Across the Faith Divideby Anita Cirulis

Faithful Christian witness among Muslims starts with learning to love ‘the other’

Centuries ago, a man raised to believe in many gods became increasingly disturbed at the idol worship in his hometown. Convinced there was only one God, he boldly preached against the sanctuary that housed the idols and opposed the powerful tribe that controlled its access. When his message threatened the tribe’s lucrative business among idol-worshipping pilgrims, he and his small band of converts left the only home they had ever known.

PATRICK BAZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Two Egyptian Christians stand guard while their Muslim countrymen pray during antigovernment demonstrations last February in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. A month earlier, Muslims formed a human shield around churches in Cairo following bombings by extremists.

From those ignoble beginnings in 613 A.D., the followers of Muhammad have grown to an estimated 1.5 billion people. Approximately 22 percent of the global population is Muslim. With Christians at 33 percent, that makes Islam and Christianity the two largest religious faiths in the world.

Although Islam had its origins in what is now Saudi Arabia, four out of five Muslims today live outside the Middle East—many in Africa and Asia, where they encounter half of the world’s Christians. Less than 1 percent of Americans are Muslim, but Islam will soon pass Judaism as the second largest religion in the U.S.

DOUG BURG

The Rev. John Hubers spent a dozen years in the Middle East and is working on a doctorate in world Christianity and global mission. An evangelical with both experience and expertise in Islamic studies, he joined Northwestern’s religion faculty last fall to pass his knowledge on to the next generation of Christian leaders.

“Increasingly, this is a multicultural, multi-religious society,” says John Hubers ’76, a former missionary to the Middle East who joined Northwestern’s religion faculty last fall. “The greatest numbers of non-Christians we’re going to meet who are practicing another religion are going to be Muslims. They tend to be very well-educated community members—doctors, engineers, technology specialists—so if our graduates work in any major corporation in America, they’re almost certainly going to be working with Muslims.”

Hubers has another reason for championing interfaith dialogue besides preparation for a diverse world. Understanding, he says, is important for witnessing.

“There’s no quicker way to close the channels of communication and the ability to share the love of Christ than Christians who, with the idea they’re defending Christianity, end up prejudiced toward Muslims,” he says. “If all that Muslims hear from Christians is hatred and stereotyping, how are they ever going to hear that Christ loves them?”

Hubers felt called to the ministry by the time he was a freshman at Northwestern. After graduating, he and his wife, Lynne (Lenderink ’76), were sent by the RCA to Bahrain, where they taught English. It was there they realized their calling to ministry was in the context of Muslim-Christian relations.

Two years later, the Hubers returned to the U.S. so John could earn a Master of Divinity degree from New Brunswick Theological Seminary. While in seminary, he spent a year in Egypt, interning with RCA missionary Dr. Harold Vogelaar ’57 and learning more about Islam and interfaith relations.

After serving an RCA church in New York, the Hubers returned to the Middle East, where John pastored churches in Oman and Bahrain for 10 years. His parishioners were expatriates—foreigners from Asia, Europe, Africa and America who were living in the Arabian Gulf—and as their pastor, Hubers encouraged them to develop an informed, sensitive, caring Christian witness to Muslims.

Now working on a Ph.D. in world Christianity and global mission at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, Hubers is following a similar calling as a professor. Few people with an evangelical background have both experience and academic credentials in Islamic studies. His goal is to share his wisdom with the next generation of Christian leaders who will increasingly be involved in Christian-Muslim relations.

“Whether it’s my atheist neighbor or my Muslim neighbor, the best way to share the love of Jesus Christ is to know who they are—to understand how they see the world,” Hubers says. “So when I’m teaching World Religions, the first thing I say is we need to understand these faiths from the perspective of the people who hold them.”

Kendra Dahlbacka ’10 is doing just that. She participated in a Spring Service Project in Minneapolis her junior year, teaching English to refugees from Somalia, a predominantly Muslim nation. During their SSP, the students also visited a mosque, ate at Somali restaurants, and shopped at a souq, or Arab/Muslim market.

Now a third grade Spanish teacher in a Minneapolis suburb, Dahlbacka is taking Arabic classes at a Muslim community center, where she’s the only non-Muslim in a class that includes people from Somalia, India, Kenya and Pakistan. Her classmates are there to learn to read the Quran, Islam’s holy book. She is there to learn Arabic in order to understand Muslims and their culture.

“I’m still at the listening point,” says Dahlbacka, who has spent time with the other women in their homes.

God has given a burden for Muslims to Dahlbacka, who says they are misunderstood and portrayed as villains by the media. “People are afraid to love on them because of 9/11 and the things that have happened that have marred relations between Muslims and Christians,” she says. “But Jesus went out of his way to be with people who were marginalized, and in a lot of ways, Muslims are marginalized in the U.S.”

The Christian-Muslim tensions that characterize so much of the world today weren’t always true of the two faiths. When Muhammad’s followers were persecuted, some of them found asylum in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, whose king heard in their story of abandoning idols to worship one God something that resonated with his own faith.

It is likely Muhammad was introduced to the concept of monotheism by Christians and Jews. Muslim sources say he met Christian monks while on trading missions, and his hometown, Mecca, was a trading center that attracted Jewish tribes.

Hubers, however, doesn’t believe Muhammad ever heard the message of true, orthodox Christianity. In 431 A.D., after the Council of Chalcedon declared that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, Eastern Christians didn’t accept that decision and were declared heretics. There were also heretical Christians in the Arabian Peninsula teaching something that approached tritheism, worshipping Mary along with Father and Son.

By all accounts, Muhammad was an upright, generous and pious man. His nickname, al-Amin, means “faithful, trustworthy one,” and in contrast to the norms of Middle Eastern culture, he was initially married to one woman for 25 years until her death. Troubled by Mecca’s religious and economic system in which the poor were exploited by the rich and powerful, he frequently went on solitary religious retreats in the mountains surrounding the city.

Islam teaches it was on such a retreat in 610 A.D. that Muhammad heard a voice command, “Recite!” and thus began a 20-year period of revelations that became the Quran—literally, “the Recitation.” For Muslims, the Quran is Islam’s one miracle.

“Muslims believe that Muhammad received, word for word, this direct revelation from God, dictated by the angel Gabriel,” Hubers explains. That many believe Muhammad was illiterate makes the Quran seem even more miraculous to the Muslim faithful, as it’s widely seen as the most powerful, poetic book ever written in Arabic.

Convinced he had been chosen as a prophet and claiming to be the Messenger of God, Muhammad continued to preach of one God and a coming Day of Judgment until he and his followers emigrated to Yathrib, 250 miles north of Mecca. There he united warring tribes into one faith community that eventually became known as Medina, or “The City of the Prophet.” It was the birthplace of Islam as a religious, political and social movement.

Eight years later—after a series of battles with the ruling tribe of Mecca—Muhammad returned to his hometown followed by 10,000 men. After receiving the key to the city and declaring amnesty for most of his enemies, he made his way to the Ka‘ba, the center of idol worship, entered the sanctuary, and destroyed all the idols inside.

There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s messenger.” In Islam, saying the Shahadah—the confession of faith—with conviction is what makes a person a Muslim (literally, “one who submits” to God).

“I tell Muslim friends we’re really on the same page with the first part of the Shahadah,” says Hubers. “It’s the second part where we begin to move in different directions.”

Islam, Christianity and Judaism share a belief in one God. Many Christians, however, are unconvinced that Muslims’ Allah is the God of the Bible. Those who argue the two are different focus on ways in which Muslims’ perception of Allah varies from what Christians know of the nature of God.

Hubers says that’s to be expected since it is through Jesus Christ that God revealed himself fully and completely. “If your argument is that unless you understand the Trinitarian nature of God you are worshipping a different god, then you have to make that same statement about Judaism,” he maintains.

Like Hubers, Dr. Ray Weiss spent more than a decade in the Middle East, where he taught at a Lebanese college and served as the pastor of an Arabic-speaking church in Bahrain. A former chaplain and professor emeritus of religion at Northwestern, Weiss cautions, “Allah is the only name for God in my Arabic Bible and the only name by which we prayed in church. So if you say Allah is their God and we have another God—because Allah in their language means ‘the God’—it’s as if you are saying we don’t worship ‘the God.’”

Islam and Christianity hold some beliefs in common: the revelation of God through nature; the existence of angels and Satan; the sovereignty of God; a coming Day of Judgment. Islam teaches that Jesus was born of a virgin, performed miracles, ascended into heaven, and will one day return. Where the two faiths diverge is in their understanding of who Jesus claimed to be.

For Muslims, Jesus is one in a long line of prophets given by God to specific people groups. Some of those prophets were also given books: Moses, the Torah; David, the Zabur, or Psalms; and Jesus, the Injil, or Gospel. Muhammad, they believe, is the “seal of the prophets”—the last and greatest—and the book he was given, the Quran, contains God’s literal words and is God’s final revelation.

While there are verses about Jesus in the Quran, both Abraham and Moses have greater prominence in Islam. And the Quran teaches that Jesus was not the Son of God and was never crucified.

“Since Muslims believe the Quran is the very words of God, when the Quran contradicts the Bible, they believe the Bible is wrong,” Hubers says. “They think Christians have tampered with Scripture, twisting it to insert our Trinitarian ideas.”

Without a Savior, Muslims envision a future in which—at a time no one knows—the world will end and God will measure people’s good deeds against their bad.

Both Hubers and Weiss baptized just two converts during their respective years of service in Bahrain. When Hubers is asked about the resistance of Muslims to the gospel, he reverses the question to help one see things from a Muslim perspective.

“Consider why it is so difficult for a Christian to become a Muslim,” he says. “First, you’re convinced that what you have is the fullest expression of a relationship with God. Why would you give that up for something that seems to offer less?” Muslims feel the same way about their faith.

Islam also puts a great emphasis on community and has a holistic understanding of faith, so when someone leaves Islam, it can be perceived almost the same way a political traitor is viewed. Because many of the cultures where Islam is prominent are communal cultures, people understand that the decisions they make impact everyone in their family.

Most crucially, Hubers says, Islam has a built-in critique of Christianity. “Jesus is in Islam, but it’s a different Jesus, and because of Muslims’ high regard for the Quran as the word of God, that’s the final expression of who Jesus is. It’s a challenge trying to share Christ with people who have an alternative understanding of him.”

That’s not to say Christians shouldn’t share their faith with their Muslim neighbors. Dahlbacka advises: Love people, pray for opportunities, and God will do the rest. Hubers stresses the importance of genuine, caring friendships. “Among the Muslims I’ve known who have become Christians,” he says, “most were loved into the faith—not argued into it.”

Relationships with understanding, non-prejudiced Christians are especially important at a time when many Muslims are experiencing discrimination and hatred. Originally from Morocco, Said Ben Saida has lived in the United States for more than 20 years and in Orange City since 1996.

“Things got hard after 9/11,” he says. “Some people look at me and just because I’m Arab, I’m the enemy.”

DAN ROSS

Said Ben Saida (left) and Nic Andersen visit while their wives prepare Kotban, a Moroccan dish. Despite their differences in faith, the two Orange City families—one Muslim and the other Christian—have become close friends.

Ben Saida was raised as a Muslim by devout parents. “My father never drank alcohol,” he says. “He never looked at another woman. He told us to be honest and work for our living. Don’t steal. Don’t cheat.”

When his brother married a woman from Granville, Ben Saida accepted his invitation to join them in Iowa. He settled in Orange City after meeting his wife, who converted to Islam after they were wed. Small-town life suits him.

“I love it,” he says. “I leave my car without locking it. The neighbors are great. They really live by their Christian values, and those Christian values and my Muslim values made like heaven of this place.”

Among Ben Saida’s neighbors is a man he describes as “a young evangelist.” A committed Christian, Nic Andersen is bold about sharing his faith, while Ben Saida prefers not to preach to non-Muslims. As the two families became close, Andersen’s efforts to convert his friend created friction.

“It was like a boxing match,” says Ben Saida. “We are both passionate.”

The two stopped talking about religion but continued their friendship. One day, as Andersen was helping him work on his roof, Ben Saida turned to his neighbor and said, “Nic, I love you, and you love me. You want to save me, and I want the best also for you. Let’s not close ourselves to this communication.”

Not all interactions between Christians and Muslims are so positive. Tensions between the two faiths in places like the Sudan, Nigeria and Egypt are costing lives.

Eliza Grizwold, an award-winning journalist and author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam, told Christianity Today, “[O]ne of the most overlooked and important human rights issues facing us today is the treatment of religious minorities.” She also says religious conflicts often have a secular trigger: a power struggle over politics, land, water, oil or natural resources.

Anti-government demonstrations that began in Tunisia in February have spread to Algeria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria. The result of the “Arab Spring” could be governments that are more democratic and tolerant. As John Hubers contends, “The biggest loser in all of this has been the radical Islamist. These are revolutions led by the young, well-educated and highly wired—reformers who would argue that to be more Islamic is to be more open.”

Whatever the outcome of the Middle East protests, however, it won’t be governments that provide solutions to interfaith conflict. The Rev. Doug Leonard, who directs Northwestern’s Oman Semester, is also director of the Al Amana Centre, which is dedicated to promoting Christian-Muslim understanding and peace. The central question of interfaith work, he says, is how we should interact with the “other.”

One month after 9/11, in a poll conducted by the Washington Post, 14 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t want a Muslim as a neighbor. When the same poll was conducted seven years later, that figure had grown to 34 percent.

While it may be human nature to view those unlike ourselves with fear and suspicion, Christ models another way, Leonard says—“the way of relationship maintained by the tools of love, humility, forgiveness and bearing with one another when we clash.”

Renowned Christian theologian Hans Kung has written about the importance of interfaith understanding. He maintains that understanding and peace between Christians and Muslims is more essential for peace in our world than peace between any other groups, since together the two faiths make up more than half of the global population.

“There will not be peace among the nations,” he says, “unless there is peace between the religions.”

And there will not be peace between religions unless there is peace—and understanding—between one person and another.