In her book The Trouble with Islam, Irshad Manji tells about two encounters with evangelical Christians in multicultural Richmond, B.C. One is with a smiling, Bible-story-telling South Asian woman who treats Irshad with love when her father dumps her there for cheap daycare. The other encounter is with a high school teacher who disapproves of Irshad’s adolescent political expressions and tells her so, but leaves her free to express herself. For Irshad, both encounters were positive.

These anecdotes offer a measure of encouragement to Canadian Christians who seek to be loyal to their Lord in word and deed. The stories also hint at three essential dimensions of appropriate gospel witness: an open and principled faith in Jesus, a complete absence of constraint upon other people, and a genuine love for the listener.

Daily life in today’s Canada, especially in our large urban centres, provides many good opportunities for entering into meaningful relationship with people who share neither our ethnic backgrounds nor our faith commitments. Included among these opportunities are friendships with Muslims that can develop over time into settings for authentic faith conversation. Good relationships can be built with those Muslims—and there are many of them in Canada—who hold a strong faith in Islam based on knowledge of their sourcebooks and practice their rituals with devotion.

The voices we generally hear in Canada claiming to speak for Islam do not represent the global reality. One might even question whether they represent the majority of Muslims in Canada. However, those who ask this question in the public media run the risk of being targeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a watchdog organization. Moreover, Christians who choose to believe the mild, westernized version of Islam offered by these aggressive voices face a more dangerous risk of an responding unrealistically to a growing global force that may one day break in upon us unawares.

They also risk missing an authentic faith conversation in which both participants bring to the dialogue their most deeply-held beliefs. Muslims understand the value of publicly confessing their faith, and have in fact made witness (shahadah) to Allah and Muhammad one of the five ‘pillars’ of ritual practice. When Christians bear witness to Jesus (Acts 1:8), Muslims may not agree with the message, but they will appreciate the action.

Muslims who are interested in Christian faith will most frequently ask about the divinity of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and the trustworthiness of the Bible. In the Vision TV program Let the Qur’an Speak broadcast across Canada April 2, Muslim preacher Shabir Ally calmly denied the first two and by doing so put the third in doubt. This is typical of authentic conversation with Muslims.

These matters are large and complex, and they have been at issue between Christians and Muslims for 1,200 years or more. To avoid them would mean to engage in a strangely artificial relationship. Struggling with them in friendly dialogue brings into the lives of believers great discoveries about the depth and beauty of the gospel.

The best approach is to know the New Testament witness to Jesus well and to explain it in a clear and sensitive way. Most of the world’s Muslims do not share the epistemology of religious pluralism which some Christian representatives seek to bring to interfaith “dialogue.” Islam and the gospel are not the same, and Christian suggestions that they are strike Muslims as condescending and—more to the point—false.

Christians who want to study the contrasts are better served by going straight to the sourcebooks of Muslim faith than to the tendentious or politically-correct secondary literature on Islam most readily found in bookstores. The critical source materials are the Qur’an, the Sira, the Hadith, and Islamic Law (Fiqh). Muslims invite us to learn Arabic in order to read these texts, and our respect for Muslims should cause us to seriously consider doing so. But good English translations are also available: the Qur’an in Arthur Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted; the Sira, or earliest biography of Muhammad, in Alfred Guillaume’s fine The Life of Muhammad. Translations of the multi-volumed collections of Hadith, or sayings attributed to Muhammad, can be found in many university libraries. Translations of Fiqh works are harder to come by, but helpful descriptions of the contents of these works are accessible in The Encyclopaedia of Islam.

The best general introduction to Islam in English is Muslims: Their Beliefs and Practices (2001) by Andrew Rippin, dean of humanities at the University of Victoria in B.C. Two excellent examples of creative theological reflection on Islam and the gospel are Kenneth Cragg’s Jesus and the Muslim and David Shenk’s Journeys of the Muslim Nation and the Christian Church.

Both Cragg and Shenk, though from quite different traditions, find a watershed at the point of Muhammad’s migration to Medina and the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. In profound and fascinating ways they trace how these divergent choices connect to our understanding of the nature of God. Does God suffer for us and with us or does He not? Is military struggle “the way of Allah?” Who is the truly “worshippable” being in the universe? How can vicariously bearing evil bear it away? These “journeys in opposite directions,” as Shenk describes them, carry crucial implications for conflicts in the world today. Their inclusion in the conversation is therefore a matter of practical urgency.

Christians who are accustomed to European notions of privacy and tact may still not be convinced that open witness is the best approach. A recent interview with Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad in Christianity Today may lend some added perspective.

Rather surprisingly, Omar Bakri spoke with respect and affection about Jay Smith of Hyde Park Christian Fellowship in London, England. Jay is a well-known Christian debater who makes his commitment to Christ explicit and questions the historical foundations of Muslim faith. He once called on Omar Bakri publicly to “condemn any form of religious violence, whenever and wherever it is perpetrated in the name of God.”

And yet when asked about Jay, Omar Bakri said: “I feel very comfortable with Jay—with him, what you see is what you get. He is no hypocrite, and neither are Salafis. His words and actions match his heart. He does not pretend by saying soft words about Islam. The Qur’an calls for debate.”

Is it not significant for gospel witness among Muslims that when this influential Islamist is asked to indicate a Christian whom he enjoys, he mentions a missionary who puts the gospel straight?

Contrary to stereotype, Jay Smith is an Anabaptist serving under the Brethren in Christ Church. He says that even when he faces off with Muslim polemicists in public and heated debate, after the meeting he and his antagonists embrace each other, laugh together, and sit down side by side for a cup of tea.

Gordon Nickel is assistant professor of intercultural studies at ACTS Seminaries, Langley, B.C. and has a PhD in Qur’anic Studies. He and his wife Gwenyth did mission work in Pakistan and India over a period of 15 years under the Mennonite Brethren churches.

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Edmonton has the distinction of being home to the first Muslim community in North America to construct its own mosque. In 1938, the small group there built the Al-Rashid Mosque. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the Muslim community in Canada began to experience real growth. By 1971 there were 33,000 Muslims in this country.

Today they number an estimated 650,000 and claim to be the fastest-growing religious group in Canada. The immigration has been especially strong from the Middle East and Africa, though now a second and third generation is already growing up. Though 86 per cent of Muslims live in six metropolitan areas in this country, over half of all Canadian Muslims live in just one area, Metropolitan Toronto. Toronto alone has 16 Muslim schools.

What may be especially striking is the claim by Daood Hassan Hamdani, a Canadian Muslim writer, that “one of the most significant phenomena of Canadian religious history…is the resurgence of Islam among the young.” At the same time, an American writer makes the claim that only five to 10 per cent of the Muslim community in America “participates in organized religion.”

Muslims occupy significant roles in many places in Canada. They are well above the Canadian average in university education for those of the prime workforce age: 27 per cent have one or more university degrees versus 17 per cent for all other Canadians. The first Muslim to become a cabinet minister in a government was Larry Chabin of Alberta. The CEO for Ballard Power Systems is Firiz Rasul, and the dean of engineering at the University of Ottawa is Tyseer Aboulnasr.

Worldwide, Islam has grown from 12.4 per cent of the world’s population in 1900 to 19.2 per cent in 2000. Christianity in 2000 represented 29.9 per cent of the world’s population. The Muslim Canada website that provided the information made the projection that by 2025 the Muslim portion of world population would rise to 30 per cent, while the Christian would fall to 25 per cent. This was based on the notion that a significant portion of the Christian community was in countries with an aging population, while much of Islam is in countries with a much younger demographic. (Harold Jantz)