Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Qureshi, Nabeel

  But before I launched into my teenage years, Ammi had a serious talk with me. Late one evening, just after our family finished praying the isha salaat, Ammi stopped me before I left the prayer rugs. “Nabeel, stay here for a moment.”

  Immediately, I sensed that this was not going to be a normal conversation. “What is it, Ammi?”

  “Beyta, I wish there were some Muslim boys in your school so you wouldn’t be alone in representing Islam and so you would have true companionship. But that was not Allah’s will. Always remember this: no matter where you are or what you are doing, you are an ambassador for Islam. You will always be an ambassador for Islam.”

  I listened with care, drawn in by her sincerity and intensity. “When people see your face, they will think, ‘He is a Muslim boy!’ It doesn’t matter what you do. You could be the valedictorian, and they will think, ‘Look at the Muslim valedictorian!’ You could be the president of the United States, and they will think, ‘Look at the Muslim president!’ In the West, Islam is foreign to people, and many of them are opposed to it. They will always see you first and foremost as a Muslim. That is your identity, and you must embrace it.”

  Ammi did not often speak like this. Her words imbued me with a sense of responsibility. I concentrated hard on her words, wrinkling my brows.

  She embraced me and held me close. “Billoo, don’t worry! This is a good thing. It is a blessing and an opportunity for you to represent Islam and to help people understand its beauty. Become the valedictorian, so people will think, ‘Wow, Islam produces good students!’ Become the president, so people will think, ‘Islam makes good leaders!’ But even if you become a janitor, be the very best.”

  I nodded in affirmation, despite my doubts that she would be okay with a janitorial career.

  “Shabash, beyta. Whatever you do, be the most respectful, honest, and dignified one doing it, so that people will praise Islam. Treat your teachers with the utmost respect! Treat them like you would treat me. When I visit them, I want to hear them tell me that you are the most respectful student in the class. Drinking is not allowed in Islam, but you must also never curse and never spend time alone with girls. Be such a virtuous person that no one can even point a finger of blame at you. In their hearts, they will praise you because they will know you are honorable, or they will dislike you because they dislike themselves. Either way, they will know that Islam has made you the good person you are.”

  And that is what I did. At school, I shared my Islamic beliefs with people who would listen; I stood up for the things that mattered to me; and I worked hard to uphold my morals and reputation. I knew people in my grade who were drinking, doing drugs, and having sex, even though we were only seventh graders. Thankfully, none of my friends were engaged in these activities, and it was not too hard for me to continue representing Islam the way I always had.

  But things were changing.

  Adolescent years are difficult for everyone. Teens develop their own identities and gradually break away from the one that their parents built for them. Each circumstance presents its own set of challenges. The challenge in our family, both for Baji and me, was that the direction of pull was not just toward a different personality but toward an entirely different paradigm. We were left straddling a chasm, with our feet firmly planted in neither culture.

  The first change I noticed was at family gatherings. Almost all of Ammi’s siblings lived in the Northeast, and we met many times a year. As I came into my teenage years, my parents, aunts, and uncles expected me to act like a good Pakistani teenager, and I wanted to be a good Pakistani teenager for them. The problem was that I had never been intimately acquainted with a good Pakistani teenager, so I didn’t know what one acted like. That wasn’t something Ammi could teach.

  I ended up trying to emulate my older male cousins and my younger uncle in their manner of speech, but apparently, I lacked some of the finesse required to walk the line between witty and rude in Pakistani culture. That was something I could do in American culture just fine, in fact charmingly so. I began getting in trouble with my parents fairly frequently on our way back from family trips for being disrespectful.

  I also realized that I asked far too many questions for my relatives’ tastes. In our culture, elders are simply to be obeyed. Obedience is what shows them that you respect them and, in certain contexts, love them. Questions are often seen as a challenge to authority. In school though, our teachers taught us critical thinking and that it was good to question everything.

  My mind was being shaped to think critically, but that shape did not fit into our culture.

  This is not to say I didn’t have unsavory character traits of my own; I certainly did. I was a prideful and self-serving youth, and that got me into plenty of trouble too. Good parents help shape and guide their children beyond these flaws, as mine tried to do. But some of what my parents saw as impertinence was actually a culture clash; I was cut out of different cultural cloth than they were. They thought I was fine Pakistani linen, but I was more of an Asian-American cotton blend.

  The same was unfortunately true at school. I was far too Pakistani to fit in well with my American friends. There was always a barrier, no matter how much we did together or how close we became. I will never forget the last week of middle school, when there was an end-of-the-year school celebration. We were receiving our “senior superlatives,” and I was given the superlative, “most likely to invent the pocket computer and then leave it in his pants on wash day.” The evening was good fun, until it was time to take pictures. When my friend Ben wanted a picture with his best friends, he asked to take it with just David and Rick. It was like an icy knife through my heart. It actually still hurts to think about that incident, but it wasn’t his fault. I just couldn’t fit in perfectly anywhere.

  No one understood that, not even I. I was no longer of traditional Pakistani culture, and I was no longer of American culture. I had a third culture, and no one met me there.

  Chapter Twelve

  MUSLIMS IN THE WEST

  LYING FLAT ON MY STOMACH, I peered between railings at a secret meeting on the floor below. Our family had gathered earlier that day for my grandfather’s funeral services. Emotions ran high, but an additional, unstated tension had been present throughout the day. Though the adults had sent me and my cousins to bed, I had snuck out. I needed answers.

  An older cousin sat at the end of my uncle’s living room, her face in her palms, the elders positioned around her in a semicircle. The atmosphere was thick with concern and melancholy. No one spoke.

  Finally, my grandmother softly broke the silence. “Are you still pure?”

  Like lightning, my cousin’s mother interjected, “Of course she is!” But all eyes were trained on my cousin. Slowly, without lifting her face from her hands, she nodded.

  Ammi began to berate my cousin in a tone that I had heard her use only on Baji, though in matters far less severe. “If you are pure, then forget him! Move on, and get married to a good Ahmadi Muslim before our reputation is tarnished any further. Or at least a non-Ahmadi Muslim. But a Hindu? Astaghfirullah!”

  Through tears and fingers crossed over her face, my cousin whimpered, “But I love him.”

  One aunt snickered and spoke under her breath, “I can’t believe her mind could be so dysfunctional.” Turning to my cousin, she chided, “You don’t know what love is! Don’t become Americanized. Listen to your elders!”

  There was another break in the conversation, and the silence intensified the emotions. The men in the room did not speak. Their presence served simply to validate the gravity of the discussion and to anchor the women’s emotions.

  After a few moments, my cousin’s mother added, “Your grandfather was a missionary. Can you imagine how he must have felt when he found out his own offspring dishonored our heritage? Dishonored Islam?”

  “We don’t have to imagine,” my grandmother suggested, looking directly at my cousin. “It is because of what you’ve done that he isn’t here a
nymore.”

  This was the only personal accusation I ever heard my grandmother make. It was spoken out of an Eastern sense of tough love, but to this day, it haunts my cousin.14 She was not the only one, though, who collided over these matters with the extended family. The culture clash of immigrant parents with their Western-born children is especially common during the emotionally stormy teenage years, and it serves to illustrate a vital fact: Muslim immigrants from the East are starkly different from their Muslim children born in the West.

  People from Eastern Islamic cultures generally assess truth through lines of authority, not individual reasoning.15 Of course, individuals do engage in critical reasoning in the East, but on average, it is relatively less valued and less prevalent than in the West. Leaders have done the critical reasoning, and leaders know best. Receiving input from multiple sources and then critically examining the data to distill a truth is an exercise for specialists, not the common man.

  This phenomenon creates stark dichotomies in the minds of Muslims raised in these cultures. An entity is either a source of authority or it isn’t. It is either trustworthy or suspect. It is either good or it is bad. Shades of grey are far less common among authority-based cultures.

  For the most part, Eastern teachers have taught the Muslims that the West is Christian, that its culture is promiscuous, and that the people oppose Islam. So the average Muslim immigrant expects people in the West to be promiscuous Christians and enemies of Islam.

  When they come to America, their cultural differences and preconceptions often cause them to remain isolated from Westerners. Like Ammi, many develop relationships only with other expatriates from their country, so their perspectives are never corrected. What is worse, some Muslims do receive poor treatment from Westerners and Christians, and this only serves to bolster their notions that all Westerners and Christians are the same way.

  On the rare occasion that someone does invite a Muslim to his or her home, differences in culture and hospitality may make the Muslim feel uncomfortable, and the host must be willing to ask, learn, and adapt to overcome this. There are simply too many barriers for Muslim immigrants to understand Christians and the West by sheer circumstance. Only the exceptional blend of love, humility, hospitality, and persistence can overcome these barriers, and not enough people make the effort.

  That explains why our families fight hard to keep us from becoming “Americanized.” The term had nothing to do with nationality; it had everything to do with their perception of the culture. To be Americanized was to be disobedient to your elders, to dress less conservatively, and to spend more time with your friends than your family. Cursing, drinking, and dating were simply unfathomable.

  One of the greatest travesties of all is that Muslim immigrants often associate Western immoralities with Christianity, and correlation becomes causation in the minds of the uncritical. The West is Christian, the West is Americanized; ergo, it is Americanized because it is Christian. Christianity, in the minds of many Muslims, has produced this promiscuous, domineering Western culture. Christianity, therefore, must be ungodly.

  I remember pointing out to Ammi and Abba that the people dressed provocatively on television might not be Christian, and their response was, 21“What do you mean? Don’t they call themselves ‘Christian’? Don’t you see them wearing crosses?” If I argued that some of them may be Christian in name only and might not even believe in God, they responded that this simply meant they were Christians who don’t believe in God. They did not categorize religion with belief but with cultural identity. The tragedy here is that no one has given them a reason to think otherwise. If they were to intimately know even one Christian who lived differently, their misconceptions might be corrected, and they might see Christianity in a virtuous light.

  All of this is different for their children, for second-generation Muslims in the West. The second generation is as varied and disparate as their peers. If anything can be said of them, it is this: almost universally, they see the world as Westerners and yet still align themselves with Islam.

  Some may be, as I was, raised to think critically and yet still love Islam. I have many highly educated female cousins who wear the burqa and are willing to defend that choice with thoughtful reasons. Others, like a few of my male cousins, have rejected everything about Islam and their culture, with the exception of the title “Muslim.”

  Whether a young Muslim stays connected with his culture or becomes nominal often has to do with pressures in the culture clash. If the parents are extremely devout, as mine were, then there is far more of a chance that the child will try to live a traditional lifestyle. If the parents are nominal, there is little chance the child will care more than nominally for Islam.

  Who the child’s friends are and what they believe is also highly influential, as well as what they learn in school. Baji grew to see things differently from me. She still wears a burqa and loves Islam, but she has blended Islam with Western pluralism. She believes that Allah can lead people to Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, or any other religion, and they can still attain salvation because all paths lead to Allah. She believes this even though we were raised in the same house. Her experiences outside the home shaped her quite differently from me.

  As for my cousin, though she eventually “came around” and did not marry the Hindu boy, it is unlikely that she will ever fully recover from that episode. One of my male cousins was reprimanded when he tried to marry a Filipina, but he “came around” and fully recovered, ultimately marrying a Pakistani girl. Another of my male cousins wanted to marry an American girl, was reprimanded, and then went ahead and married her anyway.

  All of these second-generation American Muslims are my relatives. They all trace their lineage back to the same town in Pakistan, they were raised in the same jamaat, and they are roughly the same age. Yet they all see the world and process it extremely differently.

  Perhaps most significant of all, none of them see the world as their parents do, not even close. Yet they all call themselves Muslim and identify themselves with their parents’ faith.

  What, then, does it mean to be Muslim in the West? It can mean anything. If you really want to know what someone is like and what they believe, you have to get to know them and ask them personally. But the best we can do before getting to know someone is to determine whether he is an immigrant or a second-generation Muslim. This one factor often makes a huge difference.

  Chapter Thirteen

  SWOONS AND SUBSTITUTIONS

  MY PARTICULAR BLEND of East meets West was shaped by Islamic apologetics. I did not have to wrestle long with some of the postmodern relativism that captures my generation. To me, it was self-evident that truth exists. What’s the alternative? If truth doesn’t exist, then it would be true that truth doesn’t exist, and once again we arrive at truth. There is no alternative; truth must exist.

  Traditionally, Muslims and Christians have shared this understanding. Each believes in truth, not the least because they believe their faith is true. But their common perspective extends much farther. They have roughly analogous beliefs in monotheism, spiritual and physical realms, angels and demons, good and evil, a final judgment, heaven and hell, the inspiration of scriptures, and many more peripheral beliefs.

  These commonalities are a double-edged sword. They build a common platform for dialogue such that the two can often understand each other and see the world from a similar perspective. But the commonalities perhaps also serve to sharpen disagreements on the most sensitive difference between the two faiths: their views of Jesus and Muhammad. Christians believe Jesus is God incarnate, and this is a necessary belief for orthodox Christianity.16 Muslims believe that Jesus is no more than a prophet, and to consider him God incarnate would be blasphemy and would cause one to be condemned to hell eternally, according to the Quran.17

  Muslims believe Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and this belief is so important that it makes up half the shahada, the primary proclamation of Islam. Christia
ns believe that those who teach contrarily to the gospel of salvation through Jesus are false teachers.18

  This difference in beliefs is why dialogue between Muslims and Christians has mostly focused on Jesus and Muhammad. As a young teenage Muslim, to be an effective ambassador for Islam, I thought it was my duty not only to have an unimpeachable reputation but also to have a command over these points of contention.

  Regarding Muhammad, Westerners rarely knew anything. I could say whatever I wanted about him and others would believe me. Of course, I did not try to deceive anyone, but it was not hard to make a case for Muhammad to the average Christian, simply because of their ignorance. I shared with them all the things I learned in my early childhood about Muhammad, especially his mercy upon returning to Mecca, and I was able to leave people with a much more positive impression about Muhammad and Islam than they had before.

  Regarding Jesus, there are two issues on which Muslims particularly disagree with Christians: that Jesus died on the cross and that Jesus claimed to be God. The Quran specifically denies both of these beliefs.19 To be a good ambassador, I just had to master these two issues and persuasively argue that Jesus never claimed to be God, nor did he die on the cross. For the latter, the founder of our sect had written a small book to equip the jamaat. It was called Jesus in India, and I had read it many times.20

  My first opportunity to argue what I had learned was on a school bus in front of our middle school while we were waiting to go home. It was shortly before Easter, and I was discussing my plans for the upcoming school break with my friend Kristen. Our class had let out early, so we got on the bus before it was crowded. We were some of the oldest kids, so that secured us seats toward the back.

  We sat down across the aisle from one another as she told me her plans for Good Friday.