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I’m serious about the “connect” part of Muslim Connect. It’s easier to knowabout Muslims than it is to actually befriend and engage with them. Safer, too but, Gospel love has risky feet and hands. Because of my bias toward action over knowledge (and perhaps due to my sophomoric knowledge!), I prefer talking about what Muslims and Christians have in common that can lead to connection, rather than our differences.

Can’t always do that, though. And with Easter looming gorgeous and sunny on the horizon, I’d like to consider how Muslims deal with a Jesus whom the Gospels say died all the way and 100% rose from that death.

Islam has chosen to see Jesus as one of the best prophets, but giving him anything like co-equality, or same substance, with God is anathema. Having established that, dealing with the Gospel accounts of the resurrection is tricky.

For starters, since Jesus was a beloved prophet of God, surely he would not be allowed to suffer the shame of a forsaken death on a cross. For many Muslims, it’s unthinkable. Something else must have happened.

One possible solution is a switch. God sent someone else to the cross, an imposter made to look like Jesus.

Some Muslims will say Jesus died like any other person, others that God raised him to Heaven. These assume the crucifixion did not happen at all! That makes things tidier, but is a tough sell, given the Gospel accounts.

Ahmadiyya Muslims, who are considered unorthodox by many others, contend that Jesus didn’t die, maybe fainted or something, then went to India to preach there and later died in Kashmir!

These ideas sound crazy to our Easter-loving ears, but our Muslim friends believe them sincerely. The first step to sharing a bigger, better story is understanding current convictions.

Ask your friends what they believe happened to Jesus.  

More Info: For a solid, yet quick read, check out my friend Fouad Masri’s articleand book.

Dig into Gregory Lanier’s article for a thorough, slightly more academic, but accessible and well documented look 

I’d encourage listening to Matt Maher’s song, Christ is Risen on 11 while you read!

We tend to keep track of what we love, right? You know pretty much where your kids are. At a moment’s notice, you could put your hands on your military medals and important documents. I have a pretty good idea what chips and cereal are in the pantry. The cat, on the other hand, could be anywhere!

As people who value Muslims and strive to love them as God does, it’s good to know where they are. 

Of course, you are likely familiar with the counter-intuitive reality that most Muslims are not Arab, don’t live in the Middle East nor speak Arabic. And while I feel far more comfortable paddling around in ethnographic, rather than demographic data, it’s good for us to grow in our understanding of where Muslims are and aren’t.

In that pursuit, the good people at Dimitrov Research Center shared a website with fascinating graphs showing the percentage of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians in a given country.

I was particularly struck by the dearth of countries having either a hefty minority or a slight majority of Muslim citizens. There are only five countries with Muslim populations between 18 and 87%! Buddhists and Hindupopulations follow a similar pattern. Christians, on the other hand, seem more evenly spread between none and 100%.

I wonder how this came about and what it might mean. How is the global political and religious situation affected by the reality that most Muslims live where they’re either a tiny minority or an overwhelming majority? How does that shape the broader narrative about Muslims? How does this influence how your Muslim friend sees herself or his world?

One thing it makes me think: The next time someone asks me, “How do I find God’s will for my life?” I’m going to say, “Look at this chart!”

Global research hall-of-famer and Muslim Connect reader, Dr. Todd Johnsonhas said that eight or nine out of every ten Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists don’t have a friend who follows Jesus. May our lives shift that reality.

Many of our Texan friends might echo the “Gimme Power!” sentiment. Days of rolling blackouts have caused monumental stress and challenge. They have also highlighted the thin line between normal life and desperation.

Throughout history we’ve tried to control that line, pushing desperation back while guarding our safety and increasing our security and comfort. To that end, many Muslims engage in extra-Quranic practices designed to get good things in their lives and hold off bad things. These practices collectively can be called Folk, or Popular, Islam. If you were a Muslim, rather than a Christian looking in from the outside, you’d simply call it Islam.

Such practices include praying to dead saints and seeking power at their graves, marking children to ward off evil spirits and wearing or even eating passages of the Quran to gain power or avoid illness.

Considering this brings up three thoughts:

1. I might understand my Muslim friends better if I knew more about popular Islam, how it’s practiced, by whom and why.
2. I’m reminded there is much we cannot control and that reality exists beyond my five sense perception of it. That being true, I might have something to learn from people who live with deeper awareness of that reality.
3. I’m grateful for the deal we get with Jesus. Although I suspect there are aspects of my faith that could be called “Folk Christianity,” I take comfort and hope in Paul’s vivid word picture in Colossians 2.13, “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. . . . 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

To learn more, I recommend this winsome, first-hand account of a westerner in Indonesia. I’d also love to hear what you’d like to know further about folk Islam. Email thoughts, questions or experiences here or comment below. Thank you.

The Bible is chock full of cool prayers. You’ve got Jesus’s high priestly prayer, Mary’s seditious Magnificat, and Moses’s poignant, but futile, plea, “Pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else.”

One of my favorites is Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple in I Kings 8, especially the part where he asks God to hear the prayer of non-Jews and “Do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you. . . .”

We’d be smart to pirate that prayer and raise it up for Muslims everywhere.

When I said this in a Perspectives class recently, an attentive student pushed back, “Since the Quran is full of verses that instruct violence, should we really pray that God will hear and answer Muslims’ prayers?”

I suppose not all of them! Heck, you should definitely not ask God to do all I pray!

But this far we can easily, hopefully, heartily go: In the first few lines of the Quran, which faithful Muslims pray multiple times a day, God is asked, “It is You we worship and You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path.”

That’s a prayer I can get behind, that I deeply desire God to answer. One that I suspect God wants to answer on a depth and at a scale that would stagger us.

Solomon puts no parameters on the foreigners’ prayers he asks God to hear and answer. I don’t think I’m that gutsy, but then I might not be as smart as him either!

I will go this far, though, “God, please hear our Muslim friends and enemies when they pray and ask you to show them the Straight Path.”

Will you pray that with me? May God answer in such a way that, “all the peoples of the earth may know His name and fear Him. . . .”

It started the way some of your best stories probably start: “How cool would it be to go up in that minaret? Think we could?”

My team mate Frank and I screwed up our courage and asked the caretaker. This wasn’t easy since together we spoke about eight words of Turkish and he no English, but somehow the query carried and he said yes.

Before we could enjoy the crazy great view of our city from the balcony of the minaret, he requested we wash in the ritual way Muslims do before entering the prayer room.

The caretaker showed us what to do, including the part where water is sniffed up to clean the sinuses. Foreseeing what would happen, I fake sniffed. Frank, who was very young and trained well to follow instructions, snorted what must have felt like a quart of water up his nose and nearly drowned himself!

While he spluttered, the care taker and I laughed!

This ritual cleaning is called wudu and has roots in both the Quran and various hadith. It consists of four obligatory actions:

1. Washing the face, including sniffing (a small amount of!) water into the nose.
2. Washing both arms to the elbows.
3. Wiping the head.
4. Washing the feet to the ankles.

As you might guess, the rules about how to do wudu vary and can be a little complicated. And the discussion on what breaks the state of ritual purity are extensive and can cause me to giggle like a middle school kid. IE: A toot is cause for redoing wudu, but only if it is heard or smelled.

Muslims practice wudu to prepare themselves for ritual prayer. As a Christian I’m profoundly grateful to be clean before God in all the ways that matter. I depend on the example of Jesus and the teaching of Paul that the cleanness of Jesus makes me clean.

That said, thinking about wudu makes me wonder if sometimes I’m a little too casual with my Father, the Creator, the Most High God.