The Optimistic Muslim: David Liepert and the “Faith of Life” Network

Over the last several months, I’ve corresponded with David Liepert, a Calgary anesthesiologist and father of four. His new book, Me and You: Beyond Belief, Toether: A Path to Peace All Our Faiths Can Share, tells the story of his conversion from Christianity to Islam, and all the insight he gained along the way. He looks deeply into the Bible and the Qur’an and argues: “Our holy books agree: From God’s perspective, we start off the same and become better by doing good and living well.”

Personally, I don’t think scripture and theology matter much in the current “Islam vs. the West” situation; I think it’s much more to do with politics. So Liepert’s observations that the Abrahamic scriptures have so much in common and why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along — well, they don’t grab me. But Liepert is not jaded in that way, and I think that is where his value lies.

Yesterday, Liepert described to me how he became a Muslim. First, he talked about his life as a Christian:

I can’t remember a time I didn’t feel I served God, or didn’t feel I had a specific personal relationship with God. There was a time, though, that I stepped so far into Christian doctrine that it affected that relationship and required me to come to Islam. Up to that point, I listened to and followed Jesus, but I didn’t worship him — I did not embrace that concept of the Trinity. I think if you believe that doctrine in the wrong way, you can believe you have power over God [i.e. that you can ensure your passage to heaven.] It’s the same problem the suicide bombers have. They blow themselves up believing they have an immediate pass to heaven. You can’t try to gain control over God.

He said he first learned about Islam in his 30s, while experiencing some “significant tragedies” in his life:

I discovered the people around me who were supporting me at that time just happened to be Muslim. I decided to prove to them that the Bible supported Christianity and use the Qur’an to show them that it, too, led to the path of Christianity. Instead exactly opposite happened. I discovered the two books had the same message, a message of submission, of trust and obedience.

But it wasn’t all smooth-going for Liepert. Becoming Muslim, he said, was in some ways “profoundly terrifying:”

I read the Qur’an, and it described my faith exactly. But there were aspects of Muslim practice I found noxious, particularly the treatment of women. There’s an ayat [verse] that seems to allow men to beat their wives. And then there is the verse about killing enemies wherever you find them. But when I looked at these verses in the context of the Sunnah — the life of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him — that completely changed the meaning of the verses into something wonderful.

Liepert then shared the common apologetic readings of those verses: that the verse about husbands and wives in fact restricted men’s power over women, and that when it came to warfare, the Prophet only led his men into battle when it was a matter of self-defense, and even then he was restrained. Back on the women question, Liepert shared the view often heard among mainstream Muslims that men and women have unique and distinct roles. This language is often translates into practice as “a woman’s place is at home, caring for the family.” But Liepert didn’t go that route. He talked about his relationship with his wife, who is also a doctor:

I serve God by caring for my wife, and she serves God by caring for me. I’m not subservient to her, and she is not subservient to me.

That view — that marriage is an equal partnership — is actually quite a radical break from mainstream Muslim interpretation, which usually conceives of the man as the head of the household and the leader of the family. So this is what I find amazing about Liepert: On the face of it, he accepts conventional Muslim explanations of problematic aspects of the religion, but in the very next sentence, he will put a radical spin on things. Sometimes I wonder if he is aware of how much some other Muslims would disagree with him. For example, in his book, he writes:

Muslims have been fighting over the [meaning of] the Quran for the last thousand years…Fighting over the path has driven us so far from it that many of us don’t even recognize it anymore.

Liepert implicitly criticizes the strict adherence to details of the religion developed by scholars in the centuries after the death of the Prophet, and he criticizes Muslims for coming close to worshiping the idea of their religion rather than God Himself. If Liepert brought some of these observations down to a detailed level — he might perhaps argue, for example, that headcovering for women is not mandatory — they would cause considerable controversy.

And Liepert does not work alone. He is founding director of the Faith of Life Network, which seems to have a mildly progressive approach to “educating, informing and engaging in dialogue within the Muslim community and building bridges with society as a whole, in order to address the negative and inaccurate perceptions of Islam and Muslims.” The key phrase there might be “engaging in dialogue within the Muslim community” — therefore recognizing that Muslims have a big role to play in building bridges with other civic and religious groups. The network publishes its own magazine, which you can read here in PDF form. The spiritual leader behind the group is Imam Hamid Slimi, who I know little about, but who seems like a pretty interesting guy.

I started out talking about David Liepert’s value, and here’s how I see it: Orthodox Muslims who work from within the mainstream Muslim community have the greatest chance of transforming the Muslim community. I see this important work being done by bloggers like Tariq Nelson and even, to some extent, in the leadership of Ingrid Mattson, who is currently president of ISNA, the largest umbrella organization of Muslims in North America. So Mr. Liepert, carry on — You have an optimism and lack of bitterness that not everyone shares. I hope it will do some good.