Mark Siljander
speaker
279 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mark Siljander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Right, right.
So going back to this thought about the begotten, we spoke about earlier that the Bible says that the Holy Spirit was breathed into Mary by God, who is a virgin, and the sinless Messiah was born. Well, the Quran says precisely the same thing, that God, Allah, breathed into Mary's, a virgin, womb and produced Isa, Jesus, a perfect, Zakiya, perfect, unblemished Mashiach, Messiah.
And I thought, well, what's the difference? We call him son, our term is son of God, and the Muslims are all hung up on that. They shouldn't be because in their mind, this is the critical point. And here's the common ground. You could build with Gaddafi, Omar al-Bashir, or your neighbor.
that the common ground is that he was born supernaturally, and the Son of God construct is ubiquitous throughout the Old Testament. It's unique. Anyone, any being conceived or breathed by Yahweh, including the angels... They were called the sons of God. Look down on the women in Genesis 6 and say, aren't they beautiful? And created the Nephilim. Well, they are called sons of God.
Even high priests were called sons of God. You see that in the story of Job, too. Yeah, and Job as well. So what I'm saying, the notion of son of God should not be so offensive to the Muslims. The point is, what do we mean by that? We mean that God, Yahweh, blew his... is Holy Spirit into Mary. And that's precisely what the Quran says. The stories are almost identical and even linguistically.
The Arabic and is the Hebrew. See the sounds of similarities? Aloha is God in Hebrew. Allah is what Jesus himself used in his vernacular Aramaic and Allah, Allah Arabic, Allah Aramaic, Aloha Hebrew. So that similarity was stunning because most of my Christian friends say Allah is not the God of the Bible. Right. Well, I said, etymologically, it is the same God, at least in terms of title.
Now, how one views God, maybe through their lenses, is different. There are 56,000, give or take, sects and denominations of Christianity all over the world, hair-splitting every little theological difference here. But I would say that there are more dynamic synergies between the Quran and the Bible.
I'm not saying so much Islam and Christianity, because they have their history, dogmas, culture, and politics.
But you mean in terms of the texts?
Yes, interpretations. But the text in Aramaic, in the New Testament, the text of the Quran in Arabic, merge much more smoothly and consistently than would an Islamic imam debating a Christian pastor.
Is it reasonable? There's two pathways we could walk down now. We could continue to pick up the biographical story, let's say, that begins with your interactions with the Palestinians. Let's do that. Let's do that. I have a very troublesome question to ask you as well, but I'll forestall that for the time being. So tell me what happens after you... start to make contact with the Palestinians.
Now, you've pointed out that what you were doing was like a constituency outreach and the beginnings of an investigation into a culture that you had regarded with enmity and as foreign, and that there was an exhilarating aspect to that, but there was something deeper driving it, which was the search for profound commonalities. Like, my sense is that with regards to the Islamic world, unless we
we meaning Christians, Jews and Muslims concentrate on what we have in common and work out a framework for collaboration and fair competition that the alternative is something like capitulation. It's always the alternative to negotiation, capitulation or war. And those are both dreadful alternatives.
And so it seems to me that we should at least pray, hope and pray that there's more that unites us than there is that divides us because otherwise it's gonna be a real brutal time. And the Abraham Accords seem to be a real positive move in that direction, especially with regards to the UAE's attempt to initiate this tri-faith process. Okay, and obviously that idea gripped you.
Okay, now you're dealing with the Palestinians. What happens? What do you realize in consequence of that? And what happens next?
I realize what the Abrahamic Accords are missing, all the interfaith groups are missing, what our State Department and our own government is missing. It's what I would call the fifth track of engagement, which is a missing dimension in statecraft. And that is not speaking about religion or even spirituality, but rather since especially Muslims are deeply spiritual people.
And they respect and honor one who brings faith to them in a way that's respectful.
So I did a talk with a pretty radical Muslim character in the UK, Muhammad Hijab. I listened to it. Yeah, well, you know, 7 million people have watched that, and most of them were Muslim. And the responses are very interesting, because there's a number of Hijab's acolytes, you might say, who are...
making comments, but the typical comment is, from the Muslim side is, we're so glad and relieved that a conversation like this is happening and is possible. And like, there was a lot of dissent amongst my team about me going to speak with Muhammad Hijab. And so,
like even five minutes before we were in the car on the way there, there were people from my team calling me and saying, you shouldn't do this, this isn't a good idea. But it turned out to be a good idea because the conversation struck a chord and did indicate that the kind of dialogue that you are describing is not only possible but necessary and welcome, especially on the Muslim side.
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