Thinking About it :
How can Muslims and Christians live together in marriage?
There are two kinds of answer to this question. One talks of love and focuses on the tolerance and compromise that help love overcome difficulties. The other takes religious orthodoxy as its starting-point and looks to it for guidance in defining the terms and limits of the relationship. It is a practical and often discouraging answer, because in terms of mainstream religious commitment and lifestyle in either faith, 'marrying-out' entails problems that may well be insoluble.
We married hoping that 'love would find a way', but anxious to prove that we had not left the fold of our faiths and families. Since then 'Love' and 'Religion' have not disappeared; yet through the years of working out how to raise our children and live together happily, we have found that it is rather the idea of fairness, of 'do-as-you-would-be-done-by' that works as a basis we can both trust and be equally committed to.
It may sound more like UN assembly than a marriage! Yet where there is so much difference, without an agreed basis one partner's expression of cultural or religious identity can easily become their partner's oppression. Love is generous, but when marriage turns into a struggle for power, love itself can be the casualty.
The heart of the problem seems to be that faith and identity are inextricably linked. Where identity is challenged many turn to their faith for support, comfort and guidance, it can feel like the wall we have our backs up against. Although our two faiths do have rich traditions of ethics concerning the other, their first concern is to preserve the integrity of the community and to defend its doctrines - the message of both is that we should strive to be more committed-more perfect, not semi-detached, or compromised. Moreover Islam and Christianity make mutually exclusive claims on truth. The way we have chosen to live, with both faiths in our consciousness, and participating in both, is fair and necessary for us in sustaining a happy home, but neither faith finds it easy to encourage.
Probably everyone in an interfaith marriage has had the kind of experience where someone makes a chance remark, or we hear a religious text that is a routine constituent of our partner's faith condemning us-the non-believer, the unsaved-, to the outer reaches of hell; or cajoling us for our stubbornness in persisting in error. It hurts. But then if we are honest and pay attention we find the same kind of sentiments are in our own faith, we just hadn't noticed. Creeds, particularly monotheistic creeds are like that.
But experiencing these 'blind-spots' or failures in tact on the part of our partner's faith/ culture/community serves to alert us to those of our own.
By internalizing 'UN' values we get used to scrutinizing our own faith traditions for what in our context would be unfair. If my religion is inattentive to my partner's human rights, it doesn't work for me. As in any marriage, if I want my mother, childhood memories, faith, food, etc. respected by my partner, in all fairness, I must respect theirs.
But what does it mean in practice and what does it do to faith?
Inevitably there is loss. We become outsiders, possibly rejected by our own community, or excluded by the change in our own consciousness. We both regret that we cannot give our children the undiluted faith we grew up with, in traditions not made up just 'for our convenience', but deeper and wiser than us. We can't console ourselves by dismissing that kind of commitment as narrow; in our lives we have both been inspired by people of faith who show with humour and gentleness rather than intolerance the paradox that living the discipline of a single path is in the end a kind of liberation.
We live in a society where there is no compulsion to commit to any religion. For us it would be simplest 'to put religion on the back-burner'. Yet ultimately we find 'what religion is about' too important to ignore. We have chosen faith, but we have to make it work very hard for us, or rather we have to work very hard for it. Faith that has to be thought about is not necessarily bad faith, however guilty we may feel about our 'questioning' stance. An unexamined life is not worth living. Like Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, whose valet has a habit of leaping on him and testing his readiness to fight at times when he is least expecting it, we may not be comfortable, but it is good for us! Our complacency and self-indulgence are challenged. It is in fact exhilarating to live at this intersection, as witnessed historically by the religious vitality of societies where our traditions have met. Moreover Christianity and Islam are dialogical religions;
their discussion with each other and with Judaism at the very heart of their theology and history. I would contend that both faiths have things to learn and to teach each other which go beyond polemic. Ideally such investigation can take place in our homes, where having allowed space to both faiths 'constitutionally' we are free to explore the other without fear of being eclipsed. We are part of an intimate conversation that has been going on for centuries - one that has involved intense disagreement and misunderstanding, but that can take us deeper into what our faiths and Faith are about.
Giving our faiths equal status in our lives may imply they are 'the same really'. They are not. They often talk about different things; what is crucial morally or existentially for one of us may be negligible to the other. But the commitment to respect our partner means respecting what matters to them: Ramadan and Christmas are important to us both.
Marriage goes beyond dialogue. At the center of the relationship is love. Living together, we internalize each others' ways of behaving and of talking in a kind of cultural and religious bi-lingualism, which is rooted in the ordinary life of a family: after the interfaith discussion we go and make tea together. Ultimately in practice, we find that Islam and Christianity emphasize virtues that are not a hair's breadth apart. The courtesy, and civility, the gentle manners (akhlaq) that are the hall-mark and prevailing atmosphere of Muslim homes across the globe lead people to behave in ways that Christians would recognize as loving-kindness, or charity. At this sad moment in world affairs we hear less about this aspect of life in both faiths than we should - but for me the most important discovery of my marriage is that despite all our differences, it is this quiet homely reflection of the compassion we all attribute to our Creator- which is indeed our common ground.
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