Reverend Franklin Graham:
One morning, about a week or so after
my last conversation with Mrs. Miller, when I was busy editing my last letter to
you, I had a phone call from my old friend Ruby, who had settled in Houston long
before I came here. I felt her voice choked with a kind of strange and
unexplained emotion as she asked, “Are you watching TV?”
“No. Why?”
“Turn it on and watch.”
“Which channel?” I asked.
“Any channel,” she said,
and then hung up her telephone, putting me in a pool of worries and anxieties.
The most foolish
act in the name of God and His religion Islam
After I turned my TV on I felt myself
pinned to the ground as I watched in the CNN a replay of what had happened a
few moments before. First, I thought it was an unfortunate accident as I
watched a plane crash into the high tower in New York City, followed by another
almost simultaneously. But soon I understood my mistake and I only wished I
never saw or heard any of it. My heart completely broke as if, by a sudden blow
of shock, shame, and utter disbelief, as I came to know gradually that it was a
horrendous suicidal attack, launched by a group of zealots, claiming proudly
they did it for the sake of Allah and for His religion, Islam. Their foolish
act, followed by their false claim made me feel so ashamed, low, and humiliated
that I wished nobody knew here I was a Muslim. I think Muslims all over the
world felt the same as I did at that moment.
Anti-Islamic propaganda began
in the Western Media
Reverend, in that situation, the
Western Media began to add fuel to the fire by playing a vindictive role
against Islam, with the help of well-reputed evangelists like you and others. They
seemed to compete with each other to prove who could denounce Islam the most
through their frequent appearance in the public TV. If some of them blamed Islam as a religion of
evil, others claimed its adherents being arrogant, hostile and fond of killing or
taking revenge. If someone called Muhammad-the Prophet of Islam, a terrorist,
the next one denounced the Quran as a book teaching violence and hatred among
his followers. Some of them even ridiculed the name of Allah, whom the Muslims
call or invoke in Arabic in place of His English name God. They found the God
of the Christians bigger and more real than the god of the Muslims. Others said
the god of the Muslims asked them to sacrifice their lives for him to go to
heaven, when the God of the Christians sacrificed His only Son to make them
holy and take them to heaven.
They continued this nonstop anti-Islamic propaganda against a religion
of the one-fourth population of the world, because a fraction of the fractions
of its misled adherents did some cruelest and most foolish act in the name of
their religion. While listening to those accusations from so many scholars and
religious gurus of the Western world, I could hardly expect Mrs. Miller to visit
me again or ever. Neither did I expect any devoted follower of Jesus Christ to
visit my website where I posted twelve letters in reply to your comment about
the ‘god of Islam’ being different from
the ‘God of the Judeo-Christian faith.’
So, I abandoned my idea of bringing the name of my website to the notice
of the public through some AD or publicity.
Curiosity
for Islam seemed to grow in people’s minds
As days passed into months
and months to years, I noticed the national TV channels eventually got tired of
playing a one-sided game on attacking Islam. They started inviting some Muslim
scholars to talk about various sides of Islam. Then I felt amazed to know that some
kind of curiosity toward Islam creeping slowly but steadily into the minds of many
western people. Some of them started reading books on Islam written by the open-minded
Western scholars. The sale of the meaning of the Quran, life of Muhammad and
even interest in learning the language and the culture of the Arabs, went on
increasing among the people of the western world.
Then one day while
watching CNN, I saw you in the inset of TV screen taking questions from John
King, one of its chief correspondents. He asked you for your reflection on your
previous comments about Islam being a very evil and wicked religion and the
Muslim worshipping a ‘different god’ from the God of the Jews and the Christians.
I waited excitedly for your answer. You looked a little hesitant, and as far as
I remember, you didn’t answer the first part of his question. But in reply to
the second part, you said the God of the Christians had a Son whom He sent to
sacrifice for their sin, but the god of the Muslims had no son and He sent none
to redeem their sin or to give them eternal life in heaven. To admit here
frankly, I am not sure whether you said this last part or not, though the
meaning or the implication has remained the same.
Another day, I also saw
you taking questions from Paula Zahn, the young and beautiful news staff of CNN.
In reply to her question about your reflection on Islam, you said to her promptly
that it was a very complicated religion. Then she asked you sweetly whether you
had ever studied Islam to which you admitted honestly that you did not. But
Paula was too good to ask you back how did you find Islam was a complicated
religion without knowing anything about it?
Reverend, I would like to
thank you again most gratefully, because your brief reflection upon the God of
the Muslims and their religion Islam, steered me up once again to bring my
website to the notice of the public, especially the common Christians and thus
giving me a chance to fulfill the purpose of my writing which is to help them
know about the God Islam and also about Jesus in the light of our Holy
Scriptures –the Bible and the Quran both. Not only that, it has also been
published now through Author house Publication under the title “One God For
All.”
In
return to that, I sincerely wish you, your family and friends a long meaningful
life with full of spirit, strength, health, happiness and above all, with patience
and perseverance to seek for the truth, following the advice of Jesus in John
8:32, where he said:
“And ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free.”
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