c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) With the anniversary the tragic, evil events of Sept. 11, 2001 so fresh in our minds, it may seem an odd time for me to write positively about the Islam I know.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the airwaves have been packed with shrill,demonizing rhetoric about radical Islamic terrorists consumed by hate and unfazed by the slaughter of innocents.

I do not disagree that these barbarians are intent on the destruction of infidels, whom they self-servingly define as anyone who does not share their views.

I understand this is a face of Islam, and one that must be taken seriously. But it is not the Islam I know.

It is foolish to base our perception of reality solely on our personal experience. It is also foolish to form our perception of reality on events we see and interpretations we read when they are at odds with our personal experience.

I first encountered Islam in 1967, when I, then a teenage student, traveled to Indonesia. After an interminably long flight I wanted nothing more than to sink into a long deep sleep. At sunrise a sound emanating from a nearby minaret pierced my slumber.

A muezzin issued the first call to prayer of the day: “God is the greatest. I bear witness that there is no deity except God. I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God. Make haste towards prayer. Make haste towards welfare. Prayer is better than sleep.”

For the next three months, five times a day I saw people drop to their knees to acknowledge their dependence on and submission to God. The Christian missionaries I met dismissed these daily prayers as meaningless, ritualistic and rote. But that did not lessen the deep impression they made on me; they remain embedded in my memory.

The Islam I first saw was devout, more so it seemed than my own devotion to Jesus Christ, who by that time I called my Lord.

A few years later, while taking a class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I read extensively about Islam and then wrote a paper urging a Muslim-Christian dialogue and exploring how it might come about.

Since Sept. 11, numerous books have been written by people smarter than I identifying what they see as indisputable evidence that Islamic terrorism is the inevitable result of serious devotion to the Quran.

Don Richardson, author of “Peace Child,” has spent his life identifying common ground to connect the world’s religions to Christian belief. He has concluded there is no common ground between Christianity and Islam.

But I believe that all humans and the religions we practice share some common ground, because all of us are created in God’s image and therefore inherently possess spiritual, intellectual, creative, moral and relational capacities.

After seminary, I traveled to Morocco and was welcomed into the homes of Muslims I met. Gathered around a platter of chicken and couscous, I was enfolded into their familial warmth and camaraderie.

I witnessed a Muslim wedding in Egypt and saw the same mix of solemnity, sincerity and joyous celebration I’ve seen in every Christian wedding I’ve attended.

The Islam I know is familial and hospitable.

As a matter fact a couple of years ago, historian Martin Marty told me that all world religions share at least one characteristic _ hospitality. You haven’t experienced hospitality until a watchful, welcoming host from the Middle East has attended to you.

So on Sept. 11, when those wretched fallen humans took out their rage on the innocents, it was not the Islam I knew and had experienced personally.

No religion should be judged based on its worse adherents or by extreme irrational distortions of its holy texts.

Contemporary Mormons are as distressed by polygamy as we are. Thoughtful Jews reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust fully aware of Old Testament stories documenting their ancestors’ annihilation of enemies. Devout Catholics grieve while reading stories of sexual abuse of children by priests.

I refuse to reduce a religion _ Islam included _ to its worse distortions.

I place the anomaly of hate-filled Islamic fundamentalists in the broader context of the Muslims I’ve personally seen and known: devout and hospitable humans created in God’s image and trying in their own way to transcend this human existence by connecting to the divine.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

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