My organization, InfoFaith Communications (IFC), was founded with the idea of trying to do something to improve Jewish-Christian relations.

I should hasten to add that Islam isn’t entirely ignored at IFC, nor are Buddhism and Hinduism.

For instance, in writing Faith in a Hurting World last year, I reached into the subject of cosmology and, by an odd stroke, my research brought me into contact with Creation and Evolution of the Universe, written by Shaykh-ul-Islam Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a Pakistani, who now lives in Canada. (Westerners are more familiar with the variant spelling “sheik” for “shaykh.”)

Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri has been described as a “mega-Imam” and “a loud voice of the hitherto silent [Muslim] majority” by Dr. Muqtadar Khan, Director of  Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware. The “mega-Inman” has emerged as the most acclaimed voice of the Ummah, the worldwide Muslim community of believers.

The West first heard of him early in 2006 following the publication of a dozen editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten (The Jutland Post) caricaturizing Muhammad.  These cartoons, viewed throughout the Muslim world as blasphemous and Islamophobic, led to widespread mayhem.

Qadri jumped into the fray with a sober-minded article for Media Monitors Network titled “A Call to Prevent a Clash of Civilizations.” In it he stated, “I expect that common sense will prevail and responsible leaders will rise to the occasion and repair the damage that has been done to inter-civilization relations.”

At  a recent three-day retreat for young Muslims he organized in England, he was quoted as saying, “I feel it is my duty to save the younger generation from radicalization.”  Women especially appreciate Qadri’s emphasis on female equality, an issue most other Islamic scholars tend to shy away from.

He has faith that reason will eventually overcome extremism.

Qadri, critical of the religious fanaticism of  the Saudi Arabian Wahhabists (founded by Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century),  was the first widely known Muslim leader to condemn Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

This March, Qadri issued a 600-page  fatwa (religious judgement based on Islamic law) condemning terrorism outright and denouncing terrorists and suicide bombers as “unbelievers,” destined not for Paradise, but for hell.

In Creation and Evolution of the Universe, Qadri quotes a familiar hadith (one of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). Muhammad is asked what was the first creation. He answered, “Allah Almighty made light…before he made anything else, from the reflection of his own light.” How reminiscent of Genesis 1:3: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

Dr. Qadri, however, isn’t all sweetness and light. There is a dark side to this story — if you’re Jewish or a friend of Israel.

Although his work in general is admirable, I cannot, as a Jew, overlook the fact that the organization he founded, Minhaj-ul-Quran International, MQI for short, despite its avowed mission to “spread the message of peace,” is extremely and actively pro-Palestinian.

True, MQI has initiated interfaith dialogues with religious minorities in Pakistan, but not with Jews. No surprise.

At a January 2009 conference in Gaza organized by MQI and one of its branches, the Minhaj Welfare Foundation, its literature noted that this “was the first rare occasion when 170 million people of Pakistan expressed their solidarity with their Palestinian brethren.”

Qadri, who was not in attendance, but was piped in from Canada, accused “Israel of engaging in state terrorism on the hapless Palestinians.”  There’s more to his anti-Jewish diatribe, but this is all I can stand to have repeated.

Peace remains a will-o’-the-wisp, which in its original usage referred to a ghostly light sometimes caught sight of at night or twilight in the swampland of the mind, but always recedes when approached.

PostScript: For those readers interested in learning the basics of Islam, there is a 12-page chapter, “Islam 101,” in my book, Faith in a Hurting World.

Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.

Did Mark McGwire’s public confession represent genuine repentance, teshuvah in the Jewish tradition?

Or was it merely a ploy to help him get back into baseball as a hitting coach for his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals?

These were the thoughts on the mind of Conservative Rabbi Jason Miller of Detroit, Michigan, in a blog he posted on JewishBlogging.com (Jan.14, ‘10) concerning the retired baseball slugger’s admission a few days earlier that he had used performance-enhancing drugs while a player

McGwire said he took steroids for his health, not as a performance enhancer.

He added he never needed muscle-building chemicals to smack a cork-centered, 5-ounce orb wrapped tightly in cowhide out of the ball park.

Rob Rains, in his Mark McGwire: Home Run Hero (1998), found reliable witnesses who attested to young McGwire’s Ruthian clouts when he pitched and played first base at Damien High, an all-boys Catholic school in LaVerne, California.

Big Mac never fails to give thanks to “the man upstairs” for his talent.

His statement, in March 2005, before a congressional committee investigating steroid use in baseball was a public relations disaster for him.

All he would say was, “I’m not here to talk about the past,” and with those words he condemned himself to a life of purgatory on the base paths of earth.

He didn’t succeed in redeeming himself with his January 2010 confession.

Although he delivered a competent, tearful mea culpa  recitation, still lacking were humility, contrition, and a sense of guilt for the fraud he had perpetrated on the nation’s baseball fans — and on baseball’s hallowed record book.

But all-time home run king Hank Aaron went to bat for him: “He has my forgiveness.”

Writer Bud MacFarlane points out, in “How to Start a Real Prayer Life,” written for CatholicCity.com, that the top home run hitters — Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Bobby Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Maris, Sammy Sosa — are Catholic.

Well, following up on that tack, McGwire has made a public confession, but we do not know if he has been inside a confessional, where repentance begins with the sacrament of Penance (also called the sacrament of Reconciliation), the Catholic version of teshuvah.

Repentance is the repudiation of one’s sinfulness and a consequent turning to God for forgiveness. It entails making amends, that is, doing reparation.

Big Mac seeks his redemption. He has made substantial monetary contributions to Donald Hooton’s anti-steroids foundation, the Taylor Hooton Foundation.

Hooton’s 16-year-old son Taylor, a promising athlete, turned to anabolic steroids to bulk up, but developed a not-uncommon side effect, depression, and his life ended in suicide.

McGwire can become a modern-day, anti-drug Johnny Appleseed, explaining the dangers of steroid use to the youth of America as few can.

Whether the Baseball Writers Association of America will one day factor in repentance as a vital statistic to elect McGwire to Cooperstown is an open question.

PostScript: McGwire got the job as batting coach with the Cardinals at the start of the 2010 season, but not before the Missouri Senate had voted to remove his name from a stretch of I-70 in St. Louis in favor of its original name, Mark Twain Highway.

Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.