God Intervenes Between A Person And Their Heart: Key Lessons from the Prophets is a journey in listening, reflecting, and answering the call of faith, inspired by the life experiences that challenged me, and questions that I had to work through for myself and others.
The stories of the Muslim prophets are generally used for legalistic purposes, either to support Muslims or to tear them down. I would like us to take a step back from these dos and don'ts and to see the Muslim prophets as benchmarks or a mirror devoid of imperfection that can help us human beings see our various imperfections and reflect on our human struggles, to see and question afresh.
There are many sections about the lives of the prophets and how their stories connect to the contemporary world. I hope to make the prophets relatable to the readers by sharing stories of how they embraced and faced their all-too-human struggles.
In this project, it's important for us to connect all our wounds together: The wounds of the prophets; the wounds of the Native Americans; the wounds of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism; the wounds of the disabled; the wounds of domestic violence. We have to recognize and seek out the wounds in our society, both as the oppressed and as the privileged, and sometimes as both. The prophets' stories can help us see into this complex landscape, and help us see how coexistence, too, is a shared, universal experience.
The book opens with the anger of the oppressed and blends into the stories of Adam and Satan, as the story of humanity begins with repentance and self-criticism, a state that doesn't have to feel harsh or depressing, but instead can feel comfortable and wholly human.
The questions of love and projection, truth and wisdom, power and oppression are not just stories from the Torah, Bible, or Qur'an: They are things that each one of us struggles to understand. By being able to connect to the shared cultural history, and the shared stories of these prophets, we can connect to each other.
The stories of the Prophets are connective tissue, and the Prophets are connective figures, helping connect Muslims with themselves, Muslims with each other, and Muslims with other groups.
Fadwa Wazwaz was born into a family of 10 children in Jerusalem, Palestine. A mother of one daughter, she is a Palestinian Muslim American who was raised in Chicago, Illinois, who began her college years at Knoxville, Tennessee, and who graduated from the University of Minnesota. She has used her time in Minnesota to help build and strengthen the United States' Muslim communities, as well as those communities' ties to other marginalized groups. She co-founded an educational outreach organization, through which she gave talks to local groups, dispelling negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. She has also been trained in Restorative Justice at the Center for Spirituality and Healing and has given workshops to social workers on how to work effectively with youth and Muslim patients. In 2003, she was a community columnist for the Pioneer Press. In 2006, she helped start up a civil rights organization, through which she mentored young leaders. From 2008 to 2009, she was a policy fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and, in 2009, she started as a blogger for the Star Tribune and worked on helping Minnesotans understand Islam and Muslims. Also in 2009, she and her siblings began a new journey, taking care of their mother, who had suffered a major stroke. In 2015, she formally began work on this book, bringing together writings from over the past twenty years. Wazwaz is a social commentator on issues that affect Muslim communities, Palestinian affairs, faith and values, coexistence, and ethics. She currently blogs at EngageMN.com.
