But What about Ishmael

But What about Ishmael?
Genesis 17: 20-27

When my sister and I were young children, our parents had a hard time making ends meet on my father’s wages as a factory worker. My father was not keen on my mother going out to work while we were small, and eventually they decided to sell up and move to take over a mom-and-pop store in another part of the city where my mother could look after the store during the day while my father kept his factory job. It was the time when Britain was encouraging immigration from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, and our part of the city became multicultural. We soon had people from Jamaica and Pakistan coming into the store looking for exotic foods such as rice (we knew rice only as something from which you made rice pudding for dessert). Although the people from Jamaica were Christian, they had a hard time fitting in because British churches were not very welcoming to them, but that is another story. The people from Pakistan raised quite different questions because they were Muslims. Eventually the city became the location of one of the first and largest purpose-built mosques in Western Europe, with a big sign outside that always makes me smile at its cleverness and chutzpah: “Read Al-Qur’an, the Last Testament.” What were we as British Christians to make of people from the Indian subcontinent who transformed British cuisine but also transformed British religion? It was decades before I realized that the story of Ishmael provides part of the answer. Islam traces its history back to Abraham and Ishmael. It is respectful of the stories in Genesis, though it assumes that really Ishmael was the son who counted...