By Bill Friskics-Warren /www.tennessean.com
My engagement with Islam began almost by accident, not quite three years ago, when my church, New Covenant Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), invited members of the Islamic Center of Nashville to join us for our annual Martin Luther King celebration.
The ensuing journey has changed my life, challenging my assumptions about the human and the divine in ways I’d scarcely imagined.
Members of both congregations – my church a historically African-American fellowship, the Islamic Center a mosque whose membership comprises 40 different nationalities – took part in the service.
Some of us offered prayers, others read scripture. A laywoman from the Islamic Center, an African-American who grew up Baptist and now wears the hijab, delivered the sermon.
Our choir’s raised voices and hand claps had her reminiscing fondly about the transporting call-and-response of the black church in which she grew up. Our morning together was, by all accounts, an expression in miniature of Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community.
At the reception that followed, a representative of the Islamic Center invited members of our church to visit the mosque. My wife Kaki and I took him up on his offer and began attending Juma’ah, the Friday prayer services there.
Strangers invited us in to learn and worship
We had participated in community events at the Islamic Center before but never in Salah, or worship. Not sure what to expect, we nonetheless felt welcome and, for the most part, at home, even if, early on, a discreet soul had to correct me after I mistakenly folded my left arm over my right, instead of vice versa, while praying.
We were moved by the intimacy of corporate prayer, with everyone standing shoulder-to-shoulder and facing in a single direction, toward Mecca.
We also appreciated the imam’s pragmatism and genial sense of humor. In his weekly khutbahs, or sermons, he expounded on topics ranging from civic engagement – “As Muslims we must exercise our right to vote!” he exhorted – to domestic violence, the mercy of Allah and on how “diversity is a tool of strength, not of weakness.”
It didn’t concern us, as Christians, that in Islam Isa, or Jesus, is merely accorded the status of a prophet. (Theologians by training, Kaki and I share a “low” Christology, our interpretation of scripture focusing more on the humanity than the divinity of Christ.)
As feminists and allies of womanist theologians of color (Kaki and I are white), we struggled with the separation of genders during prayer but, as outsiders, adopted a posture of humility toward it.
More than anything we were struck by how much time the imam and others at the mosque must spend interpreting their faith to a world that so profoundly, even willfully, misunderstands them.
Understanding Islam has made us better Christians
Modeled on Jesus’ identification with marginalized people, liberation theology asserts that God takes sides – God is not impartial – and that God always sides with those who are shunned or cast out.
If God is anywhere, then surely God must be present at the Islamic Center, where its members daily confront a world that unjustly fears and reviles them as the suspected other, subjected to vandalism, travel bans and dehumanizing stereotypes. To stand – indeed, to kneel – in prayer with these courageous, peace-loving souls is for me to be where God is truly manifest.
This affinity is not about any spiritual generosity on my part – certainly not as someone whose white privilege permits me to go practically anywhere I want without feeling uncomfortable or out-of-place.
Rather, it is about my Muslim siblings sharing the divine within their world with me. It is about them welcoming me, a stranger, despite my perpetuation, as a white male, of values and institutions that oppress them.
With a de-centering force akin to that of the New Testament parables, Islam has disrupted my ill-gotten sense of security and place. It has confronted me with the startling prospect that I am the “other,” and yet remarkably, not one who is treated as an unwanted outsider but as one beloved, as one regarded, as the philosopher Martin Buber so intimately put it, as “thou.”
Much as when our African-American church embraced Kaki and me as members many years ago, my time at the Islamic Center has revealed to me just how much my well-being, my completeness as a person, depends on the kinship and hospitality I am afforded there.
Bill Friskics-Warren has master’s in divinity degree and is an Elder at New Covenant Christian Church.
