It was the strongly polarized responses to our church’s efforts to help out a family of local Muslim, Syrian refugees this past December (2015) that convinced me I needed to know more about Islam. A young family of three that had gotten caught between a federal policy that brought them to the state of Georgia and a state policy that prevented them from receiving any help while they were here. This meant that unless other people, organizations, and churches stepped in, this family that had lived through several layers of hell for the last four years – watching family members die and their world destroyed – would now be in a foreign land, where they didn’t know the language or culture, with no food to eat or place to stay.

Through World Relief, an organization in Clarkston, Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, stepped in to provide housing for this family and our church offered to help provide them with food.

I knew we had taken on a project that was more than we could handle on our own, so through email and Facebook I reached out to our support network and our local community for donations of money and food cards.

This is where the trouble began.

Many people were very supportive of our efforts. They sent in money and food cards and even wrote nice notes to the little family welcoming them to the United States and to Atlanta.

Some people responded with a great deal of fear and concern about these people being Muslim, about them coming to America, and about us helping them. They mentioned the ever-increasing number of violent attacks on innocent people around the world by people who say they are doing these things for their Muslim God. They pointed out that the couple we are trying to help might seem like nice people, but everyone thought that the couple that committed the mass killing in San Bernadino was a nice couple until they started killing their co-workers. These co-workers who the couple later killed even threw them a baby shower a few months before the killings took place. These concerned readers pointed out that even if this couple is not dangerous, there are also many people killed in acts of terrorism by second and third generation Muslim immigrants. The main question for these people was, “How do we KNOW that these people aren’t terrorists or won’t become terrorists?”

Then there were other people who passionately conveyed a great deal of hatred and bigotry toward all Muslims, towards the religion of Islam, and contempt for anyone who was too naïve to see the threat for what it is. These people wrote at great length about the barbarity of the founder of Islam, the barbarity in the Qu’ran, and the sadistic barbarity found in the majority of predominantly Muslim countries, as well as Islam’s fourteen hundred year history of conquest, butchery, slavery, and brutality towards women. For these people, everyone who is Muslim is seen as a threat or a threat-in-waiting to both human life and human freedom – they are all enemies.

For both of these last groups of people I tried to explain where we were coming from as followers of the Way of Jesus and directed them to something I had written a month prior – Refugees, Risk, & The Way of Jesus – but I’m not sure this satisfied the second group’s concerns or questions and my responses certainly didn’t dampen the last group’s animosity.

I knew I needed to know more about Islam.

Treating all Muslims as enemies and pushing them out of all western civilizations is not a workable public policy, would violate the values of western civilization, and is certainly not a policy that reflects the God that Christians follow.

But neither is it fair to dismiss those who have serious fears and concerns regarding Islam and Muslims. After all a phobia, as in “Islamophobia,” is a “strong irrational fear of something that poses little or no real danger.” Anyone who looks at almost any day’s headlines and certainly the events over the last few decades would see that it is not irrational but reasonable for someone to be concerned about Islam. To what degree this fear or concern is rational and justified, I’m not sure.

I knew I needed to know more.

The intersection of Western Civilization and Islam is one of the most important issues of our time. If I hope to be the leader and teacher in my community that God has called me to be, then my answer to people’s questions on this issue needs to become more than, “I don’t know,” or “I’ve heard…,” or “I read online…” A world full of fear, and anger, and violence needs more than that.

So this year I am beginning a journey into understanding Islam. Over the course of this year (at least) I will be reading the Qu’ran (Koran), a reputable Hadith (a collection of stories and quotes from Mohammed’s life), several biographies of Mohammed’s life, and several histories of Islam. I may mix in a few hard data sources like the results of the massive survey conducted by the Pew Research Center on Muslim beliefs and views from around the world. I will also be discussing what I learn with practicing Muslims as much as I am able.

The goal here is to find facts, to find what is true, and share them with you as I find them. For the most part these posts will be in the form of book reports. Based on the size of the books, few of these reports will likely be short. I hope though that they will be helpful to you. I hope they will help all of us live the Way of Jesus and pursue the Dream of God with open eyes and informed minds.