“Jesus could walk on water. Muhammad could only ride a camel.”
-Acts of Faith, Philip Caputo, words spoken by an American missionary in Sudan
I had no religious conversations with the drovers while with them and the camels. They may have known Christian missionaries at the Comboni Brothers Catholic high school in El Obeid where some of my wealthier Sudanese friends studied, but the drovers were unlikely to know much about Christianity, and I was reluctant to get into such things as the Eucharist or the Trinity which would have sounded too much like cannibalism and polytheism in my shaky Arabic.
Best to keep to such basic Islamic interjections as Insha’Allah (if talking about what might happen), Masha’Allah (if talking about what is happening), and Alhamdulillah (if talking about what has already happened)- If God has willed it (note the past tense, for everything, everything, is foreordained), What God has willed, and Praise be to God (for having willed it). Future, present, and past- that just about covers it all.
The late Anglican missionary and Bishop of Jerusalem Kenneth Cragg saw parallels between Islam and Christianity that he found helpful for mutual understanding when talking to Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad is like John the Baptist, the herald of God’s arrival; Jesus is like the Quran, the manifestation of God on Earth; Christmas is like Ramadan, the exact time when God was made manifest; and the memorization of the Quran is like the taking of holy communion, the human ingestion of God. That’s stretching it too far, an Italian Catholic missionary in Syria once told me. He later disappeared in the war and is presumed dead, probably killed by fanatical Islamists.
I did learn one helpful word in Arabic concerning Islamic theology, Ikhwaniyya, brotherhood, which came in handy once when KhairAllah scolded Adam Hamid for suddenly refusing to share the common food dish with me and David because we were Christians. After you have ridden beside them, and slept beside them, and shared their water, and shared their jokes…now you decide they are not worthy of eating with you? he asked Adam before beating him with a camel whip. Long live ikhwaniyya, I thought. The Comboni Brothers would have agreed.