{"id":2725,"date":"2019-11-25T13:35:52","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T11:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/?p=2725"},"modified":"2019-11-25T13:36:08","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T11:36:08","slug":"2725-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/investigate-islam.com\/web\/?p=2725","title":{"rendered":"Reading the Qur’an as a Quaker"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How do Quakers \u201clove thy neighbor\u201d? For Michael Birkel, it meant crossing religious boundaries to have meaningful conversations with his Muslim neighbors. Everence helps people and organizations live out their values and mission through faith-rooted financial services.<\/div>\n
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http:\/\/fdsj.nl\/fce<\/a> Learn about how Friends Fiduciary witnesses to Quaker values on Wall Street https:\/\/fdsj.nl\/friends-fiduciary<\/a> ___ Transcript: There is within Islam a sacred saying called a \u201chadith,\u201d in which God is speaking and God says, \u201cI was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known.\u201d This was one of the motivations of the act of creation itself. \u201cI was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known.\u201d If that desire\u2014 that deep desire\u2014is imprinted on the very fabric of the universe, then our coming to know one another across religious boundaries is a sacred task and a holy opportunity. Reading the Qur\u2019an as a QuakerConversations About the Qur\u2019an So I traveled among Muslims who live from Boston to California, and I just had one question for them: would you please choose a passage in your holy book and talk to me about it? The result was a series of precious conversations, because what they brought to the conversation was their love for their faith, for God and for the experience they had of encountering God\u2019s revelation through the Qur\u2019an. The Experience of Reading the Qur\u2019an One of my Muslim teachers told me, when I asked him, \u201cwhat is it like to read the Qur\u2019an?\u201d and he said it\u2019s this experience of overwhelming divine compassion. You feel yourself swept up into this divine presence where you feel so loved that nothing else matters. Any other desires you had in the world just disappear. You are where you want to be. At the same time, you feel this overwhelming sense of compassion for others. And he told me if you don\u2019t feel that, you\u2019re not reading the Qur\u2019an. A Diversity of Voices I spoke with Muslims from many places that are within the spectrum of the Islamic community. I spoke to Sunnis, I spoke to Shiites, I spoke to Sufis, I spoke to men, I spoke to women. I spoke to people of many ethnic heritages. If there\u2019s one thing I learned, it is that whatever you think Islam is, it\u2019s wider than that. One imam\u2014who was by 39 generations removed a descendant of the prophet Muhammad himself\u2014spoke to me and said that for him, one of the jewels of the Qur\u2019an was this notion that you do not repel evil with evil. You drive away evil with goodness. And if you drive away evil with good, then you find that the person whom you regarded as your enemy can become your friend. Another Muslim teacher taught me that according to the Qur\u2019an, when we hear about good and evil, our task is not to divide the world into two teams\u2014here are the good guys, here are the bad guys\u2014but rather, our inclination towards evil is found in every heart and that is where the fundamental conflict resides. This to me sounded very close to the message of early Quakers. Encountering the Qur\u2019an as a Non-Muslim I believe that for a non-Muslim, encountering the Qur\u2019an for the first time might be perplexing. You might imagine being parachuted down into the book of Jeremiah. There you land: you don\u2019t know the territory, here are these prophetic utterances (which is how Muslims see the Qur\u2019an) and in Jeremiah they don\u2019t always have names attached to them. They\u2019re not in chronological order and they\u2019re not thematically arranged. I believe the Qur\u2019an can read like that to a newcomer. That\u2019s why I think it\u2019s valuable to read it in the company of persons who have been reading it their whole lives. What is it like to read someone else\u2019s scripture? I think it\u2019s quite possible that it can change you in ways that I can\u2019t predict for any reader, except to say that it will make your life richer. It will make your life better to know this. I am not a trained scholar of Islam. I did some preparation for this project, but mostly what I did was go out and talk to my neighbors, and it changed my life. And so I would like to encourage anyone who\u2019s hearing these words to go out, cross religious boundaries, talk to their neighbors, because your life will be changed too. ___ The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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