Shane Bennett

For most of my life, I’ve approached language learning like this: 1. Get about ten words in as many languages as possible. 2. Learn them by parroting native speakers. 3. Use them to find people who speak the only language I’m fluent in, English. 

That’s not the best approach for everyone, but it has opened the door for some amazing conversations. For my fellow “shallow end of the language pool” people, I offer you a quick way to say “Hi” or “How are you” in six of the languages most spoken by Muslims. 

(Caveats: 1. There are regional variations that may render some of these suggestions unintelligible. 2. You shouldn’t learn language from an old white guy who only speaks English.)

Arabic (~350 million)
“As-salām ʿalaykum” means “peace be upon you” and is the standard Muslim greeting not only in the Arabic speaking world, but beyond. The usual response is, “wa ʿalaykum as-salām.” Basically, “Back atcha, Bruh.”

“Keif halak” is the “howzit” equivalent that works pretty good in Jordan. YMMV.

Indonesian/Malay (~150 million. No, they’re not the same language, but kind of!) 
“Apa kabar” is a good way to informally ask someone how they are. Respond with “kabar baik” to say you’re doing well. If you want to sound local, try responding with “jalan jalan,” which literally means “walking, walking,” but carries the connotation of “just hanging.” 

Bengali (~190 million)
“Kemon achho” means roughly “how are you?” I’ve found if I run together the English words, “Common nacho,” it will usually communicate! “Bhalo achi” is a good way to reply, “I’m fine.” (Full disclosure: I usually follow this up with, “I’ll take a large order of samosas, please.”)

Urdu (~90 million)
“Aap kaise hain?” is a good way to ask “How are you doing?” in Urdu. Responding with “Alhamdulillah,” (Praise God) is a way to answer the question and exalt God at the same time! 

Turkic (~170 million)
“Merhaba” is a great way to say hello in Turkish and beyond. Follow that up with “nasılsınız” to ask how someone is. “Iiym” means fine or go big with “Alhamdulillah” again.

Persian (~120 million)
Iranians/Persians will understand “Salam” as a normal, everyday greeting. Asking, “Chetori,” is a good “howzit” follow up. 

Give this a try: Combine a dose of courage with a smidge of humility and who knows what God might open up. 

Muslim Connect readers fall neatly into three categories: 1. Those who don’t know what the Kaaba is. 2. Those who know what it is, but very little else about it. 3. And those who know so much, they should probably skip this email and pray for the rest of us. . .in Arabic! 

The Kaaba is the building at the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It’s a key component of the annual Hajj pilgrimage, which ~2 million people will make next week, as well as the direction to which all Muslims face when performing the five daily prayers. 

Adam and Sons Construction Company
Tradition has it that Adam built the original Kaaba, but God asked Abraham and Ishmael to rebuild it on the original foundation. So it goes back in time a minute! It pre-dates Islam and was used for a variety of idol worship.

Rehab It, Again
As you’d guess, the Kaaba that Muslims are marching around right now is not completely the same as the one Abraham (?!) built. Between the ravages of time, weather and marauding bandits, the Kaaba has needed extensive rehab at various intervals. The latest major renovation was conducted in the late 1990s. 

Wait! There’s an Inside to the Kaaba?
OK, you probably knew this. Gotta confess, I didn’t! It’s actually a mostly-cubic building, measuring 42’ x 36’ x 43’ high. The interior is ornate, beautiful and very much off limits to almost everyone! 

Kiss Me . . . or at least point at me!
Mounted on the eastern corner of the Kaaba are the remnants of a rock reportedly descended from Heaven. Muslims believe that Muhammad was instrumental in putting the stone where it currently is and that he both kissed it and pointed to it. They do both in imitation of him.

Circle Smart
I’ve heard of this exchange (It might not be entirely true!): 

Muslim One: “It’s a good idea to be close to the Kaaba when doing your seven laps around it.”

Muslim Two: “I see. Is this to show respect and be close to the holy place?”

Muslim One: “No! It’s so you don’t have to walk as far! Each circle is so much smaller!”

While Hindus get credit for inventing the early prototype of chess, Muslims really launched it forward after they conquered Persia in the mid-600s AD. They standardized their stylized version of the pieces and wrote some of the earliest chess books. Traders took the game west to Spain and beyond. 

Centuries later, many of the best chess players in the world are Muslims. At 21 years of age, an Uzbek named Nodirbek Abdusattorov is the number-4 player in the world. All eyes are also on Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, a 14-year-old Turkish teenager who is currently 32nd in the world. 

Here’s where the mess comes in: Islamic scholars throughout the centuries have tended to say chess is haram or forbidden. It doesn’t show up in the Quran, but the Hadith has something to say about it. The reasoning generally goes like this:

1. Gambling is bad and chess might involve gambling. But it usually doesn’t. 
2. Chess pieces could be seen as little idols, especially knights that usually resemble horses. Some scholars say this can be overcome by putting hoods on the horses!
3. Chess might distract you from God, from prayers, worship and other good works. I think the scholars have something here! Of course, I have never put off my wife, children or godly duties for a chess game. But I can imagine how that might happen! 😉

As in last week’s Muslim Connect on marriage, chess is another point where the scholars’ rules are not always lived out. The fact that there is a Saudi Chess Federation is one solid data point. 

If you play chess, and why wouldn’t you, let’s let Muslims sort out the haram/halal issues with it. In the meantime, follow my friend Kelly’s example: Get an account on chess.com, start playing games (the 3-minute version goes by quickly), and when you get matched up with an opponent from a Muslim country (each profile shows a small flag!), reach out and start a conversation! Let me know how it goes if you try this or have questions. 

Need a bed time story for a child or grandkid? You can hardly beat the biblical narrative of Joseph’s life from Genesis 37 to 50. But, heads up: You’ll want to skip over the PG-13 Judah/Tamar interlude in Genesis 38! 

This scandalous story has it all: Family drama, sex, power shifts and a fairly happy ending. In preparing preach to on it this Sunday, I’ve done a medium dive into the idea of levirate marriage, the social custom at the center of the Tamar and Judah vignette.

The idea is that a brother-in-law (Latin: levir) has family responsibility to marry the widow of a brother who dies. This serves to keep land and wealth in the clan and provides protection for widows who might otherwise be out in the wind. It also tends to fade in inverse proportion to female literacy! 

I wondered if levirate marriage is, or was, found in Muslim cultures. Turns out the Quran and the Hadith forbid compelling anyone to marry someone else. In one case, Muhammad told a dad who’d married off his daughter that she got to choose! (Oddly, she said she was cool with the marriage, just wanted to know if she had a say!) If everyone is ok with it, a brother-in-law can step up to the plate for his dead sibling. 

In spite of the evidence against levirate marriage in Islam, it has been practiced, at least until recently, in a variety of Muslim people groups. This illustrates the tension between cultural practices and orthodox Islam. As in Christianity, sometimes the words of the book are easier to know than to practice. 

What if you’re eating potato chips three meals a day? What if you’re only offered potato chips for snacks at school or work and when you relax in the evening? And what if all the cool, beautiful and powerful people are eating potato chips? Even if you occasionally snuck a piece of broccoli (a step in the right direction), you’re still going to be sick and oily.

Something has been bothering me for a bit: How does US military action against Muslims affect my psyche, my kids, maybe even the broad sweep of American culture?

The question right now isn’t the degree to which military actions are justified or moral, although such ideas merit consideration. Rather, how do those actions affect us?

Here are some gut-churning realities:

1. The US has been at war with Muslim countries for most of my adult life. If we pin Operation Desert Storm in 1990 as the starting point, around half of the US population has known hardly a day in which we were not fighting Muslims.
2. If you’re going to keep fighting Muslims and keep getting elected (Both sides have done this!), you must portray Muslims as evil, enemies and wholly “other.”
3. The “potato chips everywhere” metaphor is this: We used to take action against Communism (We still do a little.). We used to engage in war on drugs (We still do some.). But for over half my life it’s been Muslims! They’ve been enemies on the battlefield. They’ve been villains in movies and books. They’ve been the boogie man, the dirty, sneaky savages in countless efforts to gain or retain political positions. A piece of broccoli here and there will not do the trick.

Shame on us and God have mercy. 

Is this because of Israel and our desire to protect that country? It is the oil? Is it because they’re are easy to identify and caricaturize? Probably all that and more. 

What are we to do?

For starters: Be the broccoli. Read and share the counter-narrative, starting with Jesus and going on from there. And ask God for a new day, not a new villain. We’ve had so many over our short history. But a fresh light inside and going forth from our country so that the glow from the “city on a hill” is the love of Christ, not the flash of a muzzle or the launch of a missile. 

Three more Bennetts now grace the face of the planet! If you prayed for our adoption hearing last week, thank you very much. God heard and answered your prayers. After a clerical error threatened to scuttle the entire affair, and slash 18 months off Anna’s and my life expectancy, the adoption proceeded without a further hitch. Praise God. We are deeply grateful. 

That’s the beginning. Here’s the ending: My good friend, missions colleague and Jesus-following hero Mike Latsko is retiring. Mike has invested half a century in ministry, inviting his parishioners to follow Jesus, challenging Perspectives students to take the Good News to the most challenging places and lately calling leaders around the globe to pay proper attention to the people groups still waiting for the first witness to move in among them. 

Mike has been the sort of mobilizer the world could use more of. 

Laser focused
If you’ve spoken with Mike in the past few years, even fixing his car or giving him a colonoscopy, you’ve heard about the unengaged!

Humble, but gutsy 
Mike cries over the reality of the unengaged. His heart breaks when relationships go sideways. And in my experience, when he gets cynical, and this work often threatens to make us so, he’s apologetic in the next breath or two. 

But I’ve also seen him ask a foundation for hundreds of thousands of dollars and challenge mission agency CEOs to radically redirect their efforts! 

Organizationally wise
Concurrent with his retirement, Mike negotiated the transition of The Engage Network and those working with it. The ministry lives on in symbiotic collaboration with Joshua Project and even after the debits, credits and commitments were all tallied up, a few dollars remained in the coffers.

Persistently encouraging
I honestly believe Mike is the best encourager I have ever known. My soul has benefited from his words and presence. 

The hole Mike leaves is huge. No ten of us together could fill it. Rather, may God raise up 400 like him; intrepid women and men who will call the attention of Christ’s body to the “sheep of another flock,” even to the one that still must be found. 

Pray for Mike and Sally as they navigate this transition. Wish them well here. And let’s keep praying for the remaining unengaged Muslim groups. The number is falling, but at 350, still much too high. 

If you’re reading this when it drops (roughly 7-ish am Eastern time) and can spare 15 seconds to breathe a prayer to our Father, please do. This morning, in a small hearing room in an imposing judicial building in southern Colorado, I’ll petition the court to allow me to adopt the three little munchkins I’ve been step-dadding the past six years. 

You might wonder if three more Bennetts in the land is a good thing. Fair question. 

You might ask, “Don’t you already have five kids?” Indeed, five amazing, brilliant, well-adjusted and both physically and socially attractive adult children. 

But this is the step before us: To legally ordain what has become true these past years. And I am thrilled. (Mom, too!)

The concept of adoption flows through scripture and history. We’re told in Ephesians 1.5 that, “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.”

“Great pleasure” indeed. I can relate to God!

I share this with you because good news should go forth. Also to remind us Gentiles that we’ve been grafted into the things of God. And further, to fan the flames of your desire to see our Muslim cousins adopted as full-fledged, daughters and sons of the king. 

Surely they were designed for this and will find fresh joy and fulfillment in such status. Just as will our three in a nondescript, but consecrated courtroom this morning. 

PS. If you’re within range of southern Colorado, join us to celebrate Saturday noon at 6154 Boulder Ave. Rye, CO. 

If there’s one thing Muslim Connect readers are big on it’s soccer (Football for the cultural semantics snobs. You know who you are!). Personally, I’m a soccer fanatic. Well, at least once every four years for five weeks! And this summer it’s time to go crazy again. It’s the World Cup! And get this: The tournament is in North America. 

Through some dark witchery, games were parceled out to various Canadian, American and Mexican cities. Denver (the closest possibility to me) was egregiously over looked. Kansas City has six matches and we have none! No offense to readers who love Arrowhead Stadium, but some money changed hands somewhere, probably over a big plate of saucy, KC smoked brisket.

Pouting aside, the World Cup is a big deal for those of us who care about Muslims. Fourteen of the 48 countries who’ve qualified are Muslim-majority nations. Some marketing experts say, “The 2026 tournament is expected to reach around 5.8 billion viewers worldwide, meaning most of the planet will watch at least part of the competition.” 

Of course relatively few will see matches in person! That means we’ve got multiple opportunities to host watch parties and invite Muslim neighbors, friends and co-workers. (More on this to come.)

We can also join up with an outreach effort at a match venue. If you’re in Kansas City (and still reading this!) check out Chapel Oaks Church’s water evangelism effort. Click here for a collecting spot for outreach efforts across all World Cup cities. 

Finally, here’s something I just recently learned, but should have expected: Muslims are gearing up to reach out as well. The AI in this video is goofy, but the spirit of the invitation shines through. May the young evangelists who respond to this call find Jesus, even in the midst of their outreach for Islam. 

I sometimes think the differences between Muslims and Christians are not too many, but are very significant. It’s like a chasm you think you could jump across, although wide enough to be a little scary. But if you don’t make it to the other side, the fall down the crevasse is way farther than you’d like. 

On this Good Friday, I suppose most Muslim Connect readers are thinking of the crucifixion. And that’s where we find the chasm-deep division between us and our Abrahamic cousins. The Quran portrays Jesus as a prophet and a good guy, but someone who probably didn’t die. 

Divine? Nope. 

Crucified? Close, but not quite.

Resurrection? Not needed. Didn’t die.

You might be surprised to learn the beginning of Muslims’ “Jesus-didn’t-die-on-the-cross” conviction rests unsteadily on just one verse of the Quran. Here’s the verse, “That they said (in boast), ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah’; – but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not.” Q4:157

As Gregory Lanier brilliantly unfolds, that verse is probably talking more about the Jews looking bad than about Jesus dying or not. At the very least, the exegesis is tricky, the idea is mentioned only once in the Quran and it only shows up lightly in the Shia (not Sunni) Hadith. 

The alternative idea that Jesus was swept up to Heaven supports both Shia and Sunni eschatology. Denying the crucifixion makes the Resurrection a moot point, which serves your case when you want to view Jesus as just a guy, a really good guy. 

But if he was crucified. . . and he did rise from that death. Well now, that changes everything, doesn’t it?

You’d be forgiven if you find yourself tracking bad news into your house these days. Seems like it’s everywhere. The country’s at war. Gas prices are through the roof. Airport security lines are out the door! 

Could you use a little good news? Me, too. 

Muslims coming to Jesus
Ted Essler, president of Missio Nexus, said in a recent article, “Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have made decisions to become Christians in the past twenty years. One can visit any one of a number of countries and find not just Muslim converts to Christ, but entire ministry teams made up of former Muslims, reaching their neighbors.”

As an example he told of meeting an African man who’d memorized the entire Quran and had qualified to teach in mosques. After encountering Jesus, a “completely different theological framework fill[s] his teaching, mind and heart.”

Holy Land-ish Tours
As much as I hate this war in the Middle East, here’s a possible, very slight, silver lining: If your church has had to cancel a Holy Land tour, perhaps you could encourage a visit that would involve more interaction with Muslims. Say a visit to Istanbul and retracing Paul’s journeys. If you’re feeling adventurous, head east to see a softer side of Islam in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. If low risk is now at the top of the list, four long days in London would allow you to introduce your friends to representatives from most of the Muslim world.

Dennis is Out!
After over a year in custody in Afghanistan, linguistic academic and friend of Muslims, Dennis Coyle is home. This video of him hugging his mom is worth wading through the ads! I imagine “home” is hard for Dennis to get a handle on. He spent most of the past 20 years in Afghanistan. Please join me in thanking God for his release and praying for his present transition. 

If you’ve got some good news to share, I’m big time happy to hear it.