The streets are quiet and the sky is still black at half past three in the morning when cell phones and alarm clocks beginning buzzing across the city reminding Muslims to wake, eat and pray. Hassan is one of these guys. He owns a noodle shop. He and his family wake around 3:30 a.m. to eat a hearty breakfast before the Salat al-fajr prayer time at 4:10 a.m. After they pray, they will go back to sleep for a couple of hours before they rise and head to work.
Legalism is a general tendency of mankind. Many of us love rules, we love to know where we stand and to be able to judge ourselves with respect to others. The Pharisees are a great example of legalism gone wild. They were given the Law and over the centuries kept interpreting it, extending it and generally making it more and more difficult to follow. If the Pharisees, who came from God’s chosen people fell in to this trap, is it any wonder Muslims have as well?
After sharing with several Hui friends and acquaintances here in our city, I’ve encountered an interesting, and admittedly very frustrating, phenomenon. It seems that no matter how much I try to emphasize and articulate the clear differences between salvation by faith alone in Christ and what I have just been told about Islam and good works, the response is almost always the same, “Yes, we believe the same thing.” I cringe each time I hear this…
I sat around the lunch table and couldn’t help reflecting on the irony of it all. Here we were, celebrating the national Spring Festival (which Muslims don’t participate in) where our Hui friend’s family were smoking and drinking alcohol (which Muslims don’t consume) asking their non-muslim friend why Muslims in fact are not allowed to eat pork! This was not the Islam I had read about in most books.
I had never seen Friday prayers at a mosque before. On our way back from a trip to another city, we decided to stop and watch as the men assembled for worship.
It was a cold, cloudy afternoon, eerily quiet, the square almost void of people. A few minutes passed as I wandered around in front of the intricately decorated mosque, looking at the buildings and attempting but not succeeding to read the characters written on the walls.
As we sat on her lumpy sofa, eating fruit and drinking tea, we explained the Easter story to my sweet, elderly Hui neighbor. We explained that God sent Jesus to Earth and that Jesus lived a perfect life; He never sinned. We told her about His death on the cross and about His resurrection. We explained to her that for everyone who believes He was the perfect sacrifice, and for everyone who asks for forgiveness of their sins, He is faithful and will forgive them.