Sometime during my freshman year in high school, my father accepted a position as the pastor of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine, Florida. My mother, my sister, and I followed him and moved there during the summer several months later. My sister had just graduated from high school, and was soon on her way to college. I, on the other hand, would now be attending a new school, Episcopal High School, my third school in three years.

That school went from seventh grade through high school, so by the time I started there in 10th grade, most of the students had been together for at least three years. In addition, unlike the vast majority of the students who lived in Jacksonville where the school was located, I was a part of a small number of students who commuted from St. Augustine, an hour away. Furthermore, many of my classes were with upperclassmen. For example, I was the only sophomore in an Honors Physics class otherwise filled with juniors and seniors. Needless to say, I was an outsider, in more ways than one.

Perhaps it wasn't entirely an accident, then, that one of my best friends that first year was another outsider of a sort, one of my fellow Physics students. His name was Thabet Tolaymat and he was a Syrian Muslim. He and his younger brother Shadi were the only Syrians, and the only Muslims, in the school. Thabet and I became friends as we discussed our physics homework and sometimes worked together in the lab.

He was the first Muslim that I ever knew. He had me over to his house on more than one occasion. I remember grimacing through the lunch we shared with the family -- I really didn't like the hummus and the olives. (Incidentally, times have changed. These days, hummus . . . olives -- giddyup! I'm all over that!) Anyway, it is from him that I first tasted Arab hospitality, from him that I learned something about Islam such as the Friday afternoon prayer and the holy book of Islam, the Qur'an. I remember the place of honor in the home occupied by the Qur'an, and the respect with which Thabet's family obviously treated it.

Thabet was a senior and he graduated at the end of my first year at Episcopal, but I suppose that he planted a small seed within me of interest in Islam. I studied Islam briefly in college, and visited my first Muslim country a year after graduating. It is the most populous country in the Muslim world, and I spent five weeks there -- does anybody know which country that is? Indonesia. I studied more about Islam in seminary, during which time, as most of you know, I lived in Palestine. I also visited the Muslim countries of Turkey and Jordan, and a year after graduating, lived briefly in Cairo while studying Arabic.

Given this background, I was therefore surprised by a conversation I had with a good friend of mine earlier this year. I had gone up to visit him over the New Year, and we spent several days talking about all sorts of things. At one point in our conversation, as we were talking about religion or politics, he said, "I think Islam is a violent religion."

"I think Islam is a violent religion."

Part of what surprised me about this statement was its source. Joe was an educated man, in the final stages of completing his Ph.D. He had lived abroad and was open to other cultures. Most strikingly, he was a faithful Christian who was deeply committed to peace and justice.

"I think Islam is a violent religion."

I was surprised by this statement, but in retrospect, perhaps I should not have been. After all, Joe was merely vocalizing what many people think, what many people hear, what many people believe. His opinion, I suspect, is all too common. We are bombarded in the media by violence in the Muslim world. We hardly hear it anymore, but it still seeps in subconsciously. Indeed, if you asked people what word immediately comes to their mind after the word "Islamic," I suspect the most common responses would be something along the lines of "terror" or "fundamentalism". We don't really hear about Islam in other contexts. Or rather, perhaps the only other times in which most Americans encounter Muslims is via the movies, where for decades they tend to be the bad guys in Hollywood blockbusters. Given the modern geopolitical situation, I don't think it is entirely an accident that the movie "300", one of this year's blockbuster movies, demonizes the ancient Persians, the ancestors of today's Iranians.

As with most prejudice, what allows this prejudice to take root in people such as my friend is our ignorance, in this case our ignorance of Islamic civilization. Or Islamic civilization"s" I should say, the plural, because there is no such monolithic entity as "Islamic civilization," its history and composition are more diverse, more complicated than that. Those such as Samuel Huntington who speak of a "clash of civilizations" don't do justice to the complex and often subtle ways in which various societies influence and are influenced by each other, the various connections that bind them with each other. I think we falsely tend to think of the Islamic world as some great threatening, monolithic unknown. But I have had the chance to step behind the curtain, to learn the history of the Fatimids and the Ummayads, and the Abbassids, to study Turkish and Egyptian Arabic and Palestinian Arabic. I learned that most Muslims are not Arabs, that many Arabs are not Muslim, that most Muslims don't live in the Middle East, that the Arabic spoken in Morocco is incomprehensible to someone from Lebanon, etc. In living in those cultures and studying those languages, the struggles and motivations of these people who initially seemed different eventually seemed not so different after all.

That is part of what the horror in Iraq has been teaching us. We went in, to some extent, with this falsely simplistic view of Islamic civilization, but God help us we are behind the curtain now, now we are learning what we should have already known, we are learning about the differences between Shi'a and Sunni and Kurd, now we, or at least some of us, are learning about the numerous and complex histories and relationships that are in play. Unfortunately, that lesson is coming at a high price, a price primarily paid not by us, but by the Iraqis themselves.

Speaking about history in the context of a sermon about Islam and violence, I cannot help but think of Badshah Khan. Most of you have probably never heard of Badshah Khan -- I certainly hadn't before a few years ago. He was born at the end of the 19th century in what was then India, what is now Pakistan. Born into a prosperous family, he valued education and opened schools. His goal became the establishment of an independent, secular India. Like Gandhi, whom he knew well, he believed deeply in the power of nonviolence, which he saw as an outgrowth of his Muslim faith. In the 1920s, he founded a group known as the Red Shirts which eventually recruited over 100,000 members. The Muslim members of that organization took an oath of nonviolence. As he told its members, "I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against it. It is the weapon of the Prophet [Muhammed], but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience and righteousness. No power on earth can stand against it." Much like their Hindu compatriots under Gandhi, the Red Shirts mounted a massive campaign of nonviolent resistance, suffering and dying at the hands of the British occupation authorities. Khan stood by Gandhi when other members of the Indian National Congress disagreed with them. He was so closely identified with Gandhi that he is known in India as the 'Frontier Gandhi.' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Abdul_Ghaffar_Kahn)

Perhaps more damning than our ignorance of Islamic history and culture is our lack of familiarity with Muslims themselves. How many of us have been inside a Muslim home and tasted the hospitality of our Muslim brothers and sisters? How many of us have hosted them in our own homes? How many of us have or have had Muslim friends? Unless I miss my guess, the answer is "not enough." When Joe said, "I think Islam is a violent religion," I asked him if he had ever been to a Muslim country or if he had any Muslim friends. The answer was "no."

Finally, the statement "I think Islam is a violent religion," as used by my friend Joe, fosters the very ignorance from which it arises. That statement functions as an all-too-convenient excuse not to examine the complex political and cultural factors at work in the motivations of any group of people. If Islam is a violent religion, then I don't have to consider that maybe the power imbalance in the world and the way that power is used and projected might have something to do with the violence. If Islam is a violent religion, then hey, I'm done, that's easy, there's no need to ask any more questions, there is no need to study the history or meet the people. If Islam is a violent religion, then there is no need to face the uncomfortable fact that the society with the most powerful military in history, the society with the largest military-industrial complex, the only society to ever use atomic weapons, a society with one of the higher rates of violent death in the world, a society that finds pretexts to engage in unjust wars of aggression -- well, that society is our own. You see, the unspoken corollary of the statement "Islam is a violent religion" is "we are not violent -- no, not us."

That kind of hypocrisy is condemned by Jesus in our Biblical text from Matthew this morning. "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?" This passage challenges us to examine ourselves, to examine our own history. Believe me, there are all too many dark chapters there. Forced conversions, crusades, violent oppression of other Christians and Jews, the burning at the stake of Michael Severus by our denomination's founder Jean Calvin, the expulsion of the native Americans under a "divinely ordained" manifest destiny, the list goes on. I believe that studying that history, and the history of other communities of faith, reveals that violence isn't so much a Muslim problem or even a Christian problem, rather it is a human problem.

Down even deeper than that, perhaps the fundamental question is "how do we deal with people who are different than us, who are other than us, who are alien to us?" These days I think that is perhaps above all the Muslims, but it has been the Jews and native Americans, and the blacks, and someday it will be some other group of people, in some places it already is. What do we do with them, how do we treat them? Our text from Leviticus this morning tells us that, "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself." Do we then demonize Muslims in their absence, or do we invite them into your presence? For me, the most powerful part of the passage is what immediately follows, "for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God." You were aliens in the land of Egypt, you were outsiders, you were an outsider in the 10th grade when a good Samaritan, I mean, a good Muslim, invited you in, and your God is the God of outsiders, and once you stop seeking relationships with outsiders, then you stop seeing God in them, then you stop seeing God period. How we see Muslims, how we treat others, these matters aren't peripheral to our faith, they aren't secondary, they are precisely what our faith is about, they are precisely what our God is about. I think that is partially why I care about this so much.

All of this is not to deny that there is violence committed in the name of Islam. But our ready willingness to allow that minority voice to speak definitively for Islam says more about us than about Islam, it says more about our desire to demonize and compartmentalize. I told my friend Joe that I was more comfortable with the statement, "I am concerned about violence in the Muslim world." As statements go, that doesn't have the definitive, judgmental tone of "I think Islam is a violent religion." It doesn't alienate others, rather it opens up the possibility for dialogue. It allows me to say, "I share that same concern. And I am concerned about violence in the Christian world as well." It is a starting point, not an ending point, a starting point that begins to embody the nonviolent relationship for which it longs, indeed, the nonviolent relationships to which God calls us as Christians.