Christians and Muslims … Worst and Best

To my Christian friends: would you agree with this statement?

Christianity was not intended to create a chosen people, fostering exclusive claims for themselves, while looking down upon the rest of humanity like a sea of untouchables or regarding the animate and inanimate worlds around them as fields readied for wanton exploitation. Wherever Christians find themselves, they are called upon to be actively and positively engaged as vanguards of mercy, welfare, and well-being.

(More after the jump…)

I wish I had written these words, but I didn’t, and in fact, they weren’t written about Christianity by a Christian. They were written about Islam by a Muslim.
Here’s the original quote:

Islam was not intended to create a chosen people, fostering exclusive claims for themselves, while looking down upon the rest of humanity like a sea of untouchables or regarding the animate and inanimate worlds around them as fields readied for wanton exploitation. Wherever Muslims find themselves, they are called upon to be actively and positively engaged as vanguards of mercy, welfare, and well-being.

My Muslim companion in the fast, Eboo Patel, wrote me an encouraging note the other day, and he sent a link to download this article by Dr. Umar Abd-Allah, American Islam’s most senior scholar, which I encourage you to read in its entirety:
http://www.nawawi.org/downloads/article1.pdf
Here’s what tends to happen when Christians talk about Muslims or Muslims talk about Christians behind each others’ backs. We all tend to compare “our” best to “their” worst. (As I wrote in AGO, Christians of one denomination tend to do the same regarding other denominations.)
I ask myself how I would feel if a Muslim person showed me a clip of someone shouting at a town hall meeting, calling President Obama a fascist, etc., etc., saying, “God will judge you!” and then said, “This is what Christianity is.” Or going more extreme, what if they showed me clips of the KKK or some other white supremacist group and said, “This group works under the sign of the cross, draws many members from churches, often uses the Bible to justify its actions and beliefs, and therefore represents Christianity”? Would I feel that Christianity was being fairly portrayed, or would I feel insulted and wronged?
This is how it must feel for Muslims to see people in the West take their most extreme and negative examples and make them icons for the whole community. So, I urge my fellow Christians to do unto others as they would have done to them. Compare the worst Muslims to the worst Christians if you want. Compare the best to the best if you want. Even better – rather than comparing, seek to understand, and not as a watering down of your Christian faith, but as a true expression of it. That’s what I was trying to communicate in an earlier post about Jesus and the Syrophonecian woman: Jesus’ example leads us to go beyond the stereotypes and prejudices of our own religious subculture and to see “the other” in a new light. Paul said it like this: “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16).
If you’re willing to do that, here are some wonderful books by Muslims that will help you see some of the best:

Eboo’s own Acts of Faith is a good place to begin.

Reza Aslan’s No god but God is also a great introduction – both critical and constructive.

Dalia Mogahed is a brilliant researcher who, with fellow scholar John Esposito, wrote Who Speaks for Islam. The book is based on a six-year Gallop study that involved tens of thousands of in-person one-hour interviews with Muslims around the world. It confronts a lot of misconceptions with hard data.