Bearing True Witness

“Crucial to the vitality of any religious community is its ability to attract and engage descendants and converts. By this measure, notwithstanding the proliferation of mosques and Islamic organizations, the Muslim community in America is not doing at all well.” This rather sober assessment motivates Dr. Lang to address, in this book, the alienation from the Mosque of the great majority of America’s homegrown Muslims. In Losing My Religion: A Call For Help, the author comes to terms with many of the queries put to him by Americans of Muslim parentage and converts to Islam since the publication of his book Even Angels Ask in 1977. Lang asserts that to effectively respond to the general malaise of American-born Muslims, the Islamic establishment in America needs to be willing to listen to the doubts and complaints of the disaffected. This entails engaging in open discussions on issues with which many in the Muslim community will be uncomfortable, but Lang avers that such open dialogue will be of more benefit to young American Muslims struggling with their faiths than the covert and uniformed discussions that often take place or no discussion at all. For this reason, Lang feels it is important and beneficial “to be candid and objective and not evade controversy, for to inadequately state the case for or against a specific position, especially when it challenges convention, only serves to further alienate the sceptical.” In addition to examining questions of theodicy, hadith authenticity, and moot practices within the American Muslim community, the author includes many testimonials and inquiries that make this book informative. Dr. Lang is Professor of Mathematics at The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. He is the author of two best selling works: Struggling to Surrender and Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America. Both books have been translated into other languages.

In his book Islam and the west Norman Daniel wrote: People seem to take it for granted that alien society is dangerous, if not hostile, and the spasmodic outbreaks of warfare between Islam and Christendom throughout history has been one manifestation of this. Apparently, under the pressure of their own sense of danger, Whether real or not, beliefs take shape in men’s minds. By misapprehension and misrepresentation, a notion of ideas and beliefs of one society can pass into the accepted myth of another society in a form so distorted that its relation to the original facts is sometimes barely discernible. Doctrines that are the expression of the spiritual outlook of an enemy are interpreted ungenerously and with prejudice and even the facts are modified to suit the interpretation.

This process began among the Greeks whom the Arab armies conquered when they occupied Syria… St John of Dainascus, born fifty years after the Hijrah (precedented) The severe attitude of condemning whatever Muslims believe in. In this Byzantine polemic, the Anatrope, Niceta of Byzantium does not even try to understand the Qur’an before refuting it. It follows that the God of Muhammad is really a devil.

Enemies of Islam, whatever their motives, will always exploit much the same facts, as recently did Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses.

As they (Christians) resented the doctrines of Islam and saw them in the light of their own misconceptions, they inevitably deformed them. Anti-Islamic polemic inhibited any possible empathy with Muslims. The main attack on Islam was already determined in the thirteenth century.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziah, a contemporary to the outcome of these polemics against Islam, the Age of Decline, did not restrict himself from delivering  tit-for-tat replies, and sometimes he went overboard in some of his descriptions equally demeaning the Christians and the Jews.

Struggling to Surrender: Some Impressions of an American Convert to Islam is a very personal account of one man’s search for God and meaning in the midst of a culture that places no value on such a quest. Dr. Lang was brought up as a Catholic and educated in a Catholic school. However, one day he found that his religious belief could no longer provide satisfactory answers to his questions.