Tag Archives: Muhammad

Make Jesus and Muhammad Proud

This week, I published two new articles, one focused on the Middle East, and another about domestic events. Both, however, deal with Islamophobia and the necessary interfaith response to it.

Sojourners was kind enough to ask me to write a piece in response to the anti-Muslim rallies which were planned throughout the country last weekend. Fortunately, many of these protests didn’t materialize, and often the ones that did were met with loving responses from Muslims and other Americans. Still there is always more that can be done.

A Muslim woman embraced a lone protester outside an Ohio mosque on Saturday. After visiting the mosque at the encouragement of the worshippers, the protester said, "I had no idea Muslims could be nice to me, even after I stood out there with those signs. Sorry."
“I had no idea Muslims could be nice to me, even after I stood out there with those signs. Sorry.” -Lone protestor outside Ohio mosque

In “Five Things To Do When an Anti-Muslim Hate Rally Comes to Town,” I elaborate on several ways to counter to Islamophobic  activities:

  1. Gather together… and pray together.
  2. If you do demonstrate, make Jesus (and Muhammad) proud.
  3. Learn about Islam…and Islamophobia.
  4. Publicize what you’re doing, even if it’s something small.
  5. Repeat steps 1 through 4, even when a hate rally isn’t coming to town.

One important gesture, I write, is joint prayer: “Christians could observe Muslim’s prayer rituals, or better yet, recite a written prayer together with them. This sample prayer, which incorporates teachings from both Islamic and Christian traditions, could be used to affirm the common values maintained by all:

Almighty and Merciful God,
Who created humanity in all its wonderful diversity:
Help us to be peacemakers
And inspire us to repel evil with good.
Help us to love our neighbors,
To welcome the stranger,
And to turn enemies into friends.
Guide as one community
As we strive on the path of justice, peace, and understanding.”

In another piece, titled “No One is a Stranger: the Jordanian Model of Muslim-Christian Relations” and published by Commonweal online, I share my reactions to a Jordanian family’s remarks to Pope Francis at the Festival of Families in Philadelphia.

Here’s an excerpt:

There was no acknowledgment of peaceful co-existence in the past, of the centuries of tolerance during which Christian communities thrived under Muslim rulers. There was no mention of the tolerance that today is typical of Jordan. There was simply implicit condemnation of Islam and the unchallenged characterization of the country as a “hostile environment… this overwhelmingly non-Christian community [in which] the church youth group gives our children safe harbor where they can grow in their faith and feel supported and cared about.”

Elaborating on the history and contemporary situation of Muslim-Christian coexistence in Jordan, I also reference my Fulbright research on Arabic-language Christian satellite television channels to help explain what might have led to Sweden’s one-sided portrayal.

A sign welcoming Pope Francis to Jordan in May 2014

In addition, I point to a decades-old poem by the Jordanian writer, Arar, whose words are quoted in the piece’s title. It’s message, about the shared Christian and Islamic heritage of Jordan, is echoed in a more recent poem which I encountered online and translated into English:

Because I Was Born in Jordan

I open the Qur’an
with a cross upon my chest,
reading Surat al-Tawba at the break of day
and Surat Maryam as the sun sets.
I look to my right
and I see Christ there.
I look to my left
and I greet the face of the beloved Prophet.

You all, don’t ask me:
“What is this strange prayer?
What is this foreign religion?”
Because this prayer isn’t strange,
and this path isn’t foreign.
It is who we are,
our identity,
our unity,
our oneness.

Because when Mama bore me in Jordan,
she baptized me with the water of Zamzam
and gave me the Qur’an as well as the cross.

The Muslims and Christians that came together across the U.S. last weekend, and the individuals that live side-by-side in Jordan, would make Jesus and Muhammad proud.  They challenge the suspicion and distrust that too often characterize our time, and approach one another with love and patience. Their witness is crucial for today’s world, and an example we all must follow.

The $200,000 Conversation

This afternoon, while wandering the garden of my favorite, secluded hangout on an otherwise crowded hillside in Amman, I discovered the ruins of a Christian church and Islamic shrine. The site, which is still strewn with stone columns and pebbled with pale mosaic tiles, was home to an ancient church, built in the 500s and dedicated to St. George. Though the church was abandoned two hundred years later, the place remained a shrine to the saint until the 20th century. St. George—who is also revered in Islam as al-Khidr, meaning “the green one”—is a towering mythical figure in the Middle Eastern spirituality, and countless churches and holy sites in the region purport to be the location of his miracles and appearances.

An icon of St. George at the Khidr church in al-Salt, a town northwest of Amman.
An icon of St. George at the Khidr church in al-Salt, a town northwest of Amman.

As I was reading the brief plaque explaining the history of the site, which was excavated by Americans in the 1990s, I began a conversation in Arabic with a young pharmacist named Osama. I anticipated the conversation would consist only of small talk, but we quickly launched into a conversation about…surprise, surprise: Muslim-Christian relations. But this conversation was different than my usual ones, which usually involve talking about interpersonal relations between the two groups here. We began discussing  big theological questions between Christianity and Islam. He pulled out his smart phone to show me that he has both the Qur’an app and the Arabic Bible app, and asked why the Bible is composed into separate books with separate authors. I expect this a common questions Muslims ask, since their text, the Qur’an, has a single voice and author: God’s. I explained the ‘what’ of the New Testament—that people after Jesus wrote about him—and then attempted to move to the ‘why.’ I began to feel giddy as I brought up my favorite Islam-Christianity comparison explanation, where I compare the functions of Mary and Muhammad, Jesus and the Qur’an, and the Bible and the Hadith. (For many of you students and scholars of Islam out there, you might disagree with those comparisons. They may be simplistic but they’re good starting points for dialogue I think.) I’m not sure Osama really followed what I was saying, but I was proud of myself for trying to explain it—in Arabic.

What made this half-hour encounter so thrilling was that it was 98% in Arabic. Osama doesn’t speak much English from what I could tell, so it challenged me to stick to colloquial Arabic. It made me grateful for and proud of my Arabic program and professors at Georgetown. Those nights during my freshman year when I slaved away for hours on my beginner Arabic homework paid off in this one conversation (not to mention the countless more basic ones I’ve already had here.)

Osama and I then moved on to other topics including Islamic beliefs about al-Khidr, what determines prophethood in Islam, and the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims. He used very technical, theological terms like ‘aqida (“belief”), fiqh (“jurisprudence”), and wahy (“revelation”), and I could follow what he said and interject my thoughts because of my very strong education in Islam at Georgetown. Without my classes with Dan Madigan, Jonathan Brown, John Esposito, and without the many lessons and sermons from Imam Yahya Hendi, and without the many conversations with Muslim friends, I could never have dreamed to have such a meaningful, deep, and heady conversation with Osama.

As we swapped contact information, I was flying as high as the pigeons overhead. I was bowled over with gratitude at the education I received at Georgetown, realizing that so much of what I learned in classrooms there was put to use in this single conversation half the world away. I felt that my four years of study—and the thousands of dollars paid by my parents—were more than worth it. So many people feel like their undergraduate educations are barely useful, hardly relevant, in the real world. But for me, alhamdulilah (thank God), that is not the case. Every day my Hoya education informs my experiences, but today I was especially conscious of my education’s remarkable impact.

As Osama and I parted, I not only felt grateful to Georgetown, but also to St. George, who, on the crumbling ruins of once-holy ground, is still making miracles.

Ruins of the church.
Ruins of the church.

Poem: “Bethel”

About six months ago, I composed the following poem. It’s called Bethel, which means “house of God” in Hebrew. Initially inspired by peaceful summer sunsets and a passage of Genesis (which can be found below), I found myself weaving together strands of wisdom I’ve gathered from diverse religious sources over the years.

The words of this poem are not original. Every line contains a direct reference to a different scripture passage or myth that has informed my own personal sprituality. The sources include the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Qur’an and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), Jewish midrash (commentary), the poetry of Hafiz and Rumi, the mystical writings of Julian of Norwich and Gregory of Nyssa, and Buddhist myth.

I’ve linked each line to the source from which it comes, so you can look up the ideas inspired this piece. I hope this poem can be a source for inter religious education, to help acquaint religious and non-religious people alike with the beautiful truths contained in religious stories.

But more importantly, I hope this poem can express a bit of my own varied experience of God. The words of these great religions help me to describe a range of encounters and emotions: first, wonder and awe; then, confusion and mystery; abandonment and anxiety; pain and relief; excitement and giddiness; peace and communion. I’m  learning that of these states of being–all of these stages of joy, sorrow, boredom, and everything in between–are locations of encounter with God.

In short, the message of this poem is an elaboration of Jacob’s exclamation in Genesis 28:16: “Truly, the Lord is in this spot, although I did not know it.” Though I don’t often realize it, God is always with me.

Bethel
by Jordan Denari

This spot

where I place a stone
where the sparrow falls
and hovers like love over the waters
where He breaks a branch,
a rung on the ladder,
     and His foot touches earth near me.

where there’s a ringing in my ears,
     a tight, breathless squeezing
where fire passes between
     two wrestling beings
where I’m shoved into a cliff face
     and down into a ditch.

where a ram is found in the thicket
where mothers clutch branches of date
     and sal trees
where a father runs to me, though I was a long way off.

where the Lover leaps across the hills
     and knocks at my door
     so sweetly asking for your address.

where the lilies no longer toil and spin
where light is poured back in
where the stone is rolled away
    and the Gardener calls my name. 

Sunset in North East Washington, D.C. at the Franciscan Monastery.
Sunset in North East Washington, D.C. at the Franciscan Monastery.

‘In our time’: Francis moves beyond Nostra Aetate

My newest piece on dotCommonweal. Read an excerpt here and continue reading on Commonweal’s website.

Muslim immigration to Italy. Persecution of Christians in Syria. Anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Netherlands. Anti-Christian rulings in Malaysia. Mosque burnings in the United States and church burnings in Egypt. These sad events are some of the most obvious points of contact between Catholics and Muslims in the modern world. Thus, it’s unsurprising that Pope Francis’ new apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, or “The Joy of the Gospel,” makes mention of Islam and Catholic-Muslim interaction. In his familiar style, Pope Francis smartly roots his commentary on Islam in the tradition of the Church and his predecessors, while at the same time forges new theological territory.

Read more.

Islam & women piece: Seeking questions from my readers

“Why do you cover your hair? Do you have to?”

“You’ve never had a boyfriend. Will you ever date before you get married?”

“Why do you and the other girls stand behind men when you pray?  Why don’t women lead Friday prayers?”

“Muhammad had several wives.  Is polygamy still ok in Islam?”

Before coming to Georgetown, these are some of the questions that I had for Muslim women, but I didn’t have any way to get real and thoughtful answers.  I knew of a few women in my community, but not well enough that I felt I could talk to them about these deep and complex topics.

Sadly, for many Americans, this image defines their understanding of the relationship between Islam and women.

Despite the fact that we as Americans hear so much about “Islam” in the news, good resources about Islam and its female followers are hard to come by.  The only resources we have to guide our understanding about Muslim women are books like A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (the author of The Kite Runner) and news articles like TIME’s recent cover story about abused Afghan women—accounts which are not representative of the lives lived by many American Muslim women.  The most important means for understanding—daily interaction with real people, in this case, Muslim women—is not something that most people have.  I didn’t have it either.

Since coming to Georgetown, I have fortunately had those daily connections that have helped me answer my questions about Islam and women.  Spending classroom time my Arabic professor and TA; meeting female leaders and mothers affiliated with the campus; and forming friendships with students have provided me with a perspective of Islam and women that I wouldn’t have possibly received by simply watching the news or reading popular fiction.

However, many other Americans still have many of the questions I did, and they lack the daily interactions that can help provide answers.

In order to remedy this in the smallest way, this winter a Muslim friend and I will be writing a joint piece for my blog about women and Islam.

Finn (left) and Sam (right) from Glee

It is this friend* who initially provided me with this interaction. During my first semester, we became instant friends and she is now one of the closest friends I’ve ever had.  In between watching hilarious Youtube clips and arguing over whether Sam from Glee has an awkwardly big mouth, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what it means for her to be a Muslim women in America today.   She and I both think that her first person accounts can help give non-Muslim Americans a new, much-needed look into the lives and perspectives of Muslim women.

The piece (which will probably turn into a series of smaller pieces) will look like this:  I will organize a series of questions that my friend will respond to based on her personal experiences.  I will add any context that may be useful to a non-Muslim or Christian audience.

Because of our deep immersion in these topics, it is difficult for her and I to step back and identify what specific questions should drive the piece.  We don’t know what many Americans want and need to hear about.

This is where my readers come in.  What questions do you have?  Is there something you’ve heard relating to women and Islam that discomforts you or makes you curious?

I will be happy to receive any and all questions you may have.  To encourage you to ask whatever is on your mind, I will keep your questions anonymous when I use them in my piece.  Even my friend, who will be responding to the questions, will not know their origin.

So please do not worry about sounding insensitive, uninformed, or politically incorrect—all questions expressed respectfully are valid.  Meaningful and productive discussions require that we address all of our thoughts and questions.

If you know of a family member or friend who may have questions but who doesn’t read the blog, send them the link so they can submit a question.

My friend and I greatly appreciate your questions and support of this project.

My email address is jed56@georgetown.edu.  You can send me your questions there, or post them in the comments section of the blog.

*You probably noticed that I did not use my friend’s name in this post.  Because she doesn’t want her name floating around in the blogosphere, she has decided to work on this project under a pseudonym (we haven’t picked it yet).  Also, given the nature of this honest discussion and the increased hostility we’ve recently seen directed toward Muslims in America and Europe, this will allow her to respond without worrying whether her statements will be taken out of context and used against her later.