Recently I read
an article from the BBC about a program being offered in Turkey called "Muslim for a Month - a programme from social enterprise group The Blood Foundation where participants get to "test-drive" a religion."
Interesting idea.
There were a few things about this struck me.
Firstly, the people in the article talked about it as essentially cultural exchange. It was an opportunity to get to know a culture more fully in order to help them with people living in their own neighborhoods back home or to simply expand their understanding of Muslim culture.
Participants pray, fast, have lectures from Muslim scholars and spend time with Turkish families. Most are here for their first taste of Islam, but some for a deeper understanding of the Sufi culture of Turkey.
Not a bad thing, but I think what has been lost here is that religion is not culture. Sure there is a religious culture and sure cultures can and do include religions in which there is overlap, but one can't say, for instance, that Western culture is Christian culture. They are separate things and while there is some areas of similarity there are also areas of divergence.
This I think leads to a seeming a dichotomy between how the participants (at least those that are included in the article) approach the program and how those who lead the program think it should be approached.
From the standpoint of the program leaders I think that they intended this cultural exchange element to part of the program. To help people see the religion from the inside and to see the practitioners as people not as a faceless mass or even worse, as terrorists.
However I can't help but think that the core concept behind the program is evangelism. They are bringing people to Turkey to "try on" the Muslim religion in hopes that some will "buy into" it and convert to Islam.
Not a bad idea. I mean even people such as Richard Dawkins hold camps to help people become atheists. Numerous Christian churches host retreats or programs to help draw people's interest.
But this is the other thing that struck me about the article and the dichotomy between the participants and the leaders.
One would think that the leaders of the conference would hope that those taking part in the program would have an experience with Allah through the ritual of Muslim practice. This experience would then lead to conversion not simply to a better understanding of Muslim culture. But perhaps I'm just thinking too much in Christian terms and I guess that that is perhaps a point of difference between Islam and Christianity.
Christianity isn't about doing things. We do do things. We attend Church, we fellowship, we pray, we serve, we do all sorts of things but we don't do them to become Christians, we do them because we are Christians.
We are Christians because we have experienced the living God and have understood the truth of Christ's death, resurrection and all that it means. Belief did not come through my actions, my actions are the result of my belief and experience and one can't 'become' a Christian by doing things. One can only become a Christian when they are called by the living God and until that happens there is a clear gulf between those that are ritual Christians and those that are believing Christians. The former do things and hope to experience God in those moments. The latter have experienced God and as a result act. For one its a ritual of formality, for the other its a ritual of devotion and meaning.
