Is this verse from the Qur’an, the Hebrew Bible, or the New Testament?

This past Thursday I held the last of four lecture/discussion classes on Islam at a local United Methodist Church. By no means am I an expert – I spent two years as an undergrad in the religious studies department at the University of Toronto – but what I do know is learning about religions is never a bad idea.

I grew up as a pastor’s kid in the United Methodist Church, but after my confirmation I went the way of many teenagers and each week fought my mother tooth and nail to sleep in on Sundays. I not only fell out of habit but out of love with the church. Not believing in God nor understanding the language and metaphors of those who do led to a dissolution with the whole of organized religion. Truthfully, probably less of a principled stance and more a spiteful retort, though of course it didn’t seem so at the time. During my last years of high school and my “break” year between high school and university, my increasing distrust of religion coupled with a growing sense of independence formed a relatively bitter young adult.

But like all good coming-of-age stories, this girl found a boy… a boy who happened to not only be bright and eloquent in matters of philosophy and religion, but who was studying to be a Methodist minister himself. Obviously my journey with religion did not begin or end with him, but he definitely pushed me towards better things.

Blah, blah, blah, I’m sure you’ll hear about the relationship again at some point: I mention it because this seminarian had opened my awareness up to a different sort of spirituality –– a spirituality I could attempt to understand through scholarship.

Fast-forward to a few years later to when my brief yet intense experience with secular religious education in Canada had shown me the beauty that faith and tradition can bring to the world. But what I was most struck by when I moved back to the United States was the negative and ignorant portrayal of Islam in popular media.

I might not have an expert’s facts but I did have a history of good professors, hours of discussions with friends, and the proof of the societal need via Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I used my familial connections to get a teaching gig at a church over the summer, where I could pass on the knowledge I had and the ideas I had access to on to other people in the Christian community.

I did one five-class course and was considerably moved by the experience. There were many moments of brilliance on the part of the adult students: They had insightful comments on what it might have felt like to be privy to Muhammad’s first revelations; they noted that by actions alone, a passerby probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a good Muslim and a good Christian.

What I was most struck by were the participants who appeared close-minded, who asked questions that only acknowledged violent Muslims’ actions and not the grace-filled stories of the Prophet or the endearing mystical Sufis. And while after class my friends would remark at their jihad- and infidel- led questions, but in a way those “close-minded” ones are my favorite students, because they show up. They inherently distrust Islam, but they show up to a class about Muslims anyway.

Now that’s what I call redemption.

So this year, when I taught another class at a different church, I wasn’t flapped when the select few talked incessantly and un-begrudgingly about the inevitable application of Shari’ah in America and made faces when presented with the fact Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion. And the truly amazing thing was that most of those people came back the next week.

On the last class (I have to give my mother a shout-out for the idea), we ended the ninety minutes with a quiz: a list of verses that have all the “ye”s, “beget”s and “Most merciful”s you could hope for from the Abrahamic holy books titled with the question, “Is this verse from the Qur’an, the Hebrew Bible, or the New Testament?”

It was genuinely purely fun to sit around with the people I had grown to like and respect over the last month at a table to hear them joke about how they didn’t sign up to take tests. They ultimately grew silent, leaning over the Xeroxed words, puzzling over the marked similarities between the verses and whispering their guesses and reasonings to each other.

When we went over the verses one-by-one, I had them raise their hands for their answers, “Quran,” “Hebrew Bible,” or “New Testament”. No verse had consensus. It was perfect.

Not only did the participants remark that the verses were often indistinguishable in content, but that holy books can be cited as justification for people’s own personal agendas – you just have to know where to look.

The quotes were deliberately chosen to confuse. Beautiful, graceful verses from the Quran, unforgiving verses from the New Testament, poetry from the Hebrew Bible, and overlapping language and metaphors from all. I hoped the problem-solving process would convince the infidel/jihad/violence hold-outs.

I hope I have become one of those hold-outs. Not for the apparent close-mindedness, but the action (because of course, in Islam sometimes action is more important than belief) – they keep showing up. I’ve been proven wrong many times, and while I remain annoying and agnostic, I respect religion now. So I’m going to keep showing up to it.