March/April 2008 Issue

Cover Story:
Getting to Know Our Muslim Neighbours
By Alan Guenther

Faced with the great variety among Muslims in Canada, Christians would be wise to know a bit of history and to invite their neighbours to talk about what they believe
      
With more and more Muslims making Canada their home – now up to 800,000 according to one estimate by Statistics Canada – how do evangelical Christians relate to our Muslim neighbours? Newspapers and TV give us confusing impressions. Are Muslims in Canada really like the characters on the popular show Little Mosque on the Prairie? Some newspaper columnists would convince us Islam is fundamentally violent while others suggest the message of Islam is “peace.”

A helpful approach for Christians is to focus less on “Islam” and more on “Muslims.” This approach helps do justice to the diversity among Muslims and avoid simplistic generalizations. We non-Muslims don’t have the right to decide what normative or “true” Islam is anyway – we are limited to describing what we observe as outsiders. 

Two biblical commands can guide us: (1) Love your neighbour as yourself and (2) Do not bear false witness. 

The first means we should be careful to think and talk about Islam in ways that we would want Muslims to use in describing Christianity. This doesn’t mean we can’t speak critically, but it does mean we must follow Jesus’ example of self-giving love. 

Second, any statements we make about Islam and Muslims should be those a Muslim would recognize to be accurate. If no Muslim can accept our definition of Islam as true of himself or herself, then we risk bearing false witness. (We also need to beware of responses based primarily in fear, which by definition take a worldly, un-Christlike attitude.)
 
SOURCES OF AUTHORITY
Christians respect the Bible as a key source of authority. Similarly, Muslims have the Qur’an. But a close look at different kinds of Christians – Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant – shows that we express our faith differently based on the differing weight given to the Bible, gifts of the Holy Spirit, traditions from the Church Fathers, creeds and decisions reached by ecumenical councils, apostolic succession, systems of church government and even human reasoning.

Muslim diversity can be explained similarly.

The two most important sources of authority for a Muslim are the Qur’an and the Sunna, or pattern of Muhammad’s life. Muslims believe God sent revelations to Muhammad which were collected into a book to provide guidance for the new Muslim community. To help decide what the verses in the Qur’an mean, Muslims today consult commentaries written hundreds of years ago, similar to what many Christians do with classic Bible commentaries. So we can’t just pick up a Qur’an and assume we can interpret it correctly if we have no knowledge of the history of Qur’anic interpretation.

In situations where the Qur’an did not provide specific guidance, Muslims looked to the actions and words of Muhammad. Many such stories are preserved in the collections of traditions known as the Hadith. Unlike the Qur’an, there is no single book of Hadith accepted as authoritative by all Muslims, though some traditions and some collections are seen as more reliable than others.

BEYOND THE QUR’AN AND THE SUNNA
Based on the Qur’an and Muhammad’s life (he died in AD 632), early Muslims developed Sharia (Muslim law), theology and philosophy. The Sharia also drew on reasoning by qualified scholars and the consensus of the Muslim community. As a body of legal decisions accumulated, four distinct schools of law emerged – and these help characterize different groups of Muslims today.

The majority of Muslims in Canada and worldwide identify with the Sunni tradition. Sunni Muslims in Canada today may have roots in Pakistan, Indonesia, the Arab world or a North African country, for example. In many of these places, Sunnis form the majority of the national population. Sunnis share a preference for one of the four schools of law for guidance.

Another group of Muslims, with roots in Iran and Iraq, are Shi‘ite Muslims. The earliest Shi‘ites after the death of Muhammad chose to follow his cousin and son-in-law Ali, and developed their own schools of law based on the traditional sources but continue to accept the opinions of certain living scholars. 

“The main Shi‘ite legal school today follows scholars known as ‘living sources of emulation’ who are believed to have inherited the mantle of prophetic authority from 12 direct descendants of Muhammad through his daughter, Fatima. Their legal decisions are said to represent the opinions of the ever-living but absent Mahdi, the last of the 12, who will return some day to establish a just world,” explains Linda Darwish, who teaches religious studies in New Brunswick at Mount Allison University.

Other historical episodes have shaped the faces of Islam seen in Canada today. Wahhabism, a movement that influences many revivalist groups such as Al-Qa‘ida, is inspired by a back-to-basics, 18th-century reformer. Abd al-Wahhab rejected mystical practices and an unquestioning obedience to the established Sharia in favour of a more direct reliance on the Qur’an and the Hadith.

In contrast, movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan are committed to a strict following of one of the four traditional schools of law. 

There are also modernist Muslims who emphasize that Islam has enough flexibility within itself to adapt to the modern world and who have insisted on the right of Muslims to reinterpret their sources to meet the ever-changing needs of Muslim communities. 

Yet another group, often denounced as heterodox by other Muslims, is the Ahmadiyya movement. Its 19th century founder claimed to be the reformer of Islam, as well as the Mahdi awaited by the Shi‘ites and the Messiah awaited by the Christians. His followers accept his teachings as the authoritative interpretation of Islam.

ISSUES FACING CANADIAN MUSLIMS
More than half of Muslims in Canada are first-, second- or third-generation immigrants according to Statistics Canada. (Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver continue to draw most.) Like immigrant Muslims in many other western countries, they now find themselves a religious minority and are arriving at diverse conclusions about what it means to be a Muslim in such a situation.

“When young Muslims today look for help in understanding the Qur’an, where do they turn?” asks Gordon Nickel, who teaches intercultural studies at ACTS Seminaries in British Columbia. “Would committed young Muslims in Canada be more attracted to a relativist, postmodern or secularist spin on the Qur’an and Islam or to a revivalist interpretation?” 

The best way to understand how our Muslim neighbours answer such important questions is to get to know them and hear what they have to say themselves about what they believe.

We may find, for example, that our neighbours advocate Sharia to arbitrate matters such as family law disputes. Or they may strongly oppose such efforts, arguing that Muslim law would be too open to political control and manipulation by certain groups within the Muslim community. (Some Muslims even disagree as to what constitutes the Sharia, with some seeing it as a rigid code passed down from medieval times and others seeing it as a more flexible legal system sensitive to changing contexts.) 

Shi‘ites appeal to living authorities to apply the Sharia. Linda Darwish explains: “As new issues arise – and they frequently do for Muslims living in the West – Shi‘ites have a ready store of up-to-date guidance that provides security in knowing they are following the wisdom of the Prophet.” 

For example, Muslims living in the West might question what responsibilities they have towards their adopted government. “One popular source of emulation for Shi‘ites in the West, Ayatollah Fadlallah, commands a code of honourable conduct based on the idea of the contract: the Muslim who enters foreign territory is obligated to fulfil the contractual obligations implicit in the visa he or she received upon entry to the new country,” explains Darwish. 

“Wearing the hijab [or headscarf] is likewise considered a religious duty (comparable to the daily prayers at the set times) and does not change because of where a Muslim woman lives. Statements such as these are called fatwas, and there are many such declarations covering a wide range of questions that Muslims ask themselves in the process of adapting to life in the West,” says Darwish. 

Responses by Muslims in Canada to various fatwas range from strict compliance to more liberal attitudes, such as following the ideas of western Muslim academics or even one’s own interpretations.

While many Muslim immigrants have tried to duplicate in Canada the way of life they may have lived elsewhere, others – especially the second and third generations – are increasingly frustrated by traditions and practices that alienate them from other Canadians. 

They are exploring new ways of being Muslim and Canadian. The tension they face between wanting to preserve their cultural practices and needing to translate their values and beliefs into a new culture is not new in Canada. German Mennonites, Ukrainian Catholics and Korean Presbyterians and many others have worked though the same tension.

Language is a key issue in immigrant communities. Many Canadian mosques are bilingual, using English to accommodate Muslims who don’t come from the majority ethnic group in a particular mosque. Arabic, though, continues to be used for the prayers and reading or recitation of the Qur’an.

Identity and integration are also prominent concerns among Muslim intellectuals. “Questions of nationalism, gender, sexual orientation and relationships between different parts of the global Muslim community are changing notions of what it is to be Muslim,” says Chad Hillier, who teaches in Ontario at Wilfrid Laurier University and Redeemer University College. 

Cultural assimilation also continues to be discussed. For example, Hillier points to Tariq Ramadan, a leading European Muslim intellectual who has often “criticized Muslims for establishing independent schools, arguing that they hurt integration.”

LITTLE MOSQUE ON THE PRAIRIE
Translating cultural values other than language has proven difficult, as viewers of the new CBC television series Little Mosque on the Prairie have seen. The comedic show portrays emigrants from diverse Muslim regions along with converts from Christian backgrounds striving for unity in their fictional small-town community.

We see Baber, one of the main characters, desperately trying to pass on his values to his daughter who is equally desperately trying to fit in with her friends at school. 

Baber’s efforts are not limited to his home. Often his conflicts with other Muslims at the mosque come as a result of his desire to replicate his experience as a Muslim from South Asia, something the others strenuously resist – with all participants frequently claiming Islam as the ground for their various positions.

The show also illustrates how second-generation Muslims who have grown up in Canada are now expressing their Muslim identity in new ways. For example, consider the character of Rayyan, whose parents are Yasir and Sarah. Rayyan chooses to practise her faith more strictly than either of her parents. As an expression of that choice she wears a headscarf that is not adopted from either of her parents’ cultures. Like her, some Canadian Muslims have chosen to reinterpret and translate their faith to live harmoniously with their neighbours and as contributing citizens. Some others have adopted instead a radicalized faith in which Islam becomes a comprehensive ideology that is opposed to everything “western.”

Tensions among Muslims living in the West are often exacerbated by demands for assimilation made by the host culture. Such demands are frequently strident – an ironic stance in Canada when made by people whose own immigrant grandparents suffered the same treatment. Cultural practices, particularly the veiling of women, are often attacked as un-Canadian (yet my grandmother, a third-generation Canadian Mennonite, wore a head-covering all her adult life whenever she was in public). 

Conversations within Canadian Muslim communities are regularly interrupted by those outside who wish to impose their perspective or seek to influence the outcome. For example, secularists might encourage all Muslims to follow the lead of a secular Muslim such as Irshad Manji (a Canadian feminist broadcaster, author of The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith). Certainly we can all be involved in the discussion of what it means to be Canadian but only Muslims can decide what it means to be Muslim.

A more pernicious intrusion into these conversations is created by non-Muslims who choose a radical element within the conversation and declare it to be the definitive expression of Islam, and on that basis declare that Islam is to be feared and opposed.
 
EVANGELICAL RESPONSE
In conversations between Muslims and Christians, the principle of respect for people of other faiths means taking seriously what both sides believe and confess. Since the beginnings of Islam, Muslims have denied the central gospel affirmations about Jesus confessed by Christians: the divinity and the redemptive death of Jesus. How, then, should we respond to these denials in a Christlike way?

Gordon Nickel addresses that issue in Peace, Order, and Extremism: A Canadian Perspective on Moderate and Militant Islam (Wiley, 2008, co-edited by James Beverley of Tyndale Seminary in Toronto). 

Christians should not be alarmed by Muslim polemicists in Canada who debate Christian leaders, attack central tenets of Christian faith, and preach weekly on Canadian television. 

“It is simply a reality that asks for an appropriate response,” writes Nickel. “Christians understand the seriousness with which Muslim polemicists take their faith, even if they do not appreciate the attacks on their own faith.”

Nickel says expressions of anger have no place in disagreements about faith: “Points of deep faith are not settled by force or threat of force, by raising one’s voice, by polemical skill or deception or manipulation. (Neither, of course, is anything settled by avoiding crucial issues or trying to smooth them over without open discussion.)” 

Nickel concludes that Christians, following the example of Jesus, should relate to others by invitation, not compulsion: “Listen carefully and sympathetically in turn to the confession Muslims make, and take the opportunity to challenge truth claims which seem to them false.”

If we accept Muslims as they are, we have a right to expect them to accept us as we are – and sharing our faith is part of our identity as evangelical Christians. Muslims should understand the explanation that we have a responsibility to obey the commands Jesus the Messiah has given us, especially the final command to be His witnesses. 

We need to be aware, however, that Muslims also bear witness to one God and to Muhammad as His Prophet as essential parts of their faith. 

Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman (John 4:3-45) is a helpful example. We must be as humble and affirming as He was when pointing out that true worship of God has less to do with whose religious rituals are correct and more to do with worship “in spirit and in truth.”

Our belief that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth and the life” frees us to be the warmest community Muslim Canadians will encounter. That is the truth that sets us free to approach Muslims with an attitude free of fear, prejudice and preconceived notions. Then, we can be good neighbours.

Alan Guenther is assistant professor of history at Briercrest College and Seminary in Caronport, Sask.

Related articles from this issue: Getting to Know Our Muslim Neighbours, Ministries Working With Muslims Launch Network, Philosophy, Theology and Sufism and The Kite Runner.