Things I Didn't Know About Muslims and the Qur'an

• You can spell it "Koran" if you want to. But then you'll probably pronounce it wrong and sound like a Yankee.


• Jesus is a hugely influential prophet in Islam, and the scale, scope and message of his teachings are all preserved intact in the Qur'an.


• Muslims do not worship Muhammed, and they do not see him as divine. They feel pretty much the same way about him as we do about Moses or David: amazing men after God's heart that are worthy of respect, but that are really fairly ordinary human beings that responded to a higher calling.


• When we say Jesus is the "Son of God", our Muslim friends think we're implying that God and Mary...you know. To them, this is a repulsive and disrespectful view of God. God would never lust after a woman. So once we explain that we really mean that God simply willed the child to be inside Mary, this concept makes a lot more sense to them.


• Abraham, Isaac and Jacob's stories are all in the Qur'an. Good Samaritan? Check. Prodigal son? Check.


• Muslims are directed by the Qur'an to read both the Gospels and the Torah and to beleive in their teachings, and Islam does not see itself as replacing either Christianity or Judaism but rather adding to them both.


• The overall message of the Qur'an is one of peace, kindness, mercy, gentleness - the same as the Bible. Certain verses may be taken to mean things that are violent and bloodthirsty - same as the Bible.


• Muslims hate their fundamentalist sterotypes the same way we Christians hate ours.


• There are secular Muslims just as there are secular Christians.


• There are feminist and pro-woman Muslims, and in countries where we associate Islam with the opression of women, the culprit is often more cultural than religious. (For example, in Saudi Arabia women must wear the headscarf and must not drive cars, but this is a cultural norm, not a religious one. The headscarf does not necessarily mean that the wearer is a Muslim).


• Muslims believe that Christians and Jews (known as "People of the Book") will share the same heaven that Muslims are in. Muslims are commanded not to disrespect either of these other two monotheistic religions.


• Let's all take a moment of silence while we contemplate the ocean of things I still don't know. =)

Jordanians + Americans = Friends

Last week Ron and I got the chance to participate in a unique leadership experience. It all got started a few months ago when a couple of friends got talking about how to change the world. They realized that each stereotype, label, or assumption that we have about people who are across the globe from us is an individual brick in a wall of separation that sometimes feels like it reaches to the sky. The only way to start to chip away at this wall that divides and segregates us is to remove stereotypes, one by one, through friendship and open dialogue. As soon as enough bricks are extracted, the wall will collapse under the weight of its own burden, creating free and open space. With this in mind, they formulated a plan:

Get together young leaders from the Middle East and from the US and stick them together for a week. Then, see what happens.

I'm honored to say that Ron and I were invited to be a part of this, as that plan became a reality last week. Ten Jordanian students of college age (18-24, although we had one 16-year-old!) and six Americans of the same range got together in Phoenix and spent a week laughing together, creating friendships, and breaking down lifelong religious, cultural, and political stereotypes that are so often destructive to the chances of peace in the world.

We rolled our eyes together about the glittering images of Hollywood, shared pain over 9/11 and the status of Palestinian refugees, and gained an exponentially greater understanding of the humanity of the people in that part of the world. We learned how very much common ground we share as Muslims and Christians, and how similar our faiths and holy books really are. “They” are really not so different than us at all, and they, their religion and their culture is nothing to fear.

We lament over the extremism in both of our camps: they over Osama bin Laden who would take the world for Muhammed, us over our fundamentalist leaders who try to take the world over for Jesus, both doing so at the expense of the true meaning of their religions’ messages. We then reflected how this actually isn't a very good reflection of the goals of Muhammed and Jesus in the first place, and how we can reject these agendas while still being respectful of each other's faith traditions.

Overall, I think, we spent the week understanding the world as a collection not of "those" people, or "that" group, but as a collection of human souls, each with its own unfolding faith, each with a sense of insecurity of the outside world, and each with a longing to know that there are others of the same.

Teaching my dear, sweet friend Rawan our custom of blowing dandelion fluff in the wind to make a wish come true.

Finally!

This blog is under construction.

Please pardon our dust.

On the past week:

Mind.

Blowing.

will write more later.

must sleep.

On the Docket

On Saturday, Ron and I will host two Jordanian girls who are coming to participate in a Cross-Cultural Young Leader's Summit here in Phoenix. We get to participate too, which is cool.

The idea behind it is that the only thing that has ever really changed the world is small groups of people getting together and deciding to do things differently. And what happens with the Middle East peace process and the Muslim East /Christian West divide has profound repercussions for our collective future. And so, ten Middle Eastern friends from Lebanon and Jordan will come here to meet ten Americans, and we'll have a week of fun, friendship, and, most importantly, dialogue.



The most powerful thing we can do cross-culturally is to break down stereotypes: Muslim = terrorist; Q'uran = weird violent book; Middle Easterner = crazy violent jihadist. And they, in turn, will have a chance to break down theirs: Christian = warmonger; Bible = weird violent book; Westerner = arrogant uninformed materialist.



I think it should be fascinating.