Knowing Our Muslim Neighbors: Readings from 3/21 Service

Quote from the Qur’an, Sura (which means chapter) 16, Aleya (which means verse 97)

Guaranteed Happiness Now and Forever

Anyone who works righteousness, male or female, while believing, we will surely grant them a happy life in this world, and we will surely pay them their full recompense (on the Day of Judgment) for their righteous works.

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Reza Aslan is the author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” and the host of CNN’s original series “Believer With Reza Aslan.” This is an excerpt of an interview that he did with CNN.

“Religion and faith are not the same thing.

Faith is mysterious and ineffable. It is an emotional, not necessarily a rational, experience.

Religion is a fairly recent human invention. But faith, as I have elsewhere argued, is embedded in our very evolution as human beings.

And yet, in the end, faith is nothing more or less than a choice. You either believe there is something beyond the physical world (as I do), or you don’t. You either believe you are more than the sum of your material parts (as I do), or you don’t. You either believe in the existence of a soul (as I do), or you don’t.

No one can prove or disprove these things, not any more than anyone can prove or disprove love or fear or any other human emotion.

Religion, on the other hand, is the language we use to express faith. It is a language made up of symbols and metaphors that allows people to express to each other (and to themselves) what is, almost by definition, inexpressible.

After all, if there is a God, then that God is utterly beyond human comprehension.

How would one talk about – or even think about – something so completely foreign? We would need some kind of language to help us make sense of it, a set of symbols and metaphors we can all agree upon to help us define what is fundamentally indefinable.

That’s where religion comes in. Beyond the doctrines and dogma, the do’s and the don’t’s, religion is simply a framework for thinking about the existential questions we all struggle with as human beings.

Can you have faith without religion? Of course! But as the Buddha said, if you want to strike water, you don’t dig six 1-foot wells; you dig one 6-foot well. In other words, if you want to have a deep and meaningful faith experience, it helps – though it is by no means necessary – to have a language with which to do so.

So then, pick a well.

My well is Islam, and in particular, the Sufi tradition. Let me be clear, I am Muslim not because I think Islam is “truer” than other religions (it isn’t), but because Islam provides me with the “language” I feel most comfortable with in expressing my faith. It provides me with certain symbols and metaphors for thinking about God that I find useful in making sense of the universe and my place in it.

But I know, just as the Buddha did, that while my personal well may be different and unique, the water I draw from it is the same water drawn from everyone else’s wells. Indeed, having drunk from many wells in my spiritual journey, I consider it my mission in life to inform the world that, no matter the well, the water tastes just as sweet.”