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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John D'Lin. And we are now in part three of a four part series with the Interfaith Amigos.

If you're listening in order, you've already listened to Pastor Don McKinsey, Minister of the United Church of Christ. Then if you listen next, you listen to Rabbi Ted Falcon, and ordained a reform rabbi.

And now we are pleased to hear. I don't want to say the third because that means you're behind the other two, but.

I'm sorry, Imam Jamal Rakhman. Is that right? Yes, yes, we'll sit. Jamal Rakhman is a popular speaker on Islam, Sufi spirituality and interfaith relations.

He's been featured in the New York Times, CBS News, BBC and NPR. He is the co founder of Muslim Sufi Ministers. Is it Muslim Sufi Ministry?

Minister, Minister at Seattle's Interfaith Community Sanctuary. And he's at the faculty at Seattle University.

Imam Jamal, welcome to Mormon Stories. I'm delighted to be on your program, John.

Thank you. So how do I address you? Imam or Jamal or what? Just Jamal Jamal. Okay. All right. Yes.

So Jamal, I interviewed Pastor Don and Rabbi Ted and we had some wonderful conversations and I'll just start with you like I started with them.

Mormonism, the church, the religious tradition that I hail from is a relatively new religion. I kind of joked with with the others that you know it's hard to find a religion older than Judaism.

And then you know next comes Christianity and then next comes Islam. You guys are kind of the big kids on the block and you've been around quite a long time.

And to some extent, I think there's much that a new religion can learn or more importantly that religious people engaged in a new religious tradition can learn from those kind of our big brothers, so to speak.

So I'll be asking you questions about Islam because I think there's a lot that we need to learn about your faith tradition, but I also might bring it back to Mormonism occasionally and try and see if you can help us learn more about us through your experiences. How does that sound?

Always a two way street we learn from each other and one another. Absolutely.

Okay. All right. Beautiful. So let's begin with your tradition.

Tell us about the founding of Islam. Is there any extent to which it's like Christianity where it had a predecessor in Judaism or does Islam sort of emerge from from I don't want to say nothing, but sort of from the dust, so to speak.

No, you know, we are a Abrahamic faith, which means that we recognize Abraham as the founding father.

So you might say that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, these are as the Quran says people of the book and we are all cousins of the same family, the same Abrahamic family, except that.

As you know, it's a very, very, very dysfunctional family. And we share many, many, many points of similarities and a lot of the differences really comes from what we might call institutional differences.

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