Holy Envy by Barbara Brown Taylor

Author:Barbara Brown Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2019-03-12T06:00:00+00:00

7

The Shadow-Bearers

O mankind! Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another. Surely the most noble of you before God are the most reverent of you. Truly God is Knowing, Aware.

QUR’AN 49:13

When I ask students to rise from their seats during the first week of Religion 101 and write what they already know about the religions we will study on the board, I can predict what they will write under Islam. “Terrorism” will lead the list; “Muhammad,” “9/11,” “Allah,” “ISIS,” “veiled women,” “Saudi Arabia,” and “the Qur’an” will show up somewhere underneath. This helps explain why some Muslim students decide not to add anything more nuanced to the list. They can see which way the wind is blowing. I remember one in particular, a winsome young man with roots in Mali. He asked me not to ask him about being Muslim in class, since he was not ready for his classmates to see him “that way.”

It was not always so. When I first began teaching the class, Islam was only a little more foreign than the other religions on the course plan. The first, failed attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 had receded in memory, leaving most students with the impression that Islam was a religion in the Middle East whose combative followers had brown skin, lived in the desert, and wore flowing white gowns. Few could have guessed that Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world or that the majority of Muslims are not Arab. Fewer still would have suspected that Muslims revere Jesus or that the Qur’an upholds his virgin birth and says more about his mother than the New Testament does.

The hardest thing to remember is that most of these students were still in diapers when the second, successful attack on the World Trade Center took place in 2001. The United States has been at war in one Muslim country or another ever since. Hardly a day goes by without headlines involving troops, coups, bombings, or body counts. Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street have all capitalized on the fear generated by terrorist attacks at home and abroad. Trying to teach Islam under this sky full of thunderheads is like trying to teach Christianity at the height of the Thirty Years’ War, in which more than eight million Christians died.

I have six class sessions in which to give students something better for their imaginations to work with. I started out with four—the same number as all of the other religions we study—but the unit on Islam was so full of difficulties that I stretched it out, so we could at least name some of the problems. On the first day of the unit I write them on the board:

Recognizing the entanglement of politics, economics, history, and religion

Noticing how religions change from culture to culture

Vetting the viewpoints of your news sources

Resisting the tendency to judge the many by the

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