Why We Should Listen to Muslim Voices
By Joshua White on 01 October 2007
I want to reflect with you on why we are here this morning talking about our identities as Christians. And also why it is we felt that having a conversation with two American Muslims would have anything to contribute to that subject. (I’ve been to a lot of Christian conferences, and I recognize that most of them don’t devote their morning sessions to Muslim speakers.) I want to share with you why I believe it’s incumbent upon those of us who call ourselves evangelicals to hear their voices — to hear them for what they are, and for what they can tell us about who we are.
First, in order to allay some of their fears, and maybe yours, let me say up front:
- I’m not going to ask them to provide their expert hermeneutical insight into the most esoteric questions of the Christian scriptural tradition. (For that they can be grateful.)
- I’m also not going to ask them — in this forum — to critique the tenets of our faith; and nor is this a forum in which we are here to critique theirs.
- And I’m not going to ask them to dwell only on our points of commonality, avoiding talk of our differences, or the ways in which our communities sometimes come into conflict.
But I am asking them to share their voices, their experiences, and their opinions with us, because I think we have at least three good reasons to listen closely to Islamic voices on these questions of faith and identity which form the theme of this weekend’s forum.
First Impressions
I first encountered the Muslim world in a serious way when I spent about a year in Pakistan in 2005. It was a very strange arrangement: IGE had initiated a dialogue with the Chief Minister of the North-West Frontier Province, which is an ethnically Pashtun area of 20 million people bordering Afghanistan. It is a land from which the Taliban and al Qaeda emerged, but is also home to some of the most hospitable people I have ever met.
The Chief Minister was a representative of an Islamist political alliance that had swept into power in the 2002 elections with widespread popular support. We initiated this dialogue because we were concerned about the promulgation of a new sharia law in his province (the Hasbah Bill) which could have disadvantaged women and minorities.
At our invitation, the Chief Minister came to Washington as our guest for 10 days of dialogue. I remember that time as pretty much the most surreal 10 days of my life: We discussed Islamic law, the protection of minorities, and a host of controversial religious and political topics. We talked about the life of Thomas Jefferson while eating Häagen-Dazs on the National Mall. I spent an afternoon with his sons at the Air and Space Museum. After late-night trips to what seemed like every Pakistani restaurant in D.C., we had gotten to know each other.
He in turn invited us to see the Frontier for ourselves, and after our delegation’s visit to Peshawar I ended up staying there: studying, traveling throughout the country, drinking endless cups of chai on people’s carpets, asking questions, and trying to understand the place. I met with students, went to official events, and even spent a memorable afternoon pheasant hunting in the tribal areas with the mullahs (which then qualified as the most surreal moment of my life).
Being in Pakistan, I soon found that Islam was not quite what I expected it would be: American Christians, perhaps forgivably, put Islam into a very small box. “Islam,” they say, “is like this.”
But after only a few months in Pakistan, I found I couldn’t put it into any box, much less a small one.
Encountering Traditions
This, to my mind, is the first reason why we need to listen to Islamic voices: Islam simply isn’t a monolith: it has the same tremendous diversity of traditions as we do in our own faith.
Traditions, of course, can arise over many things: doctrinal disputes, cultural issues, political events, etc. But often what a tradition represents is nothing more than a distinct way of navigating our different identities as believers: our religious or theological identity; our global (or essentially human) identity; and our national or patriotic identity.
I have friends who are pacifist Quakers. I have friends who are self-professed premillenial dispensationalist fundamentalists. I have friends who are Anglican but not Episcopalian, and others who are Episcopalian but not Anglican, and still others who think they’re Anglican and Episcopalian (but can only commit to being so through the next Lambeth conference, after which time they’ll have to get back to me....)
As Christians, we are intimately aware of the diversity of our tradition, and the ways in which — within a relatively strong core of shared beliefs — we have found different ways to express our kingdom, global, and national allegiances.
The same, I think, is true with Islam. Just within Pakistan — one country — I was amazed at what I encountered. Many Muslims in Pakistan, of course, were Muslim by culture, just as many Americans consider themselves Christian by default. Many, many others were quietly devout, committed to interpreting the Quran through the lens of Islamic tradition and their own reading of the text. Others were in the Sufi (or Barelvi) tradition, seeking a more experiential, even mystical faith. I remember visiting one of our speaker’s friends in Karachi, and her grandmother had arranged an extraordinary evening in celebration of the prophet Muhammad. There was singing, and people would come to the front, take the microphone, and share about how Allah had “changed their heart.” Aside from the fact that there were no guys up front strumming acoustic guitars and shaking little plastic eggs, it felt a lot like a charismatic Christian worship night.
Other Pakistanis I met were Deobandis, following a conservative reading of the Qur’an that nonetheless traces its roots to a vibrant revivalist movement in 19th century India. This movement began, in fact, when India Muslims suffered a crisis of identity after the dissolution of Mughal rule by the British in 1857. Others were Wahabbis, who brought a very Arab-flavored, and rather strict, expression of Islam to the Indian subcontinent. Others were from the Jamaati-Islami, who were ideologues and sought the establishment of an Islamic state and, in fact, a global Islamic order.
And still others were Tablighis, who generally eschewed politics and traveled around the countryside door-to-door calling Muslims back to the fundamentals of their faith. The Tablighis are probably the closest Muslim analogy to the evangelical movement in America, but until I had been to Pakistan, I had never heard of them.
And what of the extremists? I haven’t mentioned them. Well, there are of course Islamic extremists in Pakistan. I was at the Lal Masjid — the Red Mosque — in Islamabad in late July, the day it was re-opened for Friday prayers after government commandos had stormed its walls and killed dozens of armed students and their leader, Abdul Rashid Ghazi.
I stood that Friday on a huge pile of rubble that was once the adjoining madrassa, and watched students, in a scene of total chaos, re-take the mosque, hoist the flag of jihad, bring out buckets of red paint to re-color the building red, and scream from the rooftop: “Ghazi, Ghazi, from your blood the revolution will come!”
It was the kind of moment CNN producers live for (which itself was enough to make me think that perhaps I should be going... and thankfully I did, just before the tear gas was fired). But as I left, exiting through rows of tense riot police, it made me wonder: was that really a picture of Islam?
Even the friends I was with that day — some of whom felt sympathy for the Taliban, who had a host of grievances against America, and who would never call themselves “progressive” Muslims — were horrified and embarrassed: “That’s not Islam,” they said. “That wasn’t right.”
As evangelicals, we need to hear from Islamic voices so that the “CNN moments” — the flashes of something “newsworthy” that enter our experience and then vanish — don’t blind us to the diversity and vitality of the Muslim tradition; and don’t blind us to the fact that the Red Mosque represents Islam probably just about as much as the Branch Davidians represent any Christians here in this room.
Even an experience in one country — in Pakistan — showed me that the vast majority of the Islamic world is very much, within its own intellectual traditions, wrestling in serious ways with these questions of identity.
Shared Questions
Second — and it’s a related point, I think — we need to hear from Muslim voices because, frankly, Christians and Muslims are facing many of the same perennial questions about politics and religion.
I spent a long afternoon in the Senate Chambers of the Pakistani Parliament with Professor Senator Khurshid Ahmad, the vice-amir of the Jamaati-Islami, Pakistan’s oldest and most influential Islamist political party.
We ate some pilou and some chicken and, surrounded by his senator friends, we had a little debate on the topic of “What makes people good?”
Now the tradition of the Jamaati Islami is based in the writings of Maulana Mawdudi, who proposed what you might call an “outside-in” theory of how people change: First you must make the state good, and then people will be good. Make the state Islamic, and the society will begin to follow.
But then there are other Islamic traditions (like those of the Tablighis) that are more “inside-out:” First you must change the heart, change the individual practice, change the personal devotion, and then society and state will follow.
Now does this debate sound familiar? Because it should. This debate represents a tension that runs right through our evangelical tradition, with political activism on one side and pietism on the other; and with our questions (dating back 200 years and more) of how to bring together our American citizenship with our essential identity as citizens in the heavenly kingdom that Jesus inaugurated — a kingdom that is “not from this world.”
I happen to be more of an “inside-out” kind of person, and I happen to be someone who is wary of claims that begin with “if only our government did such-and-such....” But the point is that this debate very much transcends our tradition, and that we almost certainly have something to learn from the Muslim world from its own experiences — good, bad, and indifferent — of religion and politics, and its own stories of bringing faith into the messiness of social life.
Christians sometimes say, in essence, “We’ve had our reformation. What’s taking the Muslims so long to have theirs?” Looking around the world today, I understand why this question is posed. But we would do well to remember our own checkered history of dealings with other faiths, and the decades-long wars of religion that continued to plague Europe centuries after the Reformation. We need to admit, humbly, that we have much to learn from each other’s traditions.
Shared Impulses
And third, to close, we need to listen to Muslim voices because — in spite of our very real theological and at times deeply held political differences — we often share similar impulses:
- We believe as a matter of faith that religion is more than simply a system of private preferences;
- We believe that the sovereignty of God should be expressed, at least in some way, in our common life: in political justice, in equality, in the social order;
- We believe — in a way that occasionally strikes contemporary listeners as silly, or perhaps even dangerous — that we have stories and indeed revelations worth sharing, and that somehow those stories have a bearing on history itself;
- And we believe, as modern people, that secularism really can’t answer some of the great questions that we face in the modern world about allegiance, obligation, and identity.
“Oh great. The fundamentalists like each other. Now we’re screwed.”
But that’s not it at all: it’s not that the “Christianists” and the “Islamists” are forming some sort of reactionary co-belligerency against the suffocating onslaught of modernity.
No. All I’m saying is that I’m convinced that the vast majority of devout Christians would get along quite well with the vast majority of devout Muslims: Not just in a fuzzy, children-of-Abraham kind of way, but in addressing the very questions of faith, identity, patriotism, and justice that challenge us here today.
Jesus said — and not just said, but gave as his greatest commandment — “love your neighbor as yourself.” As far as I’m concerned, Muslims are — more so today than ever — our religious neighbors, our global neighbors, and our American neighbors.
That’s why we all should be so honored to have our Muslim friends here today.
At the very least, to love them here this morning is to ask them to be gracious enough to speak out of their own experience, and to speak into ours.
Last updated 12 January 2009