Through whose eyes do you see believers of Islam? Through the eyes of an adversary? Or do you see them through the eyes of a sibling?

You see, Christians and Muslims have a great deal in common. In fact, together with Judaism, all students of world religions put Jews, Christians and Muslims together in the same category. We are referred to as the “Abrahamic” faiths. Each of our faiths considers Abraham to be our spiritual forefather. We all reach back to him and his worship of the one God as a fundamental element of our religion.

So, do you consider yourself somehow related to Muslims? Are we siblings in the faith? Or are we arch enemies in a quest for global domination? Our confusion over this issue is made worse by the current state of our global society. Our nation's state system that encourages deep divisions between national ideologies doesn’t help us feel close to our Jewish and Islamic siblings.

For instance, our western, Judeo-Christian heritage encouraged a separation of church and state. From this perspective, we eventually learned to live with sacrilegious people who would do something as stupid as print cartoons of sacred religious figures. Islamic nations do not have our system of separation of church and state, nor our sense of sacred/secular divide to life and society.

The media doesn’t help much either. Sometimes the media itself whips up conflict among us so they can sell more papers, TV ads and magazines. Do you suppose, for instance, that we should believe everything we see in the media regarding Seventh-day Adventists? If we can’t imagine the media getting it right with respect to our faith, why would we imagine that everything they report about Muslims is accurate?

So, through whose eyes do you see Muslims? Through the eyes of a sibling hoping to live peaceably together in our modern global society? Or through the eyes of an arch enemy determined to subdue and obliterate the other?

Let’s look for a moment through the eyes of siblings; the eyes of Isaac and Ishmael, sons of Abraham. Perhaps you remember the stories of Abraham’s family in the book of Genesis. Ishmael was born first and God assured Abraham that he would bless Ishmael (Genesis 17:20). Indeed he did. Over one billion Muslims trace their families and religion back to Ishmael.

Fourteen years later, Abraham had another child—the child of God’s promise—Isaac. Not long after Isaac’s birth, Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, were sent away by Abraham because Sarah's jealousy. But notice what Genesis 25:9 tells us about these two brothers some 75 years later. We don’t know what sort of interaction they may have had during the intervening years, but when Abraham died, Scripture says, “Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”

Is there any chance that the descendants of these two great men could manage to come together again, in our time?