What do Muslim women living in Syria think about ISIS? And is there a movement among Muslim women across the globe?
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Here starts the auto-generated transcription of Syria, ISIS and the Role of Women:
Alright. So we were living in Jordan at the time, and we’d gone up to Damascus, to join a group. But the only contact we had was one phone number. So my husband went off to try and find a phone and sort out this contact. And I was left standing, by the road of a really busy square in Damascus.
Traffic everywhere, a hot day, bags around my feet. Quite frankly, on the edge of tears, wishing I was anywhere else. I just said goodbye to my parents, I was homesick, I didn’t understand the culture and the language. It was a miserable time. And as I stood there in the sun, I heard a voice behind me, and a guy in one of those little kind of tent kiosks was calling out, and he put a chair in the shade for me to sit on.
So I went back and I sat there, and by the time my husband came back, the glass of mint tea had come out, sweet mint black tea, and I was feeling so much more refreshed and better, not just by the seat and the tea, but by this guy’s generosity to a total stranger. Well, once again Muslim terrorists. A terrorist Islamist and people extremist terrorists of the country. Random justice is brutal and deadly. News flash America.
These Muslim extremists are are alive and well. They are not dead, and their video is not gratuitous, and it is not irrelevant. It is a warning. Welcome to the truth about Muslims podcast. The official podcast of the Swimmer Center For Muslim Studies, where we help to educate you beyond the media.
Here are your hosts, Howard and Trevor. Alright. So we’re back. This is Truth About Muslims podcast. So excited about today’s, episode.
What are we gonna do today, Trevor? We’re gonna do that again. That was messy. Alright. I gotta loosen up my jowls.
Yeah. Okay. Alright. We hear we’re back. Hey.
Why don’t you take a shot at it, buckaroo? You tell him, man. You tell him. Alright. We’ve got a great show today.
We have a special guest coming all the way from Australia, doctor Moira Dale. Right. So who is Moira Dale? Moira has 2 PhDs. 2.
2 PhDs. Still working on my first. Actually, not even started. Yeah. PhDs.
I don’t know how you go for 2 of them, but she did. She just finished her second one. And, first one was done in education, particularly focusing on, women’s literacy in the Muslim world. Weird. Yeah.
She spent 2 decades, in the Middle East and, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. So Wow. Thinking about the context of what’s happening in the world, the recent, Jordanian pilot issue Yes. Even when we were talking with Jabur looking at Zarqawi coming from Jordan. Yeah.
Everything going on in Egypt with the Muslim brotherhood. Right. And then this will be the first perspective we’ve had about Syria. Right. And she’s been on the ground.
You said 20 years? You said 2 decades? She’s got 2 decades of experience. So her and her husband, Lauren, were working, in the Middle East for 2 decades. And then, while they were in Syria, she did a lot of research on a woman’s mosque program.
She actually joined the program and spent a lot of time with the Muslim women and then, did a research PhD on that. Actually, that’s a THD. So 2 doctorates, on a women’s mosque program. So she’s a wealth of knowledge about, Islam, about ethnography, studying of culture, religion, identity, and she is an adjunct professor at CIU. And she is also an adjunct research fellow at Melbourne School of Theology.
And? And what? She’s, you’re working on your PhD. Right? She’s she is my doctoral advisor.
Right. So you gotta have to rest her a little bit. Yeah. No. It’s So I’m gonna make you look good, bro.
Don’t worry about it. I’m gonna have a lot of dumb questions and you just make it. No. You just tell her that I never even see Trevor because he’s just cranking out this thesis. All he does is All he does is write this thesis.
Oh, my gosh. I wish I had my friend back. That’s what I’m gonna say. Yeah. Yeah.
That’ll that’ll be good for me. So anyway, without further ado, let’s give Moira a call in Australia. Here we go. This is we’re gonna Skype. No Australians accents this time.
So calling Moira to Alright. Here we go. Here we go. Oh, there we go. It’s working.
Hi, Trevor. Are we online? Yeah. Moira, how are you? Really good.
Thanks. Great to hear from you. How are you doing? You too. I’m doing really well.
This is my friend Howard Key. Hi, Moira. Hi, Howard. Good to hear you. I’m excited to talk to you today.
Thanks. So we’ve been, talking a lot about ISIS. I mean, almost to a point, Moira, where I’m kinda like, I wanna talk about something else besides ISIS. But it is in the media nonstop. And so, you know, with your experience having been on the ground in Syria, we’re hoping that you can give us a little bit more insight than what we see in the media.
Yeah. I’d like to do that and also to widen the picture beyond, IS, because it’s only one of the big players in Syria even though it’s dominating the Western media. I don’t know if you guys have ever walked into one of the old Syrian houses, that are sort of rooms built around a courtyard where the extended family would have lived around. And then you’ve got this courtyard usually with jasmine and orange trees and a fountain. And and the rooms are full of patterns.
The floor and the tiling and the wall and the roof. And I wouldn’t have believed you could put so many patterns together and it could still look lovely until I’ve been to Damascus. And Syria is kind of like that. There’s so many different ethnic groups and religious sects, and they all kind of fit and work together. So you mean kinda like a mosaic?
It’s it’s like a different groups and different peoples and ethnicities and tribes and beliefs and all of that’s happening in Syria? All of that. It’s incredibly complex. I I kinda wondered if I could give a a very quick overview of Islam in Syria Please. Which which kind of shows when they came into place.
But stop me if it gets a bit complicated. Oh, Howard will stop you if it gets complicated. I’m the guy that knows nothing. I’m protecting the listeners. Syria’s got a great history.
I mean, it goes right back to the times of Abraham, comes up in Genesis 14 and 15. But with Islam, it hits Syria quite quickly. Mohammed died in 632. And the General Khalid ibn Waleed in 634, under the second caliph, came into Syria. He brought his army through the desert, led a surprise attack and conquered Damascus in 635.
So there’s always been this famous landmark, big mosque, where his burial place was. The guy who introduced Islam into Syria, and it’s quite, I don’t know, ironic that it was bombed by the regime in 2013. It suffered a lot of bomb damage since then. So quick question, Moira. Prior to this second, leader, this this caliph coming in and and bringing Islam, was this part of, a Christian empire of the Byzantine Empire and then Islam comes?
Okay. Yeah. It was under the authority of the Byzantine Empire at the time. So it mostly ruled from what’s now Constantinople. And then when the Muslims came in, there was a shift from Aleppo being the administrative center down to Damascus, which has been the capital since then.
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Zweimer Center. And what does the Weymers Center do? Talks about lessons and and tells them on the computer that we love you. Very nice. The Swimmer Center equips the church to reach Muslims.
The Swimmer Center has been educating people about reaching Muslims in Korea with school. So so this whole concept of fighting between the Sunni and Shia, this is really at the core of a lot of what’s happening right now in Syria. Correct? It’s still happening today. Yeah.
Yeah. It’s a bit like you got Catholics and Protestants. The Protestants split it up from the Catholics and then just kept splitting. Well well, most of the splinter groups and the more sectarian groups have come out of Shiite Islam. But are they do they consider themselves Shiites still?
Yes. Yeah. You sounded like there’s more to that. Does it depend who you ask? Yeah.
Yeah. There’s a few exceptions. Because a lot of Sunnis, especially the, the IS people wouldn’t consider Shiite Muslim at all. Yeah. There’s a few variations around there.
So it sounds like, Moira, just to break it down, we have Islam Mohammed dies. You have the first four major leaders of Islam there in Mecca. It comes out of Mecca and into Syria, into Damascus. You have the first major Islamic empire, the Umayyad empire, which comes out of the Middle East and sweeps all the way across Northern Africa and all the way up into Spain, into modern day Cordoba, and this is sort of the beginnings of the sweeping of Islam. It all kind of flows right out of Damascus, Syria.
Yeah. It does. And Syrians look back to that as as their golden age. I mean, many people feel, look, the south of Spain belonged to us. We’re still linked with it.
It was all part of us. Is there any kind of spiritual significance to a caliphate, to coming into power, like, that that they see as a need? Like, this is a major goal that all Muslims think that this would be, something that needs to happen? Yeah. I think there’s a a longing for it in the hearts of many Muslims because there’s this this unity of, well, it follows the golden years, the 4 rightly guided caliphs after Mohammed.
It preserves the unity of state and religion that more conservative Muslims believe in. So there’s a lot of people want something like that, which I think is why you get some of the more extremist splinter groups right around the world in Saudi, Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, buying into al Baghdadi. I’m just at the moment reading through the document that’s come out of IS about the role of women and being translated into English by the Pylium Foundation. And their whole view is far more conservative, even in the more conservative women I’ve studied alongside in one of the mosques in Damascus. So IS is beginning to lose a bit of influence, a bit of ground, I think, at the moment.
Even though it’s dominating the Western news. Yeah, what I am hearing is that, more and more friends are saying, if this is Islam, either this extreme form that IS is promoting or this fighting against each other, then I don’t want anything of it. So there’s more open, there’s more interest happening in camps right around than ever before. But it’s at horrific cost. So I pray for a limit to bloodletting, but I also pray for God’s spirit to be acting in power.
So people in Syria see some of the things that ISIS is doing or is IS is doing and approve, but the violence is what’s keeping them from fully being on board. Yeah. Or it goes both ways. They’re attracted. And then I don’t know if you, came across recently the story of a young 15 year old in Syria who ran away from home to join the IS camps, but then was a bit shocked that they weren’t actually praying.
It was more about more than about prayer. And he was given the choice of going on the front line or becoming a suicide bomber. He said he figured that the best way of getting out was being a suicide bomber. So he got sent to a Shiite mosque to bomb them, saw that they were praying and said, why are we killing these guys? They’re Muslims.
Handed himself in and said, can I please go back to my mother? So he he went looking for true religion, a pure religion that was really theologically motivated. And when he got there, he said this has nothing to do with Islam and he was disgusted. It’s what it sounds like. Yeah.
15 year old boy. That’s crazy. Yeah. That’s right. So so there’s a lot that’s attractive about IS in terms of the morality that they’re enforcing.
I heard of one story about a shopkeeper who left when his town got taken over by IS. And he got rung up by the IS commander saying, we’ve had to break into shop. We need supplies. We want to take How much do we owe you? He did a quick calculation over the phone.
And when he got back again, he found the money left in the till and the place locked up again. Interesting. But that but that’s not always the case. Right? Because we hear, like, horrifying tales of, like like, sex slaves and and, killing of children and stuff.
And and that doesn’t sound like it kinda adds up to what the morality that they’re enforcing. It sounds like a must beg. Yeah. Well, yeah. It adds up to morality if you’re within the, Sunni Islamic camp.
And if you’re outside, then you’d have no rights. Right. And so they they’re they’re able to do whatever they want to do at that point. Yep. Yep.
Wow. That’s tough. Well, that that would make sense as far as incentive for joining, anyway. I mean, if they’re gonna take over the land, if they’re gonna be in your city and they’re gonna have power and money and influence, that would be pretty good incentive for somebody to join up. They don’t necessarily need to have the theological motivation.
Just simply the fear of becoming second class or possibly killed. But but at the same time, there’s, there’s only a select group that would be accepted to IS. Yeah. Yeah. But if so, if you’re a Sunni Muslim, if you’re fighting on the side of a rebel, then you’ve got no weapons and no uniform, and you see IS as disciplined, has uniforms, has arms, or you’re, you wanna be a hero?
No, there’s lots that’s attractive about joining them. So concerning the other Shiites, the Alawites, the other, small groups that are considered non Muslim, do they have the option of converting to avoid being killed? Yep. Yep. That would be their option.
Oh, so there are options there. But not obviously, not a good option. But yeah. Yeah. But but few people would, I mean, why would you leave your identity, your family, all that makes you who you are?
Right. So so so when you think Syria, it’s a really variegated kind of nation. I I work from the area I lived in, which was very conservative. And women, mostly because it was conservative, not Islamic, would be have the black hair by a headscarf and part of their face covered. Then I’d go across to where I used to attend the MOS program or where we’d teach, and it’d be a very wealthy area.
So you’d see women there in young women in blue coats and white headscarf if they’re conservative, but also both, Sunni Muslim, certainly Druze and Ismaili and others dressed without failing in really form fitting, quite revealing shirts, skirts, all that kind of thing. Wow. There’s a whole range of there’s a whole range of practice of the different communities that people belong to. Well, I like I like, Moira, that you’re pointing out the the diversity and the complexity because I do think it helps us to realize that, I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t this way in Australia.
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how it is. But here in the United States, it’s us against them. There’s a lot of them and they being said and not a whole lot of nuance when it comes to Muslims. Is it that way in Australia as well? Alright.
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Worldview. Real world review. Yeah. Could say. Yeah.
CIU educates people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ. Perhaps a little bit more nuanced, but for, yeah, the average person who just gets overwhelmed by what’s coming through the media, there’s a lot of uncertainty. It’s not as strong as an us and them. We have less troops in there. To help us with more of a personal touch, could you give us some, some personal stories about, the women that you’ve worked with?
So, let me tell you about a few of the women I interacted with. Let me start I’ll give them a few names just to protect them a bit. Okay. There’s the woman who ran the program. So I I sat in a study program women’s study program in a mosque, attended their lectures for a couple of years.
And I have to say, an awful lot of what I listened to as I sat there, I would have heard in any evangelical church teaching about how to live godly lives, how to cope with spouses who weren’t at all devout and weren’t interested in God, how to bring up your children, how to manage prayer and reading their scriptures, the Quran and things, and and the demands of housework and daily life. So this was like a a bible study or a Quran study? This is a Quran study, and how did you get in? Yeah. It took me a little while.
I sort of started I met her first at a graduation ceremony for women who’d memorized the Quran. And then I was invited to, this leader, Buddha Al Habash, to her place where she talked to expatriate women about Islam and then gradually she said, Yeah, okay, come along to the mosque. But she was very open. I think, a lot of mosque programs would have had me for a little while as a convert, but not been happy as I just kept sitting there. And I I have some sympathy with that.
How many churches would like a Muslim researcher sitting in for a couple of years taking notes? Right. We would not. We would not. Most churches would not allow.
Right. Be very uncomfortable with it. So this particular, woman study that happens in the mosque, is this common? I mean, I know you’ve spent 20 years in the Middle East working with Muslims. Is it common for women to have this sort of program in the mosque, like a women’s group?
It’s a whole really interesting move that’s happening worldwide around Islam, where women are moving into mosque space and moving into textual teaching far more than they ever used to before. In the past, women prayed at home, men prayed in the mosque, but now there’s more and more classes for women. And actually even in this IS document I keep referring back to, there’s only One is if they’re doctors and nurses or teachers. And One is if they’re doctors and nurses or teachers and or doctors and teachers. But the third one is if they want to go out and go to religious classes.
So so how did this all start? What was what changed? I think the things driving it are, twofold. 1 is a growth in women’s literacy around the world, just generally. At the same time, it’s a whole increasing access to religious materials through printed pamphlets right through to satellite, CD tapes.
So women are able to interact with these materials. And and the growth of conservative Islam is also generating more religious material. So it’s kind of feeding each other. It’s amazing that you point this out as being a global movement because we just had this week our first woman’s mosque in the United States. It opened up in LA.
There’s a woman imam. Only women are allowed. And I was reading this and I was thinking, I have to get this to Moira, and I totally forgot to send it to you. But now that we’re talking about it, I’ll send it on. But the first women’s mosque in LA, California opened this week.
Good. Send it on, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing who the imam is. And interestingly, when I asked, Ansehuda, the teacher of this program, at a time when, Amina Wadud, who’s a black American Muslim, was leading mixed prayer and generating a lot of controversy. I said to her, what do you think about all this? She said, well, there is this tradition about a woman in Mohammed’s time who asked permission to lead her household in prayer, and he gave her permission.
So there is a support for it. So even though she was very conservative in her dress and her public teaching, she was a little bit more radical in her private views, I think in some ways. Another woman I spent a lot of time with was an Alawite woman. She taught in the university program teaching Arabic, and I took a lot of private lessons with her. And I’d go up and visit her.
Again, the Alawites, the women don’t usually cover their heads. And in Alawite understanding, the men get the knowledge as they get older. The women aren’t supposed to have religious knowledge. They’re sort of from a a a lesser creation than the men. And there was this kind of scare story going around that one other white woman had actually heard her husband praying and went dead, dead, stop.
She went deaf from hearing her husband’s prayers? That was a story that was told, Trevor. I’m not going to verify it, but it was a way of saying to the women, don’t get religious. This is men’s business. Do when her kids get sick or if she has do when her kids get sick or if she has along to be more religious?
She’s got 2 options. She either gets a little bit more Sunni, which she’s not, but maybe she starts praying or reciting the Quran. Or she goes into folk Islam and starts using amulets to protect her children. Okay. So what is an amulet?
Give us some ideas on amulets in Islam. Oh, wow. There’s a whole range of them. They can be fairly orthodox. One orthodox way is to write verses from the Quran or the names of a prophet on a piece of paper.
And then you either wash the paper in oil, if you want to put it on the body, for healing, if you’ve got a sore part of the body, or else you wash it in water and you drink it if it’s something internal. That’s a fairly common one. And that’s orthodox? Yeah. Yeah.
That’s quite orthodox. Wow. Okay. Would this be the equivalent of anointing with oil for Christians? The for healing, you anoint someone over the head with oil, gather the elders around.
So some Muslims feel it’s okay to go, to an imam, have something written on the Quran and drink it as a healing property? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
No. I think that would be a parallel that they would understand very well. In fact, I have used that with some of my friends. Oh, okay. What what are some of the other folk practices that Muslims, particularly women will often engage in since they’re not allowed to be more religious in some sense?
Well, and also if you’re a woman, I don’t know if you’ve talked about the rules of purity, you can’t do the 4 or 5 prayers or fast or read the Quran if you’re impure, which is when anything passes your body boundaries. Gas, liquid, solids, or if you vomit or if you go to sleep. So that includes all your bodily functions, sexual intercourse, all that kind of thing. Which means that women are effectively for most of their life, unclean for 1 month 1 week out of 4, which means they can’t pray. So I’m looking at Howard’s face here and he he’s I think he’s a bit shocked about all of this.
So farting is completely, forbidden and you’re in an impure state. And so in one sense, like, if you’re in the mosque and if anybody’s ever been to the mosque and seen the form that you actually take for prayer, you could see how that could easily happen and you really should go back and reperform the washing to get back into a purified state and then rejoin the prayer. You know so all of these bodily discharges. Now for Christians that are listening, they’re like, this sounds crazy. They haven’t read Leviticus, I don’t think.
Does that sound accurate, Moira? That sounds really accurate. And actually, when you look at the New Testament, you can see that purity was a major concern for the Jews at the time. The more I read it, the more I see it’s in almost every page of the New Testament in one form or another. So, yeah, Jesus really spoke into this whole area.
So that means that women are constantly looking for ways both to express their devoutness to God, but also get the blessing they need to care for their family. So, with with my own neighbors, I lived in a household where a building where everyone in the different floors were different brothers in the one extended family. So I’d join the sister in laws and the mothers and the sisters every so often when they’d recite the Quran. So that’s a way of bringing blessing on the house. They’d put bottles of water with the lids off in the center and those bottles would then gain blessing.
The Quran’s broken into 30 sections, equal sections. And every woman would take 1 or 2 or 3 sections and just recite it quietly to herself. So everyone’s sitting around in a circle quietly reciting different So we have a funny question. I’m I’m sure other people are wondering too. When you say participated, what does that mean?
I’m I’m sure other people are wondering too. When you say participated, what does that mean? Alright. So this show wouldn’t be possible without sponsors. And at this point in the show is where if you wanna partner with us, we would put your ad.
So if you wanna be a part of the show, you like partnering with us, you like what we’re doing, you wanna be on our team, what have you, bring this show to the world, then email us and let us know. For me? Yes. Right. They did ask me to join in.
Usually, our doctor just attended. Okay. And did they appreciate your presence, or was it an awkward sort of thing? Because I think a lot of Christians assume, like, sitting with a Muslim while a Muslim’s participating in a religious thing. Maybe the Muslim doesn’t want them to be there.
But what was your experience being around during the prayers, during the recitation of the Quran? How were you received? Always welcomed, because Arabs are inherently hospitable. And certainly, the women just included me as part of the extended household. Also, if 1 or 2 of the women were in a time of uncleanness in the month, then they weren’t able to participate.
So in that sense, I’m just sitting out like they are. Oh, okay. So you wouldn’t be alone. Right. Okay.
So is there particular New Testament passages that speaks to this idea of purity? Because we don’t think in these terms normally. We think in terms of sin and guilt, and you’re saying it sounds to me like Muslims think more in terms of purity, uncleanliness. Is there New Testament passages that would be very powerful, maybe, to a Muslim woman, that’s dealing with these issues every day? I think there are.
And one of the most power and like I said, we just don’t, from our position, realize how deeply ingrained in the New Testament is. But one of the most powerful passages to me is Mark 5, and the same collection of stories comes up in Luke, where you start with Jesus healing the Jairusine demoniac, and then you’ve got Jairus’ daughter and the woman with the flow of blood. Now when you look back at the Levitical categories, those are all issues of defilement and uncleanness. So you’ve got a man who’s full of unclean spirits, and you’ve got pigs. And then you’ve got a woman who’s got a flow of blood, so touching her should defile Jesus.
And a dead body, again, should defile Jesus. But what actually happened is that the unclean spirits are thrown out, and the man is healed again. Oh, and there’s booms in there too, another area of defilement. You’ve got the woman touches Jesus. Jesus isn’t defiled, but the woman is healed.
You’ve got Jesus touching a dead body. He’s not defiled, but life pours back into the young girl. And so I I think what this is saying is that while in the old Testament and in Islam and most other groups, defilement is contagious, in Jesus, purity becomes contagious. See, when we read those stories, Moira, we’re not even thinking in terms of defilement. We don’t think about the demoniac.
We don’t think about the graveyard. We don’t think about the pigs. We don’t think about the blood. We don’t think about, lepers. And what you’re saying is that rather than the defilement actually coming on to Jesus, it’s Jesus’ purity that is transferred over and covers the defilement and how powerful that would be to a Muslim woman.
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s extraordinary. It’s like it’s like we’ve got this passage in Romans which says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. When I read this, to me, it’s the gospel writer saying, there is no defilement from anything you have done or from anything anyone has ever done to you.
And I think that is so powerful for people in any culture. Yeah. Particularly for a culture where defilement is still the law of the land. I mean, I I can’t stress how many times I’m asked by Muslims, so do you eat pork? Do you drink alcohol?
And I’m thinking, you know, most Christians are thinking, this is kind of a silly question. Like, what’s the big deal with pork and alcohol? And I’m thinking, you know, the question that they’re asking you is a whole lot bigger than just pork and alcohol. It’s really a question of purity, of are you defiled? Can you really approach God?
And Right. We really make a mistake when we answer yes or no, don’t we? Yeah. Absolutely. Because for Muslims, life is binary.
You’re either pure or impure every moment of every life, and that shapes everything you do with faith. It’s it’s a totally determining category. And I think initially, I used to to go back to that verse about it’s what, I remember visiting a friend in hospital, and this was when I’m back in Australia, and the Quran was beside her bed. And I said, are you reading it? And she said, no.
I can’t because that time the month. Are you allowed to read your bible when you’re unclean? Oh, wow. So do I say yes and make her think it’s okay to read the Bible when you’re unclap what what goes on? And and I think, initially I would have gone back to the verse, it’s only what comes out defiles you.
And while that’s true, I actually understand it slightly differently now. For Muslims, like with the Jews, you have to do all this washing in order to purify yourself again. There’s all these rules of how you purify yourself and how you wash. And my understanding is that that is still needed just as the Jews couldn’t pray and couldn’t come to God and couldn’t interact with their scriptures until they were purified. You’ve got all those jars of purification in the in the wedding of Cana.
So my understanding is that justice sacrifice was essential for the old testament, and it stopped not because it’s been superseded, but because it’s been completely fulfilled in Jesus’ sacrifice. In the same way, we still need to be purified, but we are When I read when I read the bible and when I pray I do. But I have been so purified in Jesus that that purification obviates and is bigger than every other possible way of purity. Just like his sacrifice fulfilled and went beyond every other sacrifice. Yeah.
It it goes back to when Jesus is asked questions and, you never see Jesus just give a yes or no. He usually goes right to the heart of the question. And I think sometimes when Muslims are asking those questions, they’re asking much deeper theological questions than we realize. And by answering, yes, I can pray, during that time of the month, then you might actually be giving them the wrong impression. You might be saying that I don’t need to be purified, that I can just read whenever.
And the reality is no, you do need to be purified and that’s what Christ has done. An opportunity to witness for Jesus actually gets bypassed because it’s simple yes or no question. Yeah. Totally. And you know, it’s one of the things I love about hanging out with Muslim friends and people of other religions is I learn so much more about my own faith.
I just There’s stuff I would never have understood in the bible, had other people and other religions not sent me back to say, what’s the bible really say about this issue that’s so important to them? Well, that was a good good stuff from doctor Moira Dale. And it sounds really good through Skype. You know, this that was all the way in Australia. Yeah.
We had a couple a couple glitches, but otherwise Right. Yeah. Let’s okay. Yeah. Anyway, so, thank you so much for listening, to Choose About Muslims, podcast.
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