# Your Neighbour Prays Five Times a Day. Do You Know Why? A few years ago a man in our congregation told me he'd lived next door to a Muslim family for eleven years, borrowed their ladder twice, accepted their Eid sweets every year, and never once asked them what they actually believed. "I suppose I was afraid," he said. "Afraid of offending them, or afraid of what I'd find out — I'm not sure which." That double anxiety — politeness masking incuriosity masking a deeper fear — is, I think, the dominant posture of British Christians toward their Muslim neighbours, and it is not good enough. ## The Ladder We Never Return The man in question is one of the kindest people I know. He is not a bigot. He would, I am certain, run into a burning building to pull his neighbours' children out. But over eleven years of borrowed ladders and accepted sweets, he had constructed a kind of cordon sanitaire around the one question that mattered most to the family next door: who is God, and what does he require of us? We tell ourselves this restraint is respectful. I think it is mostly cowardice dressed up in liberal clothes. Real respect involves curiosity. If my neighbour orients his entire life — his diet, his calendar, his five daily appointments with God — around a set of convictions, and I never once ask him what those convictions are, I am not respecting him. I am treating him as scenery. The culture warrior and the conflict-avoider make the same mistake from opposite directions. The first assumes he already knows what Muslims believe and shouts about it on the internet. The second assumes it is impolite to find out and changes the subject. Both have decided that the actual content of Islam is unimportant — to the warrior because the caricature suffices, to the avoider because the friendship requires its absence. Neither has loved his neighbour. So before any of us opens our mouth — to witness, to argue, to commiserate over the bin collections — we have to do the unglamorous work of learning what the faith of a quarter of the world's population actually teaches. ## What Islam Actually Is: Submission, Not Just Rules The word *Islam* comes from the Arabic root *s-l-m*, the same root that gives us *salaam*, peace. It means surrender, or submission. A *Muslim* is one who has submitted. This is not, in the Islamic self-understanding, primarily a system of rules; it is a posture of the whole self before the one God, whose name is Allah — which is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Christians long before Muhammad and still used by them today. This matters because Westerners — including Western Christians — tend to reach for legal metaphors first when describing Islam. We talk about *sharia* and prohibitions and what Muslims aren't allowed to eat. We picture a religion of constraints. But to the devout Muslim, the rules are downstream of something more fundamental: the recognition that God is God and the human creature is not, and that the only coherent response to that asymmetry is total submission. You can disagree with this — Christians should, in important ways — but you have to feel its weight first. The Muslim conviction is that the universe is not absurd, that history is not random, that human beings are not autonomous units negotiating their preferences. There is one God. He has spoken. The only sane response is to bow. Whatever one thinks of where that conviction leads, the conviction itself is not contemptible. It is, in fact, considerably closer to historic Christianity than the autonomous-self gospel that most of our Western neighbours have absorbed by osmosis. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The Muslim would say something analogous: that the soul is in revolt until it submits. The diagnosis overlaps. The cure is where we part company. ## The Five Pillars: A Scaffold for a Whole Life Five practices structure the life of an observant Muslim. They are called the *arkan*, the pillars, and they are not optional extras but the load-bearing architecture of the faith. **Shahada** is the confession: *La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah*, "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God." To become a Muslim, one says these words sincerely, with two witnesses. It is, in its way, the most minimal entry point of any major religion. One sentence, and you are in. But that sentence is doing enormous work: it denies every other claimant to deity, and it locates the final revelation of God in a particular man in a particular century. **Salat** is the prayer, five times a day, facing Mecca, performed in a prescribed sequence of standing, bowing, and prostration. Before dawn, just past noon, mid-afternoon, just after sunset, and at night. The body is involved. You wash before you pray. You touch your forehead to the ground. The point is not merely to inform God of your gratitude or your needs; it is to submit, physically, repeatedly, in a way that trains the soul through the body. The Christian who scoffs at this should remember Daniel praying three times a day with his window open, and the early church's hours of prayer, and reflect on how thoroughly we have lost that rhythm. **Zakat** is the alms, typically 2.5% of one's accumulated wealth, given annually to the poor. It is not charity in the Western sense, a voluntary overflow of generosity. It is an obligation, a structural redistribution that recognises wealth is held in trust. The wealthy Muslim who fails to pay zakat is not stingy but impious. **Sawm** is the fast of Ramadan, no food, no water, no sex from dawn to dusk for a lunar month. The whole community does it together. Families wake before dawn to eat *suhoor*; they break the fast at sunset with *iftar*, often with neighbours and extended family. The fast is meant to cultivate empathy with the hungry, discipline of the appetites, and dependence on God. I know Muslim friends in finance who fast a fourteen-hour London summer day and still close deals. The seriousness of it is humbling. **Hajj** is the pilgrimage to Mecca, required once in a lifetime of any Muslim with the physical and financial means. Pilgrims wear simple white garments, the same for the day labourer and the Saudi prince, and circle the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine that Muslims believe Abraham built. It is meant to be a foretaste of the day of judgement, when all human distinctions fall away and only the soul stands before God. You could memorise these five and still not understand Islam. But you cannot understand Islam without them. They are what your neighbour is doing when his life looks different from yours. ## Three Things Christians Routinely Get Wrong **First, that Muslims worship a different God entirely.** This is theologically more complicated than either side of the usual argument allows. Muslims affirm the God of Abraham, the creator of heaven and earth, the God who spoke to Moses, the God who is one. They deny the Trinity and deny that Jesus is the Son of God. So: same referent, different description? Or different God altogether? The honest answer is that we worship the same God *insofar as* we both intend the creator of Abraham, and a fundamentally different God *insofar as* the Christian God is irreducibly triune and incarnate, and the Muslim God is not. To say flatly "different God" is to deny the shared inheritance. To say flatly "same God" is to render the cross optional. Hold both. **Second, that Islam is inherently violent.** This is the talking point of the culture warrior, and it is both lazy and false. There are violent verses in the Qur'an and violent verses in the Bible. There are warlike chapters in Islamic history and warlike chapters in Christian history. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, and the overwhelming majority of them are not interested in killing you; they are interested in raising their children and paying their mortgages and getting their parents into a good care home. The minority who do violence in the name of Islam are doing real violence and reading real texts, and their interpretation has to be argued with on its own terms, not waved away. But the move from "some Muslims are violent" to "Islam is violent" is the same logical move as "some Christians abuse children" to "Christianity is paedophilia." It is unworthy of us. **Third, that the Qur'an is just the Islamic Bible.** It isn't. The Bible, for Christians, is a library of texts written by many authors over more than a thousand years, in multiple genres, that together bear witness to Christ. The Qur'an, for Muslims, is the direct speech of God, dictated to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, in Arabic, every word eternal and uncreated. Its closer analogue in Christianity is not the Bible but Christ himself, the Word of God made present. This is why Qur'an burnings strike Muslims as something more like a crucifixion than a book-burning. We do not have to agree with their theology of revelation to grasp the analogy. We do have to grasp the analogy if we want to understand why our neighbours weep. ## Where the Gospels and the Qur'an Actually Disagree Interfaith conversation, in the British mode, often takes the form of an extended search for common ground. We share Abraham. We share monotheism. We share an ethical concern for the poor. This is true, and important, and not enough. The real disagreements are these. **The nature of Jesus.** Islam honours Jesus as a great prophet, born of a virgin, a worker of miracles, who will return at the end of the age. It denies that he is the Son of God in any unique sense, denies that he is divine, and considers the very suggestion *shirk*, the unforgivable sin of associating a creature with the creator. The Christian confession that Jesus is God incarnate is not a footnote we can soften; it is the thing the Qur'an most pointedly rejects (Sura 4:171, Sura 5:72-75). **The cross.** The Qur'an teaches that Jesus was not crucified but that it only appeared so (Sura 4:157). A great prophet, in Islamic logic, could not be allowed to suffer such humiliation; God would deliver him. The Christian gospel, by contrast, hangs on the public, historical, deliberate death of Jesus under Pontius Pilate, and on the resurrection that followed. Remove the cross and you do not have a slightly different Christianity. You have no Christianity. **The Trinity.** Islam reads the Trinity as a compromise of monotheism, three gods rather than one. Christians have always insisted it is no such thing: one God in three persons, an ancient and difficult and non-negotiable confession. The disagreement here is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up. It is a genuine fork in the road about who God is. **The sufficiency of human obedience.** This is the deepest divide, and the one Christians most often miss. Islam teaches that God is merciful and forgiving, and that on the day of judgement he will weigh your deeds, and the sincere submitter has reasonable hope of paradise. Christianity teaches that no human deed could ever balance the scale, that we are dead in sin, and that salvation is by grace through faith in a crucified and risen Lord. Paul's question in Romans, "what then becomes of our boasting?", has no Islamic analogue. The Muslim boasts in submission; the Christian, in the cross alone. These disagreements are not to be smoothed over. The polite Christian who pretends they don't exist is being dishonest, and dishonesty is no foundation for friendship. ## What Islam Sees That We Have Forgotten And yet, and this is the part the culture warrior cannot bear to hear, there are things Islamic practice embodies that Western Christianity has largely mislaid, and we should be willing to feel the rebuke. Islam prays with the body. We have spiritualised prayer into a mental exercise, a kind of holy talking-to-yourself with the eyes closed, fitted around the school run. The Muslim prostrates. The Muslim washes his hands and feet. The Muslim's faith is enacted in his joints. The biblical tradition knows this, Daniel on his knees, the publican beating his breast, Paul bowing his knee, but most British Christians I know would feel awkward kneeling in church, let alone on an office carpet at lunchtime. Islam fasts communally. We fast, when we fast at all, privately and apologetically. The Muslim community of a million people in a city all stop eating at the same minute and all start eating at the same minute, for a month, every year. That is a discipline of solidarity. Compare it to our atomised, calorie-counting Lent. Islam organises generosity structurally. Zakat is not a feeling; it is a percentage. The Christian tithe, biblically warranted and historically near-universal, has become in most evangelical churches a vague encouragement that the average attender meets at something under 3%. The Muslim 2.5% of accumulated wealth is, in many cases, more rigorous than what we do. None of this proves Islam true. The pagan can also be disciplined. But it should make us suspicious of our smug assumption that we have the substance and they have the husk. Often they have a husk of substance, and we have the substance of a husk. ## How to Actually Talk to Your Neighbour Practical guidance, then, for the man with the borrowed ladder. Ask before you explain. The temptation, once we've read a book or watched a video, is to march next door and inform our Muslim neighbour what he believes. Don't. Ask him. "I realised I've known you for years and I've never asked you what your faith means to you. Would you tell me?" Then shut up and listen. You will learn things no book can tell you, because his Islam is his, shaped by his family and his country and his own conscience. Listen for the personal, not just the doctrinal. Why does *he* fast? What did Ramadan mean in his grandmother's house? When did *Salat* become more than habit? People do not live by abstractions. They live by stories, and the gospel travels best between people who have shared theirs. Share your own story of surrender and failure. Don't lead with apologetic arguments. Lead with the fact that you, too, know what it is to want to please God and not be able to, and that you have found someone who pleased him on your behalf. The personal confession disarms the suspicion that you are a missionary in disguise. You are a missionary, of course, every Christian is, but you are first a person, telling another person what you have found. Let the cross do the heavy lifting. You are not going to argue anyone into the kingdom. The Spirit will do what the Spirit does. Your job is to be present, honest, persistent, and willing to be embarrassed. The most powerful thing you can say to a Muslim friend is not a refutation of *tawhid* but a description of the Saviour who bled for him. ## The God Who Comes Down The deepest difference between Islam and Christianity is not that Muslims submit and Christians don't. We do, or we should. The deepest difference is the direction of travel. In Islam, the human being climbs. He submits, he prays, he fasts, he gives, he pilgrimages, and on the last day his deeds are weighed. The architecture is vertical and the movement is upward, and the question that haunts the sincere Muslim, I have heard this from Muslim friends, in quiet moments, is whether it will ever be enough. In Christianity, God comes down. The eternal Word takes flesh in a teenage girl's womb in an occupied province. He is born among animals, raised in a backwater, killed by an empire on a charge he didn't commit, and raised on the third day. The whole movement is the wrong way round. The God who, in Islamic theology, could not stoop to be crucified is, in Christian confession, the God who would not stop until he was. "He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8). This is what we have to say to our neighbours. Not that we submit better. Not that our rules are kinder. Not that our community is warmer, sometimes it isn't. We have to say that God himself crossed the distance, and that the climb we could never finish has been finished for us, and that the only response left is to fall down at the feet of the one who first fell down at ours. Go and borrow the ladder back. And this time, return it with a question.