and honest Muslim scholars would themselves endorse.

VIII. The Christians in Muslim-Majority Countries

The abstract theological and legal questions of this chapter have concrete consequences for real human lives — above all, for the lives of Christians living as minorities in Muslim-majority societies.

The global picture is sobering. According to the Pew Research Center and Open Doors International, Christians face significant levels of persecution, discrimination, or social hostility in the majority of Muslim-majority countries. In countries where classical sharia is applied as state law — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban — the public practice of Christianity is prohibited or severely restricted. In Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iraq, and Syria, Christian communities that have existed for two thousand years have faced violence, forced displacement, church burnings, and in some cases systematic elimination. [100]

The persecution of Christians in the Middle East — the region where Christianity was born, and where Christian communities have existed continuously since the apostolic age — is one of the most serious human rights crises of our time. The ancient churches of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt have seen their numbers decimated by a combination of state-sponsored discrimination, Islamist violence, and the social pressure generated by communities in which being a non-Muslim carries permanent social disadvantage.

Christians in the West are often unaware of the extent and severity of this persecution — partly because it receives less media attention than other human rights issues, and partly because the demands of interfaith dialogue and unjustified political correctness have sometimes created a reluctance to name it. This reluctance is not charitable. It is a form of abandonment.

Speaking clearly about the persecution of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority societies is not Islamophobia. It is basic pastoral and moral responsibility. It is what solidarity with the suffering demands. And it is entirely compatible with — indeed, it requires — an equally clear rejection of anti-Muslim prejudice, discrimination, and violence in Western societies.

IX. The Human Rights Question

The international human rights framework — rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and developed through subsequent treaties and conventions — represents humanity's most serious collective attempt to articulate the minimum conditions for human dignity across cultural and religious boundaries.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation's Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (1990) represents the most significant Muslim-majority-world engagement with this framework. It affirms many of the same values as the Universal Declaration — the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the right to justice — but conditions all rights on their compatibility with Sharia Law: “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia (Article 24). This qualification effectively subordinates universal human rights to Islamic religious law — which means that where the two conflict, sharia prevails. [101]

This is a coherent position from within the logic of Islamic theology — if sharia is God's revealed guidance for human life, then it must take precedence over any merely human framework, however well-intentioned. But it is precisely this logic that creates the tension with universal human rights. The principle that no religious law can override the equal dignity and basic rights of every human person is foundational to the modern human rights framework. The principle that God's law, as interpreted by Islamic jurisprudence, takes precedence over all human frameworks is equally foundational to classical Islamic political theology. These principles are, at the point of their conflict, irreconcilable.

Contemporary Muslim human rights thinkers — including An-Na'im, Amina Wadud, Irshad Manji, and many others — have argued that this tension is not irresolvable, and that the Islamic tradition contains the resources to arrive at a genuine, theologically grounded commitment to universal human rights rather than a conditional endorsement subject to religious override. Their arguments deserve serious engagement, and the development they are calling for is genuinely possible. But it has not yet been achieved at the level of institutional Islamic consensus.

X. Speaking Truthfully, Acting Charitably

This chapter has covered difficult ground. It has named real tensions — between classical Islamic law and the principles of equal citizenship, religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and gender equality — that cannot be dissolved by goodwill or diplomatic language. These tensions are real, they are grounded in texts and traditions that have genuine authority within Islam, and their consequences for real human beings — especially religious minorities and women living under regimes that apply classical sharia — are serious and sometimes devastating.

None of this means that Christians should engage with their Muslim neighbours with suspicion, hostility, or condescension. Many Muslims living and working in Western democracies are not seeking to impose classical Sharia Law on their fellow citizens. They are seeking to live faithful lives within pluralist and diverse societies that respect their religious freedom — the same freedom that Christians claim for themselves. But it is also true that many Muslims wish for a Western world that is compliant with their Sharia vision.

What these tensions mean is that Christians should be honest — in public discourse, in dialogue, and in their own thinking — about the specific areas where classical Islamic law and the values of equal human dignity diverge. This honesty is not a form of hostility. It is a form of respect — the respect that takes the other tradition seriously enough to engage with it as it actually is, rather than as we might wish it to be. [102]

It also means that Christians should support — actively and visibly — the Muslim men and women who are working from within their own tradition for interpretations of Islamic law that honour the equal dignity of all human beings. These voices deserve amplification, not because they confirm what Western liberals want to hear, but because the arguments they are making are serious, grounded in genuine scholarship, and consequential for the shared future of Christian and Muslim communities in an increasingly interconnected world.

And it means that the Christian community has a specific responsibility to speak up for persecuted Christian minorities in Muslim-majority countries — not as a polemical move against Islam, but as a basic act of solidarity with brothers and sisters in Christ who are suffering, in many cases, simply because they bear the name of Jesus.

Summary

Classical Islamic law — Sharia Law, as developed across the major jurisprudential schools — contains provisions that are in direct tension with the modern principles of equal citizenship, religious liberty of all other non-Muslim faiths, and gender equality. The Dhimma system governed the status of non-Muslims under Islamic governance as protected but subordinate subjects, required to pay the Jizya poll tax as a sign of their humiliation under Islamic sovereignty. Classical jurisprudence prescribed the death penalty for apostasy from Islam in all four major Sunni legal schools. Blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries continue to be used against religious minorities, including Christians, with devastating consequences. Classical Islamic law regarding women — including the permission for physical punishment in Surah 4:34, unequal inheritance, testimony rules in Court proceedings, and discriminatory divorce rights — reflects social norms of seventh-century Arabia rather than the principle of equal human dignity. Christians must acknowledge their own tradition's failures in these areas before engaging with Islamic law. The relevant difference is not a superior Christian record but the fact that mainstream Christian institutional theology has, through a long and often painful process, arrived at formal positions on human dignity, religious liberty, and gender equality that are broadly compatible with universal human rights — a development that has not yet occurred across mainstream Islamic institutional theology, though serious reform movements are working toward it. The concrete consequences of these tensions for Christian minorities in Muslim-majority societies - and Western societies with Muslim populations - are severe, and Christian solidarity with persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ is a moral and pastoral duty that the demands of diplomatic interfaith dialogue and political correctness must not be allowed to suppress.