GOD-centric :

A life centered on the pursuit of a good and fair God of love

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Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)

Islam

  My religious quest took place during the late 1980s when there was little mention of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The Iran hostage crisis had faded a bit from memory and I figured that most Muslims did not support fundamentalist  terrorism just like most Irish did not support the IRA's terrorism and most Catholics did not support the bombing of abortion clinics. At that time, Islam was as unfamiliar to me as the religions from the Far East and I wanted to know more.

  The Muslim in me embraced the integration of spiritual life into daily life. The Muslim ritual prayer five times a day reminded me of the canonical hours of prayer in monastic Catholicism. I endorsed this centering practice of being reminded of what is most important regularly throughout the day. I agreed that human nature possessed equal ability to do good or evil rather than its being predisposed to evil by inherited original sin. I appreciated Sufism's loving mystical approach to Islam and Rabi'ah al-Adawiyah's ideal of a pure love of God that was not self-interested in achieving heaven or avoiding hell.

  I was not a Muslim because I could proclaim only half of the Shahada: There is no god but God. I found it no more fair that Muhammad would have recorded the inspired and/or inerrant divine revelation in the Qur'an in 7th century Saudi Arabia than that the forty or so authors of the Bible would have recorded the inspired and/or inerrant divine revelation during the 1,000+ years it took to write the 66 or so books in Palestine. I did not believe that God's love or truth were bound in any way by time or space. I believed that you could be born in a remote cave and not receive any religious instruction and still possess all you needed to know and love God.