Life as a Woman in a Middle Eastern Muslim Context

Our hope is to encourage thoughtful engagement from a Christian perspective, and our hope is in addition that these will prove beneficial to you as you think about how to discuss with your friends and neighbors, these topics. This specific podcast deals with life as a woman in the context of Islam.

We're interviewing a person – whom we've called Miriam, and whose voice we have disguised – who grew up, actually, in a mixed home as a child. A mixed Christian and Islamic home, but went to Islamic school as a child. She reviews her experience growing up in the context of Islam as a Muslim.

It's important to understand a little bit about Islam before we engage in the interview, so I thought I would review the five pillars of Islam that make up the core of the Islamic faith as taught in the Quran. The first is the testimony of faith, that is that there is no God but Allah. This, of course, is an affirmation of the Islamic view of God that denies the existence of the Trinity and denies that Jesus is divine.

The second pillar is the pillar of prayer, praying five times a day. The third pillar is what is called "giving zakat," which is support for the needy. The fourth pillar is the fast during the month of Ramadan. That's a special holiday season in the Islamic faith. The fifth pillar is the pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the hajj. Everyone at some point in their life is supposed to take a journey to Mecca.

Of course, the key scripture for Islam is the Quran. Most people don’t realize that it went through two phases, one a less violent phase. Then as Islam was not meeting acceptance, it became more violent as a faith so that the total Quran has elements of affirmation about violence. This is the background of the core elements of Islamic faith that feed into the interview that we're going to be engaged in. We think that you'll find the conversation with Miriam a fascinating one about what life is like inside the context of being a Muslim.

However, in the Middle Eastern culture, my dad had the right to choose a husband for me and to force me to get married. There is a big, huge misconception, I think, here in the United States between the culture and the religion. Naturally, with the religion, I grew up thinking that I had a lot of rights in Islam.

I had the right to choose my husband. I had the right to education. I had the right to be a schoolteacher, or to be a professional, and to be a wife. There is a difference between the Arab culture and the religion. I think a lot of what happens as we look at the Middle East, we think that what is culture is actually religion, and it's not. There's a big difference between the two.

He said that, and then he said that they lack religion because of the fact women cannot pray during their menstrual cycle, during the 40 days after having a child. He says that they lack religion in that respect. There is that as far as religion. He did say that most of the dwellers of hell are going to women, because they gossip, and they are not very appreciative. At least that was his explanation of why most of the hell dwellers are going to be women.

In that regard, that is religion. As far as not being able to go to school, for example, when the Taliban came and took over in Afghanistan, they would not allow women to become teachers. They basically shut the doors of schools, and they let women stop being doctors. Because that was just their culture. It had nothing to do with religion.

Now, according to the Islamic religion, they have the right to kill me as a woman. They have the right to kill any man as well for converting, to become an apostate. If you leave the religion, then you have the right to be killed. It doesn't matter whether you're a man or woman. However, in the Middle Eastern culture, they have a right to kill their daughters even today for dishonoring the family, for shaming the family. That has a lot to do with the culture and not to do with the religion.

If it's not written in there, if there's nothing a particular topic that's written in there, then you go to the leaders, the Muslim leaders. They decide based on principle. For example, the issue of a woman driving. First, you go to the Quran, and you decide, is it written in the Quran whether a woman can drive or not?

Then you go back to the Muslim leaders, and then they decide based on the principles of what is found in the Quran. Is it permissible for a woman to drive a car or not? There are some who said yes, and there are some who had said no.

For a woman, Mohammed decided that it wasn't obligatory for a woman to go just because she had kids and young kids. She could go if she wanted to go. There are even sayings of Mohammed in history where he would have the women standing in the back, and the men are in front.

The reason why he did that was because when a woman is bending down, he doesn't want a man behind her looking at her as she's bending down. That's why women are to stand in the back, and men are to stand in the front. When he would hear a child crying, and he knew that a woman was in the back of the ranks, he would finish up the prayer very quickly because he knew the woman had to attend to her child.

A lot of times, what these imams are talking about are political issues. Oftentimes they're talking about, well, is it permissible to do a certain thing that's not in the Quran, that's not in the Hadith?

People go and ask for advice and say, "Well, my wife did this. What should I do? My husband did this, what should I do?" They act as advisors oftentimes of what people should and shouldn't do, but they are also motivators.

That levels the playing field, because we're not better than Arabs. We're not better than Muslims. We're not better just because we live here in the United States. We are privileged, and we are blessed by the Lord. But apart from the grace of God, I don't know why we're here.

Just because, for example, if you see a woman in the grocery store who's wearing a head covering, I promise you she doesn't have a bomb under that head covering. She just doesn't. She may look different, and it may look intimidating to us, but she's a woman that has the same needs as any other woman that is in the grocery store. She's hungry, she's trying to feed her kids. She wants a better life for her kids. She wants a better life for her family.

You'll find a lot of hospitality. I oftentimes work with a lot of refugees that come to the United States, and I encourage women to go and minister to these women. Oftentimes, these women from the church will come to me and say, "It's amazing, cuz I feel like they're ministering to me."

We have to open the door. God's heart, God's vision, the end goal is that every tribe, every tongue, every nation will bow their knee to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That's going to include a whole lot of Arabs, and a whole lot of Muslims, and a whole lot of tribes, Middle Eastern countries.

A big part of Islam and a big part of the Arab culture is the whole idea of marriage, and the whole idea of raising a family, and being a mother. That was very central in the Middle East, and growing up as a Muslim – and obviously, it's all about works. I mean, I think if I can say a big huge comparison between Islam and Christianity, as far as the religions are concerned, is I grew up with no hope. I had no hope, no eternal hope, but now I have hope.

I have hope in the fact that Christ died on the cross for me. He made a way for me. He came down to me rather than me try to climb to him to reach him. That is a huge difference, I think. The good works is based on my fear. Fear plays a big, huge role in Islam. Whereas the Bible clearly says that there is no fear in love, that love casts out all fear.

I grew up fearful, fearful of God, fearful of how God may punish me, fearful of how God may feel about me. Whereas in Christianity, I have peace, the peace that passes all understanding. I have hope, which did not exist in Islam.

There are very religious-oriented Muslims, if I can say it that way. There also is a strong secular strand of culture related. It's Islamic, but it's more secular. We see these tensions in several Middle Eastern countries, and I'm thinking of Egypt. I'm thinking of Turkey, et cetera.

Talk a little bit about that. Because on the one hand the goals of someone who comes out of a more secularized form of Islam and the way they approach life is very different from their Muslim neighbors, if I can say it that way, who are more – and I don’t even know what the right word to use – more traditionally religious or more intensely religious about their faith.

In the Middle East, they don’t separate the two. Whether you're secular or whether you're devout, being a Muslim is who you are. When we start talking negatively about Islam, they're automatically offended by it personally, and obviously we've seen that in the media. Because you've just offended who they are, even though some of these people who have gone out and rioted about certain things are probably not even very religious people.

The hard thing about Islam is it's very hard to tell who's very devout and who's really very secular, because – and I've seen this happen with my own family. You can go for several years where you're wearing the head covering, and you're following Islam, and you're doing all that. But one of the hard things about being a human being is you can't keep up. You just can't keep up. Then they leave it for a while, and then they come back to it. Then they become devout.

It's kind of an ebb and flow relationship with God and with Islam. Sometimes you're very, very devout, and other times you're really not devout at all. You're not even praying at all. Yeah, and I think there is definitely a tension between the secular Muslims and the devout Muslims. There's even tension between the devout Muslims themselves.

It's the same thing throughout history if you look at even Christianity in history. There is tension between the Catholics and the Protestants. Then there's even tension between people that go to Bible churches and people that are Baptists. You see that even in the Middle East. It does exist in the Middle East.

One of the things that I think that binds Christians together is the issue of love and loving one another. That does not exist in Islam. There's the brotherly love. That exists, but brotherly love is not the same as unconditional love. Last night I was reading John I, and I teach that in my Sunday school class. I thought, one of the marks of salvation is loving your brother regardless of what they do and how they act.

With Islam, there's a whole lot of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth mentality, and so there isn't that unconditional love. There isn't that unity, and there is that tension that constant tension between the sects, and the between the devout versus the secular.

There's a lot of tension that goes on.

Shiites, I would compare them to Catholics, because they add a different dimension, and culture, and tradition into their faith. That's who the Shiites are. Then there's a whole lot of other smaller sects, like the Sufis, the Amalekites. There's just smaller versions of these different sects.

If you go to Iraq, the huge tension in Iraq is that there's lot of Sunnis, and a lot of Shiites, and they're the ones who are fighting against each other. You go to Iran, they're mostly Shiites. It just really depends on what country you go to.

I think we have that covered in the other podcast, but the thing I want to zero in on here is to talk about – I'm gonna ask a difficult question in some ways. The role of honesty in Islam, now here's what I'm raising is there's a sense that we have in the West that within Islam, in terms of the defense of Islam as a faith, there's a kind of ends justifies the means.

There's the ability to – what we would say – lie, deceive, et cetera, that's acceptable. It's not only acceptable, it's almost honorable. Can I have you talk about that?

It says in the Old Testament that God blessed them. God blessed them. We have an example of that in the Old Testament, where lying was not only honorable, but it was even blessed by God. One of the things that I've noticed about religion, or that in the Bible and in the Quran, is that you can take just about anything and justify just about anything that you wanna do.

We've justified slavery, because of the passages that are in the New Testament of, "Slaves, obey your masters." We justify the whole century or two centuries of slavery just because that's written in the Bible. Does Islam allow you to lie in a situation where it protects Islam, or protects you, or protects your life? Yeah, absolutely. It does that. We have an example of that in the Old Testament.

Is what we would sometimes call terrorism put under that umbrella as well? Yet at the same time, there's a sense of, well, that's stretching the category a little bit. I know that some of the debate among Muslims about how some of the terrorism has been against other Muslims –

Dr. Darrell Bock: – and how that has shaken the Islamic community. Because although there's a defense for it at one level, there's another sense this is coming against another principle of Islam. Sort that out for us.

He's justifying it. Anybody, like I mentioned earlier, anybody can justify anything, at any time, with any Bible verse, or any Quranic verse. He'll justify that, and these terrorists will justify what they do because they think they're doing it in self-defense.

Has that been used by man? Absolutely, it's been used by man. In the Quran, it's permissible to lie in certain situations, when you're in a war, when there's a self-defense, and situations like that. The Quran particularly permits – or the Sharia law permits – people to lie in those types of situations. I don’t know that there is a mandate in the Bible that says, "Yes, you can lie in a certain situations." I think it has been used, and I believe it's been blessed even.

Let's shift gears. Let's talk about your own personal walk a little bit, and let's talk about – I'm gonna do it this way. How you saw yourself when you were growing up in the context of Islam, and I'll give you the whole train of thought here so we can kind of segment it.

Then how you encountered the Christian faith, and what struck you about it as you were still in Islam? Then how you came to faith, and then on the other side, what are you doing now? Kind of in four parts.

In my thought process, I thought, well, God created Islam, and Judaism, and Christianity, and he just wouldn't be too horribly upset if I attend a Christian church. When I went to church, I was curious. My impression of the pastor was he's a nice guy, but he's just confused and mislead because he doesn't know the truth about –

I began to read books, and I began to question – read the Quran and read the Bible. That's when I was confronted with the fact that both religions could not be right. One says one thing about Jesus, and the other was just a completely different thing about him. Islam says that Jesus was never crucified, that God sent someone to look like him to be crucified. Christians clearly believe that he was crucified and died on the cross for their sins.

I thought to myself, one question that I had was how could God deceive people? I couldn’t reconcile in my mind how could God deceive people and send a double for him to crucified. Why would he deceive people and then try to rectify the situation 600 years later? I believe that Jesus did die on the cross, and I was studying the Book of Romans. In Chapter 5 it says, "Through one men, all men have fallen. Through one men, all men have been saved," which is Christ. That made sense to me that God would make a way rather than me try to climb an invisible ladder to try to reach him with my good works.

Whereas with Christianity, the whole idea of the sacrifice, where God committed the first sacrifice in the Garden of Eden, and he committed the last sacrifice with his son Jesus Christ, that just blew my mind away.

Start with prayer. Start with a lot of prayer, and bathe everything that you do with prayer. Ask the Lord to open doors, because the most amazing thing that happens is when you ask God to open doors. You know what happens? He opens 'em.

It begins and ends with relationships. To start a relationship, one of the things that I tell people is you build a relationship with a person. Along the way you plant seeds about Christ and Christianity as the Lord opens the door for you.

He says, "You know, I've walked around. I've observed." He studied what they believe. Give them an opportunity to talk about their faith. They're happy to talk about that. Once you give them that opportunity, that will open a door for you and afford you the opportunity to share about your faith. He says, "I've walked around, and I've noticed this unknown God." He builds a bridge. He says, "Let me tell you about this unknown God. Let me make this unknown God known to you."

That may actually help you think about how to engage. Sometimes I think particularly initially, we need to be slow to talk and quick to listen so that we give people a time to tell their story. By getting to know them, then we put ourselves in a better place to know how to minister to them.

We certainly have a sense of that with this journey that we took with Miriam. It means that when we engage with Muslims, particularly here in the States as we encounter them, it involves listening, sensitivity, showing love, and reaching out to them as a possibility of getting to know them and building a relationship towards which you can share Christ. We need to recognize that we cannot generalize about people of Islamic background.

There is a strand of Islam that certainly is radical and violent, but there also are people who have left the Middle East, who have come in many cases to the West because they wanted to leave that form of Islam that threatened them, and they're interested in the possibility of hearing different ideas. We need to be open and aware of that possibility as we discuss issues of faith and God with Muslims.

We hope you've appreciated this interview, and we look forward to having you back on The Table again.