Calls to Prayer in Michigan and Elsewhere
by James Carvin 6/3/04

A law is currently being debated in Michigan and the buzz is spreading elsewhere. Muslims want to make their public prayer calls five times a day. The non-Muslim neighbors are calling it a disturbance. Is it a provocation or a call to prayer?

Have you heard a prayer call before? Most Westerners can't stand them. We like a little instrumental music with our gospel tunes, a little contemporary flavor. Some of us even prefer the organ, though I can't understand why.

I know I'm an exception, but I can appreciate their chanting. When you sing as you pray, (sing your prayers), you pray harder. Singing lifts the mind and heart to something otherly, a place where there is focus on something higher in our humanity, maybe even godly. St. Augustine said that singing prayer was to pray twice, a thought echoed by St. Francis and many others. I and they have seen even more than that. Music is inherantly communal. It is a group activity. To sing your prayers is to be a part of a unified community. Even if you sing alone you sing with the angels and saints.

Strictly in terms of the music, Muslim chant has much in common with Christian chant. It is only in the past century that we have become ignorant of that. But go to any Eastern Orthodox Christian Church in America, where that old time religion is still given, and you may think you're in Turkey.

But that's inside. Islam wants to take it to the streets, where everyone has to hear it, like it or not. And the words, "unified community" hardly apply. On two levels, American culture won't stand for it. The first is that we are fixated on American idol. We care too much about professionalism and talent. If we lack talent we don't sing at all on account of our self-consciousness and self-criticism. We have become critics. And we have little appreciation for its antiquity even if we collect antiques.

One radio commentator, Todd Schnitt, says he prefers church bells to the Muslim prayer calls. He plays both for his audience. He has it right. There is a parallel. But he hates the chant so much he prefers the bells. It's like he wants to influence his audience to vote for Fantasia. I don't think he gets it.

Seeing that I am probably one of the few who do "get it" I realize I am living in another age. Even on a strictly musical level, to me the prayer calls are much better side by side with Schnitt's bells. They are on pitch, whereas bells are extremely disonant. The one sound is a clanging with a doppler like pitch shift on each note. The other is a person crying out to God with all his heart. Maybe it helps that I have been a cantor in an Orthodox Christian Church before. I've been trained in what to listen for the way a computer is trained to listen to the signals in a modem. To most people this sounds like gargling.

But I digress. The complaint then goes that church bells ring only on Sundays. This, evidently, is tolerable. If not for poor taste alone, it must be fair to outlaw these obnoxious prayer calls on account of how frequent they are. Five times a day makes thirty-five times a week. It's bad enough just once. But as I recall, monasteries do ring their bells that many times and more - compline, matins, louds, vespers, terce, sext, non .... Of course, those are usually in remote areas where the bells aren't heard by the general public.

Sigh. The bells are meant to call us to prayer and to gather together as church. Being heard by the general public is what they are designed for. This is what the Muslims are looking for too. Not church, of course. They are calling the whole world to Islam. But this brings us to the second form of distaste I mentioned. We don't like what they are calling us to. And we don't think they like us or anything we stand for very much either. Some of them are in our face and want to kill us. The chant calls seem like a taunt to violence.

Distasteful as this may seem, they are now living in America. Hate us as they may many have chosen to live here. Something has attracted them. I am not sure it is our freedom. But we are not now making laws prohibiting the free expression of their religion, are we? May it never be. Are we really going to deny them the right to practice their religion now that they are here just because we find it obnoxious?

Let me be blunt. For me these calls are beyond obnoxious. The words "detestible" and "abominable" come closer to how I feel. While I am probably rare in supporting not only their right to make public calls to prayer, even loudly and five times a day, but also deeply appreciating the sentiment which calls the whole world to prayer and to gather together to God, I will boldly admit that I find the Islamic faith abhorrent. Crucify me. I'm not PC. It is not so much the sound as it is the whole experience. And it's not the call to prayer that bothers me. It's the call to Islam: like many Americans, I can't think about Islam without thinking of its violence. But for me it goes beyond that. I also can't think of Islam without thinking of its lies. These loud calls to prayer become for me not the beautiful calls to prayer I find in the double prayer of singing and the notion of ringing bells for all mankind, but a grinding and painful reminder of how hypocritical mankind can be.

My feelings stem from being a Christian, not just in name, but in belief. You may not agree. You may hate Christians, for all I know. But I have to be honest. In my view, Jesus really rose from the dead. In my view, there are thousands of prophecies that were fulfilled in him. I have considered them carefully. In my view, there are not any other holy books of any other religion that can make any such claim. But the initial premise of Muhammed was that the holy books of the Jews and of the Christians were edited over the years to serve certain political ends of a small portion of God's people. They were corrupted. Muhammed supposedly straightened all this out with the Quran he wrote. As a Christian who has studied, I find this initial assertion of Muhammed to be not only incorrect but disasterous in its consequences. In my view, Christianity was a very good thing. And then it got wiped out by Islam both by the sword and by ignorance. In my view, to be a true prophet it would be necessary to profess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that he rose from the dead for our salvation. Muhammed didn't do this. He did the opposite. And he took millions of people with him. Wars have ensued ever since. Regarding false prophets, Jesus said we would know them by their fruits.

So what am I to think of Muhammed and Muhammed's God? Is Muhammed's God my God? This is a great question. He was a monotheist. That much he got right. He understood, as do the Jews, that God can't be contained in an image. This, as a Christian, I also agree with. Other aspects, I have serious qualms about. I find no means of salvation and sanctification in Muhammed's God except through works, which are commonly referred to as the five pillars. Probably the greatest thing I have ever come to understand is that it is impossible to be united with God through works. What is required is the acceptance with a contrite heart of a free gift. Salvation is free just like life itself is free. It is given. We don't earn it. The brilliant mind of St. Augustine straightened this out for us in the fourth century when certain followers of a monk named Pelagius rose up. As we drifted away from the Scriptures we forgot how he dealt with this. So later an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther reminded us again. But Muhammed, writing two centuries later, seems to have had very little knowledge of Augustine.

With controversy and discussion comes complexity. Maybe that is why Muhammed rejected Christianity. Pelagius was just one of many controversial individuals many people in the church had been forced to respond to. Muhammed called for simplicity. This was like a breath of fresh air. Simplicity is something we all like and I'm no exception. Islam gains quite a few adherants not through force, but through the lure of simplicity. But isn't that just marketing? If truth was more complex would we avoid it for the sake of simplicity? Hopefully not but probably so. You know it. And I know it.

Two things in the God of the Christians were far too complex for good marketing: (1) the incarnation, (2) the Trinity. Muhammed knew this. And he appealed to the intellectual lazy man by releasing us from having to contemplate this God of the Christians. It is thus always put forth that Allah is God. But when we examine it more closely, Allah is not the God of the Christians. To put it simply, Allah is not Jesus Christ. Still, I am willing to accept that Allah is God so long as we agree on what this term "God" means. If we are referring to the one perfect being, all sufficient, all powerful, all loving, all knowing, uncreated creator, then we are talking about the same God. If that is what Allah is to a Muslim, then Allah is God. This also is what the Jews believe about God. We could then agree that there is only one God and that the problems just lie with those of us who have differing opinions about God.

In some ways I have a simplistic way of looking at things too. I simply ask some questions. If God is all powerful and all loving and all sufficient in his perfection what would He do? I view God as being perfect. What would something that was all sufficient in its perfection do? Well, since it stands in need of nothing it doesn't have to do anything. It already has what it needs. Rather than doing anything it just is. But on the other hand its "is" is also a doing, lest it lack doing. But perfection lacks no good thing. Being all powerful implies the ability to do. Certainly it loves. And love is a doing, not just an idol thing. Therefore Perfection is both Being and Doing. I conclude from this that if God is perfect, then God "Gods." He is both Being and Doing. And what He Does is what He Is. It is a simple answer to a simple question.

If Jews Muslims and Christians alike can believe together in the all sufficiency, love and perfection of God then by the simple reasoning above they can conclude together that God Gods, "God" being both a noun and a verb. All sufficiency takes us one step farther too. If God Gods then the result of God Godding is God. I see in this simple phrase the Word, the Logos, the Reason, the Wisdom of God revealing His Perfection in a sentence that is worth repeating. If God Gods then the result of God Godding is God. Let me put it another way. If Allah Allahs then the result of Allah Allahing is Allah.

Forgive me if this seems too simple. Forgive me if I care to lead peoples who have been at war with one another for centuries to reconcile their differences by the force of this simple statement. But the statement of above is the revelation of the Trinity, which hopefully you are aware is not a revelation of three Gods but of One. As the Christian sages pointed out, God is both nature and person. If God Gods. And if God Godding is God then we see the nature of God being revealed in three persons. Namely, (1) The God who Gods, (2) The Godding of God and (3) The God who is Godded. These three relations are described well as "Father" (because Fathers beget), "Son" (because Sons are begotten), and "Spirit" (because spirit is energy and action).

The Christian church in the time of Muhammed described two aspects of this Trinity. The emminant Trinity, which always was in this simple Being and Doing of God Godding God, and an imminant Trinity, in which God relates to His creation. God draws close to us. It is one thing to be all sufficient. God has no need of us. But all sufficiency does not exclude the possibility that that which is less than God can learn of God and perhaps, somehow, share in His goodness. We have then in the Scriptures of the Jews and of the Christians a God who revealed himself a little bit at a time. The Christians insist that the Trinity is revealed in the Jewish Scriptures.

In the Christian view part of this revelation is God becoming man, revealing Himself as Son and later sending His Spirit, revealing Father, Son and Spirit. Jews and Muslims reject this because the limited can never contain the unlimited. Christians reply that the unlimited is all powerful and can, in fact, become less yet while remaining more. What is impossible for man is not impossible for God. The incarnation is offensive to Jews and to Muslims for good reason. But it is not only possible for God, but natural, because it is an appropriate expression of that love of God which both Jews and Muslims profess. It provides not only expressions of love but a means of salvation, which no man could achieve on his own. Without God our life would vanish. Life is a gift. Eternal life is also a gift. I could elaborate at length on any one of these thoughts, but this is already more than enough to think on.

The problem, as I see it, is that the Muslim call is a call to believe that Allah is God and that Muhammed is his prophet. We've talked about Allah being God and that seems to be okay given the conditions above. But how about Muhammed? Was he a true prophet?

This is where the biggest problem lies. I don't see the evidence for it. Quite the contrary, he directly opposed my God, the Lord Jesus Christ, claiming Jesus was merely a prophet, claiming that he was never risen from the dead. As a prophet, can their be anything more false than to oppose God or to call God a liar? No. So as you might guess, in my view Muhammed was a false prophet. and since the whole religion is based on Muhammed what we have here, as I see it, is the religion of the false prophet.

Church bells call us together not only for prayer but for our uniting in Christ. They symbolize the sound of the last trumpet, which raises us from the dead and gathers us in the air with all the saints to Christ when he returns at the end of the age. But the Islamic prayer calls demonstrate the fulfillment of still more Christian prophecy. It as an abomination. Here we have a people who seems to want America to die. The more zealous among them seem to oppose liberty itself. They ally with our enemies and they make themselves our enemies. It may not be what the Muslims intend but this is what the prayer call does. The temple of prayer has been defiled with these bitter images. Do the terrorists not know that this is the consequence of their deeds?

I call on Muslims to refute me. But just prior to our uniting in Christ, the Bible speaks of some interesting events. Let's look at event number six. Point one, the Euphrates River dries up so that the Kings of the East can make their way across it to attack Israel. Point two, the False Prophet points to the AntiChrist. The AntiChrist's mark is the dragon. We need to remember that the Euphrates River was indeed dried up by Saddam Hussein. It has already happened. And who do we suppose the False Prophet the Bible speaks of is? It seems to me to be Muhammed. Who else is known as "the prophet"?

As for the dragon? Sounds like China. What other country has the dragon for its mascot?

Now I understand from Daniel 11 that the Antichrist will probably be of Jewish descent, a man who believes in a strong military and doesn't care much about women. But I also see a bowing down before this dragon, which I suppose to be China. They appear to have an army of about 200 million motorcycles with tail pipes and assault rifles that emit poison gas, something which causes terrible pain for at least 5 months. And I see the false prophet recommending China. Now what motive would the Arab nations have for promoting China in a day and age in which the United States is hated? The answer is simple. They have the power to destroy us.

Christian prophecy is a little scary and usually associated with zealous fools. But these things kind of glare out at me. The good news is these are the very last things described in the Bible before the Lord returns, before the bell rings and we are called to unity in eternal worship. Ironic, isn't it?

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