In this lecture, Vivienne Stacey explores the challenge of the programmed mind. Many people are trained to think and behave in particular ways. This can present a challenge when introducing new ideas, particularly when the ideas are in conflict with current thinking. How can we discuss the Bible and engage in fruitful debate with Muslims. 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. If you want to access Carl Pfander’s book, it can be downloaded here.
Here starts the auto-generated transcription of Vivienne Stacey’s Lecture on debate and Bible study with Muslims:
We’re going to look at the subject of the program mind. In the handout, which you have in your collection handbook, I’ve said the problem of the program mind, but I I’m I think I shall change it in the next edition if there is one, and make it the challenge of the program mind because the program mind, can be and is, as I hope to show, a a great possibility or challenge for us. Now, you might wonder what I’m talking about when I talk about the programmed mind, but I’ve decided that this is a very good way of describing, some of the, ways that that some Muslims think. There it’s like, having a program on your computer. It is brilliant, but it goes only one way.
It goes as it has been set. And, the particularly men, I think, have an overdose, Muslim men, of, the program Mind. I maybe I’m being a bit too, I’m just sort of joking a bit, but women don’t have this so much. They’re not so programmed, but let me just explain it. But I here I find 3 aspects of the program mind, 3 things that make, people think along a certain way.
There’s the learning by rote system in education, which stresses memorization more than comprehension. That’s certainly a program. It’s a way of education. I don’t really want to be critical of Muslims and, of, eastern ways or root systems because I find, some of the western ways of education also questionable. I find it questionable that we learn the theory and then do the practice.
I was just thinking recently how much Jesus, sort of he did things with his disciples, and they analyzed it afterwards as far as I can see. So I feel that that’s a perhaps it’s a more lively way, a realistic way, to live. The worker, as I’ve quoted before from the Fins, the worker is trained by his work. Get on with it and don’t sit for too long in courses, but, practice and then analyze and, then practice and discuss it in this way. So we’re not being necessarily critical, but it is a fact of life, I think, that the rote system in education, which stresses memorization more than comprehension, runs right through the Middle East and through Asia and probably Africa.
It in Cyprus, it operates, I notice, where I live. And then there’s the Islamic attention to detail with regulations for every aspect of life. I was once in a middle gulf Muslim country, a gulf state or gulf country, and, I was staying with an American family, and this American, worked with a Pakistani Muslim in his job. And the Pakistani Muslim learned that I was coming to stay. And he said I I and he learned that I was a writer.
He he said, I’ve never met a writer. I would like to meet her. So it was all properly set up in my host’s home that I should meet this young man. And when we were discussing, I was asking him what he felt about his visit to Mecca and how he enjoyed the Hajj and so on and so forth. And then I said, oh, yeah.
Well, we also I’m also on pilgrimage, but I’m not going to to Mecca, and I’m not, going to any particular city, except that I am like Abraham, and I’m seeking the city which is above. And I quoted, Hebrews. So he realized that I was quoting the bible, and I quote we were talking in Urdu, and I quoted it in Urdu. Anyway, he suddenly realized that pass possibly the Bible was in Urdu, his language. And, I said, yes, the Bible’s in Urdu.
And I said, I do have one copy with me. If you would allow me to present it to you, I I would be very happy to do that. So he was very pleased. So I gave, this much prayed for bible to him, and I went off to to another city and and then to a further city, and 3 weeks later came back to stay in the same place. So my host said, so and so, he’s, asked if he may have another interview with you, and, so he’s coming this evening, and, he’s got a question.
So I was wondering through the afternoon what the question was, and the the question turned out to be, where of I’ve read what you told me. You told me Genesis, you told me some of the Psalms of David, and you told me Matthew. So I’ve read all this, but I have a question. Where are the rules? Where are the regulations?
So we had a long chat about that. But, the Islamic attention to detail with regulations for every aspect of life. If you’re ever if you’re ever in charge of an institution as I once was, you might be responsible indirectly, at least, for some building. And, this was a major a minor matter. We needed to build a toilet somewhere in the grounds for a gardener.
So I don’t like, things that are built on the skew wiff, as we say, but, so I instructed how exactly the toilet and where it should be built. But, it was slightly off. It wasn’t very off. But the reason, of course, was that, it the position of a toilet is very important because of the direction of Mecca, and you shouldn’t squat in in the wrong way. You have to be not being sort of dishonorable to the direction for prayer.
So, well, I got on very lightly. I’ve only had a few inches. The toilet was off The building was off a bit, a few inches. But a a neighboring institution had its toilets smashed because they were directly facing Mecca in the way that, would do do dishonor to that direction. So for every aspect of life, there is a detail.
So there’s that, and it’s, part of the programmed situation. And then the emphasis on the memorization of the Quran. So we’ve been talking about that a bit earlier in the last, time, the last session that we had. The emphasis on the memorization of the Quran and the recitation of the Quran in Arabic, of course. So lots of people learn parts of the Quran.
Lots of children go to a Koranic school, a madrasah, and girls go, boys go separately. And, sometimes women who can’t read but, who are wanting to learn a bit of Arabic and how to say something of the Quran, they go to another time to learn to recite the Quran in the proper way, parts of it or all of it. So here is then what I’m calling the programmed mind, programmed by the rote system of education, programmed by the attention to detail for every aspect of life, regulation for every aspect of life, they automatically know what to say and do. And, the emphasis on the memorization of the Quran. Now I want us to look at this this, diagram, which will be in your folder or in your handbook, and you will wonder what I’m up to, but I hope I hope to make it clear in about 5 minutes.
So here, in the diagram, I want to explain how I think, the program mind in relation certainly to yeah. I would say in relation to the Quran and the subjects that Muslims discuss, got what I call, set up and, how this whole thing got fossilized. Well, when I explain it, it will be very clear. Well, until I’ve done so, it probably won’t be, but it arises actually, what I have to say, this debate form. This is meant to be a debate form.
It’s, is part of Urdu culture. There are 2 100,000,000 people who speak Urdu, so it’s quite well worthwhile learning. I keep you’ve got a lot of people to talk to. Urdu, is a was grew up as a kind of, came to being as part of the camp language. It was a camp language of the Mughals.
It belongs to the golden age of Urdu literature and to the famous Mogul kings like Jahangir and Akbar Akbar and few others of those famous people of the golden age of Islam in India. And, so Urdu became eventually the a court language as well, and it developed a lovely literature. But among its, cultural patterns was the debating form, and there were debates held. They were held between Muslim groups, one one group, one side of the debate, and the other the other. One of my Muslim friends said he was going to a debate, and I said, what are you gonna debate?
He said, we’re gonna debate whether the dead can hear. So when they’re waiting for the resurrection, can they hear or can’t hear? So I said yes, and the debate form, was not just related to Christian Muslim debates, which became famous in about, the 18, fifties, but, they relate to something much more in the whole cultural scene. So Muslims would debate with Muslims. Muslims would debate with Hindus.
Muslims would debate with Christians. But in this system, in the city of Agra, about 3 hours journey by train from south of Delhi in India, a very well known Muslim divine called Rahmatullah challenged doctor Fander. Doctor Fander was a a a church missionary society missionary, I think, from Germany event originally, and he was an apologist. He wrote, he wrote, eventually, some books and so on. Anyway, he was the resident clergyman, the resident Christian sort of apologist in the city of Agra, a Muslim city.
And, Rehmatullah, who was well known as as a leader of Muslims and Beta, challenged him, to a public debate. And he didn’t really want you can read Fandir’s diaries, and he didn’t really want to do it in public, but, he thought that, under the circumstances, he’d better do it. So the whole all the rules for debate were all set. You had to have, some judges. You had participants on each side, and the participants, there’d be a leader.
That would be Rahmatullah, and he would have a few assistants. He had 2 that I can remember. He had, Imad ad Din, and he had Sufta Ali, who I remember them because they became Christians later, but he had some others. And, Fander had Thomas Wolpe French. His biography is over there, a little pamphlet, a very booklet that I wrote.
Thomas Warpi French, who was a very young missionary at that point, and he must have had some somebody else as well. So there were the participants, and then there was the time frame, possibly 2 days that they would meet for so many hours. There were the subjects set, and at the end, there should be the winners and losers. Okay. Now the subject set for that debate and for practically all the debates between Christians and Muslims at that time were the unity of God, and that involved the question of the mistaken view of the Trinity, the divinity or sonship of Jesus, the reliability of the Bible, and the mission of Muhammad.
And, so that was all set up, and they debated, and you can read not only about the debates at Agra, you can read the text if you want in in Urdu, in Hyderabad. I’ve seen the texts, but I’ve not read them. So the debate form. But what happened after the debate in Agra was that, and I don’t really know who would be considered the winner, but, what happened was Rehmatullah, wrote to Fander a a a kind of small pamphlet, and then Fander wrote a small pamphlet back. And then these pamphlets started to get a bit fatter and, so they were small books, and then they sort of, in the end, turned into books.
So but then Rehmatullah went off to Mecca, and he took his his pamphlets and his books to Mecca, and they got them translated into Arabic. And some of this apologetic and polemical, material started to circulate Urdu setting in India, but in the Arab speaking world. And it became, there’s a lot of apologetic is when you defend your own faith. Polemical is when you attack and engage with a another faith, and a lot of this was polemical, unfortunately. Well, it so happened that as, time went by and we came into the 20th century, the frame the cultural framework, and I’ve put dots for it or sort of dashes, started to fall away.
But, when Christian men met Christian men, Muslim men and the other way around, they tended to talk in the coffee shops and the tea shops of the subcontinent and the the Arabian world too, in the coffee shops. They tended to talk on these 3 4 subjects. And I could guarantee that even today, from Morocco to Istanbul or from Morocco to even to parts of Central Asia, if, there were Christians and Muslims in a tea shop or a coffee shop, men, they would be discussing these subjects which somehow have got set in concrete. And the problem from my point of view, and I think from yours, is that because these are things that, first, the subjects are so set, they are also sort of answers that Muslims have got in their minds at programmed answers for programmed questions. And, the means that the Christian has to answer the Muslim objection.
So it means that the initiative is always with the with the Muslim, and the Christian is answering. So what I think we need are are new agendas, new subjects, and, for Christians to be to take initiatives. And women have got a better chance at that because they are not quite so caught into the this set agenda as men. So it’s good chance that you have, as women, to, to take initiative, to find different ways and new ways of discussing, the interaction of our faiths and presenting the faith of God in who reveals himself in Christ. So that’s, that’s a a major question.
So now, today, there’s some revival of the debate debate form by Ahmed DeDatt and Josh McDowell and a few others, and we do come across debates, in this part of the century. I remember that Sweetman, who is a theologian in Britain and is an expose on Islamic theology and some of his books, at least one of them is in the library here. I saw it last night. He had a he went around Pakistan in 1954, and he gay he debated with Muslims in public. We haven’t had many debates in public since then, but, until now when things are getting there’s there’s a bit more of that sort of thing.
But, he came to the last point in a debate, and he if he pressed one more point, he would have won that debate, but he didn’t press the last point. And so somebody came to him afterwards and said, why didn’t you, say this to finish and win that debate? And he said, I would have won the debate, but I would have lost the man. And, anyway but I’m wanting to say to you, that, as women, you have a greater opportunity in some ways than men. You don’t have to, you can you have a more, clear field.
You’re not so tied into the coffee shop agenda, which, is this, these things. You can take the initiative much more because, Muslim women are not quite so, caught in the program mind, at least on these issues. But they are affected by the rote system in education, the Islamic attention to detail, and the emphasis on the memory on memorization. But they are not quite so caught into this agenda. So look for other agendas in which you have the initiative, in which there is a possibility of really helping people to think and to, understand and to respond to Christ.
So I have listed some possible agendas. Sometimes, it can be taking subjects, somehow talking about subjects like suffering or abortion or purity or impurity. Some of these issues are very, much the concern of Muslims, and particularly women suffering. Abortion. And then the whole question of purity and impurity.
I mean, you can’t say your prayers at a certain time, the that is the purity, These are issues. These are things that, you could discuss at length rather than, you can introduce the subjects. You can talk to the things that are concerning the the right these issues of life, which concern, things that concern Hagar. There it wasn’t so much theology, but there was theology there, because we come to the God who hears, the God who sees. But, there are all these real human problems of, abuse and, of exploitation, problems of being a refugee.
How many million Muslim women are refugees? It’s 1,000,000. Some of these issues, attitude to suffering and so on. I have on this paper, as you see, listed things, but you can add to it. Studies on Exodus.
I don’t mean the book of Exodus. I mean going out. Exodus. Pilgrimage. I’m always on pilgrimage, I tell my Muslim friends, but, I’m not a pilgrim.
I I don’t get the title of Haji because I’m not there yet. Okay. Many possibilities. And I have but the things I’ve listed here are mostly biblical subjects, but we can there are many ways in which we can engage in deep conversations, I think, which I hope will lead to the study of the scripture. We can have I had a real change in my in my life when I I decided to work towards in-depth discussion based on scripture and with engaging, in bible study with Muslims, I didn’t make it my aim to have loads of conversations.
I I had them naturally as I traveled. Somehow or the other, we talked about this and that. But one off, that’s fine. But, pray that God will give you opportunity to to study in-depth with 1 or 2 Muslim friends. One friend, 2 friends.
I think it will make a difference to your your ministry, and, you will learn, as I have learned. I learned a lot from the people that I studied with. You cannot study the Bible with anybody and not both of you, some way or the other, learn, and it’s a rich experience. So we’re looking for people with whom we may do bible study. So think about the life of Christ with the references to the Old Testament.
That’s one possibility. Think about, selections from Genesis, the lives of the patriarch patriarchs. All of the basis, basic Christian theo Christian theological themes are in Genesis. They come out of a kind of experience of life and the records of what happened, which, are very meaningful to Muslims. They identify with many people and names in Genesis.
Then, you could study the themes of Exodus. I mean, not Exodus as a book, but themes of going out, Exodus. Themes of pilgrimage, themes of servanthood, themes about community, umrah, themes about the nations, issues of this sort. If you’re going to study a gospel, if you’re gonna study with a a mystic, a Sufi, then the gospel of John, I suggest, rather than the Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But, and Sufis, by the way, somebody mentioned Sufis the other day.
They are not a sect, but they because Sufis come from Shia background or they come from most quite a lot or from Sunni background. So a Sufi is a movement. Sufism is a movement. It’s a mystic. It’s the there’s the mystical movement within Islam.
So now I have here listed an evangelistic bible study which you could use with an individual or a group, And I have used this piece of scripture over 100 of times with individual Muslims and with groups. When I’m a guest in a house and they ask me if I will, lead some worship, Muslim home, I’m asked, several places in several countries. Okay? Then I like a passage like numbers 214 to 9 as the story of the brazen serpent. I like it or not the story.
I like to call it the record or the account, because if you use story in some languages, it means fiction. So you have to think about which language you’re using. It does in Urdu. So I’ll roughly, just in these 2 or 3 minutes, run through this, why it’s so appropriate. There’s the prophet mentioned, Moses, who’s known as Kalim Ulla, the converser with God, in both in the both the Old Testament and the Quran.
This prophet and his community were traveling. The the community is made up of tribes and groups of families. They were people who worshiped 1 god. They fasted. They prayed.
They gave alms. Their hearts were not always pure. And there’s a deep idea of sin in this, the breaking of relationship. They murmured against God, ingratitude. For the Muslim, it’s a sin, but, you can see here, it breaks relationship.
There’s, the severity of God’s punishment. These people were bitten, and some of them died. There’s God’s remedy for their sin. There’s the healing that came through the remedy. Who would not be healed?
Who what would happen to those who were not healed? Heal healing through faith. Now here, I would, emphasize that god is great. Muslims are saying this every day from every mosque in the whole world. God is great.
God is great. Okay? God is great. He can choose how he say he he saves. He chose to save, one family, the family of Noah, from the flood.
He he chose that way to save a family at that time. He chose the brazen serpent idea or actuality, if you like, that through the arrangements that he made, he would save a nation, at that time, his chosen nation. And in God who is great can choose his own ways, and God who is great chose a way to save the world. And, if you have a receptive audience, you can go on to John 3, verses 14 to 15. As Moses lifted up the servant, even so serpent, even so shall the, son of man be lifted up.
So that is, God who is great can choose his way. There’s always this objection by men to the cross. In Islam, not always, but often. Sometimes women don’t object because they don’t really understand that, but, it’s something that comes into the mind of Muslim. God is great, and you see his greatness in saving one family, in saving one nation, and his greatness in the arrangements he’s made to save the world.
From this passage in Numbers 21, you you learn about intercession. You learn about prayer, and you can, look through this and study it yourself, but I commend this passage for one off bible studies, or a starter before the, main course.