Monday, 17 December 2007 00:00
In September, I had the opportunity to attend the Global Leadership Forum (GLF) sponsored by the Institute for Global Engagement. As Professor of Education and Director of Graduate Studies at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, I have a profound interest in building bridges to people of other faiths. The GLF offered a rich opportunity to hear people from a variety of perspectives dialogue about ways in which we can collaborate, while not denying the differences among us.
When I returned to Missouri, I wanted to share something of what I had experienced at GLF so I wrote the following letter to our local newspaper, The Springfield News-Leader, and it was published on October 19, 2007.
Sharing God's Love Crosses Religious Boundaries
Several letters to the editor in recent days have addressed the issue of Muslim-Christian relations. In 1983, the Springfield Rotary Club sponsored my application for a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship, enabling me to spend a year studying at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. Dozens of Moroccan friends welcomed me into their homes, fed me their extraordinary food, and took me to see the historic sites in that remarkable country. I was a foreigner and a person of a different faith, a Christian among Muslims, but they treated me with hospitality and generosity.
Among the kind Moroccans I got to know that year was Rachid, a businessman working in Rabat while his wife and children continued to live in his hometown of Tangiers. Rachid and I and another American friend shared an apartment, prepared and ate our meals together, and visited his family in Tangiers. One of the most memorable experiences of that year was praying with Rachid for his ailing young daughter. Praying together, I felt a strong sense of God's love at work in both our lives and in his daughter's. Before long, she was up and around and we celebrated together God's goodness.
At the end of the year, I shared my gratitude with the Rabat Rotary Club that had hosted me. Upon returning to Springfield, I had the opportunity to express my thanks to the Springfield Rotary Club and to share what I had learned about the importance of building bridges of friendship across the lines that separate Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
As tensions have risen among these historically related peoples, I sometimes wonder if a Muslim from Morocco would receive the same kind of hospitality coming to Springfield now as I received when I went to Rabat then. Some of the rhetoric I hear concerns me, painting Muslims with the broad brush of "Islamo-fascism" or some similar epithet. I recently attended a leadership forum in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Institute for Global Engagement, an organization established by Christians for the purpose of building bridges to those of other faiths and advocating for religious freedom globally. Two of the speakers at the forum were young American Muslims. One appealed to us: "When someone kills innocent people, please do not call him an Islamo-fascist or a Muslim terrorist, or a Muslim anything. People like that do not represent Islam." Someone in the audience asked, "Then what should we call them?" Her answer: "Call them murderers."
She's right, I think. Islam is as diverse as Christianity. Any statement that begins, "All Muslims ..." is as likely to be wrong as any statement that begins, "All Christians..." The Muslims I met in Morocco, and those who have become my friends subsequently, are people like us: each one with his or her own unique strengths, weaknesses, culture, and perspective.
Those of us who are followers of Christ are doubly responsible to treat people of Muslim faith with love rather than anger and hostility. "If I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing" (I Corinthians 13:2).
