How Not to Kill a Muslim

A Manifesto of Hope for Christianity and Islam in North America

Joshua Graves

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781630879594
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Ecumenism & Interfaith

The adherents of Islam and Christianity comprise half of the world's population, or 3.5 billion people. Tension between them exists throughout the world and is increasing here in North America. In How Not to Kill a Muslim, Dr. Joshua Graves provides a practical subversive theological framework for a strategic posture of peaceful engagement between Christians and Muslims.Based upon both academic and personal experience (Josh grew up in Metro Detroit), this book will provide progressive Christians with a clear understanding of Jesus' radical message of inclusivity and love. There is no one who is not a neighbor. There is no them. There's only us. Our future depends upon this becoming true in our cities, synagogues, churches, and mosques. In pluralistic societies such as those of Canada and the United States, the true test of Christianity is what it offers those who are not Christian. And it starts with Islam.

1

We Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves

N. Scott Momaday, American Indian writer and retired professor of literature at the University of Southern California, offers a critical wisdom story for the beginning of our journey together. When Momaday was a young boy, his father woke him early in the morning and said, “I want you to get up and go with me.” His father took him by the hand and led him, sleepy, to the house of an old squaw (his words), and left him, saying, “I’ll get you this afternoon.” All day long the old squaw of the Kiowa tribe told stories to the boy, sang songs, described rituals, and told the history of the Kiowa. She told the boy how the tribe began out of a hollow log in the Yellowstone River, of the migration southward, the wars with other tribes, the great blizzards, the buffalo hunt, the coming of the white man, starvation, the diminished tribe, and, finally, being moved to a reservation, confinement. At sunset his father came and said, “Son, it’s time to go.”

Momaday—as a much older man—later reflected, “I left her house a Kiowa.”1

To be Christian (or Jewish, Muslim, Baha’i, or Buddhist) is to be enrolled in a particular story, and anybody who can’t remember any further back than his or her birth is an orphan. To be human is to be enrolled in a story.

Every person alive is a compilation of multiple crashing, colliding narratives.

We are both the stories we receive and the stories we tell.

If I’ve learned anything in the ten years I’ve given to being a public spiritual leader, it is this: Because humans are narrative creatures, our primary orientation in identity is inextricably linked to the narratives that comprise our memories, conversations, and emotional responses. To say it plainly: We are the stories we tell ourselves.

A cursory consideration of modern life in America underscores this point. There are multiple divisions within the current American milieu offering fundamentally different narratives. Northerners scoff at Southern racism as if racism is only a Southern problem. Local churches and synagogues wage wars between leadership teams, elder boards, and laity regarding the role of women and gay persons because of generational and interpretive stories undergirding the entire debate. Unspoken stories are the most dangerous. Individual family members who are unable or unwilling to tell truthful memories hold family systems hostage. Scientists and theologians speak two different languages. Muslims are treated as terrorists even though most Muslims are peaceful and honorable people.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. We become the stories we privilege. Flannery O’Connor never wrote, “We are the stories we tell ourselves.” She actually said it better. She wrote, “It takes a story to make a story.”2

It takes a story to make a story. Stories produce more stories. How significant is it that Scripture, which the church believes possesses the sacred words of God, comes to us primarily in narrative form (not formulas, doctrinal proofs, or diatribe)? Like a script that is incomplete until it is enacted in daily life—this is the meaning and place of Judaism’s Torah and Christianity’s New Testament, along with Islam’s Qur’an.

Which story are you living?

I had a clear example of this in my own life recently.

My friend Randy is the president of a thriving Christian university. He is one of the most dynamic, creative, hard-working leaders I’ve ever been around. Over breakfast, he explained why many American Christians have so much fear toward Muslims. He informed me that psychologists used to believe that humans made decisions on two levels: that of emotion and that of logic. Despite the stereotype that women are emotional and men are logical, both actually make choices and decisions based upon emotion.3

That was the conventional thinking until about fifteen years ago when brain researchers created a third category. Deeper than emotion, deeper than logic resides fear. Fear, long thought to be a strong emotion, is not just psychological, it is also physiological.

It isn’t simply spiritual. Fear alters the physical body too.

When someone cuts you off on the expressway, or when someone insults you—your heritage, religious preference, or core values—you get mad. It goes deep in your bones. When someone slanders your family, spouse, or ethnic origin . . . something happens in you, in your very person. At a molecular level. DNA. This is a physiological response.

When conversations about Islam and Christianity come up over coffee, or on a news program or call-in radio show, those conversations are not about emotion or logic. They are first rooted in fear. On both sides. Fear reigns. Fear allows a toxic view of what might be to trump the beauty of what is and the life-giving potential of what could be.

This collective fear is the result of the loss of something precious; it’s what happens when we don’t know our story. And because we don’t know our story, we don’t know how to see our world and ourselves; and because we don’t know how to see, we don’t know who we are; and because we don’t know who we are, we don’t know how to live. And because we don’t know how to live creatively for the betterment of the world, we don’t know what to believe and value. By we, I mostly mean people who claim the Jesus Story as the definitive story for their life.

Sight.

Identity.

Ethics.

Beliefs and values.

That’s how it works. For families, religions, sports, art, music. It’s true everywhere you look.

Roots

In Genesis we find a story that tells us how to do all of the above—a sacred text primarily concerned with sight, identity, action, and beliefs.

Abraham found himself in an impossible situation. His beautiful wife, Sarah—whom he had twice attempted to sell in a pinch, out of fear for his own life—was unable to bear him a son. Barrenness, in the ancient world, was not only thought to be a curse from God (or the gods); it was also believed that a woman had not fulfilled her role in a sacred relationship if she was unable to bring her husband the gift of children.

A woman who could not produce a son was expendable.

This married couple was getting older. No children. It was the proverbial elephant in the room at every dinner, the thing each of them thought about but didn’t have the nerve to discuss.

Sarah became so frustrated with the entire situation (herself, God, Abraham—maybe her inability to bring children was his fault) that she decided to take matters into her own hands (Gen 16). God promised her husband that God would keep a special relationship with Abraham and all of his descendants, accomplishing God’s purposes in the world through a particular people on behalf of the rest of the world.

Just one problem remained. They were still waiting on God. Promises are nice. But promises don’t mean anything until they come true. Not only did Abraham lack five children in pursuit of God’s promise that his offspring would be too many to count, Abraham lacked one child. Hence, Sarah’s decision to orchestrate events is about survival.

Sarah brings The Help into the predicament. She has a maidservant from Egypt named Hagar. Sarah knows that if Abraham agrees to conceive a child with Hagar, that son can begin to fulfill the promise of God. At the age of eighty-five, Abraham takes Hagar as his second wife. A year later, Hagar bears a son to Abraham. His name is Ishmael.4

During the pregnancy, animosity emerges between the two wives. Sarah, perhaps the most powerful maternal figure in the clan, approaches Abraham, demanding that he do something (16:5). Sarah mistreats Hagar and Hagar flees. While she’s on the run, God comes near for the first time in the form of an angel and tells her, “Go back and submit to Sarai and I’ll also bless your offspring as I will bless the offspring of Sarai” (16:9–10).5

This is the first time in the Bible that an angel is sent to humans. And it’s to a slave girl on the margins of society. Calling Ishmael a wild donkey (Gen 16:12) is a compliment; it means he will survive. (So next time you’d like to compliment someone . . .) Up to this point in Genesis, God has named people, but now Hagar names God. She’s the Bible’s first theologian, and look at what she names Him: You are the God who sees me. She has been abused, written off, ...