Learning from Islam: How to Live as a Christian

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Shahada Means Testimony of Faith, or As I’ve Learned it: Know What You Believe

Chapter 2

Salat Means Prayer, or As I’ve Learned It: Inconvenience Yourself

Chapter 3

Sawm means Fasting, or As I’ve Learned it: Spirituality is a Communal Discipline

Chapter 4

Zakat Means Charitable Giving, or As I’ve Learned It: Don’t Outsource the Poor

Chapter 5

Hajj Means Pilgrimage, or As I’ve Learned It: There Is No Faith Without Works

Chapter 6

Kalam Means Dialogue, or What I Hope My Friends Learn From Me

Epilogue: On Blessed Crusade

On Blessed Crusade

Dedication

This is for my friends: Walid A., Faez, Abdullah, Walid H., Hisham, Shihab, Adnan, Fahmy, Fuad, Khalid, Sheikh Muhammad, Ibrahim, Muhammad M., Gelal, Abdulqader, and Uncle Amin. You have taught me so much. I hope that what I offer here honours you.

Introduction

I am a Christian, doing business in the Muslim world. I don’t want to get much more specific than that about who I am though. I’m happy to introduce myself by my Arabic name, Kamal al-Kanady. My real name is a pain to explain in Arabic, so my friends gave me the other name instead. Loosely translated it means the perfect Canadian, and I’m just arrogant enough to appreciate it.

There are more than a billion Muslims and a billion Christians on the planet at the moment, and the relationship between the Muslims and Christians historically has been a bit rough. Anyone with a television knows that the Christian-Muslim relationship is currently one of the most important keys to achieving and sustaining world peace. This book is my contribution to that relationship.

It should be known that though I write about Islam in this book, I do so as a student of Islam, not as a practitioner. I’m not a Muslim, and so if any of my comments lack understanding for the religion of Islam, I apologise in advance. My intent here is to faithfully record what I’ve learned so far. I don’t claim to know everything worth knowing about the Islamic religion.

Anonymity

I have chosen to write this book anonymously for three reasons:

First, I live in a country where there are many extremist Muslims, and, for the sake of my family and I, I really don’t want them to know who I am. Not all Muslims are good, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to offend some of them in this book—you understand. Also, one of the worst things you can be called here is a missionary. Being a missionary is just the newer version of being a colonialist or a crusader. A missionary is a Christian from the West who wants to convert Muslims into Christians, divide homes, ruin marriages, spread porn and alcohol among the youth, and infect the Islamic community like a cancer that slowly kills culture, religion, family, and peace. Yup, I’d never let anyone call me a missionary. Being known as a missionary is about the worst possible thing and would immediately put our family at risk of being targeted by extremists. The other things I’ve been called are: spy, Muslim extremist (yes, really), and journalist (which became a serious accusation during the Arab Spring uprising). I am none of those things.

Second, extremist Muslims aren’t the only group of people that I will disappoint in this book. In 2009 when I was invited for the first time to speak to a crowd of a thousand Western Christians about Islam, I was called a heretic by some of them for being too generous toward Islam. There are two major lines of thought in Christianity these days that govern how Christians view Muslims. If you are from the line of reasoning that is congenial, humble, and conciliatory, you may be accused of universalism or syncretism by the first kind of Christian, so I discovered. I’m very glad for the experience, though, because the reactions of the other kinds of Christians are why I am writing this book. The second kind of Christians know that what they believe about Muslims is heavily influenced by the media, and a millennium-long narrative of war that has invited young Christian men to wield weapons against young Muslim men, and vice-versa. They know there’s more to the story than what they’ve been taught. Anyway, I am not keen to have the first half of the Christian community seek me out as a heretic and berate me for my generous worldview of Islam. I don’t have time for that conversation. I’m busy.

Third, what I am writing about here is applicable anywhere where Christians and Muslims are neighbours. This is especially important in the Arab world. I want Christians and Muslims alike to see themselves in these pages and learn something from my perspective of this dialogue. Keeping the details a little blurry will help with that. So I’m remaining anonymous, because myopic Christians and extremist Muslims will join forces and hunt me down for writing this, but good hearted Muslims and good hearted Christians everywhere will benefit.

I Am My Audience

Some of those who will benefit, I hope, will be my Muslim friends about whom I write in this book. I have given copies of this book to them, so that they know what I think of their religion, and how they represent it. I’ve written it with them in mind, and it is my hope that I have represented them both fairly and honourably.

Mostly, I’ve written this book for Christians in the West, to share with them my experiences in dialogue with Muslims. It’s my hope that other Christians will learn to be humble, fair, loving, and welcoming of Muslims from my experience.

I’ve never thought as much about my religious beliefs as I have since living in the Middle East. My family and I live in a conservative Islamic country, and because we don’t live in the capital city, we are surrounded every day, on every side, by a whole mass of people that look like the Fox News version of a terrorist, guys wearing white business shirts that go down to their sandals and checkered scarves that sometimes drape around their shoulders and wrap around their heads—seriously. It’s not uncommon to see our neighbours riding down the street on motorbikes in their white ankle-length shirts with AK-47s hung on their shoulders. That’s been a little more common since the beginning of the Arab Spring movement in early 2011, but it has never been unusual.

So here I am, in the middle of the desert, consulting for businesses and providing management training, and I am confronted every day with guys that all look like Bin Laden, inviting me over for tea.

I think we had been here for a day before one of our neighbours invited us over. When you go over to an Arab home, there are only two things to do and four things to talk about. Smoking is one. I occasionally smoke cigars, but switched to sheesha (water pipe) since moving here. Most of my friends smoke cigarettes, so I’m pretty sure that whether I like it or not (which I don’t) I’m consuming a half a pack in second hand smoke every time I go out. The other is drinking tea, ginger beer, or whatever you like the taste of with your sheesha, so long as it’s non alcoholic.

There are four things to talk about when Muslims gather for an afternoon chat: sex, politics, economics, and religion. In Canada we don’t talk too deeply about sex or religion. Sex is one of my favourite topics, though, so religion was really the only surprise. Wow, what a shock! Religion, Islam specifically, is the centre of the culture here, and there aren’t many outsiders that bother to connect with their neighbours, so naturally Muslims from majority Islamic countries are curious about people from the outside, like me, and what we believe. Often, when I meet someone for the first time, the first or second question they ask is, Are you a Muslim? If you consider that we’ve lived here for several years now and I meet new people every day, that’s a lot. This question prompts the same dialogue nearly every time:

Are you a Muslim?

No, Christian.

"Well, Inshallah you will become a Muslim soon."

"Inshallah."

"Inshallah, is an awesome expression that literally means if God wills. It’s used in sentences as an equivalent for Lord willing or hopefully." There are three kinds of Inshallah where we live. There’s the Inshallah akeed, which means that God certainly wills it, the Inshalla mumkin which means maybe God wills it, and the basic Inshallah which means that God probably won’t will it to happen, because if I thought God was going to will it, I would have said "akeed or mumkin."

So several times a week I meet new people and tell them my religion before I tell them my name, and let them know that I doubt that God wants me to become a Muslim. I’ve had that short conversation, literally, more than a thousand times, and I’m not the kind of person to use literally, figuratively. But that short conversation reminds me, consistently, how deeply set into the fabric of society the religion of Islam is here, and it invites me just as often into a religious dialogue with Muslims.

Many Christians think of the mosque as a place where Muslim children go to get indoctrinated. I can tell you without reservation that this is true. Muslim children are indoctrinated in the same way as Christian children. The content of that doctrine varies from mosque to mosque, just as it does from church to church. Most mosques are really good, some are worrisome, and some are downright scary. Personally, I’m a little more concerned for children indoctrinated into Texan Evangelicalism than I am about those indoctrinated into Iraqi Shi’ite Islam. Sorry for the generalization; it doesn’t apply to everyone. For those who don’t know the difference between a Shi’ite and a Sunni, it’s a bit like comparing Catholics and Protestants whose differences began over a heated argument about who the leader of the Christian religion should be which led to centuries of war and mass murders, political infighting, and mutual hatred. The same kind of schism happened in early Islam. As a result, they share the basic tenets of faith, but Shi’ites and Sunnis differ on the expression of that faith in their respective traditions.

As for me, I grew up going to a Mennonite church. When we moved to Ottawa, we went to an Alliance church there too. Then when I was fifteen we moved to Vancouver, and the closest church to our new house that had a youth group was Pentecostal. Even as a teenager I needed my indoctrination, so we became Pentecostal. So when I converse now with my Muslim neighbours, it’s from a Pentecostal perspective. For those who don’t know, Pentecostal Christians are a bit like Sufi Muslims in how we view God. We believe that God is close to us, and we can experience him in powerful and sometimes dramatic or even miraculous ways. Some of us have what I consider extremely odd expressions of faith. I have a good friend who calls himself a Baptist Muslim, and I sometimes call myself a Sufi Christian. These designations are meant to be comical and are used only to communicate how our expression of faith is reflected in the other’s religious denominations.

When I was growing up, one of the things we were taught consistently as Pentecostals was that the whole of the Bible can be summed up in a single quote from Jesus, which I will paraphrase: There’s only one God; love him with everything you’ve got, and treat people like you’d want to be treated.

I try to keep those words in mind. If I don’t, they won’t inform my behaviour. We love our neighbours, honestly. They’re awesome people. And our love for our Muslim neighbours has forced us to think differently about how to be good representatives to them of what we believe, especially since we share religiously focussed conversations a lot. By we I mean myself and my wife. We’ve been married sixteen years now and have two young children.

On the Nature of a Christian and Muslim

There’s something really important that you need to know about my intentions when I discuss religion with my friends. I don’t care if they ever become Christians. Now I know that’s going to earn me a fatwa from some Republican Evangelicals out there, but to me it doesn’t matter whether one calls oneself a Christian or a