When a Christian chants the Qur'an.

When Dr. Muhammad Shafiq, imam of Rochester's Islamic Center, entered the center's main prayer area (the masjid or mosque), I was chanting the Qur'an with my teacher Siddiq Abdul Hakkim. The two of us were sitting on the carpet near the back wall. Dr. Shafiq came over and said something that startled, even alarmed me. He invited me to join the prayer line with the other men at salat, the prayer performed daily at five prescribed times.

Why was I startled? Because as a Roman Catholic Christian, I had somehow assumed that my taking part in salat was off limits to me in the same way as Communion in my church would be off limits to Dr. Shafiq. Didn't every religion have its boundaries beyond which outsiders might not pass? Yet here was the leader of a Muslim congregation inviting me, a Catholic, over that boundary, and doing so in the gentlest way possible, as if the invitation, from his point of view, involved no boundary violation whatsoever. Where I saw a wall, Dr. Shafiq saw an open path leading directly to the front of the masjid.

Later on I asked Dr. Shafiq what he'd had in mind when he made the invitation. His answer--which I'll give in due course--didn't surprise me. From the start, I understood him better than I understood myself. I knew right away, for example, that my alarm had nothing to do with an effort on Dr. Shafiq's part to convert me to Islam. I had known him for almost two years, ever since my first coming to the center to take his course in Arabic. I'd been moved to do so by my dismay at my ignorance of Islam, an ignorance which had forced me to rely on the mass media's distorted accounts during events like the Salmon Rushdie controversy and the Persian Gulf War. After the course, I asked Dr. Shafiq if I might study the Qur'an. For it was now clear to me, as I had often been told, that without such study I wouldn't have a way of knowing Islam with any degree of intimacy. At this point Dr. Shafiq arranged for me to take lessons from Siddiq. Meanwhile, our relationship grew closer. Dr. Shafiq gave me good counsel during an illness in my family. I brought my high school English classes to visit the masjid during Friday prayers. A year ago, Dr. Shafiq invited me to speak at the center to Muslim teen-agers about the meaning of Christmas from a Christian perspective. He has asked me on occasion to edit his writings on Islam. In short, it is a relationship based on mutual trust and personal liking. He has been happy to see my degree of commitment to Christianity and has never sought to challenge that commitment or dissuade me from it. I don't say he wouldn't be happier still to see me become a Muslim, but, as the Qur'an says, "let there be no compulsion in religion"--a verse Dr. Shafiq quoted for me early in our friendship. One's way of worshiping God must be freely chosen or else it is no meaningful choice at all.

So if I ask again why I was so alarmed at his invitation, I'm forced to look inside myself for an answer. Some of this answer lies, as I have said, in my uncertainty about what is allowable to outsiders, and specifically to Christians, in the practice of Islam. But most of the answer lies at a deeper level, and so is harder to get at: in my own attraction to Islam. What began for me out of a sense of civic and intellectual responsibility--as a desire to cut through my ignorance of a religion practiced by a good proportion of the earth's population, a religion often misrepresented in the Western press--had become a passion. For how else than as the result of a passion could I account for the fact that I was returning to the masjid week after week to study the Qur'an with Siddiq and with my other brother in Islam, Navid Aslam? Why was I including within my daily Christian prayers others I'd learned at the masjid--for example, the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur'an, which stands in approximately the same relation to Muslims as the Lord's Prayer does to Christians? And didn't my alarm at Dr. Shafiq's invitation indicate that my attachment to my study had become stronger than I was aware of? Didn't my alarm really signify my sudden awareness, not of a boundary in front of me, but of one behind me, one I had crossed already without knowing it?

But what was this boundary? And where exactly was I now? And in general, how far can I or any Christian go in following an attraction to Islam?

First things first! I cannot answer these more general questions without returning to my own uncertain position at the moment of Dr. Shafiq's invitation. In moving along the path toward--into?--Islam, I knew I was following a strong attraction. But precisely to what?

To people, primarily--to Dr. Shafiq and Siddiq and everyone else I had met at the center. I would not have proceeded down the path opened for me there unless I had felt welcomed at every step.

Yet surmounting these strong attractions to people--surmounting but supported by them, and unimaginable to me without them--is my attraction to the Qur'an, and particularly to its voice. I was slow to hear that voice because of the inevitable difficulties any Westerner has with Arabic's alphabet, grammar, and, above all, with its vocalization. Arabic's various throat, velar (middle of the palate), and nasal intonations are ones we don't make unless we are choking or clearing our throat and sinuses. Gradually, however, my body and my understanding accommodated themselves to the language's demands. And then, last summer, came an event I count as a special blessing. I was able to take lessons in Qur'anic tajwid or chanting with Qari Muhammad Khursheed Ali. Qari Muhammad (qari means "reciter") is the mu'adhan or muezzin, the one who calls the faithful to prayer, at the Faisal Masjid in Islamabad, Pakistan. His chanting of the Qur'an's verses is treasured throughout Pakistan. Very fortunately for me and others at the center, Qari Muhammad was able to come to Rochester for a few weeks to teach tajwid to American Muslims. Such instruction is not an "extra." The Qur'an--which means "recitation"--is meant to be heard aloud. The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him) delivered the verses orally as he heard them from the angel Jibreel (Gabriel), who was himself reciting the very words of Allah. Many hadith (traditional stories about the Prophet's sayings and actions) establish the spirit in which one is to vocalize the Qur'an's verses; other traditions not only set down technical rules for pronunciation and rhythm but also indicate where and how far one may extemporize, especially in the changing of pitch and the free shaping of lengthened vowels. A qari like Muhammad Khursheed Ali studies and follows such prescriptions carefully, finding in them the source of a centuries-old discipline and of a constantly renewed freshness. The result is that when one hears the Qur'an chanted by a good qari, one is hearing it reembodied, as if the Prophet's voice wee revived in the voice of the chanter.

To hear this voice--and not only to hear it but to learn to embody it in oneself through tajwid--is to experience a beauty that stretches the heart. It is an invigoration of the mind and body, as if one stood, at each moment of vocalization, at the edge of all time and space, themselves merely the Creator's doorstep. No matter that after atteming to follow Qari Muhammad through a verse phrase by phrase, my sinuses ached, my nose became runny, my breath became short. These are happy birth pangs as a new creature enters what the Qur'an calls, in one of its most memorable verses, the "light of lights."

But how new is this "new creature," as I call myself? What exactly is different about the relationship I hope I have with God as a result of this transformation by the Qur'an's voice?

For me this is the key question, one whose answer I must approach delicately.

I spoke earlier of a tradition of recitation. Each chanter chants the same text chanted by every other chanter through the ages, but the chant takes form in each throat differently. The laws of tajwid allow, as I have said, for certain freedoms of expression. Such freedoms are themselves rooted in each chanter's individual gifts, musical and spiritual, as they manifest themselves at the moment of utterance. In this sense, recitation of the Qur'an is a continuous prayer, an audible sign of the inner disposition or Islam, submission, of the chanter. (The word Muslim means, "one who submits.") It is not a mere musical performance that Qari Muhammad gives, or that his student gives in imitation of him, but the evidence of a sincere longing for what the voice promises, again and again, in verse after verse: reward. Reward is the Garden, the land of delight and fulfillment after death where the only conversation is the word salam, peace, the fruit and climax of all voices raised in Qur'anic prayer.

But a strong taste of that peace is realized here on earth when one finds echoing in one's own body and soul, despite their imperfections, the Qur'an's true and original voice, God's own. This voice, mediated from a great distance above and behind one, through lines of transmission from Allah to Jibreel to the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) to qaris throughout the ages, is nevertheless disconcertingly or perhaps reassuringly near--"closer than their jugular vein," as one Qur'anic verse puts it. It is the voice, the message, the tone conveyed by the Hebrew prophets--overwhelming, magisterial, commanding, glorious, and so on and on, in adjectives derived from our experience of anyone who has ever spoken to us with true authority. And because it speaks with authority, it is not a bullying voice. Its power is not flaunted. It simply soars out high above us without interruption from the beginning of the Qur'an to the end, effortless and unhurried, even in modulations of tone from the joyful to the grim to the ironic to the reassuring. Yet without sacrificing its grandeur it seems to swoop low as well, to listen closely to our own inner voices, including the secret conniving voice in which we resist or try to ignore this penetration. The Qur'anic voice speaks often of our not listening to it, and records with short, devastating strokes the consequences of this indifference: the turbulence of heart, the violence of behavior, and the terrible end in the fire of final judgment. The effect, however, is not to frighten but to warn. We are not helpless in meeting the voice's challenge. We possess the strength to listen, and God-- "ar-Rahman ar-Rahim" (the beneficent, the merciful)--never tires of trying to catch our ear and enter it.

My understanding is that being Muslim means just this, allowing the voice of the Qur'an, God's voice, to penetrate one's heart, with the result that one's behavior radically changes. The Qur'an's ethical dimension is rooted in this joyful submission. One simply cannot afterward, for example--in keeping with behavior the Qur'an most frequently condemns--neglect the poor, play the hypocrite, or set oneself (or anyone or anything else) up as an idol. Such behavior is not simply proscribed; it is impossible in the creature one is invited to become.

But what of myself as a Catholic Christian, coming to the Qur'an not from discontent or atheism but from a kindred belief in God's might and from a kindred ethical orientation? Could my experience of the Qur'an be said to have changed me in any way? If so, am I less of a Christian than I once was, as I become more of a Muslim? Or could the opposite be true, that I am more of a Christian as a result? What would "more of a Christian" in this sense mean?

Whatever the ambiguities of my position in the masjid, whatever my doubts about the degree to which I may take part in the practice of this religion to which I have been drawn, I do find myself "more of a Christian" as a result of my experience--meaning that I am more joyfully and wonderingly a Christian than before.

This is so because the Qur'an has enlarged my sense of the Word of God.

How? To start with John's Gospel, Jesus is the "Word made flesh." He is the creative power of the Father come down from heaven to share fully in our humanity and to sacrifice himself for that humanity on the cross. That sacrifice, for a Christian, is not a bitter but a joyous event since it leads to resurrection. Our fallen humanity is transformed by Christ's saving action, a transformation that begins here on earth in our celebrations of Communion and which is perfected after death in heaven, when our union with Christ becomes complete.

The Word of God in the Qur'an is not transformative in the same way or to the same degree. Islam vigorously denies that human nature has fallen so low as to require God's salvific action. But in its power to enter the heart through the body and to lift both heart and body toward the light of God's mercy the Qur'anic Word is fruitfully close to the "Word made flesh." What the Qur'an "adds" for me--though, for God, there can be no question of a deficiency, of an adding or a subtracting--is a reinvigorated emphasis on the voice as the agent of embodiment. At Catholic Mass, the Word of God is made flesh both in the scriptural Word which our mouths proclaim and in the Eucharist which we consume. But though the Second Vatican Council declared the indivisibility of the Liturgy of the Word and of the Eucharist, we Catholics tend to tip this balance forward, emphasizing the Eucharist at the expense of the Word. The Eucharist then becomes the climax of a liturgical drama to which the Word is mere prelude. A prayerful recitation of the Qur'an, which requires that key ingredient of Muslim worship, taqwa, or absolute attentiveness to God's "signs," primarily to those given in the Qur'an itself, has led me to a more prayerful attention to the Christian Word at Mass and in private Bible reading. Word presence is real presence. The force of this truth, acknowledged by me before, but often lukewarmly, has been quickened by my Qur'anic chanting.

But can the Qur'an's voice lead me farther? Has it had only an oblique usefulness, in invigorating a somewhat dulled consciousness of the power of the spoken Word in my own religion? What of the message of that voice? How much of it can I absorb as my own without peril to my love of the risen Christ? I speak here of the level of importance the Qur'an assigns to Jesus. For while, as Geoffrey Parrinder convincingly demonstrates in his Jesus in the Qur'an (Oxford University Press, 1977), the Qur'an speaks of Jesus in terms surprisingly close to those used in the Gospels, he is mentioned in only 93 of the Qur'an's 6,226 verses. "He receives many honorable names but he is placed in the succession of the prophets, and teaching about the prophets is only one element in the Qur'an." Given the Qur'an's apparent minimizing of Jesus' role in God's plan for humankind, how far can I, or any Christian, go in my reverence for the Qur'an as God's Word? As attractive as the Qur'an may be, for all the reasons I have stated, doesn't its seeming indifference or blindness to Jesus' centrality divide it from me, force me always to hear it with a certain detachment? The Vatican II document Lumen gentium (16) may say that "the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these are the Moslems...," but nothing whatever is said or implied about the value or indeed the legitimacy of a Christian's worshiping with them. If, as almost all Christians, including myself, believe, there can be no salvation except through Christ, how can I chant the Qur'an sincerely without assuming--against all evidence--that the Qur'an is also, at some level, the language of the Gospels?

But for me--I cannot speak for all Christians--my love of Christ is not reducible to a series of dogmatic declarations. This love is a presence that accompanies me at every moment of my life, in moments of folly, weakness, and misery as well as in happier states. It is the atmosphere in which I "live and move and have my being." Put another way: the risen Christ is present to me, not only at Mass, but at every beat of my heart, in every circumstance. There is no limit to this penetration. Similarly with everyone else, including those who do not know him as risen Lord, or who do not know him at all. Yet my belief in his universality does not entitle me to make claims of superior knowledge. I could never confront Dr. Shafiq with the statement that, whatever he may think to the contrary, Jesus is with him. Not good manners but humility prohibits my doing so. What Saint Paul calls "the language of the cross" is not like the language we use with each other, where we deal with equals. This language bridges heaven and earth. We humans did not invent it. God purified and transformed an instrument of torture, the cross, as his vehicle for communicating with his creatures. In his unfathomable wisdom he performed a not dissimilar miracle with the language of an obscure Semitic people, the Arabs, purifying and transforming that language into a vehicle of his almost direct utterance. As I stand before the cross chanting the Qur'an, I do not find myself, God's creature, moved to argue about discrepancies, even ones as significant as those involving Jesus' true nature or importance. My conviction that the language of the Qur'an is also God's language overrides what would otherwise bring me to disagree with it as a mere human utterance. In such moments of enthusiasm--and they come often--I find nothing to hinder me from making the Muslim shahada, the credal statement of faith in one God and in Muhammad as his prophet.

For Dr. Shafiq too, God's Tawhid or Oneness resolves all tensions in belief. I mentioned earlier that I finally asked him, once I had gotten over my surprise, what he'd had in mind when he invited me to pray with the others at salat. His answer was, simply, that he already saw me as a Muslim in the truest sense, in that I believed in the one God. I myself might think I'm also something else, but in his view, Allah had brought me to Rochester's Islamic Center to become a part of the community of the monotheistic religions. "Islam and Christianity and Judaism are different only on cultural, not on spiritual levels. People don't see this larger picture because of a lack of knowledge," he said. As for my taking part in salat, Allah is the judge of my intentions, not people. But Dr. Shafiq thought salat would be good for me since it is a humbler form of prayer than the prayer of chanting the Qur'an. I did not press him on this point, but reflecting on it now, I think he meant to say that salat--whose formulas are largely composed of Qur'anic verses, especially those of the fatiha--enforces the Qur'an's egalitarianism. Qur'anic chant by itself might foster a certain intellectual and spiritual arrogance. Salat brings the believer side by side with every other person smitten by the voice of the Qur'an, not just with those adept at tajwid.

Smitten as I continue to be, however, I have not--yet--answered the adhan, or call to prayer. While I trust Dr. Shafiq and agree with his vision of the oneness of religion under one God, I nevertheless feel a restraint about taking a step which to me, rightly or wrongly, expresses a form of trespass. It isn't simply a fear of what my fellow Catholics would say of my doing so, let alone of what Muslims less enlightened than Dr. Shafiq might think to find me, a Christian, at their side during salat. It's that the communal action of prayer, as opposed to the more private version of it represented by chanting the Qur'an, assumes a full commitment to those with whom one prays. By "full commitment," I don't mean tithing only, or serving on committees, or regular participation at liturgies, though of course these things are part of what a full commitment means, and of what they mean to me in my service to my local parish and diocese. It means primarily a desire to make one's religion one's home. In marital terms, it means monogamy. Was it chance or God's will that I married the woman who is still and I hope will always be my wife? Given different circumstances, I might have married someone else--or no one. But the marriage I made, though a limitation in one sense, has also enabled me to be open to people in ways I doubt I could have managed otherwise. Similarly with my Catholicism. I was baptized as a Catholic Christian thirteen years ago. Given different circumstances, I might have become a Protestant or a Muslim--or remained agnostic. Yet my baptism and confirmation, from one point of view a deliberate narrowing of my options, gave me the security I hadn't possessed earlier, to open myself to God everywhere, since that is where my church told me to look for him. Without the security thus granted me, would I have approached the Islamic Center at all? And if I had managed to get so far, would I have been able to look at the Qur'an as anything but an important cultural text, the way the Bible itself is viewed in secular society?

Yet all such analogies, persuasive and binding on my behavior in the masjid as they seem, could evaporate instantaneously under the "light of lights." While I was flustered by Dr. Shafiq's invitation, I wasn't left speechless. What I said to him at the time in answer still makes sense to me--at least I have not been able to improve upon it, in all my replayings of the scene. I described my reluctance to take part in salat as a form of fasting, comparing it to my fast when, as a catechumen, I awaited baptism and confirmation as a Catholic Christian. As I watched at Mass the congregation file up to the altar to receive Communion, I felt keenly a hunger for the Eucharist. But I also felt joy for the hunger itself, as if it were important in God's plan that I experience fully the hunger before I knew its satisfaction. So in my reply to Dr. Shafiq, I spoke in similar terms of performing salat--that, in holding myself from performing it at present, I was putting myself in the position of knowing fully the extent and meaning of my desire.

Unlike my fast from the Eucharist, however, I undertake my fast from salat without the certainty that the fast will end. Yet it well might. I doubt I would find such suspense tolerable if I weren't sure in my heart that my love for God in Jesus Christ has brought me to it. When I mentioned earlier feeling "more wonderingly" a Christian than before coming to the Islamic Center, I was referring to my amazement (not untinged by humor) at the predicaments into which a commitment to Christ can lead one--even to the threshold of a different religion! When I mentioned feeling "more joyfully" so as well, I was referring to the new way given me, in the Qur'an, to embody the Word of God. During this growth, some categories have been broken. An old wineskin has begun to split. So be it. May all Christians know the complex delight granted me to know our God at the boundary of our practice and understanding.