Vivienne Stacey discusses how to communicate the Gospel with Muslims through religious rites. Muslims are often more concerned about what Christians do than what they believe. They will often have questions regarding Christian rites and practices which are a great opportunity to share the Gospel. This lecture focuses on the rites associated with Islamic death and burial rites.
These lectures were given at Columbia International University in partnership with the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies. The Zwemer Center was founded in 1979 and exists to offer comprehensive courses on Islam, facilitate research, foster dialogues, offer seminars, conduct training, and provide resources for effective witness and ministry among Muslims. We also have a course study guide for these lectures that you might find helpful.
Here starts the auto-generated transcription of Vivienne Stacey’s Lecture on communicating the Gospel to Muslims through religious rites:
Well, we’ve thought of communicating the good news through festivals, through Muslim festivals, and through Christian festivals. But I haven’t come on yet to the matter of communicating the gospel through rites or through, rites of passage as some people would call them. What happens at a birth? What happens at a marriage? What happens at a a funeral? And Muslims are very interested in not so much in what Muslims what Christians believe, but often in what they do. And so what they what we do can be a very, significant way of sharing good news. Let me give you an example. Because I was doing some bible study, with a helping this young man with his bible study because he was, in roles in the Christian, bible correspondence course which was operating from another city. And his bible correspondence, courses came through the mail. And, the postmaster started interfering with his mail because he didn’t approve of this type of mail. And so this young man came to ask me, was there any other way of, arranging things? So I said I thought I could find a way of arranging things, but it would take some time, and I thought I could see who was very keen about studying, so I said well maybe I could give you some to keep up. I’ve got something here. It’s kind of correspondence, it’s question and answer.
So if you’d like to do this, then you can bring it to me and I’ll check it for you. I will check your answers and so on. I thought he’d come about once a week, but he came about every other day. He was very he really wanted to learn. We got things sorted out eventually but, there was a very bad accident during that period and, 4 of my friends were killed in a car accident and, Christians. And, he came very quickly when this accident occurred to see he was he thought maybe I was involved in the accident. So he came to find out if I was okay and I was okay. I hadn’t been involved in the accident. So but then he said, how do Christians, what do you do for a funeral? And what I mean, what do you do?
So he wanted to know. So I told him. I gave him quite a lot of things about what took place. He want he wanted to know quite a lot of detail. And then I but having explained the right or the the detail to an extent, I could then talk to him about the belief behind it. So I got out my prayer book, Anglican prayer book, because it it tells you a bit more than than I mean, it’s a sort of formal art more formal statement about what you do and what you say. So I think, that I felt was appropriate. That’s he would sort of line up with that a bit. But, so we looked at 1 Corinthians 15 and, the meaning the whole thought about, Christ’s death and so on. Interestingly, this and wonderfully, this man eventually through, some lot of difficulty in many ways, he became a believer.
He he was like a flower opening up to anything he heard. And, when I came to Cyprus, I was in touch with him. It was he when I visited Pakistan after I’d left, retired from there, he came 300 miles from or it’s more than that, from the frontier to the to the Punjab to see me in Lahore. So I took the chance to take him around and introduce him at the Christian, to various Christian institutions and meet Christian leaders and so on. But, when my mother died a few years ago, he wrote to me and I think that his letter perhaps was the most lovely letter that I received, and he talked about her being in heaven and and so on.
I have to say that the letter that touched me most was from this young man who, for Christ’s sake, has faced many difficulties and, who is living in a village well, his his ancestral village, he can’t be baptized there. He isn’t baptized, actually. And he’s already faced very quite a considerable amount of persecution. He’s very, very keen for the education of his 2 daughters, and he wrote he’s a writer, journalist, and he’s a teacher as well and he’s obviously writing to he’s he wrote to me women are treated like cattle and he was furious. I mean he’s really got a concern about children, women, and children. And he’s he’s got 2 daughters and, he’s negotiating to be able to enroll them in the Christian school in this town. But at the moment he’s working in Saudi Arabia and no one else is interested in getting his kids from the 3 miles from the village to this school. Though it would be wouldn’t be a cost or anything it’s so until he gets back there he can’t work it out. They’re about 5 and 6, these kids. But the loveliest of letters from a brother in Christ, very, very clear about his understanding of death and resurrection of Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life.
The death and burial of a Muslim, The way to wrap the body. What side? Who should do it? The measurements of the of the sheeting and the calico and requirements for male and female cuffing. It’s the shroud, I suppose. Sheeting. 4 metres. A 140 metres, centimeters. Sorry. A 150 centimeters or a 180 centimeters wide according to the size of the body. And and then there’s different sizes for men and women and, women have an extra an extra garment. All this tremendous detail tells you what to do when when someone has died, what to do after a person has passed away. Inform relatives and friends, Prepare Kabr, that’s the tomb, that’s the, grave. Arrange transport to the kabrastan which is the cemetery if it’s at a distance, perform the hussul, that’s the ritual wart washing of the body, put on the cuffen, this is the route the shroud, obtain doctor’s certificate, obtain death certificate, and obtain burial order. So these things have to be done, and they have to be done within 24 hours.
Ideally, if that person died, say, in the morning, they should be buried before sunset. And, very often, people are not, wouldn’t would be buried within 24 hours. It’s a it’s a custom but it’s, and it’s, it’s generally expected and it’s, here it it mentions that it that should be that’s how it should be. Christians also follow that. In a hot country, it’s difficult to keep a corpse and I have in the Punjab once we had we had a corpse under our fan, I don’t know if I can hear but and with ice blocks to keep the body a bit longer because the relatives were coming from the furthest parts of the country and they weren’t quite sure, they wanted to postpone the burial.
So that was our neighborly duty to, keep the corpse in our sitting room, in the coolest place under the fan with lots of ice blocks around. A lack of assurance in, in the, in the, of shall of salvation in Islam. A lack of assurance. It’s it’s presumptuous to think that God has forgiven you. So no Muslim prob probably no Muslim would say, I am sure that my sins are forgiven. And this is partly why I say it’s a good idea to present the good news as as a a release from the bondage of death and of sin, a Muslim doesn’t have problems with the idea of being liberated or release. Jesus said he’d come to release the captives, the captives of fear, of sin, and so on. So if you tell a Muslim I’m released from my sins, it’s okay to say I am I am sure that my sins are forgiven through Christ, but it but then the Muslim will think, this is presumption and think I’m presumptuous. It won’t mean that I will never say that, but but if you can it’s the gospel can be presented in different ways. And if we’re gonna stress, let’s stress, the deliverance and, the breaking of the bonds, and, let’s stress that side of it more than, the assurance.
Because a Muslim will not see assurance as a wonderful offer. A Muslim will see you as an, presumptuous person. There’s no special job for women when the men are going taking the corpse for burial, but, but they would be preparing food. They have this very good habit of or custom of, the bereaved don’t have to do any cooking for some days. People will bring to their home.
So because they’re involved in everybody comes to say how sorry they are about what’s happened and so on and so forth, they don’t have time for cooking, and they don’t have time to prepare meals for the people who come to their home. Sometimes Christians, emulate Muslims. I remember going to a 40th day celebration, not celebration, commemoration, for for Christian. I’ve been off offered off, been off into these things. And, it’s part of the 3rd day and 30 40th day remembering the dead now and praying for the dead too.
So a Christian once invited me, because some relative is of hers had died, and this was 40 days afterwards. And I was asked to pray. They said, please, will you, they said, pray pray for the dead. So I thought that’s a good test. So I got up and, I said well, I don’t actually pray for the dead, I pray for the living, so I’m gonna pray for everyone.
I’m praying for this home and I’m praying for living, and so I went ahead and prayed for the living because I I, don’t I don’t feel like it was a Christian home supposedly, and, I’m on Christian territory, so to speak, so I didn’t think, if I were in a Muslim home, and I’ve been asked to pray in Muslim homes, I would probably not give a statement. I would just pray and I wouldn’t. I I would find some way to give thanks and so on, but I wouldn’t pray for the dead. Well, I want to use the last few minutes to refer to an article which I found interesting. It’s in a book called The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection.
It’s by 2 well known women, Jane Smith, who’s an Islamicist, and Yvonne Haddad, who’s a university professor and well, she was in Ann Arbor, I think, not sure where she is now, but, I was particularly interested, that I haven’t read the whole book, but I read, one of the appendices, it’s none it’s b and it’s it’s on the subject of, yeah, appendix b, the special case of women and children in the afterlife and I thought that must be very interesting so I just went went through it. And I’ll I’ll just share a few thoughts here from it. You might want to read it yourself or, I think it’s quite useful to consider what Muslims are thinking. And you’re working with Muslim women, well what are they going to look forward to in the afterlife? What do they think they’re looking forward to? And what does the Quran and the Hadith and the community say they’re going to look forward to and what about children? So I just quote a few things. Women in the afterlife. The occasional conclusion of observers of Islam, particularly in the early stages of Christian missionary outreach to the mush Muslim community, has been that women, according to the Islamic understanding, do not have souls. Someone brought this up the other day. And then the writer here, Ivan Haddad, says this is totally incorrect, and I think it’s totally incorrect. If this were true, it would have grave and obvious implications for the issue of judgment and responsibility in regard to women. Now the Quran is very clear that every soul must bear his own responsibility and his own sin. So every woman must bear the responsibility for her own life and for her own sin. And if women don’t have souls, it’s an undermining, in a way, of this issue of judgment and responsibility which the Quran so greatly stresses.
Incidentally, it’s one of the reasons that Muslims find it difficult to accept the idea that Christ bore our sins because of this doctrine. Anyway, it’s not Koranic and it’s not in the Hadith and it’s not correct to say that Muslims, I don’t know how this got started. I think it’s she may explain this in one of her footnotes. I haven’t read the footnotes yet. So so it’s not to be accepted. And, she says too, while certain of the Hadith have greatly elaborated the suggested fate of women after death from the Quranic intention, it is equivocally clear in the Quran itself that men and women are on an equal footing when it comes to the chances of final felicity or perdition. Perdition. So that’s a clear statement. Another she also goes into what not just what is written in the Hadith and what is written in the Quran, but what modern writers in Islam are now saying. She says modern writers and commentators generally concur that the wives wives are not to be punished for the deeds of their husbands, although one does find an occasional reference to the contrary.
The Quran has little to say about earthly women in regard in relation to eschatological concerns, so there’s not much said. However, the Hiddis were certainly influential in molding the opinions and understanding of many generations, many centuries of Muslims. While they do not necessarily reflect either the revelation of God or the teaching of the prophet, they are nonetheless significant in so far as they reveal a cultural understanding important to the historical, development of Islam. So some of the the cultural things have become kind of baggage, like, we get cultural baggage sometimes, and we do, in in the Christian faith, you you we mix culture and and our faith and, sometimes it’s difficult to know which is which and we have to be careful especially if we’re going work in another culture that we are really communicating the gospel and its essentials and we’re not, teaching people that they have to sit in pews and do everything the way we did it. I mean that’s just an extreme example I suppose.
But it’s amazing how many churches in Pakistan have got pews and it’s completely uncultural. It’s a hangover from the British Raj. People generally sit on the floor or they sit in the villages they do or they sit on stools and we don’t have this Victorian architecture. The reversal of the natural order so graphically portrayed in the Quran is preceded in the transitional expansion of the series of excatological events by other signs signaling the disruption of ethical, moral, and social order. Well, let’s give an example of that.
Sounds rather complicated. But it’s so it it has come to this state now that in some societies women will go on pilgrimage with other women unaccompanied by a man. Now that’s that’s, not according to the book. It’s not according to the Quran or to the traditions, but it is happening. And the number of males, will decrease according to of another version the prophet related, this is what Mohammed is supposed to have said, I saw the fire, hell, and I have not seen to this day a more terrible sight.
Most of the inhabitants are women. They, those to whom the prophet was talking, said, oh messenger of God, why? He said, because of their ingratitude. They said, are they ungrateful to god? He said, no. But they are ungrateful to the companion, meaning husband, and ungrateful for the charity shown by their husbands to them. Even if you men continue to do good things for them and a woman sees one bad thing from you, she will say I never saw anything at all good from you. See, it doesn’t really help the image of the woman, does it? Other reports omit the direct reference to the death fate of women in the fire, but indicate that women are deficient in their religious practice because of menstruation, which prevents them from fasting on certain times, suggesting punishment for a biological function. And that in many instances, the husbands should be permitted the right to determine when and how their wives perform their religious duties.
Let me conclude, with a a prayer that is used and this gives us some clues, prayers do give us clues, It’s about the death of a child, and often we have opportunities to share with Muslim friends when a child has died. Death is an opportunity to give comfort, and, we can certainly genuinely give comfort when a child has dies, a baby, that it has gone to God who created it or him or her. And, and we can say that I’d like to say that, it is through Jesus that this child is accepted. And if I have a chance, I might in some try and be discreet and say, and and through Jesus he he would accept you and you will meet up with your baby again. Anyway, here’s the prayer. And, the prayer recited in contemporary Egypt on the occasion of a child’s death. You find in it a summary of the best Islamic thought can concerning hope for the little one as well as comfort for those who must face the ordeal of loss. Oh God, he is thy servant and the son of thy servant. Thou didst create him and sustain him and bring him to death and thou wilt give him life. Oh god, make him for his parents an anticipation, riches sent on before, a reward which proceeds.
And through him, make the make heavy the balance of their good deeds and increase their rewards. Let neither us nor them be seduced by temptation after his departure. Oh god, cause him to overtake the believers who preceded him in the guardianship of Abraham, and give him in exchange for his earthly home a better dwelling and a family better than his family, and keep him sound from the temptation of the tomb and from the fire of Gehenna. So it’s good if you explore a bit what Muslims think about and women, in the afterlife. I haven’t gone into the question of Hur, the Uhura’s and women but they are not the same believers and Uhura’s.
We could go into that at some other time, but do use, consider prayerfully how you may use the opportunities, with people who have been bereaved and also see what Muslims do believe about women in the afterlife and and children.