Transforming friendship : Christian-Muslim Friendship and Religious Change

Abstract

This study takes as its point of departure the need for more research into the role of friendship in interaction and understanding across religious differences. More specifically, its main aim is to provide an empirical study and a theoretical analysis of how interfaith friendship between Christians and Muslims has impacted their experienced changes in relation to their views on, understanding of and attitudes to religious faith and practices. My qualitative data consists of transcribed 16 semi-structural interviews, where eight Christian and eight Muslim respondents in the southern part of Norway told me about their shared interfaith friendships. In my study I give in-depth and thick descriptions of each interview, and I use a hermeneutical-phenomenological method of analysis where I use perspectives on change to theoretically interpret my material. My findings show that earlier empirical research on interfaith friendship is confirmed, nuanced and elaborated. The interfaith friendships have provided the respondents with the opportunity to get closer to the religious other through dialogues and prolonged observation of their religious practices, that in turn have influenced their views on religious matters. As far as changes in the way respondents view their own faith are concerned, interfaith friendship encouraged a strengthening of the subjects’ own religious awareness. The friendship made the respondents reflect on how they practised their faith in terms of moral conduct, witness and worship. When it comes to views on the other religion, the findings show that interfaith friendship helped the respondents to differentiate between individual Muslims or Christians, respectively. In many cases this differentiation had an inherent corrective effect that encouraged a more positive understanding of the other religion, and of the religious other friend as a religious practitioner. Where changes in opinions on the relationship between Christianity and Islam are concerned, interfaith friendship lead all the respondents to acknowledge common religious ground, where the potentially negative influence of religious difference was discouraged. The respondents also demonstrated a religiously based creativity that helped to strengthen and to justify their interfaith friendship. The findings in relation to the issue of conversion show that all the Christian respondents struggled with combining friendship with an ulterior motive of wanting to convert the other, while the issue did not appear to be as important for the Muslim respondents. Interfaith friendship encouraged the respondents to come up with various strategies that replaced uncompromising and urgent efforts to convert the other with other subtler methods. In a wider sense, the findings of this study on how interfaith friendship has helped respondents change their views on religion may provide important tools for preparing and improving the ground for both the construction of interfaith relationships in a multireligious society and for efforts to enter or engage in interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims.