Saved By Islam

Evangelical Christianity claims to offer salvation, yet it doesn’t work for everyone who takes it up. If you leave it behind then where do you go? Moving away from it means rethinking life, beliefs and attachments, it also opens the door to everything that was once taboo. In fact, no door is closed. Just think about it, suddenly every door to God, life and other people is open, it’s like being born again!

Where I ended up, after some time, and an unpleasant encounter with Alpha Course leadership, was wondering whether Christianity could still work, whether it was too tainted with Evangelical thinking and the only hope was outside orthodox Christianity. The outlook of Unitarianism looked increasingly tempting, though I never took that path. Ultimately, whatever it is about, religion, or rather God, even if it was not what I was ‘sold’, could not be shaken off, nor dwindle away to nothing. Perhaps it has not entirely disappeared from some of those who have been failed or burnt by religion, even when it condemns them or does not know how to show interest in reconnecting with them. It is an unpredictable path, except for those who make it predictable.

My own eventual reconnecting with Christianity, which was explicitly a reinventing of it, coincided with encountering Islam, first of all through reading the Qur’an. Not only have I been a fellow traveller with Islam, and Muslim friends, but my exploration of it has paralleled and shaped my re-Christianising. Even in my early reading of the Qur’an I found that I nearly quoted the famous verse — ‘God is nearer to you than your jugular vein’ — when offering some reassurance to another Christian.

I caused concern for some Christian colleagues when I went on I’tikaf (retreat) in Ramadan 2007, which is when I really started to think about my own sharing in the spirituality of Islam and to begin to follow its path, in part. In fact my deepest religious experiences in recent years have been outside church settings and via the rituals and practices of other religions and spiritualities — many within an Islamic setting. Sufi spirituality offers a similar kind of worship to Taize, only Catholic mystical style Christianity comes close to Islam in this area.

I have no hesitation in saying that I have been ‘saved by Islam’, even though I don’t believe that religion is about being ‘saved’. I have definitely moved beyond the boundaries of Christianity, though good religion has no boundaries.

This is more of a fragment than a full blog. It was written in 2018 and only published now, nearly a year after I converted. I guess I forecasted my own conversion, no surprise there …

If you enjoyed this, please read How to Read the Quran