Mosque Visit

I had a great time last Friday. I didn’t really want to go and visit one of the local mosques again. I’m not the type who easily makes initial contact with people, but when a friend agreed to go with me—well, let’s just say that I felt the Holy Spirit tugging at me.  I’m glad I did—we had a great time. Sure, the sermon was about what I expected, except at the end of it, a Muslim leader stood up and thanked the two guests in the back (that would be me and my friend) for coming and expressing solidarity with them (referring to the three Muslim college students shot to death the week before in North Carolina). 

We stayed on for over two hours talking about the Bible and answering questions about Bible passages. It was a lot different from what I often hear around church. Too often, the average church member seems to be afraid of Muslims—doesn’t want to meet them, and (I guess—I’m not sure) thinks they are all somehow potential terrorists. Or maybe just different. Or maybe they just don’t know what to say.

The books that are published and read by evangelicals don’t seem to help much. Take this short excerpt from a review by Doug Howard, professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan of The Blood of Lambs, by Kamal Saleem. (The review itself appeared in Books and Culture  magazine some time ago):

On Christmas Day 2009, our youngest son, Jay, found himself on Delta Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. Toward the end of the flight, Jay's seatmate, a Nigerian Muslim about his age named Umar abd al-Muttalib, tried to blow up the plane using a bomb hidden in his underwear. Reflecting on Jay's experience, and on Umar and the failed efforts by his father to warn authorities, has helped me clarify my attitude toward American Christian anti-Islamic literary polemics, including Kamal Saleem's "memoir, The Blood of Lambs. The book fits the familiar pattern of reassuring Christians of the superiority of their own faith tradition by negative comparisons with a dehumanized Islam. But Kamal Saleem's titillating dance with violence and fame makes the book more complicated and more uncomfortable than most like it. By embracing the glamorous violence it claims to abhor, it raises readers' hopes of touching secret human meanings through it.

I first encountered Kamal Saleem when he appeared at Calvin College in November 2007. A look at his website told me immediately that he was not who he said he was. The signature of his deception was his statement that "in my family was the Grand Wazir of Islam." The term is ridiculous, a spurious title meant to mislead the innocent with an aura of authority. . . .

Howard is clear, concise, and restrained in his comments; I just wish that the evangelical community would wake up and listen. I fear there may not be much chance of that in this country, especially with ISIS stealing the headlines.

But in all of this confusion, there seems to be a silver lining—many Muslims in our country—and especially perhaps the second generation that has gone through our school system (and been challenged to express and debate ideas) seem to be open to talk.

Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh—a violent and powerful people at the time whose practices might not have differed significantly from those of ISIS today (I’ll let the history buffs among us comment on that one). And American Christians—too often we don’t even want to visit our Muslim friends and sit down to a meal, prepared at their expense.

Don’t know what to say? I didn’t either, except I think I’ve discovered that the best approach to Muslims is simply to know, love, and memorize our own Scriptures. When I started quoting Isaiah 53 by heart, one of them said, ‘what I’ve been told by Christians I know is that they don’t need to memorize Scripture or make good moral choices—they already have salvation.’

Whether or not somebody really said that to him (it wouldn’t surprise me, though), my visit showed me again that Muslims are willing to talk about Jesus.

Are we?