“I am an atheist and a Muslim,” Warrick Farah, Circumpolar. Here’s an interesting illustration of cultural Islam (somewhat the same as cultural Christianity?).
“Believing in God can also mean being at odds with him. I don’t pray regularly, and I don’t fast during Ramadan. In that sense, I’m not religious. But I perceive myself as a Muslim. It’s my cultural community. For me, Islam is also my homeland and my language, and my Arabic can’t be separated from all of that. You can distance yourself from Islam but remain within the heart of Islam. I don’t want to yield to the fundamentalists who preach violence. They are on the rise.”
Check the article for more. What does it mean to follow Christ in such a setting? This is one of the complexities of C-4/5 contextualization and the debates/arguments/conversations about it. Grappling with these kinds of realities is one of the difficulties for workers on the field. It’s also something that those at home will face more and more, as “Muslims” (who may be no more than Muslim than your next-door neighbor is Christian) move into to the neighborhood.
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Thanks for the post Justin. Praying that you and the family are settling in.