The Word!!!
An account of my experiences observing the competitive camaraderie between Muslims and immigrant Christians in the UK
A few days ago, I was on Instagram and saw a clip which was easily the funniest video I have ever seen on the app. Popular American pastor Jamal Bryant was preaching a sermon to his congregation inspired by a recent Uber journey in New York. His Muslim driver stopped mid-journey to conduct one of his daily prayers on the sidewalk despite him being late to a meeting. He announced that he felt as if God had arrested him in the car to bear witness to the driver’s faith so that he too could be challenged to reflect that same dedication to prayer in his personal life. God seems to have succeeded. In his sermon, Jamal emphatically exclaimed, ‘I don’t know where y’all are. But I ain’t gon’ let no Muslim out-pray me!’ whilst images of Muslim men praying were projected on the screen behind him. The congregation jumped up and down with arms waving in agreement.
I’ve been laughing at this video for days and I’ve had it in my head on repeat for far too long. It resonated with me as I am constantly surrounded by Muslims who speak to me openly about their faith and who share their deep knowledge of their religion with me. I see their fervency and I have often been in situations like Jamal, watching them leave various social settings to pray; or simply being in conversations where they are testifying Allah’s greatness. Much like the pastor, these moments are times of education for me too. They do not cause me discomfort; they positively challenge my Christianity. In a world where religion- particularly my own- is diluted by tedious interpretive discourse, muddied by cultural beliefs, and co-opted by political actors, this dedication to core spirituality in which the key focus is purely humankind’s submission to God, is inspiring. Within my relationships with my friends, this inspiration results in a competitive camaraderie in which we speak comfortably about our beliefs and motivate each other to serve God more despite our conflicting beliefs.
This positive competition is nothing new to me.
I grew up in a Methodist Church in the early 2000s which had a congregation of predominantly African and Caribbean immigrants. Many of them had come to the UK with a perception that it was a beacon of Christianity; that the country’s infrastructure was held together by Christian institutions; and that its population comprised majorly of active churchgoers. Contrastingly, British Christianity was becoming far more passive in this time: whilst nearly 6 million people identified as Christians by 2005, only an approximate number of 3.5 million Christians attended church at all and the difference continued to widen in subsequent years (Brierley Consultancy, 2022). British Christianity was far from what the members of this congregation expected, and it was very different from the committed fundamentalism that characterised Christianity in their home countries. I remember hearing this being lamented openly in services. Tony Blair’s “We don’t do God” (Allen, 2011) was quoted apocalyptically all the time. It was a clear sign that British Christianity was not as fundamental a part of our country anymore and it was understood that this had contributed to the decline in active membership. But it seemed that Islam did not suffer this same problem. Islam had never played such a vital role as a British institution, so the state’s changing attitudes towards religion did not affect them in the same way. Furthermore, the portrayal of Muslims in the UK continued to be associated with dedication to prayer, fasting and modesty; the outward appearances of hijabs, niqabs and kufis worn by Muslims helped to reinforce this also. So, it looked to Christians that Islam was consistent, whilst a stagnancy was imposing itself upon their own religion.
Jamal Bryant’s sermon was intriguing to me, not just because of his theatrics, but because it was very similar to some sermons that I used to hear during this time. Congregations were frequently instigated to practice rigorous discipline in their faith and Muslims were examples of this: we were sometimes encouraged to memorise Bible scriptures even more comprehensively than Muslims do the Qur’an; to treat prayer with even more fastidiousness than Muslims do; and to hold as fundamentalist an approach to reading scriptures as Islam advocates for. It was all in jest, but the message was clear: ‘don’t let those Muslims out-pray you’. This competitive camaraderie was a long-running one and the role it played was to remind congregations that a distant, agnostic relationship with God was not our end goal; a committed, unequivocal relationship was.
This advice was never delivered to imply that Islam was better than Christianity, or to even position Islam as an aspirational target. Islam was referred to like this only because it was the closest and most vivid example of unequivocal religion that these Christians had outside of themselves. Immigrant Christians’ understanding of faith is deeply averse to distance and uncertainty. Despite the various different backgrounds of immigrants in my church, they could all attest to how they had been educated to know God deeply and intimately in their home countries. They had to ensure that their relationship with God defined the structure of their life, their social routines and their every interaction. Thus, for them to hear a phrase like “We don’t do God” sounded almost cannibalistic- to not ‘do’ God, was to allow the erosion of their own existence. In allowing their relationship with God to define their lives in this way, their identity was inextricably attached to him. They had to ‘do’ God- to seek a passionate relationship with him- in order to realise themselves. They knew themselves as his children or his disciples rather than laissez-faire individuals as this new wave of modern thinking encouraged them to believe and so they needed new imagery to reinforce that. Islam worked well in this way because it was a religion which believed in many of the same stories as Christianity and it had the same focus on dedication and submission to God to. There were still gripes with the Muslim faith. Islam’s refusal to acknowledge Jesus as humanity’s saviour was the most pressing of these. For Methodists, their refusal to accept the concept of the Holy Spirit- through which God exists within us, empowers us and continually saves us- was also concerning. But this respect for Islam despite the contradicting theologies was what characterised this camaraderie. Our monotheistic overlap- our belief in a singular omnipotent God, who we must devote ourselves to- was our common ground and this was strengthened by our focus on devotion.
This could have easily included Jews too who shared these qualities, but their devotion was also characterised by being enclosed away from the secular world. They were visible to people in my church as we were situated in North London, where there is a large Jewish community, but they didn’t live amongst us as vividly as Muslims did. In fact, both the Muslim notion of the Da’wah (the invitation to follow the way of Allah) and the Christian notion of evangelism encourage believers to be visible within their communities. This meant that there was another strand to this camaraderie, which was community and the awareness of how groups were perceived within the community. I was able to see this camaraderie in full colour because of my upbringing in multicultural Tottenham. All of the continents of the world existed cohesively within our locality, and they shone through the businesses and stores that the different ventures- corner shops, restaurants, religious buildings and miscellaneous businesses- that populated our high street. Each of these was a lens into the lives and practices of these different communities and funnily enough, the owners of these ventures treated them as means of visibility. Muslim store owners would hold prayer beads in their hand as they served customers, would be dressed in their religious wear regularly and would leave their store fronts to pray at different intervals; Christian store owners would ornament their stores with religious imagery, would offer blessings to their customers and would allow different church groups to place evangelical advertisements in their stores. The two groups were constantly performing their faith for all to see, which is a great way to see this competition: as one of performance.
This is apt since the performance of their faith was what bonded them at times more than the substance. Whilst they both believed in God, Christians often found Muslim rituals to not be as meaningful as their own because the clockwork-like routine of Muslim prayer and fasting did not seem as personal whereas routines in Christianity- specifically Methodism and other denominations that focus on the power of the holy spirit- are largely seen to develop interpersonally between God and the individual so that a meaningful relationship can flourish. But this lack of definition is something that Muslims often see as a weakness in the Christian theology because they see their routines as being intrinsically valuable through being quantified by God in scripture.
In response to Jamal Bryant’s video, this tension of ideas came to full light. Muslim scholar Hamzah Raza from Cairo took the opportunity to troll Bryant throughout the week: he posted pictures of his prayer mat during his daily prayers, tagging Jamal Bryant in them each time and he made comments under his Instagram post inviting him to mosques in Atlanta. This was the camaraderie that I used to see in my community growing up- and that I still experience within my friendship groups- playing out again. As Raza gained more attention from Bryant, he used his platform to voice his gripes with Christianity. The summary of his critiques (and many other Muslims who joined in the conversation) was that it was impossible for a Christian to come close to the fervency of a Muslim because Muslim’s prayers were more valuable. He even retweeted a message which said: ‘If my math is correct… A single prostration is probably closer to a single set of worship for a typical Christian’.
From a Christian perspective, this is a flawed logic because relationship with God is not quantifiable and the value of someone’s worship depends their intentions, rather than their actions. Contradictingly, this is what these Christians respect about Muslims. Whilst they believe it would strip their religion of its intimacy to have as strict a view of their religion as Muslims, they also believe that this strictness is far preferable than the relaxed agnosticism that their religion has slipped into in the UK. Thus, critiques like Hamzah Raza’s are sometimes used to remind them to always strive for God more. In effect, this results in an endless game of self-betterment because Christians are always trying to preserve intimacy of their relationship with God by avoiding mechanical, ritualistic routines, but they always remind themselves (whether it be in relation to Islam or not) to be stricter on themselves to improve that relationship.
Bibliography
Brierley Consultancy. (2021). Christianity in the UK. London: Faith Survey.
Allen, C. (2011). ‘We don't do God’: A critical retrospective of New Labour's approaches to ‘religion or belief’ and ‘faith’. Taylor & Francis.
[1] This piece is called “The Word” because both Christians and Muslims use this phrase to mean the eternal truth of their faith. But for Christians, this eternal truth is the nature of Christ as one with God. For Muslims this means their scripture, which was handed to them by God. They both strive towards these things, but they have a very different understanding as to what the phrase means.
Me and one of my Muslim friends have been debating the bible’s book of John chapter 1 for a while now because it says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. They struggle to understand what the bible is trying to say here or even accept that the translation is correct. Our debates are ceaseless.
[2] I will be posting a follow-up to this piece in the coming months. It is largely anecdotal, which offers a personal view into this history, but this relationship should also be considered more deeply within the early 2000s New Labour context. There is much to be discovered about this.