Professor Eleanor Nesbitt’s book, Quaker Quicks — Open to New Light (published by Christian Alternative Books) provides an accessible and deeply informed account of Quakers engaged in interfaith activity over the last three and a half centuries. The following chapter (Chapter 4), which Professor Nesbitt has kindly allowed us to include at this site in the form of a guest column, discusses the engagement of Quakers with Muslims since the start of the twentieth century.
Muslims
Britain Yearly Meeting’s 1995 book of discipline, Quaker Faith and Practice, includes the Quaker writer John Punshon’s experience at an interfaith gathering in his home city of Birmingham:
The discussion was about prayer and I confessed that it was my habit to pray anywhere and that I could do so sitting comfortably in a chair. A devout Muslim woman in the conference was shocked at what she saw as my easygoing familiarity with God, my lack of respect, my denial of my own human dignity. When you think of God, she said, there is only one possible response. It is to go down on your knees.
From this unnamed woman I learned something of Islam – submission to God – in a way that no Christian had ever taught me… It was not the Mosque or the Qur’an addressing me, but the living God I know in Christ speaking through her.27
Certainly, Punshon’s reflection illustrates openness to new light.
Unsurprisingly, whether they have met Muslims or not, many Quakers find inspiration in translations of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalal Ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, better known simply as Rumi. As the ‘progressive Christian Quaker theologian’ Daniel P. Coleman suggests, it is easy to detect parallels between Sufis and Quakers as a mystical element in Islam and Christianity respectively.28 Moreover, as another Friend, the American interfaith practitioner Anthony Manousos, has pointed out, both Sufis and Quakers value simplicity and silence. (Sufis take their name from the simple woollen clothing that they used to wear.) An inner simplicity characterises both Sufi and Quaker worship, and both Sufis and Quakers may fill their silence with recollected – and sometimes wordless – prayer. Manousos quotes the fourteenth-century Baha-ad-din Naqshband, the founder of Sufis’ Naqshbandi Order, declaring, ‘God is silence, and is most easily reached in silence.’29
At the same time, it needs to be remembered that, while Sufi shrines and saints bring spiritual solace to countless Muslims, for many other Muslims Sufism and Rumi himself are unacceptable. Clearly, from the perspective of Islamic State, to take the most extreme example, Sufism is idolatrous and its popularity threatens their own hold on the Muslim masses. Hence the brutal attacks this century on Sufi shrines in Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Mali and elsewhere.
Horrifying as these attacks have been, it is the 9/11 attack by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 that has shaken the world most profoundly. Along with many other concerned citizens, Quakers – in the US especially – responded by seeking out local mosques, expressing solidarity with local Muslims and reading translations of the Qur’an and the writings of Muslims and others about Islam. Quakers invited Muslims to speak in their meetings and also examined in depth their own level of understanding of Islam and of Muslims’ experience. Anthony Manousos, described how he felt impelled to keep the fast of Ramadan from 17 November 2001 and to incorporate Muslim prayers in his own daily practice. On realising that Manousos, a non-Muslim, was maintaining the fast, Muslims began questioning him about Quakerism.30
For some late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Friends in the UK and in North America the experience of learning from Islam, and from Sufi Islam especially, has led them to become Muslims themselves. An increasing (though small) number of Quakers have adopted Islam without feeling either that their Quaker loyalty is compromised or that they cannot fully embrace Islam. To take two examples, Brett Miller-White and Christopher Bagley are Muslim Quakers. In his article on ‘the making of a Muslim Quaker’ Miller-White wrote of Muslims’ respect for Jesus as a prophet and teacher rather than as God and he mentioned too the appeal of Sufi tradition. He found his own multiple identity unproblematic and spoke of ‘my hybrid culture’.31 Christopher Bagley (a Jew by birth who first adopted Christianity, then Quakerism and, finally, Islam) wrote ‘Islam Today: A Muslim Quaker’s View’ which appeared as a Quaker Universalist Group pamphlet.32
At the same time that individual Quakers have adopted Islam, a few Muslims have engaged with Quakers. Another Quaker Quicks author, the British Quaker John Lampen, reported: ‘Two Bosnian Muslims who attended my local meeting for worship said afterwards, “You say God and we say Allah, but at the level of spirit we are one.”’33
One Muslim who has entered deeply into Quakerism is Naveed Moheen. He speaks of practising Islam in a Quakerly manner. To quote Moheen:
There is a verse in the Qur’an that goes Qul kulluny ya’malu ‘alaa shaakilatihee fa rabbukum a’lamu biman huwa ahdaa sabeelaa, which translates loosely as ‘Let everyone act according to their own disposition. It is only God who knows who is truly on the right path.’
And to me, that embraces both Islam and how Friends think about coming to the Light. As Friends, we know that there are multiple, legitimate ways to the Light, and personally I don’t see a conflict between that and what Islam teaches.34
Moheen found a resonance between Quakers’ sense of a ‘gathered meeting’ and the Islamic principle of jamia, a gathering with a spiritual purpose. Moreover, he likened Quakers’ belief in ‘the messages that come from the divine’ with the Qur’an coming as a message through Mohammed. He ended his testimony by stating that, with regard to Islam and Quakerism:
I found that—and I still find—that there is no difference in the fundamental principles of loving your fellow human being, of being able to walk in the Light with others and of seeking the good in others.35
Similarly, Anthony Manousos has shared the parallels between Islam in general and the Quaker testimonies. As well as the shared emphasis on community, there is simplicity – evident in the plainness of both meeting houses and mosques ‒ plus there is the emphasis on Islam as a religion of peace (although violence is allowed in some circumstances). The Qur’an enjoins Muslims: ‘Repel evil with what is better, then will the one with whom there is enmity become an intimate friend.’36 Moreover, the principles of equality and of integrity are affirmed by both Muslims and Quakers. Also, as Manousos points out, many liberal Friends’ respect for Jesus’ teachings (such as ‘Love your enemies’) coupled with their unreadiness to worship him as divine, is closer to Muslims’ stance than to that of traditional Christians, including Christ-centred Friends.37
In the seventeenth century parallels had sometimes been drawn between Muslims and Quakers by those who wished to malign both communities. However, when George Fox, George Robinson and Mary Fisher attempted to share their truth with ‘Turks’ they probably never imagined a time when some individuals could identify themselves as Quaker Muslims or Muslim Quakers.
As a footnote, with regard to the Quaker-Muslim interface in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Quaker chocolate manufacturer and philanthropist Edward Cadbury merits a mention. In the 1920s Cadbury financed three journeys to the Middle East, by a Chaldean collector, Alphonse Mingana, to collect manuscripts for Woodbrooke, the Quaker college in Birmingham. The manuscripts included what turned out (thanks to radiocarbon dating nearly a century later) to be one of the oldest surviving fragments of the Qur’an – parts of surahs 18 to 20, written in Hijazi, an early Arabic script, on parchment dating from during, or shortly after, the prophet Muhammad’s lifetime.
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