08055
January 23, 2008

‘Abraham’s dysfunctional family’

by Jerry L. Van Marter
Presbyterian News Service

LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Brian Arthur Brown likes to call Muslims, Christians and Jews “Abraham’s dysfunctional family.”

For though the sacred texts of the three “Abrahamic” religions share many common precepts and characters, mistrust and misunderstanding between them seems to grow rather than recede, says the United Church of Canada pastor and author of a provocative new book, Noah’s Other Son: Bridging the Gap Between the Bible and the Qur’an.

In the book, which rose to number one on the religious books list on Amazon.com after it was released last spring and has stayed in the top 25 since, Brown examines 25 familiar figures who appear in both the Bible and Qur’an, “revealing how these characters can point present-day Muslims, Christians and Jews toward more mature relationships.”

He begins with Noah’s youngest son, Canaan, who derided his parents for building the ark, refused to go aboard, and drowned in the Flood.

“Twenty-first century people can so easily ignore the warnings of our times,” Brown told the Presbyterian News Service in a recent interview during a three-week tour promoting his book. The tour started and ended in Presbyterian churches in Ohio and Florida, respectively.

“Those who heed the warnings of this parable may be able to transcend their sectarian differences to work together to address universal concerns such as global warming, pandemics and poverty,” he says.

Brown says he thinks his book is doing well because “churches are more and more responsive to interfaith relationships,” particularly since 9/11. “I have observed a decided switch, an emphasis on interfaith understanding rather than ‘comparative religion,’” he says, “where the purpose is to convince or convert.”

Brown, a Toronto-area pastor who received his theological education from McGill University and San Francisco Theological Seminary, says readers are surprised to learn how many common characters populate both the Bible and the Qur’an.

For instance, he says, “The Qur’an says much more about Mary the mother of Jesus than the Bible does. The Qur’an describes Mary has having a priestly vocation, which makes her much more frequently cited by Muslim feminists than by Christian scholars.”

Brown says he hopes his book will also break down the post-9/11 negativity that has grown around Islam. “Christian extremists — Hitler, Mussolini, the Ku Klux Klan — got the upper hand in the 20th century,” he explained. “To now judge Islam by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is at least as distorted as to judge Christianity by those people.”

Dennis DeWilde, author of The Performance Connection, says Brown’s book may be even more valuable to Muslims. “He may be encouraging Islamic scholars to open the Qur’an to critical analyses and share the quest to unravel the many mysteries of God’s word.”