My name is Abdullah DeLancey.  I am Canadian and I am employed as a Patient Service Worker at the local hospital. […] I was a Protestant Christian for all of my life.

My family brought me up in the Pentecostal Church until I was an adult at which time I moved to a fundamental Independent Baptist Church.

As a faithful Christian I was very involved at Church, giving lectures for the Adult Sunday School and other duties.  I was eventually elected as the Deacon of the Church.  I really wanted to further my dedication to God and decided to pursue a career as a Minister.

I was awarded a scholarship to help me start taking a degree in Divinity.  My goal was to be a Pastor of a Church or a Missionary.  […]

I thought it best to look at Christianity critically and ask some very serious questions about my faith.  I questioned the Trinity, why God would need a son, and why the human sacrifice of Jesus, as stated in the Bible, was needed to provide me with forgiveness.

I questioned the Christian belief of how all the righteous people in the Old Testament were “saved” and in heaven if Jesus wasn’t even born yet. […]

Realizing that I had always accepted Christianity, with blind faith for my entire life and never had questioned it, was perplexing to me.  How could I have not realized this before?

I could not find the answers in the Bible.  Once I realized that the Trinity was a myth and that God is powerful enough to “save” someone without the need for help from a son or anyone or anything else.  Things changed.  […]

I left the Church for good and my wife dutifully left with me, as she was having trouble accepting Christianity too.  This was the start of my spiritual journey.  I was now without a religion but believed in a God.

This was a very hard time for me and my family as Christianity was all we had ever known.  I had to search for the truth.  I began studying various religions and found them as false one after another.  Until, I heard about Islam.

Islam!!!  What was that? As far as I could remember, I had never known a Muslim and Islam was not heard or spoken of “as a faith” in my part of Canada.  Unless, of course, it was news stories talking bad about Islam. […]

But then I started to read a little about Islam.  Then, I kept reading a little more.  Then, I read the Quran.  This wonderful revelation of truth changed my life forever.  […]

I discovered the nearest mosque was about 100 miles away from my city.  So I promptly loaded the family van and drove my family to this mosque.  […] I asked myself, was I even allowed in the mosque because I wasn’t an Arab or a Muslim?

However, after arriving at the mosque, I quickly realized I had nothing to fear.  I was greeted by the Imam and the Muslims with a most warm greeting.  I found them very nice.  Nothing like the bad things the news always said about Muslims.

[…] After studying I was in shock.  How could I have been a Christian for so long and never heard the truth? I now believed in Islam.  I knew it and I wanted to convert.

I was put in contact with the small Muslim community in my city.  […]  Just before Friday prayer started and with most of the local Muslim Community present as witness; I testified that “La illaha ill Allah, Muhammadur Rasul Allah” (There is no God but Allah, Muhammad (PBUH&HP) is the Messenger of Allah).  I was now a Muslim.  It was the best day of my life.  I love Islam and have peace now.

Difficult times have come since I became a Muslim.  When people started realizing I was now a Muslim they would shun me or laugh at me, most of our old Christian friends have never talked to us again.  My parents have all but disowned me.

I love being a Muslim and it doesn’t matter if some of my fellow Canadians think of me as odd for becoming a Muslim.  Why? The reason is that I alone, am the one that will have to answer to God after my death. […]

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Two Muslim boys in Switzerland have declined, on religious grounds, to handshake with their female teachers. The school district says Swiss custom should override religion and is now threatening to fine the parents of the boys $5,000 if the boys continue to refuse to comply.

Some years ago, I worked with a male Muslim intern who refused to shake my hand for religious reasons. The experience challenged me to think more deeply about tolerance and diversity, and I think the lessons I learned are worth sharing.

In the summer of 2010, as Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ, I hired my first Muslim intern, a young man named Muhammad. I was eager to move beyond studying Islam from a distance and to develop the project into an opportunity for Muslim and non-Muslim Americans to collaborate together as partners on issues of shared concern.

I was impressed by Muhammad’s resume, which included a rigorous education at an excellent college that left him just as prepared to attend graduate school in Islamic studies or medical school (he has since done both). We had never met in person, as the internship had been arranged via e-mail. But on paper, he sure seemed like a rising star.

The first thing that happened when he arrived in Princeton to start his internship was that he refused to shake my hand. The shock was my initial response. I tried to hide how stunned I was, but it was difficult. He was absolutely gracious in declining. I felt angry when he refused to shake my hand just because I am female, but it was hard to be angry at someone who was so kind. It wasn’t even clear to me what or who the object of my confused anger was. He explained that it was due to his religious beliefs that he does not shake women’s hands. Was I, who had hired this intern to help with religious freedom work, going to reject his freedom to follow his religious beliefs?

I suppressed how baffled and worried I felt. I moved right along as if nothing had happened. I welcomed him to the Witherspoon Institute and began introducing him to the work we would be doing that summer. But inside, my head and heart were spinning.

I have zero patience—I mean zero—for misogyny. I’ve had boys in Yemen throw stones at me and another woman. I’ve been treated like a dangerous toxic substance by a Catholic priest who seemed to wish desperately that women just didn’t exist. “Misogyny” is a word I don’t use lightly, but there are times when it is the appropriate descriptor of some men’s attitudes. I could not help but wonder: was misogyny what I was experiencing? What I would be in all summer long?

Yet, because I recognized that I did not understand why this young man refused to shake my hand, I did not jump to conclusions. Instead, I took a “wait-and-see” approach. He was an American. A kid from the Jersey shore. His refusal was religious, not cultural. I realized that I knew almost nothing about this young man. Who was I to judge him? Moreover, I badly needed an assistant at work and had prepared a mighty long to-do list for him. I knew we needed to work together in a spirit of collaboration to get through the busy summer ahead. An antagonistic relationship seemed like it would only get in the way. I swallowed my fears and acted as nothing had happened.

But something had happened: my assumptions about my own tolerance had been jolted with a radical challenge. Was I tolerant enough and sufficiently appreciative of diversity—particularly of religious diversity—to live and let live, even if it made me feel slighted?

That summer with Muhammed, along with subsequent collaboration at the Witherspoon Institute with Orthodox Jewish men who did not shake women’s hands, taught me many lessons.

Lesson one: I was reminded concretely of something I knew abstractly: namely, that Muslims are diverse. This young man was from a particular interpretive school of Shia Islam with which I was not very familiar. In over twenty years of academic studies and professional work related to Islam, I had never met a Muslim who, for religious reasons, would not shake a woman’s hand. Well, here was one. And then I met Orthodox Jewish men who would not shake my hand. And here too I was reminded: Jews are diverse. Moreover, for religious reasons, some Muslim women and some Orthodox Jewish women do not shake men’s hands. Issues of modesty, chastity, and ritual purity can involve both men and women; this is not just an issue of male attitudes toward women.

Lesson two: the reasons some religious men do not have social physical contact with women outside of their direct families should not always be reduced to misogyny. Where there is actual misogyny, it is something to be taken seriously. But painting all males with a broad brush is neither fair nor accurate. Men should be given the opportunity to speak for themselves, to explain their own thoughts, intentions, and consciences.

Lesson three: refusal to have physical contact with women is not necessarily equivalent to a refusal to recognize that women have professional abilities. This intern had absolutely no problem having a woman as his boss that summer. He was eager to assist me, and he always listened attentively to directions I gave him. He consistently did an excellent job carrying out the tasks I assigned to him.

Lesson four: refusal to have physical contact with women is not necessarily equivalent to a refusal to recognize that women have intellectual abilities. That summer, starting from that very first day, this intern and I had fantastic discussions about some of the greatest minds in Muslim intellectual history. He asked me lots of questions about my dissertation and treated me as a person from whom he thought he might learn something. He gave me brilliant reading recommendations in modern Islamic theology, all of them profound and challenging sources. He never treated me as if he thought I was stupid. Never.

Muhammad was a fantastic intern. We were lucky to have him work with us that summer at the Witherspoon Institute. He was a delightful colleague for all of us at the Institute and, significantly, he treated all the women with respect.

While I do not know the particular reasons for the refusal of the two Syrian boys in Switzerland to shake women’s hands, I can’t help but think of my intern Muhammad. After his internship, he went on to do a Master’s Degree at Harvard in Islamic theology, and now he is in medical school preparing to serve others in society as a doctor. As an American, I feel my country is lucky to have such a talented man, who values public service, as a citizen. If these two boys are even half as talented and kind as Muhammad, the loss will be Switzerland’s if this family cannot stay there.

I can’t say that I genuinely understand why Muhammad won’t shake women’s hands, but having to live without fully understanding is something that I think comes with the territory of genuine diversity. Muhammad allows me the freedom to shake the hands of men who choose to partake of this cultural practice, and I allow him the freedom not to.

The principle of religious freedom demands that we allow space in our society for the difference. Genuine tolerance allows for the difference. Of course, this is something quite different from trying to pass off the imposition of the cultural norms of those who are in power as “tolerance” simply by labeling it so. I hope that the Swiss government is able to tell the difference between the two—not only for the sake of those boys and their families but for the sake of their own society.

Jennifer S. Bryson, PhD, is Director of Operations and Development at the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom in Washington, DC.

Refrences:

1. Handshakes, Islam, and Religious Tolerance in the West