Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus

Product Description
Personal friendships with Somali Muslims overcome the prejudices and expand the faith of a typical American Evangelical Christian living in the Horn of Africa.
When Rachel Pieh Jones moved from Minnesota to rural Somalia with her husband and twin toddlers eighteen years ago, she was secure in a faith that defined who was right and who was wrong, who was saved and who needed saving. She had been taught that Islam was evil, full of lies and darkness, and that the world would be better without it.
Luckily, locals show compassion for this blundering outsider who can’t keep her headscarf on or her toddlers from tripping over AK-47s. After the murder of several foreigners forces them to evacuate, the Joneses resettle in nearby Djibouti.
Jones recounts, often entertainingly, the personal encounters and growing friendships that gradually dismantle her unspoken fears and prejudices and deepen her appreciation for Islam. Unexpectedly, along the way she also gains a far richer understanding of her own Christian faith. Grouping her stories around the five pillars of Islam – creed, prayer, fasting, giving, and pilgrimage – Jones shows how her Muslim friends’ devotion to these pillars leads her to rediscover ancient Christian practices her own religious tradition has lost or neglected.
Jones brings the reader along as she reexamines her assumptions about faith and God through the lens of Islam and Somali culture. Are God and Allah the same? What happens when one’s ideas about God and the Bible crumble and the only people around are Muslims? What happens is that she discovers that Jesus is more generous, daring, and loving than she ever imagined.
Review
Besides being an enjoyable read, it is a timely reminder for all of us to do all we can to remove prejudicial barriers and build bridges between different faiths. —
Dr. Simon Ross Valentine,
Church Times
, UK
As committed Christians and American expatriates living in East Africa, Jones and her family have built a life on the borders of one of the most fractious relationships in human history: Islam and Christianity. . . She relates her story without universalizing her experience, but we can learn much from her example. —
Christianity Today
As an American raised in a Muslim country, I have waited for a book like Pillars all my adult life, a personal book that discovers similarities and honors differences between Christianity and Islam, a book that, pillar by pillar, builds bridges of greater understanding across what are often chasms of disconnect. Read and savor this book, which shows what can happen when we connect rather than collide.
--Marilyn R. Gardner, author of
Between Worlds: Essays on Culture & Belonging
This is a book Christians and non-Christians alike can relate to: its core message is one of knowing how to admit you are wrong and learn from your mistakes, while strengthening friendships. —
Booklist
This is not a book for those interested in polemics against Islam. Jones takes us into the lived experience of Muslims in the Horn of Africa and what a real engagement with them can be like with risk, affection, difference, and real learning. We also should remember her learning journey began with the Somali refugees in Minnesota. Many of us have Muslim neighbors or work colleagues or health care providers. This is a valuable book both for its exploration of Islam, but also for its model of humble, open dialogue, willing to make mistakes and take risks, to welcome and be welcomed. And it points to what can happen as we engage those of another faith. We not only learn about their faith; we rediscover our own. —
Bob Trube
In this charming memoir, Rachel Pieh Jones (
Stronger than Death), an expat American writer living in Djibouti, recounts her experiences moving from Minnesota to the horn of Africa when her husband took a professorship there, showing readers how her time in Muslim regions freed her from Islamophobic prejudice a