This sermon proposes that Americans have a difficult time
understanding Islam as a religion, as well as understanding
Arab peoples, because of prejudice, an ancient prejudice
that has been revived particularly since 9/11.
This makes peace in the Middle East very difficult.
I think this
prejudice has a lot to do with
protecting our lifestyle of consumption under the
banner of "freedom"
even though this conception of freedom has little
depth.
It also describes the religion of Islam with a degree of sympathy
showing how it is not a religion of fanatics and terrorists,
but a brother or sister religion to Judaism and Christianity.
And the sermon depicts the ancient and ongoing violent history
between Jews/Christians and Muslims as "sibling
rivalry."
OUTLINE:
Introduction: Personal Thoughts
A Strange Co-dependence between Siblings
Blockages to Understanding Islam
The Universality of Islam
Allah or God
The Moslem View of Creation
Responses to the Gift of Life
Freedom of the Individual
The Five Pillars of Islam
Conclusion: A Deeper Freedom beyond Prejudice &
Co-dependence
AUTHOR:
The Rev. Robert Bowler was a Unitarian minister in England
for three years, 1994-1997, before returning to the United States
and qualifying for Fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist minister.
He currently serves the Walpole Unitarian Church in Walpole, New Hampshire.
Previously he served churches in Glens Falls, New York
and Cheltenham, Gloucester and Evesham, England.
Currently, Robert also teaches Religious Studies courses
at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire.
He is a graduate of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California.
His wife Cindy is an artist completing her Masters of Fine Arts degree
and they have a teenage daughter.
ISLAM: SUBMISSION TO GOD
Introduction: Personal Thoughts
I was walking to the Post Office, as I do most mornings,
thinking
about this sermon,
and here on our busy Main Street I saw a pickup, a huge pickup truck,
with an American flag pasted to the back window.
I immediately thought,
“She is proud to be an American,
but that does not give her the right to
parade her car,
as big as a village, equating her freedom
with burning tons of fossil
fuels each year
and setting the American standard for contributing to global warming.”
After all, we Americans, per capita, are the global pace-setters in the
race
to increase the average temperatures everywhere by 10 degrees in this
century.
Then a phrase popped into my head,
“We suffer a strange co-dependence
with oil-rich nations
like Saudi Arabia, the spiritual center of the religion of
Islam.”
A Strange Co-dependence between Siblings
We suffer a strange co-dependence:
we depend on oil to fuel our
economy while we have made
Saudi Arabia incredibly wealthy, the country which raised Osama bin
Laden.
I do not pretend to fully understand the dynamics of this co-dependency.
It would probably take an army of psychotherapists to unravel all the
nuances.
My hunch is that it has a lot to do with sibling rivalry.
The brothers
Ishmael and Isaac
(that is, The Arabs and the Jews-and by extension
Christianity)
continue to duke it out.
As you know, Abraham is the father of
Judeo-Christianity
as well as, ultimately, of Islam.
Islam in fact looks back, through the
Koran,
to the Christian testament and Jesus as a great prophet.
And Moslems
look right back to the Jewish scriptures
back to Adam and the Patriarchs.
All these religions look to the Bible, a great library of books,
making them together the People of the Book.
But, instead of seeing ourselves as part of a family,
a family of brother
and sister religions,
we tend to be strangers and even enemies to one another.
Can you imagine
the woman, in her pick up as big as a village,
driving down the streets of Riyadh
with her American Flag?
Or if it were a Saudi flag or a Palestinian one,
would it really be that
much different?
It may be for her, but nationalism is the same no matter where it
sprouts.
When this nationalism becomes wrapped up in materialism,
when a religious
culture sees itself as the chosen people,
the favorite of Yahweh or Allah among
all the nations,
when we see ourselves as the rightful dwellers
in the Promised Land of
power and plenty,
I begin to get a little scared.
I know this sibling rivalry has been
going on for centuries, even millennia,
but today, when we stand on the brink of potential
environmental destruction
and we continue an ancient clash of civilizations
in the Middle East and
now around the globe,
my terrorist alert goes to red.
And by terrorists I do not just mean
individuals,
but also nations, such as ours,
with narrow economic and cultural
agendas.
Blockages to Understanding Islam
Because of this ancient sibling rivalry and the strange co-dependence
that arises when you add the oil pumped from beneath the Arab sands,
Islam, for Westerners, is difficult to understand.
When today’s rhetoric,
“Islam is the enemy,”
is also added, even when this remains unstated or explicitly denied,
the sibling rivalry becomes explosive.
Real understanding, resulting in a lasting peace, becomes very
difficult.
The Universality of Islam
In the Gospel of Luke,
the author universalizes and spiritualizes the
Promised Land.
He is a Syrian Greek, a Gentile,
unlike Matthew who is a Jewish follower
of Jesus.
While Matthew seeks to show the continuity of Judaism and Christianity
and thereby reaches out to the Jews, Luke universalizes Judaism,
argues that Christianity supersedes Judaism,
and reaches out to all the
nations to build a universal temple,
the Church, and a universal people, the Body
of Christ.
Something similar happened with Islam.
It, too, strives to be a universal
religion, accessible to all people.
Mohammed, or the Angel Gabriel who revealed to
him the Koran,
is probably the only prophet in the history of the world
that consciously
set about founding a religion.
Saying this, however, is to make the same mistake
early Western scholars
made about Islam.
They called it Mohammedanism, but this is a grave insult.
Moslems believe
Mohammed did not create this religion, rather God did.
Therefore it is called
Islam, which means “peace” and “surrender,”
or more fully “the peace which comes when one’s
life is surrendered to God.”
And this religion is designed for all humanity;
Islam is specifically
designed not to be an ethnic religion
even though it arose from the lands of Arab peoples.
This characteristic
it shares with Christianity,
and, in general, Islam’s basic theology
is virtually identical to Judaism
and Christianity in it broad outlines.
Allah or God
Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is an historical religion:
it
sees God at work in history.
And Allah, which is simply the Arabic name for God,
is the single,
invisible God for everyone
and the religion’s central focus.
Thus, it perfects and supersedes
Judaism
because Yahweh only chose the Jews.
And it perfects and supersedes Christianity
because it adheres to the absolute unity of God
and does not deify Mohammed as Christians
deify Jesus.
Islam sees Jesus as a prophet in a long line of prophets,
but Jesus is
not God’s son
nor is humanity God’s children in any sense,
for casting God as a parent
is to anthropomorphize God.
In its rejection of idolatry,
Islam takes monotheism to its logical
conclusion.
God is an awesome, fear-inspiring power,
to which we can only surrender.
In verse 7:143 of the Koran, Moses requests to see God.
When God showed himself instead to a nearby mountain,
the mountain came crashing down and Moses fell down senseless.
God is infinite and omnipotent and Muslims fear God’s absolute power.
Muslims face this fear by living a righteous life in the sight of
God.
However, Allah is not wrathful and vengeful, domineering and ruthless.
On the contrary, according to Huston Smith,
God is referred to as
compassionate and merciful 192 times in the Koran
and only 72 times is he wrathful and
vengeful.
God is “the holy, the peaceful, the faithful,
the guardian over his
servants, the shelterer of the orphan,
the guide of the erring, the deliverer from
every affliction,
the friend of the bereaved, the consoler of the afflicted.”
The Moslem View of Creation
Another important theological concept is Islam’s view of the
creation.
The earth is a perfect and deliberate act of divine will
and is therefore real and to be taken seriously.
As a result, reason and science are of great importance,
and Islamic civilization and its great universities attest to this fact.
The philosophy of Aristotle, for example, lost to Europe in the Middle
Ages,
was preserved by Muslim philosophers
until returned around the 12th
century.
While Moslems revere reason as did the Greeks,
it is their faith that gives them a great confidence
in the material
aspects of life.
They share this faith with their brother religions, Judaism and
Christianity.
Life is a great gift of Allah, and the Moslem strives
to keep in balance the spiritual and the material, faith and
reason.
Responses to the Gift of Life
Therefore, Moslems respond in two ways to the gift of life.
First is gratitude.
To the Arab, the world “infidel” means one who lacks
thankfulness.
Every moment is an opportunity to acknowledge God’s blessings,
and, in gratitude, share their wealth with the needy.
The second obligation is to give oneself
whole-heartedly to Allah in
friendship and love.
As Huston Smith said,
“To be a slave to Allah is to be freed from other
forms of slavery,”
including slavery to greed, anxiety or personal status.
The prophet Abraham, when asked by God to sacrifice his beloved son
Isaac,
responded with fear but also faithfulness.
Likewise, Islam demands complete commitment,
a commitment in which nothing is held
back.
Freedom of the Individual
Yet, there is no loss of individuality or freedom
in this ultimate
commitment of surrender.
We are each created unique
with individual responsibility special to each
of us,
and this is right and good.
As a Moslem philosopher wrote,
“This inexplicable final center of experience
is the fundamental fact of
the universe.
All life is individual; there is no such thing as universal life.
God Himself is an individual; He is the most unique individual.”
And despite the fact that God’s omnipotence would lead one to believe,
like Calvin, in predestination,
Islamic individualism results in belief
in human freedom.
The great mystery that is Allah somehow
grants humans enough freedom
and responsibility
to make real moral and spiritual decisions.
Only we are responsible for sin, never God.
And, in the end, we will be judged for our deeds,
just as we are in the religions of Judaism and Christianity.
The Five Pillars of Islam
And what is the straight path in life that leads to a heaven
hereafter?
It is the five pillars of Islam:
Faith, Prayer, Charity, Fasting and
Pilgrimage.
Moslems declare their faith by pronouncing the Shahada:
“There is no God but God, the source of all creation,
and Mohammed is His
messenger.”
They pray five times per day, at appointed hours.
They give 2 ½ percent of all they have each year to the poor,
for personal wealth is held in trust for all.
Also, each year, during Ramadan,
they must fast from first light until
sundown
as a means of self-purification.
And, once in their lifetime, they must make a pilgrimage to Mecca.
These are the outer signs of a person who has surrendered to
Allah.
Conclusion: A Deeper Freedom beyond Prejudice &
Co-dependence
But in order for us Westerners,
Americans dependent on Arab oil for
our material wealth,
ever to understand what makes Moslem’s tick
we need to step outside
stereotypes.
Islam is not a religion of fanatics,
though Moslems do take the Koran more literally
than most Christians and Jews take the Bible.
Terrorists, whom we hear so much about in the media,
are only a small
percentage of the one billion Moslems worldwide.
And though Al Qaeda may be engaged
in a holy war
against all things western that spell materialism and selfish
greed,
the attitude of Osama bin Laden and his followers is not characteristic
of Islamic religious surrender, as we have seen.
It is our prejudice and our hunger for oil, that, in the final analysis,
perpetuates the strange co-dependence of this deadly sibling rivalry.
I can only pray that, in God’s good time,
the peace of Allah prevails in
our hearts
as we learn to surrender to the real truth
about the religion of Islam
and the Arab people.
Maybe then American flags will be a symbol for a deeper freedom
than that expressed in driving pickup trucks the size of villages.
May it be so.
If you would like to write to the author of this Rural Sermon-of-the-Month,
Robert Bowler's e-mail address is: uubeau@adelphia.net
If you would like to respond to the whole mailing list,
send an e-mail to: RURAL-L@uua.org.
HISTORY OF THIS SERMON: "Islam: Submission to God"
This sermon was first presented by the author, Robert Bowler,
to the Walpole Unitarian Church
in Walpole, New Hampshire on October 5, 2003.