The panicked cry of the young man startled me. “Keep it away from me!” he yelled. I glanced up just in time to see him diving behind the back of my car. Was it a snake, a scorpion or some other venomous creature? Then I caught a glimpse of it. It was big—at least up to my knee—very hairy, had big teeth and was running toward us.

“Don’t let that dog lick me!” my friend screamed as we hurriedly opened the car door, and he scrambled into the back seat.

Why the panic? Was my friend afraid of catching some disease from dog saliva? Sort of. He was afraid of dusah.

Dusah is our people’s word for sin, and it comes in all shapes and sizes. Dusah can come from a dog’s saliva getting on your clothes or skin. Dusah can come from drinking alcohol. Dusah can come from taking birth-control medicine. Dusah can come from taking another man’s wife or from eating food prepared by a woman during her menstrual cycle. Dusah can come from eating beef that was sitting next to pork. Dusah can come from stealing or killing. The list goes on.
In essence, dusah is breaking Islamic law. In the Muslim’s mind, dusah comes about because people forget to remind themselves of that law.

The remedy for dusah? More faithful attendance at the Mosque, more memorizing of the Quran and a greater care in avoiding dusah in the future. Our people have a keen sense of dusah, and they shun it like the plague.

Haram is another term that is akin to dusah and is often interchangeable with it. In our people’s minds, haram means unclean. Pork is haram, a woman during her menstrual cycle is haram, and sexual relations with someone other than your spouse will make you haram.

One of my friends confided in me that, when he comes home from working in the provincial capital, his wife always asks him if he is haram. Many of his coworkers play around with women while there.

The common denominator with dusah and haram is that they are external. They are about external actions. If one does right things and refrains from doing wrong things, then one can be Halal or free from Dusah.

Good deeds counteract dusah. One day, Hope felt impressed to take some fruit and vitamins to a woman who has been bleeding for the past two years. As Hope sat on a bed beside her, the elderly mother exclaimed, “Your family is earning a lot of merit!”

“Why is that?” Hope asked.

“Because you give lots of medicine to people, and you take many sick people to the hospital.”
With these concepts of dusah, haram and earning merit, it is no wonder that most of the religious questions my friends pepper me with revolve around externals. “Do you eat pigs? How many wives are you allowed? How many times a day do you pray? Do you drink alcohol? Do you refrain from these things because of your religious law?”
As I was riding my motorcycle through a large village just up the road from ours, I passed by a small restaurant where some of my friends were drinking tea. They caught my attention and called me over. In typical fashion, the questions began flying—slightly deeper than normal, but still in the superficial realm. “Do you bow down to statues? Do you believe Mary was God’s wife?” The quiz went on.

After I assured them that we do not use images in our worship and that Mary was not God’s wife, the conversation turned to alcohol. “We don’t drink alcohol or smoke because we belong to God, and we want to keep our bodies clean for Him,” I explained. That a person would not drink or smoke because he belonged to God and not simply because it is a religious law seemed a new thought to them.

This past Sabbath, Abner, one of our Muslim friends, asked if he could come to our little house church. “Of course,” I replied.

As we sat down and opened up our Bibles and Sabbath-School quarterly, I noticed the lesson was about sin. “Praise the Lord!” I thought to myself.

As the lesson was ending, I asked the teacher if I could say a few words. I sent up a silent prayer and then began. “In Jesus’ time, the Jewish leaders saw sin as not following their external laws. To them, dirty hands were more offensive than having sin in your heart. They thought that, if the outward actions were good, God would be happy. God sent Jesus to show us the true way. Jesus said in Matthew 23 that the religious leaders were like beautiful cups on the outside but filthy on the inside. If they would only make the inside of the cup clean first, then the outside would be clean also.”

I glanced over at Abner. It was as though a light bulb had turned on over his head. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “And if you put clean water into a dirty cup, it makes the water dirty also!” These are deep thoughts for a Muslim who, from his childhood, has been taught that being holy and being sinful is all external.

Pray that God will impress these dear people to look beyond the externals to the internal. Beyond Dusah to the Savior.

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