A DEADLY MISUNDERSTANDING:

A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide

By Mark D. Siljander. From Chapter 4, “THE OTHER HOLY BOOK” , P. 38-42

Charles was in D.C. not long after the 1993 bombing in Man­hattan, and we got together to talk about our lives and the state of the world. I told him a bit about my search in the New Testa­ment for a justification of conversion, and he nodded. I described my discoveries about Aramaic, about shalem and punaya and the meaning behind the English word “convert,” and coming to the conclusion that Jesus had never meant to start an exclusive reli­gion but rather to describe a state of one’s personal being in rela­tion to God. After going on for a while, I paused to gather my thoughts, and Charles suddenly spoke up. “You know, Jesus is mentioned extensively in the Qur’an.”

It caught me completely off guard. The Qur’an? This seemed the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. I didn’t believe him for a moment and told him so. He gave me a withering look and said, “Mark, you’re so west­ernized and Christianized. You need to educate yourself.”

For days, the comment rankled. Not long before, a longtime Christian friend of mine named Jim Lawler had utterly mysti­fied me by saying that he had read the Qur’an — which was shock enough — and that doing so had “strengthened his faith.” I’d known him since grade school days; we used to call him “Crazy Jim.” Now I thought he was just being his usual Crazy Jim self. Not Charles, though—I thought Charles was being cocky. I’ll bet he hasn’t really read it himself, I thought. This is how these exaggerations get started: someone takes something out of context, passes it on, it gets distorted, and before you know it you have educated people saying Jesus is a key figure in the Qur’an! Give me a break. It was so annoying, in fact, that I felt compelled to do something. I had to prove that Charles was wrong — and there was only one way to do that.

Which is how it happened that on a chilly evening in the spring of 1993, I stood on the sidewalk outside a bookstore in Reston, Virginia, pacing and talking to myself, probably looking for all the world like someone trying to get up the nerve to ask his boss for a raise or a girl out on a first date. But it wasn’t a raise or a date I was steeling myself to go after — it was a book. To me, it felt like a struggle for my soul. Back and forth I argued with myself as the sky darkened. Only a few years ear­lier, I would never have even considered purchasing a copy of the Qur’an, let alone bringing it into my house. This was the devil’s book we were talking about here! Why would any sane person want to spiritually contaminate his home? But if I didn’t go and read it myself, how would I know? Of course, Charles was wrong — but how would I really know? It was approaching 9:00 p.m. The store was about to close. I went inside, picked out a copy, and paid for it.

Sitting in my study at home half an hour later, I unwrapped my parcel, placed the book on my desk, and stared at it. Then, a flash of inspiration: maybe there was an index! That would cer­tainly allow me to get the job done quickly. A quick look in the back of the book — and so there was. Excellent. I’ll just look through the pages back here, let’s see ... H... I... J... — I stared at the page, incredulous. There was “Jesus,” followed by page num­bers for the entries. Dozens of them. It would take me hours to look them all up. I turned to the first entry and (not realizing that my actions transgressed Islam’s injunction against defacing the holy book) began underlining and highlighting.

The Arabic wordqur ‘an comes from the shared Arabic and Aramaic root qara’a, meaning “to read” or “to recite.” 2 According to Muslim tradition, this was the command the angel Gabriel gave three times to Muhammad when he confronted him in the Hira cave, a few miles northeast of Mecca in A.D. 610. Muslims believe the Qur’an, “the Recitation,” is the final revelation from Allah, given to his last and greatest prophet.

The Qur’an is divided into 114 sections or chapters, called suras, which are in turn divided into verses, or ayas. The more suras and ayas I read, the more amazed I became. The text talked about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Mount Sinai, Noah, Solomon and Sheba, Moses, heaven, Satan, hell, angels, end times, Judgment Day, sin, forgiveness, Zechariah, John the Baptist, and Mary, whose name adorns an entire chapter.

And Jesus. Boy, did it talk about Jesus. Charles hadn’t exag­gerated; if anything, he’d understated the case. Jesus — or Isa, as he is called in Arabic — is mentioned in the Qur’an more than 110 times, ninety directly and twenty or more indirectly. He is called “righteous,” “pure and without sin,” the “Word of Truth,” the “Word of God,” the “good news,” “intercessor,” “mediator,” a “witness for Allah,” a “straight path,” and the “right path to follow.” He is referred to as “the Messiah” eleven times. The Qur’an says that Isa performed miracles, healed the sick and the lepers, breathed life into clay, and had the power to raise the dead. It says that he will return again on Judgment Day.

In the years to come I would learn a great deal more about Jesus and Islam. For now, it was sufficiently astonishing to find that the carpenter from Nazareth was not only “mentioned ex­tensively” in the Qur’an, as Charles had put it, but that he clearly played a unique and highly revered role there. For that matter, so did the Bible itself. I had expected to read excoriations of Jews and Christians and derision of their holy books at every turn. Instead, I kept bumping into passages where the Qur’an mentioned the holy books of both Jew and Christian and gave them a place of honor. It was captivating. I began underlining these and soon started an index of my own. By the time the last page was turned I had totted up over one hundred references asserting the validity of spiritual truths in the al-Turat (Torah), Zubor (Psalms), and Injil (New Testament)! For example:

And We gave them The Book which helps to make things clear (sura 37:117). And He sent down the Turat (Torah) and Injil (Gospel) before this, as a guide to mankind (sura 3:3—4). We gave Moses the Book (sura 2:87). Each one believeth in Allah, His angels, His books and His messengers. “We make no distinction ... between one and another of His messen­gers” (sura 2:285). Those to whom We have sent The Book study it as it should be studied (sura 2:121). We believe in Allah, and the revelations given to us, and to Abraham, Ismail, Isaac, Jacob, and the descendents and that given to Moses and Jesus and that given to all Prophets from their Lord; we make no difference between one and another of them (sura 2:136). Dispute ye not with the People of the Book [Christians] ... but say, “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which has come down to you; our God and your God is One; and it is to Him we bow” (sura 29:46). Before this We wrote in the Psalms, after the Torah: “My servants, the righteous, shall inherit the earth” (sura 21:105). Say, “0 People of the Book [Christians]! Ye have no ground to stand upon unless ye stand fast by the Turat [Torah], the Injil [Gospel], and all the revelation that has come to you from your Lord (sura 5:68).

But what about the violence? This was the book of Islam, right, the “religion of hate”? Where were all the verses telling me to rise up and go slay the infidels? They were there, all right, and they are quoted repeatedly these days, both by Muslim militants for purposes of exploita­tion and by their critics for purposes of denunciation. But I was wholly unprepared for how few and far between these verses are. In fact, when I listed all the verses embodying or advocating violence in the Old Testament and New Testament (at least, out of context), then tallied and compared these to a similar list drawn from the Qur’an, the Bible came out as three to five times more violent.