“This ain’t a song about bottles in the club / This is about a role model filled with love. / A teacher, a preacher, with guidance from above.” So begins the rap song “I Believe in Jesus” by Mo Sabri, a Muslim from Johnson City, Tennesee.

Sabri introduces the song’s music video with:

The angels said, ‘O Mary, indeed God gives you good tidings of a word from Him, whose name shall be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary.’ (Quran 3:45)

Here’s a hip video, by a nice young gentleman wearing a starched shirt and a tie, about a radical commitment to following Jesus with one’s life, not just in words. Sabri’s isn’t a mushy attempt to paint Jesus as just a “nice guy” like the rest of us.

Instead Sabri sings about human weakness and sin, and our need for Jesus. He identifies Jesus as:

The son of a virgin, they say it is illogical,

probably improbable, but God made it possible.

Gabriel told Mary that her son would be phenomenal,

His voice was always audible, the opposite of prodigal,

He overcame the obstacles, people attacking him.

He was a walking hospital, with heathen he was compassionate.

He healed the sick, raised the dead. Shout out to Lazarus.

I’m talkin’ about Jesus of Nazareth.

Are there other Muslims who chant about beheading Christians? Yep. But they’re not the whole story. Listen to what Mo Sabri has to say, what he sings. He is part of the story of what it means to be Muslim today, and out of his faith he is engaging his culture to offer a way forward which is more beautiful than “bottles in the club,” namely one led by “guidance from above.”

The video makes no claim Christians and Muslims should or even could gloss over our differences about who Jesus is. But he highlights a shared belief that Jesus came, divinely, to teach us radical love. Sabri’s music video “I Believe in Jesus” ends with a quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.”

This week a group of American Muslims has launched a campaign called “My Jihad.” They are asking, “My Jihad Is…What’s Yours?” Their mission is “taking back Islam from Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists alike.” They are placing their ads on buses, starting in a few major American cities, and spreading their message through social media.

Their campaign “seeks to share the proper meaning of Jihad as believed and practiced by the majority of Muslims.” They define jihad as: “An Islamic concept that means to struggle against barriers and odds in search of a better place. Jihad requires faith, courage, and perseverance.” In the About section of their website they further explain, “Jihad is a personal commitment to service, patience, determination, and taking the higher road, as such, it tasks us with confronting our own weaknesses, vices, and shortcomings; it is about taking personal responsibility.”

They launched the campaign this week in Chicago, where the side of a bus now proclaims, My jihad is making friends across the aisle, what’s yours? featuring warm pictures of very different individuals, presumably Muslims and non-Muslims, as friends.

Yesterday the My Jihad Public Education Campaign on Facebook page posted advice, “soul food,” for pursuing “jihad al-nafs,” a spiritual jihad or jihad of the soul. They recommended it should include six components: “1) silence, 2) isolation, 3) fasting, 4) night prayer, 5) thikr, 6) undo the defects of our soul (anger, envy, arrogance),” with “thikr,” or “dhikr,” being the act of remembrance of God.

In an ad on their website a young woman in a cheerful long-sleeved pink shirt wearing a headscarf and lifting a barbell announces, My Jihad: “Modesty is not a weakness.” –What’s yours?

These American Muslims are living out the best of religious freedom. Practicing their faith, engaging in the public square, and freely voicing their perspectives in intra-faith debates. Religious freedom allows space and Constitutional protections for mainstream believers to counter violent extremists.

And along the way they are reminding me of some things I myself might do well to devote some effort to: fasting, night prayer, and working on the defects of my own soul . . . plus some well-dressed weightlifting might help provide a boost in these dark days of winter and counter the calories of Christmas parties.

Jennifer S. Bryson, Ph.D., is currently a Visiting Research Professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.

Both articles offers an opportunity to learn why a Muslim would argue in favor of religious freedom and against the death penalty for apostasy.  This is important today not only for freedom of conversion from Islam to other faiths or to no faith, but also for protection of Muslim reformers in Muslim-majority areas who all too often face pressure to be silent under threat of being accused of “apostasy”. To read Saeed’s article, go here.

Jennifer S. Bryson is Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ.