Conversation with Muslim Author, Amir Hussain

Tim: Amir, as I was reading your book I was acutely aware of the different meaning your sacred text, the Qur’an, has for you as a Muslim compared to the meaning the Bible has for me as a Christian. For you the Qur’an consists of the direct words of God as revealed through one person, Muhammad, the prophet of God. For me, the Bible consists of a collection of writings, which are an inspired record of people’s response to God’s presence in their lives over many centuries of ancient history. As you point out in your final chapter, many Christians understand the Bible to be historical, metaphorical, and sacramental, but not literal.

I was aware, however, that on a number of occasions in your book you made reference to the Qur’an as a product of a particular cultural context and historical moment. Furthermore, in the last chapter, you write, “Just as more and more Christians see the truth of the Bible to be in the way it provides meaning for their lives and puts them in touch with the Divine – so Muslims can experience ‘truth’ in new ways. What once might have been understood as literally true is now seen as metaphorically true.” The more I read, the closer you and I seemed to be in terms of the relationship between faith and text. How close do you think we actually are?

Amir : I think we are actually very close on this. For me as a Muslim, the Qur’an is the very word of God. In this way, it is similar to the way in which Christians understand Jesus. Historical Jesus scholarship has helped us to learn more about who Jesus was, and more about the composition and context of the New Testament. In a similar way, as a scholar of Islam, I know something about the historical context of the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad. I think that allows me to read the Qur’an as a whole, and not to pick and choose verses. Muslims have much the same problem with proof texts as Christians do. In reading the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad, I am called to work, as a Muslim, for a world where it is safe for all of us to be human. I know the same is true for you and for many Christians.

... READ MORE

The Emerging Christian Way Meets Islam

As you can see from my conversation with Amir Hussain, I am interested not just in general interfaith issues, but specifically in the meeting point between the emerging vision of Christianity and other faiths.

Here’s how I framed a question for another person of the Muslim faith:

I am part of a growing movement within Christianity that calls itself “the emerging Christian way.” People attracted to this way

• see the way of Jesus as being about the transformation of the self and of the world and not about right belief,
• are concerned with how the practice of our faith addresses our relationships and growth in this life rather with the requirements and rewards of an afterlife,
• appreciate that all the major world religions are inviting the faithful into communities of transformation: of the self, to a new way and of the world through compassion,
• honour the distinctiveness of each religion, while wanting to be enriched and changed through involvement with these other paths of transformation and belief.

I have three questions for you:

1. Is the emphasis on transformation-centered rather than belief-centered faith a feature of discourse within your own religion at this time?
2. What specific opportunities are there in your faith community for Christians desiring to deepen their own knowledge of God and the sacred?
3. Can you think of ways that we might more effectively work together as people of different faiths, with a shared desire to bring God’s healing compassion to our broken world?

I contacted Raheel Raza, a prominent and outspoken Muslim leader and writer in Toronto (www.raheelraza.com), and asked her my questions. Here’s her response.

1. Transformation-centered dialogue is a part of the Sufi or mystic tradition in Islam. To my understanding, that is the most desirable path because it embraces a pluralistic ideology where changing the self is more important than holding others up to our own belief system. This discourse is not taking place at a general level, but rather in some circles where interfaith discussion is built into the dialogue.
2. The opportunities for Christians to deepen their own knowledge of God and the sacred through dialogue with Muslims are manifold. However, once again, it all depends on the individuals involved in this practice and their intention. In my personal experience, I find that when I speak of similarities rather than differences between Islam and Christianity, people are empowered to learn more. I have also discovered that when we pray together the experience is extremely moving and allows others to look for alternate ways to remember God.
   For example when we do sufi zikr, which is the remembrance of God by repetition of God’s name and attributes, there are always people from the Christian faith who pick this up as a regular practice, thereby finding another path to God.
3. These are the kinds of things that have worked for me in my interfaith practice and that I would encourage:
• Focus more on similarities than differences.
• Find those aspects of our faiths that are in sync with each other and expand on them. This would include things like sacred music. This takes time and research, but if you are really serious, it’s worth it.
• Find ways to worship together. When I speak in churches these days, we do a multi-faith service with both Muslim and Christian scriptures. People are moved by the power of these services.

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Getting Real in Interfaith Dialogue

Those are great challenges from Raheel!

Hearing the clarity of her perspective made me want to learn more about how interfaith dialogue can become truly transformative, so I turned to another Wood Lake author, Derek Evans. No one I know has been to more places on the globe for more conversations with people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds than Derek. I really trust the windows that Derek opens for me on the realities of our world. I also appreciate how candid Derek can be about these matters.

When I asked Derek to propose five interfaith challenges for people of the emerging Christian way, I wasn’t surprised that he started out with specific memories from his globetrotting days. I hope you will take a few minutes to read the full article that follows, because Derek’s stories from his own interfaith experiences offer further insight the “emergent” challenges he issues. Below, I’ve summarized the challenges Derek names in his article.

Now I hope you will take time to read the whole of Derek’s article.

Facing the Challenge: Toward a Credible and Authentic InterFaith Dialogue

The deeper we step into the 21st century, the clearer it becomes that we must take seriously the significance of the world’s great spiritual traditions if we are to survive as a species, let alone become a healthy family. We are challenged with the urgent need to discover creative ways of relating with each other in open, honest, and respectful relationships. Yet we seem increasingly caught in a complex dialectic of distrust and resentment that allows little room for dialogue, and that threatens to condemn us to a perpetual spiral of division and conflict. A headline in The Economist earlier this year captured not only the difficulties of the current moment, but also the dynamic that has characterized much of the 1,300 year relationship between the Islamic world and the Christian and humanist traditions of the West: “Mutual Incomprehension, Mutual Outrage.”

I have been asked to reflect on the key challenges we face if we are to engage in interfaith dialogue in a credible and authentic manner. In considering the future, I found it was necessary first to remember some moments in my own experience that inform and guide my perspective on the challenges that lie ahead. ... READ MORE

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A DIVINE SPARK: Harvie Barker on the Prophetic Vision of Karen Armstrong

Harvie Barker is a good friend and a minister of the United Church of Canada who lives in Penticton, British Columbia. He has been writing columns in regional newspapers for years and has published many of them in a collection called A Good Word in Season. I always watch for Harvie’s contributions in the Penticton Herald. As I was mulling over the focus of this newsletter, an article Harvie had just written drew my attention to the thought and work of Karen Armstrong, the most popular writer on religion in the world today. Take a moment to read what Harvie wrote.

A Divine Spark

Those who study the world’s religions tell us that, going back to the 4th century BCE and earlier, all ancient belief systems contained the conviction that the divine essence was within every person.

In her book The Spiral Staircase, Armstrong writes

The only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice is that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express your sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. ... READ MORE

CRASH: Fulfilling the Profound Desire for Human Contact

Being a lover of story and image, I am always on the lookout for good films that express through narrative, image, and well-considered dialogue ideas such as the ones offered by Rachel Remen in My Grandfather’s Blessings. Crash is memorable in that way. It came out of nowhere, developed a huge following, and then won the Oscar for best movie of 2005 at the Academy Awards this year.

Crash is all about the encounter with strangers and the human tendency to be fooled by appearances: race, age, illness, anger, or busyness. It’s about recognizing that place of goodness and integrity in the other, no matter how deeply it has been buried or for how long. It’s also about the profound human desire for contact with other humans, regardless of who they are. As the film opens, a police detective, played by actor Don Cheadle, is giving voice to the thesis that is so powerfully explored in this film:

It’s the sense of touch.
In any real city, you walk, you pass people; people bump into you.
In L.A. nobody touches you.
We’re always behind this metal and glass.
I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.

Of course, the consequence of encountering another is that we also encounter ourselves. The brilliance of the film resides in the fact that, as viewers, we have to deal with our judgements of the characters, as well as their judgements of one another. Filmmaker Paul Haggis interweaves numerous threads of story, which connect in fascinating ways, as he pursues his thesis with a clear eye and a genuine spirit of intercultural exploration.

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BAGDAD CAFÉ: Coming Out From Behind The Metal And Glass

Here’s another jewel of a film that begins with various expressions of “metal and glass” barriers that have been created in the name of safety, but that have led to extreme alienation. At the heart of Bagdad Café, a 1988 film made in English by German director Percy Adlon, is the “crash” of two characters.

Imagine this: a Bavarian Hausfrau in her tweedy wool German jacket, skirt, and hat, and pulling a wheeled suitcase, walks off a desert road somewhere west of Las Vegas and into a dusty truck stop, where an afro-American woman, who has just sent her useless husband packing, is at her wits end trying to run the gas station, motel, and restaurant, while looking after her three kids.

Drop any two people, from opposite sides of the planet, into something like the Bagdad Café truck stop, and see what happens. It could be a disaster, but it could also be magic. This movie leads us through the slow process of magic and transformation that happens between Jasmin and Brenda. Along the way, we get to meet as unlikely a crew of characters as you’re ever bound to meet, anywhere. The truth is that Bagdad Café is everywhere; it just may be harder to see the process of transformation going on in the busyness and complexity of communities that are not as isolated as this one in the California desert. ... READ MORE

From BAGDAD CAFÉ to Jerusalem: On the Road with the Magi

Just as this strange Bavarian woman, Jasmin, came out of the California desert and transformed the lives of the folks at the Bagdad Café, so did the three Magi came out of the desert east of Jerusalem and transform the meaning of the birth of a baby born to peasant parents.

Bruce Sanguin has written a wonderful little essay about the difference between these travelers and the king they encountered on their way to find the Godchild, whose sign they had seen in the sky. Bruce presents a way of seeing the Magi that offers insight into how we might be Christian in a world of many faiths. Here’s a taste of what Bruce offers in his reflection on the Magi:

Here we have wise people scouring the night skies, not for signs that they have the Truth, but for signs of the truth wherever truth might choose to show itself. They have the wisdom to realize that the Holy One is not restricted to revealing Herself to only their people. They’ve taken their heads out of their own Bibles long enough to gaze up and out at what is the source of our fundamental unity, rather than at what divides us. The wise ones intuited what science has now confirmed, that the basis of the unity of all peoples of faith is biospiritual. We have come from the same place and are made of the same stuff. We are stardust, reconfigured in human form, inspired by the Creator. They gaze up at the stars and realize that a very special human being is about to be born, a child who is meant to transcend cultures, transcend religious differences, and point us all in the direction of a compassionate Father, the love which fired it all into being.

You can read the rest of Bruce’s essay, “Paying Homage: Being Christian in a World of Many Faiths,” in the CopperHouse book The Emerging Christian Way: Thoughts, Stories, and Wisdom for a Faith of Transformation.

Bruce is one of a growing community of Christians who are moving beyond restlessness with past forms and practices, and who are giving creative and innovative voice to this “emerging” movement. Are you feeling that restlessness; that desire for the persuasive? How are you involved in shaping the emerging way?

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Signing Off and Waiting to Hear from You

All of us at CopperHouse bring a highly exploratory spirit to the work and development of the network. Please write and let us know what’s going on for you in this emerging adventure.

What are your responses to anything you have read in this newsletter?

What’s happening in your community that reflects the emerging Christian way, as you understand and experience it?

What issues would you encourage us to bring forward in future editions of the Current?

Thank you for reading this edition of CopperHouseCURRENT.

Shalom, Salaams, Peace

Tim Scorer

Tim Scorer, editor of CopperHouseCURRENT, is a freelance writer, educator, and spiritual director, who lives in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada. He has been growing into the emerging vision of Christianity since the mid 1960s, when he first read John Robinson’s prophetic book Honest to God. In more recent times, he has been influenced by the work of teachers and scholars such as Marcus Borg and Brian McLaren. In 2005, Wood Lake Publishing published Tim’s small-group study guide to Borg’s The Heart of Christianity, called Experiencing the Heart of Christianity.

 Contact Tim at copperhousecurrent@woodlakebooks.com

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Coming Next

With the release of Matthew Fox’s CopperHouse book The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human , we will focus our attention on education and the emerging way, and particularly on education that brings about transformation, both personal and societal.

If you would like to contribute to that edition, contact us by September 22 with stories of people who are bringing about transformation through their work in education.

 Write an email to copperhousecurrent@woodlakebooks.com

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